Time Bomb(34)

“No offense taken.” She gasped as she glanced at the cut, then turned her head, pain flickering across her face. “My mother thinks girls are supposed to like shiny clothes. Crazy, right?”

“My dad believes all boys want to play football—I guess everyone has their thing. Hold still. I have an idea.” He pulled his shirt over his head, folded it quickly, and pressed it firmly over the injury. Then he took the scarf she’d used before and quickly wrapped it as secure as he could around the T-shirt and her arm. She flinched, bit her lip, and closed her eyes so tightly that he thought her forehead was going to pop, but she barely made a sound as he pulled the fabric tight.

Most of the guys on the team would have had a hard time sucking it up the way she had. Even Tad would have had trouble.

Frankie ignored the way thinking of Tad made his stomach lurch, and he finished tying the final knot. Either Tad was still alive or he wasn’t. Frankie had no way of knowing.

“That should do it.” He wiped his blood-streaked hands on his shorts and looked back at the empty art office. Not much smoke. No fire . . . yet. Holding out his hand to help her up, he said, “Let’s get the hell out of this place. What do you think?”

“Do you honestly expect me to say no?” she asked.

With more energy than she probably felt, Cas pushed up from the ground with her good hand as Frankie grabbed her arm and helped her to her feet. Together, they walked down the long corridor, climbing up and over the broken pieces of hallway and ceiling in their path. When they got close to the collapsed staircase at the end of the hall, Cas asked, “Do you think there’s another way down?”

“Could be.” The stairs that mirrored this set down the front hallway on the other side of the school were their best shot. If those were destroyed, their only other option would be the ones at the rear of the school—which meant going back toward the fire. No, thanks.

“Don’t take offense, since this has nothing to do with you, but I didn’t think I could hate this place more than I already did before.”

“Then what are you doing here?” Frankie pitched a board obstructing his path to one side, shoved another, and then realized Cas hadn’t answered. Turning, he asked, “You must have a pretty good reason for being here at school today.”

“Does it matter?” she asked.

It didn’t. But the way she was evading the question told him it should. So instead of dropping it, he said, “Humor me. School isn’t in session. You aren’t interested in being fashionable in polyester marching-band uniforms. You could have found someplace else to practice clarinet if you wanted to. So, why come? And why come up here?” It’s not as if the art room she’d been stuck in was right around the corner from the music department, where he’d first spotted her. Far from it.

Cas hugged her bag to her chest. “The art room was quiet, and I figured no one would notice me in there. Things have been . . .” She shrugged again. “I needed to get away.” Before he could comment, she asked, “What about you? Why are you here instead of off doing whatever it is football players do?”

Frankie mentally ran through the path he’d taken to get here and the stops he’d made along the way and Tad, who had said his time was up just before the first bomb went off. He started to answer when he heard someone shouting.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

Cas turned. “I think it’s coming from down that way. Someone must need help.”

It could be Tad.

“Let’s go find out.”





Rashid





— Chapter 30 —


“THEY’RE DEAD.”

One of them must have been alive only a few minutes ago. The call had been weak, but he’d heard it and followed the sound. If he’d only gotten here a few minutes earlier . . .

Nothing would have changed. Nothing he could have done would have saved them. Rashid smoothed the dead girl’s sleeve. The pool of blood under her head ran along the cracks in the bathroom tile near where the other woman, Mrs. Barnes, lay on the floor. The two of them must have gotten caught in the bathroom when the bomb went off, or maybe Mrs. Barnes pulled the girl in here thinking it would be safer when the building started to come apart. The broken glass that had sliced the artery in Mrs. Barnes’s neck showed how little was safe now.

Tad turned and stared down the hall. Rashid wished he could look away. But he couldn’t. The stream of blood following the grout in between the tiles reached where he was kneeling, and still he didn’t move.

Mrs. Barnes had taught history. Rashid had taken AP American History from her. He was supposed to have AP European History with her this year. She valued all her students equally and made sure they knew that every voice was important to the conversation in her class. He remembered when the discussion turned to the Japanese internment camps during World War II. She’d made sure the class knew it was never fair to condemn an entire racial group based on the actions of a few and had everyone in the room do a project on the time and place when their heritage was considered a threat.

He’d wished everyone in the school could take her class. She’d taught her students that if people took the time and effort, they’d still believe in what America pretended to stand for. She’d given him hope that maybe, just maybe, things would change if he just waited.