Time Bomb(67)

“Diana . . .”

“If you want to live, you have to go,” she said as she stepped under a fallen board and disappeared from sight.

Move, he told himself, now.

He snaked his arms under Tad’s armpits and pulled. Tad’s tortured groan made Rashid’s knees go weak, but he kept pulling. Two feet. Six. Ten. Blood streaking their path. Tad’s blood. He wasn’t going to make it at this rate.

Rashid’s heart hammered hard as he pulled Tad down the hall. How long did they have before the bomb went off? Rashid glanced over his shoulder. He was almost to the end of the hallway. He had to get around the corner. Just a few more feet. Please let me make it just a few more feet.

Tad screamed. Rashid screamed too as he leaned back and pulled as hard as he could until they finally reached the end of the hallway. He looked back into the haze, trying to see Diana. For a second, he thought he saw a shadow before he dragged Tad again and rounded the corner.

He pulled Tad into the closest classroom and slammed the door shut.

As the explosion rocked behind him, he pictured Diana’s beautiful face. Hers was the face of a girl who looked happy. She looked as if she had every reason to live. But under it all, she was a bomb with a fuse that had been lit and was waiting to explode.

“We’re okay, Tad,” he said as he heard shouting down the hall. Firefighters had finally arrived. “It’s over.”





The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection.



—Henri Nouwen





Five Weeks Later . . .





Cas





— Chapter 46 —


WHY?

Cas looked out the window as her mother pulled into the student parking lot that had looked so far away from the second-story classroom window more than a month ago.

All because Diana wanted to prove that her father’s bill was necessary. At least, that’s what everyone said. The senator’s aide who planned the bombing with Diana had told the authorities that it had been her idea to demonstrate how vital the Safety Through Education law was. But it had done the opposite, because not one person could think of anything that had indicated Diana was planning something like this. Diana was the last student anyone would have reported to the administration, and yet she was the time bomb that had been waiting to go off.

Rashid and Frankie and Z had told the FBI and the cops and everyone else who interviewed them what she had said before letting them all leave and setting off the final bomb. She’d never meant to get caught in the blast and had believed her father’s aide had set up another student to take the fall. On the advice of his lawyer, the senator’s aide wasn’t talking anymore, but everyone was speculating that he had always intended for Diana to die. A senator losing a daughter to the kind of violence his bill was trying to prevent was far more sympathetic than one whose daughter had lived. The aide said he and Diana had been working for the greater good. Maybe he even believed it. After talking to Rashid, Cas wasn’t sure what Diana had believed.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to pick you up later?” Cas’s mom asked.

“Rashid said he’d drive me home,” she said, looking at the construction crews sweating in the September sun. It was hot today, but that didn’t matter to Cas as she opened the SUV door and hopped out of the car. “I’m okay, Mom. Really. It’s not like there’s any reason for someone to blow this place up again,” she said as she straightened her black tank and black shorts. Her mother gave her an uncertain smile. Cas was getting that smile a lot nowadays, but it was better than the manic one that tried to pretend everything was normal.

Waving to her mom, Cas turned and looked at the building sitting on the hill that was slowly being put back together. It would be months before it was back to normal. As if that was possible.

The administration was saying that the school would partially reopen in January. No one she knew actually thought the damage could be fixed so fast, but Cas hoped it would be. She wanted to believe that mending what was broken could be done quickly if you wanted it badly enough. But until the school was ready, classes and all activities were being held at the community college. Cas’s mother, her father, even her new but still annoying shrink assumed that after everything, she would want to attend a different school or be homeschooled. Homeschooling would mean no kids to face. No repercussions for the rules she’d broken. She could just forget that it and everything else she was running from had ever happened.

Only she didn’t want to forget.

She spotted Tad coming out of a group of trees. His eyes were firmly fixed on the building where their lives had changed, so he didn’t see her watching him—studying how gingerly he was walking. She’d been in the hospital for two days with the blood loss and risk of infection. He’d been in for more than a week. All because of the gun she’d brought with her.

The gun.

Explaining it—how it had gotten into Diana’s hands and why Cas had brought it to the school in the first place—was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do.

Seeing her father’s expression.

Watching her mother cry.

The hundred hours of community service she had been given for her actions were nothing compared to the way people pretended not to stare when she walked by. They all now knew that Cas had gone into the school that day intending to die.