And he’s pointing his gun in my face.
For a long minute, all I can see is the barrel of that gun.
“You aren’t the ones we want,” he frowns, sounding disappointed. He lowers the gun, puts his sunglasses back on and moves away. Out there, in the darkness, the blue lights disappear two by two.
I don’t wait. I step on the gas and with a burning of wheels, we race off into the night.
“Mike,” Henna says.
“I know,” I say.
“Mike,” she says again, just saying my name, not asking anything. I don’t even know where I’m going, I’m just driving as fast as I can away and away.
I hear Henna say, “I’ve never been so happy not to be an indie kid in my entire life.”
She starts crying, and we do that for a while, just drive and cry.
Mainly out of relief for being alive.
CHAPTER THE TENTH, in which indie kids Joffrey and Earth disappear from their homes, their bodies found miles away; Satchel goes into hiding at an abandoned drive-in with fellow indie kids Finn, Dylan, Finn, Finn, Lincoln, Archie, Wisconsin, Finn, Aquamarine, and Finn; seeing a blue light in the night, Satchel meets the boy from the amulet, the handsomest one she’s ever seen; he tells her this isn’t a safe place for her or the others and that they should run; then he tells her she’s beautiful in her own special way and that’s when she knows she can trust him; the indie kids go back to their homes.
Things get darker in the days after the cop incident.
There are two more dead indie kids. I didn’t really know either of them, except to see them in the hallway at school, but still. “This is worse than when they were all dying beautifully of cancer,”
Henna said, and she’s right.
The cops are calling one a suicide and the other a car accident.
The cops are saying this.
And why should we doubt the cops?
Henna and I told Mel and Jared and, fine, Nathan what happened, but none of us told our parents.
How could we? My dad’s automatically out of everything important. (I’m not even sure I’ve seen him this week, just evidence – discarded clothes, snoring – that he’s in the house somewhere.) My mom’s in pre-campaign mode, which is probably not the best time to tell her the local policemen have gone crazy and are threatening her son. (I told her I broke the mirror hitting a mailbox; she just sighed and handed me the insurance forms.) Henna’s parents would pack her off to a convent, and even Mr Shurin would be overly concerned and get involved in all the wrong ways.
We’re just going to stick together and tough it out and try to live long enough to graduate. The usual.
The surviving indie kids disappeared from school for a bit. No one knows where they went. No one knows what they saw there. No one knows why they all came back on the Friday.
They won’t tell us what’s going on, even when we ask them.
“What’d they say?” Jared asks Mel over lunch.
“That we wouldn’t understand,” Mel says, frowning like she’s about to fire the world from a job it loves. “But one of them showed me a poem about how we’re all essentially alone. As if they’re not the biggest clique of togetherness that ever was.”
Everyone knows the indie kids don’t use the internet – have you noticed? They never do, it’s weird, like it never occurs to them, like it’s still 1985 and there’s only card catalogues – so we can’t find them discussing anything online. The vibe seems to be that it’s totally not our business. Historically, non-indie kids were pretty much left alone by the vampires and the soul-eating ghosts, so maybe they have a point.