I nearly choked on my corn flakes. Because the only time Douglas ever starts talking about "them" is when he is having an episode.
My dad knew something was wrong, too. He put down his coffee and stared at Douglas worriedly.
Only my mom was oblivious. She was loading more biscotti onto a plate. She said, "Don't be ridiculous, Dougie. They're after Jessica, not you."
"No," Douglas said. He shook his head. "It's me they want. You see those dishes? Those satellite dishes on top of their vans? They're scanning my thought waves. They're using those satellite dishes to scan my thought waves."
I dropped my spoon. My dad went, gently, "Doug, did you take your medicine yesterday?"
"Don't you see?" Douglas, quick as a flash, yanked the biscotti out of my mom's hands and flung the plate to the floor. "Are you all blind? It's me they want! It's me!"
My dad jumped up and put his arms around Douglas. I pushed away my cereal bowl and said, "I better go. Maybe if I go, they'll follow me—"
"Go," my dad said.
I went. I got up, grabbed my flute and my backpack, and headed for the door.
They followed me. Or, I should say, they followed Ruth, who'd managed to convince the cops to let her out of her driveway and into mine. I jumped into the front seat, and we took off. If I hadn't been so worried about Douglas, I would have enjoyed watching all the reporters trying to scramble into their vans and follow us. But I was concerned. Douglas had been doing so well. What had happened?
"Well," Ruth said. "You have to admit, it's a lot to take."
"What is?"
Ruth reached up to adjust her rearview mirror. "Um," she said, staring pointedly into it. "That."
I looked behind us. We had a police escort, a bunch of the motorcycle cops rolling along beside us in an attempt to keep the hordes of news vans from bearing down on us too hard. But there were a lot more news vans than I would have thought. And they were all coming right at us. It wasn't going to be very funny when we tried to get out of the car.
"Maybe they won't let them onto school property," I said, hopefully.
"Yeah, right. Feeney's going to be standing there with a big welcome banner. Are you kidding?"
I said, "Well, maybe if I just talked to them …"
Which was how, just before the start of first period, I found myself standing on the school steps, fielding questions from these news reporters I'd been watching on TV my whole life.
"No," I said, in reply to one question, "it didn't hurt, really. It just felt sort of tingly."
"Yes," I said to someone else, "I do think the government should be doing more to find these children."
"No," I replied to another question, "I don't know where Elvis is."
Mr. Feeney, just as Ruth had predicted, was there all right. He was there with a little flock of reporters all his own. He and Mr. Goodhart stood on either side of me as I answered the reporters' questions. Mr. Goodhart looked uncomfortable, but Mr. Feeney, you could tell, was having the time of his life. He kept on saying to anyone who would listen how Ernest Pyle High School had won the state basketball championship in 1997. Like anyone cared.
And then, in the middle of this lame little impromptu press conference, something happened. Something happened that changed everything, even more than Douglas's episode had.
"Miss Mastriani," someone in the middle of the horde of reporters cried, "do you feel any guilt whatsoever over the fact that Sean Patrick O'Hanahan claims that, when his mother kidnapped him five years ago, it was in order to protect him from his abusive father?"
I blinked. It was another beautiful spring day, with the temperature already climbing into the seventies. But, suddenly, I felt cold.
"What?" I said, scanning the crowd, trying to figure out who was talking.
"And that your revealing Sean's whereabouts to the authorities," the voice went on, "has not only endangered his life, but put his mother's freedom in jeopardy?"
And then, instead of there being a sea of faces in front of me, there was only one face. I couldn't even tell if I was really seeing it, or if it was just in my mind's eye. But there it was, Sean's face, as I'd seen it that day in front of the little brick house in Paoli. A small face, white as paper, the freckles on it standing out like hives. His fingers, clinging to me, had shaken like leaves.
"Don't you tell anyone," he'd hissed at me. "Don't you ever tell anyone you saw me, understand?"
He had begged me not to tell. He had clung to me and begged me not to tell.
And I had told anyway. Because I had thought—I had honestly thought—he was being held against his will, by people of whom he was deathly afraid. He had certainly acted as if he were afraid.
And that was because he had been afraid. Of me.
I had truly thought I was doing the right thing. But I hadn't been doing the right thing. I hadn't done the right thing at all.
The reporters were still yelling questions at me. I heard them, but it was as if they were yelling them from very far away.
"Jessica?" Mr. Goodhart was looking down at me. "Are you all right?"
"I am not Sean Patrick O'Hanahan." That's what Sean had said to me that day outside his house. "So you can just go away, do you hear? You can just go away."
"And don't ever come back."
"Okay." Mr. Goodhart put his arm around me and started steering me back into the school. "That's enough for one day."
"Wait," I said. "Who said that? Who said that about Sean?"
But, unfortunately, as soon as they saw I was leaving, all the reporters started screaming questions at once, and I couldn't figure out who had asked me about Sean Patrick O'Hanahan.
"Is it true?" I asked Mr. Goodhart as he hustled me back inside the school.
"Is what true?"
"Is it true what that reporter said?" My lips felt funny, like I'd been to the dentist and gotten novocaine. "About Sean Patrick O'Hanahan not having been kidnapped at all?"
"I don't know, Jessica."
"Could his mom really go to jail?"
"I don't know, Jessica. But if it is, it isn't your fault."
"Why isn't it my fault?" He was walking me to my homeroom. For once I was late and nobody gave a damn. "How do you know it isn't my fault?"
"No court in the land," Mr. Goodhart said, "is going to award custody of a child to an abusive parent. The mother's probably just brainwashed the kid into thinking his father abused him."
"But how do you know?" I repeated. "How can anyone know? How am I supposed to know if what I'm doing, revealing these kids' locations to the authorities, is really in the best interest of the kids? I mean, maybe some of them don't want to be found. How am I supposed to know the difference?"
"You can't know," Mr. Goodhart said. We'd reached my classroom by then. "Jess, you can't know. You just have to assume that if someone loved them enough to report them missing, that person deserves to know where they are. Don't you think?"
No. That was the problem. I hadn't thought. I hadn't thought about anything at all. Once I'd figured out that my dream was true—that Sean Patrick O'Hanahan really was alive and well and living in that little brick house in Paoli—I had acted, without the slightest bit of further consideration.
And now, because of it, a little kid was in more trouble than ever.
Oh, yeah. I'd been touched by the finger of God, all right.
The question was, which finger?
C H A P T E R
13
It wasn't all bad news.
The good news was, I no longer had detention.
Pretty impressive, right? Girl gets psychic powers, girl gets punishment lifted. Just like that. I wonder how Coach Albright would feel if he knew. Essentially, I'd pretty much gotten away with punching his star tackle. That's gotta be a kick in the pants, right?