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“Is she hurt? Is she bleeding?” Nathans asks, leaning over the girl in an absolute violation of all CPR training ever. I firmly back her up, and the Red Cross people swarm in, propping the girl’s legs up and taking her pulse.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” I tell Nathans. “She was just . . . TWO!”
I scream the last bit, my overjoyed brain latching on to what it had been searching for and biting down at just the wrong moment—again.
“Lydia?” Nathans asks.
“You can only have one doughnut!” I whirl and scream at Brandon, who is guiltily double-fisting a couple of jelly-filleds. “You can’t have two! I don’t care how low your blood sugar is right now.”
“Lydia,” Nathans says carefully. “There really are plenty, if he feels like he needs it.”
“No one needs two doughnuts, Nathans,” I snap at her.
“And, no,” I keep going, letting all the venom of my internal monologue out, “there might not be enough doughnuts, because this idiot just pitched headfirst into three feet of muffins.”
The idiot in question is starting to come around, and she looks up at me with a rage that might burn a little brighter if she had a few more red blood cells inside of her at the moment.
“Fuck you, Chass,” Brandon Childress says lazily, his mouth moving around about half a pound of strawberry jelly. “My little sister was on that bus.”
He’s not the first person to say fuck you to me, and getting a lunch tray over the head in elementary school was way more embarrassing than this. But coming hard on the heels of Mom being threatened over Facebook, I don’t have a retaliatory response locked and loaded. His words aren’t sliding off my back the way they usually would; anger rises in my stomach, but it was preceded by something else—cold, hard fear.
“You!” Nathans says, trying to regain some control and pointing at Brandon. “Get back to ISS, and let Mrs. St. John know you’re doing an extra day for how you just spoke to Lydia.”
“’Kay,” he says, snagging a sugar cookie as he leaves, apparently all his anger about his little sister mollified by about fifteen hundred free calories.
“I’m just going to take Lydia to the bathroom for a minute,” MacKenzie cheerily informs Mrs. Nathans, then steers me by the elbow out into the hallway.
“You okay?” she asks as I lean against the wall, my breaths coming shallow and fast. “Brandon better get more than one day OSS for that.”
She’s worried about me, and I appreciate it. But it’s not only Brandon’s casual attack that has my blood pressure high. It’s because I just figured it out, and like Archimedes hopping out of the bathtub to go tell the king what he’d discovered about volume and water displacement, nothing else mattered to me in the moment. Archimedes ran outside naked, and I screamed a seemingly random number in the middle of a blood drive.
“Two,” I repeat to MacKenzie, putting my hands on her shoulders. “The June sixteenth article said the remaining two townspeople who were MIA had been found. But the June fifteenth issue said there were three.”
“Neat,” Kenzie says, with complete disinterest. She’s not listening, and she doesn’t care—but I know someone who will.
Unfortunately, that person is as high as a kite when I call her.
“Lydiaaaaaaaaaa,” Bristal says, drawing my name out as long as she can. “What is up?”
“I figured out what was bothering me about that article,” I say, taking her off speakerphone so that anyone else in the girls’ bathroom doesn’t know exactly how under the influence Bristal is at the moment. “The reporter said the two missing people have now been accounted for, but the issue before had the tally at three.”
“Huh,” Bristal says, mulling it. I don’t know if I need to do the subtraction for her, or if she’s got this. “Could’ve been a typo, do you think?”
“Maybe,” I admit. “But I doubt it. Swinton might have been the only employee and was run absolutely ragged, but he was good at what he did. That’s a pretty big slip, to not know the number of missing when it’s the biggest moment in Henley history.”
“So who was this third person?” Bristal asks. “And how do we find out?”
My mind goes back to Bailey Foxglove, sixteen years old and trying to answer the questions of every resident in Henley who can’t find their loved ones.
“Two options,” I tell her. “Remember the sheriff’s daughter who was taking police calls? We can ask her, and, of course, we follow up with David Swinton, the reporter. What are you doing right now?”
“Now?” Bristal asks. “I’m smoking the devil’s lettuce.”
“Well, I need you to stop,” I say, then flick through my messages to find one from my mom that came in this morning with Bailey Foxglove’s contact info. “We’re going to meet with the sheriff’s daughter after school. Can you be sober by then?”
“Dude, it’s cheap weed. I’m going to be fully functioning in like five minutes.”
“Great,” I say. “Because I’m going to need you to be sharp.”
