Chubby Chet Rogers leaned toward me, his cheeks flushed with concern. “Did you see my little brother?”
Someone else said, “My mom—was my mom in the square?”
All those dread-filled faces, hands grabbing at me, trying to get my attention. Fighting through claustrophobia, I shook my head. “Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t. I don’t know.” The kids finally eased off and left me alone, going back to their groups. Gossip swirled all around, bitter with desperation.
“I heard Tommy’s dad put him in a duffel bag.”
“Sheila saw Patrice slung over her mommy’s shoulder in a burlap sack. She said she could see her in there squirming.”
Through the press of bodies, I saw Alex resting her hands on Britney’s shoulders, talking to her. Britney was crying. I figured Alex had told her about seeing her dad and uncle in the square, working the jackhammers, taking down the power grid. They were Hosts like everyone else’s parents. For the first time in my life, I was grateful that my mom and dad weren’t around. Seeing Uncle Jim and Aunt Sue-Anne had been painful enough. At least I never had to see this happen to my parents.
I reached the bleachers and realized I was standing next to Eve Jenkins. She said hi quietly and turned her right cheek away from me, the one with the scrapes.
Patrick had always thought that she had a crush on me, though I wasn’t sure. She’d do things like borrow my science textbook, then stop by our house later with it, apologizing that she’d forgotten to give it back. Patrick said it was an excuse to see me, but I wondered if she was just absentminded. She was pretty in a simple kind of way—dark hair with straight bangs, round face, a dimple in one cheek when she smiled. Even though she was also older than me, next to Alex she still looked like a kid.
Then again, I supposed I still looked like a kid, too.
Up in the bleachers, JoJo and Rocky were sitting behind the Mendez twins, helping them put their hair up in pigtails to cover the patches that had been yanked out.
Eve’s eyes were still lowered, her face turned slightly away. I figured maybe I should take a page from JoJo and Rocky’s book.
“Hey,” I said to her. “You okay?”
Her eyes were watering. “It’s nothing.”
“Fingernails?”
She nodded, maybe because she knew she’d start crying if she spoke.
“Can I clean it for you?” I asked.
She firmed her trembling lips. Then she turned her face fully to me for the first time. Her brown eyes held tiny flecks of yellow. “My mom,” she said. And that was all she could get out.
I took some Neosporin from one of the first-aid kits on the bleachers and put it on a soft gauze pad. I rested one hand on her warm cheek, and she closed her eyes. When the pad dabbed her cuts, she flinched, squeezing the wrist of my hand on her cheek. I didn’t pause, and she didn’t stop me. Cassius walked over and nudged her, and she lowered her other hand. He licked her palm. Once I’d finished, Eve took a shuddering breath and opened her eyes.
“Thank you,” she said.
We were interrupted by a loud rapping sound. We turned to see Alex tapping the dry-erase board with her hockey stick to get everyone’s attention. Patrick was up front with her, Dr. Chatterjee to the side. The gym fell silent.
Britney stood beside Alex, her face red from crying. They were holding hands, but now Alex let go and stepped in front of the board.
“Okay, guys,” Alex said. “Let’s talk about where we are with everything. Have you tried a phone?”
“Of course we tried a phone,” Ben Braaten said. He wasn’t as tall as Patrick, but he was thicker, with beefy biceps and big square wrists. His flannel shirt tugged up in the front, snared around something shoved in the waistband of his jeans. As he swaggered closer, I saw that it was a bolt gun used to stun cattle before the kill. It made sense, since his dad worked at a slaughterhouse. An image from earlier came to me—Don Braaten in his bloodstained overalls, pinning Janie Woodrow to the road.
Cassius gave a low growl, and a moment later Ben breezed by me, bumping my shoulder. He ran a hand over his bristling crew cut. The rippled flesh from a skin graft at his hairline never ceased to fascinate me, not because it was ugly—it wasn’t—but because it always looked to me like some otherworldly mark. When his drunken older brothers had crashed the Camaro, Ben alone had emerged from the fiery hull, and the scar on his forehead seemed like the thumbprint of an angel or a devil branded into his flesh, marking him to survive.