The Replaced(39)

I tried to think back. Mad? Was it really that simple? It made me sound like a Neanderthal, but that didn’t make it untrue.

I was always sort of pissed at Agent Truman.

But what about that first time it had happened? At the minimart, when Tyler had been back at the motel burning up with fever, had I been pissed then, too?

No, not pissed, just out of my mind with worry, and completely racked with guilt because it had been my fault he was sick. I’d been absolutely-utterly-hopelessly desperate to get my hands on some Tylenol to bring his fever down. I’d been frustrated . . . almost to the point of being panicked.

Maybe that was the key. Maybe it didn’t have to be angry so much as just worked up in general. Pissed . . . panicked . . . agitated . . . whatever it was that made my adrenaline pump.

So why, then, hadn’t this uncanny ability of mine manifested itself in the alley when Agent Truman had Simon, Willow, and me cornered? What had been different about then?

It took me a second to put my finger on it, but it was there: fear.

It hadn’t been anger then, it had been full-on terror—a tail-between-my-legs, cowering kind of fear.

At the bowling alley, when I’d been freaking out that Agent Truman might find out we were there, I’d been . . . desperate to stop that from happening.

Desperate. Panicked. One hundred percent freaked out.

It was as if I’d been zapped with ten thousand volts and juiced up with steroids, all at the same time.

“Try it again,” Simon coaxed.

I whirled around, concentrating as hard as I could on the haphazard stacks around me. At a row of old encyclopedias, and magazines and journals, at the uneven spines of hardcovers and paperbacks all shoved in together.

“Get mad,” Simon coached, as if I hadn’t thought of that myself. I conjured up an image of Agent Truman as I squeezed my hands into fists, thinking of all the things he’d done to ruin my life—convincing my mom I was hazardous to be around, hauling my father up to Devil’s Hole that night and using him the same way he’d used the promise of Tyler being alive to bait me. I pictured his smug face and the way he’d looked, standing on my doorstep that very first day in his starched suit, which was almost the exact same way he’d looked when he’d shot Willow with those beanbag bullets.

I glared at the pages of the open book at my feet, the one that had hit Simon in the head, as I pictured the agent’s arrogant face, but nothing happened. The pages didn’t budge. Not so much as a rustle.

“Get pissed, Kyra.”

“I’m trying,” I shot back. I didn’t need him telling me what I should do—I understood what he’d said. Maybe I just wasn’t the kind of person who could get mad at the drop of a hat. Maybe I didn’t have a big enough chip on my shoulder.

He got in my face. “You know he’s never coming back, don’t you? Tyler? And it’s all because of you.” His words were crisp and cutting. I recoiled. And when he said, “You killed him,” I felt my fists clench into tense balls.

I wanted to hit him, and I wanted to turn away so he couldn’t see the way my eyes burned. His face blurred in front of me. It was bad enough that I’d beaten myself up about Tyler, and what might’ve happened to him, every single second he’d been gone—I didn’t need Simon shoving it in my face.

The book tore through the air from behind my head, whizzing past my ear so fast I could feel the draft. It slammed hard against the wall, sounding like a rock, and then it dropped to the floor.

I tried to tell myself to stop, but all I could think was: I killed Tyler . . .

. . . I killed Tyler . . .

. . . I killed Tyler . . .

And each time those words rang through my head, another book shot off the shelves, and another . . . and another.

Footsteps shuffled upstairs, and Simon’s fingers closed over mine. “Okay,” he said. “Enough for now. We can’t let anyone see you.” He squeezed my hand, silently telling me I’d done well.

I didn’t know about that because all I could think was that other thing: I’d killed Tyler.

“I didn’t mean it,” he whispered, as if he’d read my mind, and he didn’t let go of my hand, even when Natty came into the room, her eyes wide.

“What’s going on in here?” Her nervous glance shot to the books strewn around the floor, and then over her shoulder.

“You kids okay down there?” the librarian called from the top of the stairs. “Need anything?”

My pulse echoed in my ears, and my throat felt tight and raw.

“We’re okay!” Simon called back to him. “We’ll let you know if we need help!”

We were all still for a second as we waited to see if he might come down anyway. But then there was more shuffling, and his footsteps, along the creaky old floorboards, moved away from us.

“This might not’ve been the best place to practice. We probably should’ve chosen someplace a little more . . . soundproof,” Simon said, shifting into action and picking up fallen books. “We need to clean this mess up and get out of here. Who knows what he heard and who he might’ve called.”

We did our best to put everything back where it belonged, but the order was tough to figure out. There was a book on military strategy that I dropped on a table on our way out the door, and another that totally didn’t belong in the nonfiction section at all.