“I am,” Dad says. Stab, stab, stab. Daniel and I exchange glances across the kitchen table, and my brother silently holds up three fingers. Then two, then one, and then…
“Enough!” Dad roars, getting to his feet. He marches into the hall as Daniel and I crane our necks to watch him. Dad flings open the front door, and is greeted by flashes from half a dozen cameras. Reporters loitering near the news vans parked in front of our house spring to life, stretching microphones toward my father as he leans out the door. “We have no further comment!” he yells before slamming the door and stalking back into the kitchen.
Mom sips her juice. “They’re never going to leave if you keep doing that.”
I swallow a smile. Dad is spiraling, just like me. I’m not sure I realized, until reporters started camping in front of our house all day, how much we’re alike in that respect. He’s just a whole lot better at managing it, usually.
It’s been five days since the police pulled Cal and me out of Ms. Jamison’s garage. Or Lara’s garage, I guess. Once you’ve been through a hostage situation with someone, you might as well be on a first-name basis. Coach Kendall is in jail, but Lara isn’t. She lawyered up fast, refusing to say a word until one of the state’s top defense attorneys agreed to represent her. Now she’s cooperating with the police, helping them build a case against her fiancé, and she insists that everything she said in the garage was just an attempt to disarm him. She says she was too afraid of Coach Kendall to come forward before now, and that the false ID in her bag was a last-ditch attempt to escape from a cold-blooded killer who’d never let her go. It would be believable, I guess, if you hadn’t been in the room while she fantasized about running off to a beach with him.
Lara also says that Cal—poor Cal, who spent two days in the hospital being treated for a concussion—misunderstood their conversation in the house before Coach Kendall arrived.
That Cal misunderstood everything.
I’m not buying it for a second. I know exactly how hard she was fighting for the gun in the garage, and it wasn’t, as she put it, to keep me from hurting myself. And I’ll never forget the look on her face when she called me “a vindictive little thing.” But other people—people who aren’t related to me, anyway—are divided. Some seem to believe her, and others act like her cooperation against Coach Kendall is more important than anything that came before it.
The Carlton Citizen of the Year Award has been postponed indefinitely, and I still feel bad about that. Not to mention having to finally come clean about what I did at Spare Me last spring. But here’s the thing about getting taken hostage by your brother’s lacrosse coach–turned–drug dealer: it gives you a lot of leeway. Mom and Dad are so happy that I’m not dead, they barely blinked at the fact that I single-handedly brought down a business.
“We’ll make this right,” Dad said. He’s been on the phone all week with Ms. Reyes, his insurance company, and Shepard Properties lawyers. I only eavesdropped once, when I heard Dad yelling at one of his lawyers. “I don’t care about minimizing my exposure,” he said. “I care about what’s fair.” And while I felt another wave of remorse about putting my dad in this position, I also felt relieved that he is who he is. The kind of person who will make this right. And also the kind of person I could have talked to a lot sooner, if I hadn’t been too twisted up with fear and insecurity.
Autumn has a lawyer too—not as flashy as Lara’s, but a friend of Mateo’s mom who took the case pro bono. Her name is Christy something, and wow, does she like to talk. She’s been all over the news, pushing hard for rehabilitation instead of punishment, and so far, at least, the local politicians weighing in seem to agree. There’s more focus on unraveling Coach Kendall’s network of suppliers and distributors than on prosecuting Autumn or Charlie. Gabe Prescott is a different case, though, since his association with Coach Kendall goes back more than a year. Stefan St. Clair had it right; Gabe’s job was essentially to spy on his friends and classmates, and he got paid a small fortune to do it.
I guess Autumn is doing all right. But I’m not sure, since I’ve only spoken to Mateo twice since it all happened: once at the police station when we all gave statements, and once when I called to thank him for saving our lives. I was afraid he wouldn’t pick up, but he did.
“I didn’t know you guys were in trouble,” he said. “It was the police’s idea to raid Ms. Jamison’s place. They thought it might be a drop-off point for Coach Kendall. Then they saw his car, and your car, and a light on in the garage, so…that was that. They escalated.”