The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek(12)

“We’re wasting time!” Leif could no longer see any sign of the white van. “Just get on my pegs!”

Rex kept scooting.

“I agree it’s your scooter leg and not the scooter,” Leif said.

Rex abruptly hopped off his scooter and tossed it under a shrub on the side of the road. He stepped onto the two pegs jutting out from Leif’s back wheel, his hands on Leif’s shoulders. “Burn it.”

And Leif did. He pedaled like he’d never pedaled before, rocketing forward even with the extra 150 pounds of lanky human freight. The fiery pain in his thighs was overwhelming, but as the boys rounded the last turn on Creek Road, the white dot reappeared ahead, and that was all the motivation Leif needed.

Soon the lights at the Whitewood School gate came into view, the only indication that there was anything behind the pine trees lining the road. On the rare occasion when Leif had passed by the school, secluded as it was on the far side of town, he’d been unsettled with how the utilitarian chain-link fence seemed much more like the gateway to a prison than to an educational institution. But that was the least of his concerns now. By the time he’d pedaled them to the entrance, one of the men was locking the gate, then hopping into the van and heading up the long driveway toward Alicia’s new home.

“Alicia!” Rex shouted, hopping off the pegs and grabbing the fence, shaking it to punctuate his anger. Leif joined him, passionately rattling the links as headlights briefly illuminated one side of the three-story school in the distance before the van disappeared behind it.

Alicia was gone.

“We gotta get in there, man!” Rex said, reaching up as if he was about to climb the fence.

“And then do what?” Leif asked. “Alicia’s parents sent her here. If we somehow get her out, they’ll just send her back.”

“But…” Rex still had both hands and one foot on the fence. “So that’s it? We’re just giving up on her?”

“I…I don’t know,” Leif said, wiping his wet cheeks, grateful for the cover of night. “Maybe.”

“Aaaargh!” Rex shouted, pulling himself away from the fence and violently kicking at nothing. Save for the light from the lampposts on each side of the gate, darkness was all around them.

Leif stared down the shadowy driveway, feeling like his heart had been injured. It didn’t seem real that he wouldn’t see Alicia tomorrow. Or the next day. She was right there in that building, just a bike ride away, and yet she might as well have been on the other side of the globe. Or in Nebraska.

“We should probably get back,” Rex said, seconds (or minutes?) later. “I don’t want my parents to realize it’s my punching bag in my bed and not me.”

“You think they’d fall for that?”

“No. That’s why I’m saying we should get back.”

“Yeah.” Leif flipped his kickstand, let Rex step up on the pegs, and started pedaling toward home. “My mom had an overnight shift, so…she’s not even home yet. You want me to drop you off at your scooter?”

“Nah. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

They rode to Rex’s house in silence.

“Hey, Leif,” Rex said out of nowhere, and Leif had the funny thought that maybe Rex had read his mind, that he was about to tell Leif what a great couple he and Alicia would make someday. “Good call on the bike pegs.”

Or not.

Leif nodded and kept pedaling.





3


IT HAD ONLY been two days, but Janine Blitstein was already tired of Bleak Creek.

Things that had seemed charming and quaint during her childhood summertime visits now seemed, at best, out of touch and, at worst, annoyingly backward. It completely boggled her mind that her mother had grown up here. Then again, her mom had left town as soon as she could, so in that way it made perfect sense.

It occurred to Janine why this trip felt so different: It was the first one she’d made on her own. Every other time, her parents had been there to offer their commentary, which, once she and her brother, Jared, were teenagers, was usually her mom railing against the patriarchy baked into Bleak Creek’s churches or the xenophobia hidden beneath the town’s folksy demeanor, and her dad—a Jewish guy from New Jersey—voicing his wry befuddlement at pretty much all of it. But now, a decade or so later, the only commentary was inside Janine’s own head. Her eighty-one-year-old grandmother, GamGam, certainly wasn’t providing any. Which left Janine in a constant state of feeling slightly insane. And lonely.

“Tell me more about the first kidney stone you remember,” she said now, one eye on the lens of her camcorder, making sure that her grandmother was still framed well.

“Ooooohhhhh, honey, do I remember it!” GamGam said, leaning slightly forward in her floral chair. “Though, I’ll tell ya, Neenie, I’d like to forget it!”

“Uh, don’t use my name, GamGam,” Janine said, standing up from behind the tripod. “Remember, just talk to me like I’m a stranger who’s never been to Bleak Creek.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, sweetheart. You’ve told me that goin’ on a dozen times now. Guess I’m not used to bein’ a big movie star yet.” GamGam winked. “Now where was I…?”

“That first stone.” This was Janine’s second interview with GamGam, and she felt considerably less enthused than she had yesterday during the first. But she knew that if she asked the right questions, she’d find what she was looking for: confirmation that this project—the reason she’d flown down here to stay with her grandmother for a couple weeks—was a brilliant idea.