Pushing through the crowd was slow. She was fighting against the tide, she realized. People were slowly being herded back behind the low perimeter wall that ringed Seitz’s grounds. She finally managed to squeeze through the press to where she could get a view and was relieved to see there wasn’t anyone lying dead. There was a fire truck parked beside the ambulance, and a couple of firemen in heavy Day-Glo coats sitting on the steps of the fire truck.
How bad can it be if the firemen are drinking coffee?
She craned her neck and caught another glimpse of yellow crime-scene tape being stretched to push the crowd farther back. Beyond the tape, though, all she could see were the fire truck and ambulance parked on the quad, and, of course, Widener Hall, with its four stories of classroom windows, all looking down on the Seitz grounds like rows of empty eyes.
“What’s going on?” Jonah grabbed her shoulder and jumped, yanking on her in the process and earning them both dirty looks as he jostled the bystanders around them. “I can’t see!”
Alix shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “I don’t think anybody knows.” She stood on tiptoe again. Now she spied a bunch of cops standing at the doors to Widener.
What the—?
It looked like they were in some kind of hazmat gear.
Maybe something broke in the labs. Some kind of spill.
“Alix!” Derek and Cynthia were elbowing through the crowd to join them. “Did you just get here?”
“Yeah. Do you know what’s going on?”
“Everyone’s clueless,” Derek said as he squeezed into Alix’s personal space. He shifted apologetically, trying to give her room, and bumped into her again as Cynthia plowed through to them as well.
“They’ve had us locked out for the last twenty minutes,” she said breathlessly. “The fire truck got here just before you did. The guys in the bodysuits, too.”
Alix noticed that Jonah was getting antsy, looking for a chance to slip away. She barely snagged him by his book bag and dragged him back as he made an escape. “Nice try, bro.”
“Come on, Alix,” Jonah whined as she got a firmer grip on his arm. “I just wanted to see if anyone was dead in the ambulance.”
My brother, ghoul in training, Alix thought.
But Jonah’s mention of bodies mirrored her own suppressed worry. The whole thing was too weird, and now that Jonah had said it out loud, it made her own anxiety suddenly feel more real as well. As if he’d invoked something that had to happen now that he’d said it.
It had happened to her friend Anna Lenay that way. She’d lost her mother and father in a small-plane accident when they were sophomores. Before her parents left, Anna had joked with her dad that he was probably going to crash the plane. It was probably the last thing she’d said to them before they took off for Martha’s Vineyard, and Alix had been there to hear it.
One of the guys in the hazmat suits jogged over to the crowd. He was sweating when he pulled off his hood. He spoke to an officer who looked like he was in charge, and then the police were telling everyone to step back even farther.
“Maybe it’s a bomb,” Jonah said.
“You better hope not,” Alix replied darkly.
They’d had a bomb scare in the fall. The faculty and students had been cleared off the entire campus, dorms and day students, faculty housing, science and humanities buildings, the pool house, everything, while K9 units went over the grounds. No one had been caught for it, and Alix had never said anything out loud, but she privately suspected Jonah had been behind the scare. It was the kind of thing her brother would do. The kid had serious impulse-control problems.
Luckily, Jonah hadn’t even been suspected. He’d covered his tracks, at least. Alix wondered if he’d been disappointed. It was at least possible that he’d been trying to get himself caught so he wouldn’t have to attend Seitz, but she never asked.
The cops kept pushing everyone farther back, and the crowd got tighter as a result. Alix was shoved up against Jonah and Cynthia and Derek. Some of the really little kids were starting to freak out. Older ones were talking on their cell phones, giving a blow-by-blow of what was happening, or else texting and posting photos online as it all went down.
Alix was starting to feel claustrophobic. The crush and shift of the crowd were overwhelming.
“We need everyone to step back, please! Behind the yellow tape! All the way back!”
The jostling increased. A truck rumbled through the crowd with the word SWAT on the side.
“Worse and worse,” Cynthia said.
“You think there are hostages?” Derek wondered.
“Yeah. SWAT got a call about a crew of free radicals holding a bunch of innocent alkanes prisoner in the chem lab,” Cynthia said.
In the crush, Alix couldn’t turn to respond. She was sweltering in her school blazer. Seitz school uniforms were uncomfortable enough as it was, and now in the unseasonably warm spring sunshine, packed in with the crowd, the layers of clothing were becoming unbearable.
A news crew showed up. A camerawoman and blow-dried-hair guy with a microphone went from person to person, asking questions. The camerawoman was gesturing for the guy to move into a better position. Everyone watched the SWAT police get out of their armored truck. They started pulling equipment and setting it up on the grass.
“Bomb squad,” someone said.
It looked that way to Alix as well. The cops all had heavily padded protective garments. The SWAT guys were skulking around the edges of Widener, carrying assault rifles, and now the guys in heavy bodysuits were lumbering up the steps of the building. The SWAT guys pressed themselves up against the brick on either side of the doors. Riot helmets and body armor. It looked like the movies: cops all around the doors, ready to bust in and start blasting away at the bad guys.
The shout of “Clear!” echoed distantly.
Derek was standing right behind Alix, leaning over her shoulder, cheek close, his breath hot on her ear.
“Watch this,” he said. “It should be good.”
Alix froze.
That’s not Derek.
Alix tried to turn in the constricting crowd. She barely managed to twist, and when she did, she gasped. The black guy from yesterday was leaning close over her shoulder, smiling slightly. Mirror aviator sunglasses reflected her own surprised expression back at her.
“Nice to see you again, Alix.”
He looked completely different. His head was shaved smooth now, and he was wearing an expensive sports coat over a button shirt. TAG Heuer wristwatch. But it wasn’t just the change of hair and clothing. Everything about him was different. The style of him was different. The guy yesterday had been loose, carefree—cool in that I don’t give a damn about all of you sort of way. Hip-hop cool. But the way this guy held himself, the first thing that popped into Alix’s mind was cop. Or even more: Secret Service. Like the cold men who had observed from the alcoves the time Dad had been invited to a dinner for the president’s reelection campaign.
But still, this was definitely the same guy who had punched Mulroy. She was sure of it. He was an inch away, and he looked completely different, but he was the same guy.
“How do you know my name?”
“You’re going to miss the show if you keep looking at me,” he said. And then he smiled and raised his sunglasses, showing dark, flashing eyes. Alix felt like she’d been hit by a train. Definitely the same guy. The same flash of wildness and laughter. The same frightening promise.
His eyes flicked toward the school. “You’ll like this, Alix,” he said. “This is for you.”
Another preparatory call echoed up from the SWAT team members arrayed around Widener Hall’s doorway, and then the air shivered as their explosives went off. A booming rush rolled over the crowd and left everyone murmuring. Alix jerked her gaze back to the school. Smoke was billowing up from around the doorway.