Played. Liz Fichera

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СКАЧАТЬ Jin stood at the bus door with a clipboard. His eyes dropped to his sheet when he saw me, presumably to find my name. Scott knew me through my brother, like most upperclassman. I think he may have been on the golf team with Ryan before he traded golf for Math Club and Debate, but he always dressed like he was ready to play—brown shorts with perfect creases and golf shirts buttoned right up to his neck. “Riley Berenger,” he said, very official-like, without looking at me. “You’re in bus number one. This one.” He pointed to the door with a blue pen.

      “What about when we get to Woods Canyon?” I said. “Where will I be assigned there?”

      “Girls will be in one cabin. Guys in the other,” he said. He might as well have added “Duh” at the end of his sentence.

      “Oh,” I said, mildly relieved that this wasn’t a sleeping-in-tents-with-an-outhouse affair. The brochure hadn’t been completely clear on that point, and camping was not my thing. “I didn’t know.”

      He tapped his clipboard, dismissing me, and I climbed inside.

      There was excitement on the bus but it wasn’t, say, going-to-a-football-game-at-a-rival-school excitement. This was, after all, a collection of some of the smartest kids in all of Phoenix. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I was considered one of them, especially on the days when I felt like the biggest idiot in the world. Like yesterday, when I let Drew inject my forehead with toxic chemicals. What was I thinking?

      The bus driver was reading a newspaper, his baseball cap turned backward on his head. He was chewing on a toothpick that looked as if it had been spinning between his teeth for the past six months.

      When I reached the top step, I looked across the bus and saw that all of the seats were taken except for the first two rows behind the bus driver and one empty row near the back of the bus. It might have been my imagination but the excitement on the bus dimmed a smidgen. I pulled my cap lower as I surveyed the real estate. I didn’t see any sophomores from Lone Butte, and the juniors and seniors were already sitting with people, talking. There was no way I was walking all the way to the back, so I slipped into the second empty row behind the bus driver. At least I’d have a whole row to myself, so I guessed that arriving late had its advantages.

      Behind me, Scott Jin hopped up the stairs, trailed by Mr. Romero, one of the school’s guidance counselors. Instead of his usual dark pants, white shirt and either red-or blue-striped tie, Mr. Romero looked almost human dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt that said Someone in Bozeman, Montana, Loves Me on the front. But his brow was furrowed as if he were anxious about something—and who could blame him? No doubt he’d rather be anywhere than camping with two busloads of teenagers. “Time to roll,” he finally instructed the bus driver.

      Scott and Mr. Romero took the first seat behind the bus driver, thank god. Mr. Romero was okay, but I really didn’t want to talk to him for two hours about college applications and test scores, not when I’d downloaded four episodes of Friends to my iPod along with five new songs that I was dying to listen to.

      The bus driver tucked his newspaper next to his seat, reached for the handle that cranked the door shut and steered the bus away from the curb.

      We hadn’t even made it to the street when Mr. Romero stood and yelled, “Stop!”

      I wasn’t the only one to look up in surprise. I hadn’t even scrolled down to my first Friends episode.

      A blue pickup truck sped into the parking lot and headed straight for us.

      “What the...” the bus driver muttered as the bus jolted to a stop. It looked like the truck was going to play chicken with our school bus.

      I gripped the seat in front of me as a black cloud spewed from behind the truck, which, by the way, looked ready to explode. When it got closer, I could make out two faces behind the cloudy windshield. Boys. The one in the passenger seat was waving his arm out the window.

      “Good!” Mr. Romero said, a smile in his voice as Scott returned to his clipboard.

      “I thought we had everybody?” Scott said.

      “We do now,” Mr. Romero said.

      Scott’s brow furrowed as he continued to study his clipboard. He flipped through a stack of white pages. “Who’d I miss?” he said, as if it were not humanly possible for him to miss anything. Which, for him, was probably true. I’d heard that he’d gotten a perfect score on the math section of the SATs. I mean, who scored perfect on that? That was borderline freakish.

      “Sam Tracy,” Mr. Romero said as he stared out the front windshield. “But let’s cut him some slack, okay? He traveled a long way to get here.”

      4

      Sam

      Martin’s truck almost stalled three times before we finally chugged into the school parking lot. It was a miracle that his wheels made it at all.

      Both my parents had worked late, so if the truck had died, waking them wouldn’t have been my favorite option. At the casino on the Rez, Dad worked security and Mom worked in a back office, “counting the money,” she always said, but really, she was an accountant for the tribe, and a damn good one. Dad was Gila and Mom was Havasupai and they’d been together since the summer of their senior year when they’d met at some high school summer program in Oklahoma. Figures that two Natives from Arizona would have to travel across state lines to meet. According to Mom, they’d fallen madly in love that summer, which was impossible for me to picture. You had to know my dad to understand—and knowing my dad, even a little bit, was one of the hardest things in the whole world. Harder than AP physics. Dad wasn’t exactly the flower-and-chocolates type. “Your dad’s just not sensitive like you are, Sam,” Mom had whispered to me once when I was about ten years old and I’d made him a Father’s Day card at school. “But he loves you, even if he doesn’t say the words. It’s what he thinks in his heart that’s most important.” Dad had looked at the card I’d made and smiled, sort of, but then he’d closed the card and placed it facedown and never looked at it for the rest of the weekend. I knew, because I’d watched him. I’d never made another card for him again. “But you’re more alike than you realize,” Mom had added, which I absolutely had not believed. Still didn’t. Sometimes I wondered if I was adopted.

      On a good day, you’d never hear Dad utter five words, least of all to me, but I supposed that came in handy when most of your day consisted of sitting in a smoky haze and watching for people who cheated or misbehaved while playing slot machines or blackjack. I knew that my parents loved me. At least, my mother told me she did all the time. I just wished that I could hear my father say it, even once, before I stopped caring altogether.

      Fortunately for my parents, they usually worked the same hours, but that was unfortunate for me from a ride perspective. So Martin really had saved the day by offering to drive me to school at the butt-crack of dawn on a Saturday morning, on the condition that I stayed later at last night’s party.

      “How are you gonna stay awake long enough to reach Coolidge?” I stifled another yawn.

      “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” Martin said dully, his eyelids as puffy as mine.

      “You sound like a rapper.”

      “Don’t I wish,” he said. And then he flashed some sign with his fingers. I had no idea what it meant, but I was sure it was stupid.

      I didn’t СКАЧАТЬ