They’d started out wanting to save the world. Then they’d scaled back, settling for saving the city. But they couldn’t even do that. Maybe they’d gone about it the wrong way. April wasn’t sorry they’d tried. But then again, for her the cause had always been the smallest part. She’d believed in McGee more than she’d believed in politics. The five of them could have organized a bowling league and April would’ve been satisfied, as long as they did it together.
Whenever she caught herself thinking this way, April tried to tell herself that missing the past didn’t mean she regretted having chosen to leave with Inez. But sometimes she couldn’t help feeling Inez was unhappy with her — as if, having won April away from her friends, she’d come to discover the prize was less enjoyable than the fight.
And was that why she was on this bus now? April wondered. Not for McGee but to force Inez to fight for her again?
A commotion woke her, a screech and a shudder. April looked outside. It took a few moments to understand they were at a bus station.
“Where are we?” she asked.
R.J. had turned to face the back of the bus. “Police.”
With a start, April spun around. There was a cop standing at the last row.
“Up,” he was saying, “now.” He was gesturing at one of the passengers, his other hand hovering at his hip, just above his holster.
At the front, another cop, a woman, was talking to the driver. Quietly, impossible to hear over the chatter of her radio. Suddenly the female cop looked up, meeting April’s eye.
April ducked behind the seat in front of her.
“What are you doing?” R.J. said.
Beyond the edge of the seat, April could see the cop up front coming toward them. Slowly, studying everyone as she passed. As if she were looking for someone. Or something. April’s first thought was Uncle Xavier’s package. When the cop reached her, April felt as pale as the mist on the window.
But the cop passed her by.
“What’s wrong with you?” R.J. asked.
“Nothing.”
In the back of the bus, the two cops together raised a short man in a lime-green sweatsuit to his feet. Together they dragged him backward down the aisle.
“This is unconstitutional,” the man hollered as he struggled to grip a seat back. “I have my rights. I paid just like everyone else. You can’t do this. Hey, what’s your name? Give me your names. You’re all witnesses. We have to stand up together.”
As he passed April’s row, the man’s flailing arm smacked R.J. on the back of the head.
“I’m going to sue your ass off. I want my money back. Driver. Driver—”
The man fought to free himself from the cops’ grip.
“Is it my fault you can’t drive?”
At the top of the steps, the man attempted to lunge at the driver, but the cops held him back.
The driver’s hands were shaking as he levered the door shut. Not until he’d released the air brakes did April feel sure the police wouldn’t be back for her.
Within a few minutes, they were back on the highway. Half an hour later, the bus stopped again, this time at a rest area. April got off with everyone else, but while the others were still in line for food and coffee, she returned to the bus, intending to collect her bag and find a new seat before R.J. got back.
But he was already there, row twenty-two, sitting with his head between the pages of the newspaper.
April didn’t have it in her to hurt his feelings. She lifted her backpack from the overhead bin and sat down beside him with a sigh. She held the bag in her lap. Somehow it seemed safer pressed to her body.
“I guess you’re not going to visit for too long if that’s your only bag,” R.J. said. “I’ve got a whole suitcase. Plus this.” He pointed to his own misshapen backpack. “My brother Simon taught me this trick where if I put the strap around my leg, no one can swipe it. I mean, without taking me with it.”
Before she could stop him, R.J. had taken April’s backpack from her lap. Then, as though her leg were his own, he lifted it and lowered it again into the center of a strap. He smiled at what he’d done.
“No thanks,” she said, to his clear disappointment, returning the bag to her lap. She didn’t want to let the package out of her sight.
“So who’s this friend?” R.J. said. “Is it like a boyfriend or just a friend?”
“Just a friend.”
“So like where’d you meet this friend? Is this someone you knew from when you were a kid?”
R.J. removed a piece of paper and a nub of pencil from his bag. “When was the last time you saw this friend?”
“Are you taking notes?” she said. “Are you a spy?”
R.J. smiled enigmatically. “Do you want to play tic-tac-toe?”
She didn’t. He commenced to draw. The bus resumed its course.
In the center of the paper, R.J. sketched a large rectangle, twice as wide as it was high. Inside he drew a door. Then came the windows, which he crossed with thin veinlike lines, to indicate they were broken.
“Why do you think they’re doing it?” he said.
“Doing what?”
“Blowing up buildings. In that story I was telling you about. This is like the second one.”
“I don’t know,” April said, turning away. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“Just to scare people?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does it scare you?”
“I guess so. Maybe—”
“Do you like scary movies?”
“You ask a lot of questions,” she said.
“That’s what my brother Freddy says. He says people don’t like to think about everything they do. He says sometimes people just do things, not for any reason.”
Well, April thought, if that’s what Freddy believes, then Freddy’s wrong. Or Freddy knew it was pointless to try to explain something so complicated to someone so young. There were always reasons for what people did. Sometimes they were just bad reasons. Or deceitful reasons — sometimes self-deceitful. In this, she considered herself an expert, and nothing Freddy could say would dissuade her. All her life she’d been doing things, pretending they were for herself, when really they were for others.
“What are you going to do while you stay with your friend?” R.J. asked, looking up from his drawing.
“I don’t know,” April said, waving him off. “I don’t know.”
R.J.’s drawing had expanded. The city in the picture had undergone gentrification. The first building was now one of many, rising into a sky that seemed never to have known a cloudy day. Motionless on the sidewalk, stick figures stood wide-legged and open-armed, as if bewildered by the beauty of the scenery. A small boy with unbending legs rode a bicycle. Each of their faces held an impossibly wide grin.
A squarish car with no steering wheel sped down the street, past the buildings and pedestrians, lines like a jet stream shooting from its back tires. A man, defying gravity, hung three-quarters of the way out the driver’s side window, one arm raised, as if to throw something or as if in warning.
“What do you think?” R.J. said, lifting it up so April could get a better look.
As he raised his picture, another appeared beneath it, a photograph on top of the stack of newspapers. In a glance, April could see the photo had been his model, though only loosely. The place R.J. had drawn first was in this photograph a mangled wreck of debris. Ceiling caved in, walls collapsed.
April had to squint to read the caption, something about an old, shuttered grocery store.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” R.J. said. “A couple weeks ago it was something else, a place that used to make shoes.”
On the sidewalk, firefighters picked through a small pile of rubble, while a stooped man in a wrinkled suit watched over their shoulders. Beyond a police barricade, just at the edge of the frame, stood several onlookers. There was a stocky Hispanic guy with a ponytail. And there was a black man April vaguely thought she recognized. And between them, as if April had known all along, stood McGee, dressed in the same wig she’d had that night at HSI, blond hair reaching down to her shoulders.