“I know where you’re going with this, but you can’t think like that. We’ve done things that seemed impossible before.”
“We haven’t cast spells! Not that I remember!”
“Don’t be mad at me! I didn’t do this.”
“You led them there!”
“What are you talking about?”
“How do you know you didn’t lead the OTs to the park?” he asked accusingly.
“Because I didn’t.”
“And you know that how?”
“I can’t believe you’d even think that! I was not followed. I was insanely careful about that. If anything, it was you and your mother. It’s your family car, Finn. You think the OTs don’t know what car your mother drives?”
“I think everything was all right until I heard you back there following me. Why’d you do that, anyway? Why didn’t you tell me you were in the park?”
“Because of the rescue dummies.”
“You saw them, I suppose?”
“Yes. I saw them. I stayed back.”
“So…if you saw them, why didn’t you warn me?”
“How was I supposed to do that? Shout at you? Fire a flare? Scream?”
Finn leaned into the handlebars. “I don’t know.”
“I can’t believe you’d think that,” she mumbled. “I was trying to help you.”
“And how’d that work out?”
She stood up straight, her eyes stinging. “I think you’re tired.”
“Tired of being tricked. Tired of being lied to.”
“You can’t possibly mean that.”
“Can’t I?”
“We were nearly killed!” she reminded.
“I was there,” he said.
“I saved you! Us!”
He rocked against the handlebars. “I…know,” he said. He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
“You think that I faked all that?” She had trouble speaking between her heavy breaths. “Seriously?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
She marched off, the tears starting to fall, her belly feeling like he’d punched her. Please don’t follow me! she willed.
But there he was, pedaling idly at her side.
“Go away!” Her choked voice betrayed her. She wanted to run.
“Amanda.”
“Don’t!”
“I’m leaving,” he reminded. “Today.”
“Then leave. Go. Go!”
He applied the brakes and stopped. She continued forward. The most difficult steps of her life.
“Amanda?” he called out.
She wanted so badly to turn around and throw herself into him, to put the past few minutes behind and start all over, but her feet wouldn’t stop walking. She thought that this was where real life diverged from the way it happened in movies. Real life didn’t always work out. The sad truth was—and she knew this—that she didn’t know enough about boys and the way she felt about Finn to know what to do.
No matter how much her life felt like fiction at times, it was anything but. She’d been abandoned. She’d been found. She’d run away and been found again. Up and down. In and out. The last two years with the Keepers had been so totally unreal—so wonderfully welcome—that they couldn’t have been made up. Now she and Finn were breaking up when they hadn’t officially been going together in the first place. How was she supposed to make sense of any of this?
She tried to turn to look back at him. Her brain wouldn’t allow it. Foolish stubbornness on her part, or did he deserve it? They’d been through a rough night together. That’s all it was, she told herself.
“That’s all it is,” she repeated aloud, drawing curious looks as she approached the bus stop.
On an unseasonably cold spring night, a small basement window at ground level popped open, filling the girl’s nostrils with salt air. The house was not actually a house at all, but a former army barracks. This was the only window in the complex rigged to avoid sounding the alarm. Months earlier, a magnet that mated with a wired sensor had been carefully removed from the window frame and secretly taped to its wired counterpart. Normally, if the window were opened, the magnetic field between the two magnets would be broken and the alarm would sound. Rigged as it was, the magnetic connection remained intact. The window could be opened and closed at will.
The girls of Barracks 14, ranging in age from eight to eighteen, used this window to come and go without being noticed. Sometimes departures facilitated food runs or attempts to contact family. Sometimes it was to try to find a boyfriend or girlfriend. Sometimes, like tonight, it was for something much more risky.