I don’t want an ambulance. I feel fine, sort of. I ignore the officer, my eyes trained on Ivy. “Was it Daniel, do you think?” I ask. “Did he use his super brain to figure things out?”
“Not this time,” Ivy snorts. “I just talked to Trevor. They were at Olive Garden when Coach Kendall texted me, totally clueless. Daniel didn’t even realize his phone was gone. It was easy to hack, since all the lax guys use the same passcode so they can take pictures with each other’s phones during games.” She rolls her eyes. “Bunch of dumbasses.”
“Lara, maybe?” I hate the hopeful lilt in my voice. Ivy pretends not to notice, but there’s no missing the way her face hardens.
“She didn’t help us” is all she says.
A transmitter clipped to the officer’s hip crackles beside us. “Witness family, incoming,” it intones. I cut my eyes toward Ivy, questioning. She swallows and shakes her head. “Mine are in a cab, stuck in rush-hour traffic. Must be you.”
I rise as quickly as I can, helped by the officer, and eagerly scan the area. Every police car on the scene has its lights flashing, illuminating the street so brightly that Lara’s deserted neighborhood looks like a movie set. I don’t see my parents, but I know they must be nearby, and that’s almost as good. There are what look like a dozen police cars parked around us, plus Ivy’s car, and then…
I blink at the unexpected sight of a boxy sedan a few hundred yards away. Not at the car, even though I don’t recognize it, but at the figure leaning against it. We’re too far away for me to be sure, but I’d swear on the grave we just avoided that it’s Mateo.
“Is that…,” I start to ask Ivy. But then I hear Henry’s frantic voice calling “Cal!”, followed by a piercing shout of joy from Wes, and everything else will have to wait.
IVY
“This is ridiculous,” Dad mutters, stabbing at his eggs with a fork.
Mom pours a glass of vegetable juice. “Just ignore them.”
“I am,” Dad says. Stab, stab, stab. Daniel and I exchange glances across the kitchen table, and my brother silently holds up three fingers. Then two, then one, and then…
“Enough!” Dad roars, getting to his feet. He marches into the hall as Daniel and I crane our necks to watch him. Dad flings open the front door, and is greeted by flashes from half a dozen cameras. Reporters loitering near the news vans parked in front of our house spring to life, stretching microphones toward my father as he leans out the door. “We have no further comment!” he yells before slamming the door and stalking back into the kitchen.
Mom sips her juice. “They’re never going to leave if you keep doing that.”
I swallow a smile. Dad is spiraling, just like me. I’m not sure I realized, until reporters started camping in front of our house all day, how much we’re alike in that respect. He’s just a whole lot better at managing it, usually.
It’s been five days since the police pulled Cal and me out of Ms. Jamison’s garage. Or Lara’s garage, I guess. Once you’ve been through a hostage situation with someone, you might as well be on a first-name basis. Coach Kendall is in jail, but Lara isn’t. She lawyered up fast, refusing to say a word until one of the state’s top defense attorneys agreed to represent her. Now she’s cooperating with the police, helping them build a case against her fiancé, and she insists that everything she said in the garage was just an attempt to disarm him. She says she was too afraid of Coach Kendall to come forward before now, and that the false ID in her bag was a last-ditch attempt to escape from a cold-blooded killer who’d never let her go. It would be believable, I guess, if you hadn’t been in the room while she fantasized about running off to a beach with him.
Lara also says that Cal—poor Cal, who spent two days in the hospital being treated for a concussion—misunderstood their conversation in the house before Coach Kendall arrived.
That Cal misunderstood everything.
I’m not buying it for a second. I know exactly how hard she was fighting for the gun in the garage, and it wasn’t, as she put it, to keep me from hurting myself. And I’ll never forget the look on her face when she called me “a vindictive little thing.” But other people—people who aren’t related to me, anyway—are divided. Some seem to believe her, and others act like her cooperation against Coach Kendall is more important than anything that came before it.