“Let’s have a word with her alone,” Chief Calhoun tells Mr. Goodall. “Son, you can step out and wait there with Officer Greenlea.”
Mr. Goodall opens the door, gesturing for Mick to make his exit. As he steps over the threshold, he sees Mrs. Dunlop, the young cop, and his mother clustered in the small reception area.
“Mick! What’s going on?” Mom is windblown, red--faced, wide--eyed.
He finds his voice. “I don’t know, but I—-”
“Officer, this young man is going to sit here with you,” the chief cuts in.
This young man—-as if Mick is some juvenile delinquent off the street instead of the kid Coach Calhoun affectionately called Striker because of his skills on the soccer field. Bile pitches and rolls in his empty stomach.
“Mick, are you okay?”
There’s no easy way to answer his mother’s question. He shrugs and bows his head to avoid the confused concern in her eyes, afraid she’ll see the tears that have sprung to his. All he wants is to escape this overheated little room, but it’s his mother who gets to do that, ushered away into the principal’s office.
Hearing the door close, Mick lifts his head at last. Mrs. Dunlop is back at her desk, shuffling papers around as if she’s suddenly very busy, or just pretending to be. Officer Greenlea gestures at a chair.
“You can have a seat.”
“Can I . . . I don’t . . .” Vomit is pushing into his throat. “I’m going to . . .”
He lurches toward the wastepaper basket beside the desk, lowers his head into it, and retches as Mrs. Dunlop cries out in dismay.
Miserable, he looks to see Officer Greenlea wordlessly holding out a handful of tissues. He accepts them and mops his mouth, and then his eyes. If he could speak, he’d probably feel compelled to explain that they’re watering because he’s sick. But you shouldn’t lie to a cop and anyway, another tide of bile is pushing ominously at his throat.
“Here . . .” Mrs. Dunlop pulls a key out of her desk drawer and hands it to Mick. “There’s a faculty restroom right outside the door. You can use it.”
“Come on, kid.” The officer puts a hand on Mick’s shoulder and propels him away from the offending wastebasket, toward the hallway.
He’s relieved to see that the corridor is deserted. Everyone is in class right now, so there’s no one to see him let himself into the faculty restroom as a police officer stations himself right outside.
Locked inside, he tosses the key on the sink, kneels in front of the toilet, and vomits again. Then, racked by dry heaves, he thinks about what’s waiting for him beyond the door, and he thinks about Brianna.
This is crazy. If he could just find her, everything would be okay. More than okay: he’d be her hero—-hers, and everyone else’s.
He stands on shaky legs, reaches out to flush the toilet, and hesitates with his fingers on the handle, noticing something.
There’s a window above the sink.
It’s propped open with a stick and it’s large. Much larger than the high, small windows in the boys’ restrooms in the building’s newer wings. Large enough for someone to climb through?
Conscious of the police officer stationed outside the door, Mick makes another loud retching sound as he walks over to examine the window. In his own house, they use propped sticks to keep some of the old windows from crashing down, and others are almost impossible to open at all.
Mick tugs to see if it will open wider.
It does.
Without stopping to consider the wisdom of his newfound plan, he scrambles onto the sill, climbs out, and hits the ground running.
Either Rick’s stepson forgot about his promise to check in on him, or he did check in on him, but forgot to update Bob afterward.
Those are the two conclusions Bob drew as he spent the morning on the endless errands that are necessary after a long absence. He went from the bank to the pharmacy to the post office to the dry cleaner, with long lines at every stop, then met a -couple of friends for a late breakfast that stretched past lunchtime.