He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing as I continued. “I understand I was so much trouble before, and I want to convince you I’ve changed.” I tried to remember the speech my mom had used on me. “I know I don’t deserve forgiveness,” I added, “but I’m going to work for it all the same.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I want to serve detention, sir. After school, for the same amount of time as I should have been suspended.”
Assistant Principal Strachan stared at me. “You want detention?”
“It’s the only way to show you I mean what I say,” I explained. This didn’t really make sense, even to me, but he seemed to buy it. Or at least he couldn’t figure out a sinister motive behind my sudden desire to scrub the hallways and dust the library.
“Very well,” he said, his eyes narrowed. “You will serve out your suspension as a detention for the next two weeks. I don’t know what you’re up to, Miss Gumm, but if I find out you’re doing anything shady—”
“You won’t, sir!” I said quickly, grabbing my bag and resisting the urge to give him a big kiss on the cheek. He was still staring after me in confusion as I ran out the door.
I was so ready to start searching that I didn’t pay attention to much of anything that day. I ate lunch with Dustin and Madison again; true to his word, Dustin had shown up so late for first period that he, too, was sentenced to after-school purgatory. “Aren’t you worried they’ll kick you out of school, too?” I asked him.
“Are you kidding? I was on the football team,” he said. Madison snorted in disgust and muttered something that sounded a lot like “bullshit double standards.”
I was practically bouncing in my seat on the long hard cafeteria bench. Dustin Jr. was in a cheerful mood, waving his arms around and drooling on his terry-cloth onesie. Watching Madison taking care of her baby, I was struck by how much she had changed. She was still tough, but now it seemed protective. You could tell she didn’t really know what she was doing. Sometimes she seemed almost terrified of the baby, as if she might drop him or do something totally wrong. Dustin obviously had no clue how to deal with an infant either. But they both looked at the little guy with so much love. It was strange to see the person who’d made my life miserable for so long this caring and vulnerable. Madison had been good at everything without even trying. But I guess even Madison was no match for ten pounds of screaming, spit-covered, easily damaged newborn.
I wondered if my own mom had been anything like that when I was a baby. If she and my dad had looked at me with that same expression of dopey, helpless, animal love. If anyone would ever love me like that again. Nox. I shoved that thought into a closet at the back of my brain and slammed the door. Nox had made his choice and I didn’t blame him. I knew Oz would always come first in his heart. If I felt that strongly about a place, I’d put it before people, too. Maybe I just wasn’t meant to have a home. But the least I could do was help Nox save his.
“What are you thinking, Amy?” Madison, having secured Dustin Jr. in his baby wrap again, was looking at me. “You look like you went to another planet. A really, like, sad planet.”
“Nothing,” I said, a little too sharply. But she didn’t seem to mind.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know all about that.” For a second I wanted to snap at her. What did Madison know about real sadness? And then I thought of what her life must be like now, how her so-called friends had bailed on her the second she’d turned into a teen-mom warning story, and I realized that Madison probably knew a lot more about suffering than I gave her credit for.
After-school detention was a motley collection of the school’s biggest losers (whose number I probably would’ve counted among even if I hadn’t offered to serve out my sentence): a couple of potheads, a guy I recognized from one of my classes junior year who was always getting in fights in the halls, and a girl with a bleach-blond ratty perm and stonewashed jeans straight out of 1997 who rolled her eyes at me as I eagerly accepted my vacuum cleaner and dust rag. The shop teacher, Mr. Stone, handed out supplies to my fellow detainees, and then mumbled instructions so low that he might as well have been speaking another language. Just then, the door swung open and Dustin walked in.
“Hi, Amy,” he said. “We should—”
“No socializing!” Mr. Stone said, coming to life a little. Dustin apologized and accepted his bottle of glass cleaner. “Help Gumm with the science classrooms,” Mr. Stone added.
“Actually, sir, I thought we could clean the library,” Dustin said innocently. “That was my job last time. I’m a real expert.”
Mr. Stone stared at Dustin as if he was up to something—which, of course, he was. Sort of. But Dustin just looked back with a vacant, innocent expression. I had to look away or else I’d start cracking up.
“Fine,” Mr. Stone growled. “But I’ll be checking up on you. Any hanky-panky . . .” He stopped short and then flushed red. One of the potheads snickered and sneezed the name of a venereal disease.
“That’s enough!” Mr. Stone barked. “For that, you’re on bathroom duty, Carson.” Mr. Stone tossed Dustin a set of keys, and I hid another smile as I followed him to the library.
I’d never spent any time in the high school library. From what I could tell, nobody else had either. Dustin unlocked the door to what was more or less a glorified janitor’s closet: a tiny, windowless room full of rusting metal shelves crammed with books that hadn’t been new when my mom was going to school here. It looked like the shelves hadn’t been dusted since the last time Dustin served detention. The sad little book display arranged on a tiny table near the door was springtime-themed—despite the fact that it was October. There wasn’t even a librarian; if you wanted to check out books, you were supposed to borrow a teacher’s keys and use the honor system. Literature theft wasn’t exactly a high-concern crime in our neck of the prairie. The school probably would’ve been excited just to learn that someone could actually read.
The “archive” turned out to be a closet at the back of the library. Dustin flipped through the keys Mr. Stone had given him, but none of them fit the lock. “Shoot,” he said. I looked at the flimsy wooden door, and then at Dustin. He grinned. “Really?”
“Come on,” I said. “I did your homework for you for a year. You owe me.”
He nodded solemnly. “You do have a point there.” Bracing one foot against the doorframe, he grabbed the doorknob and pulled. Muscles bulged under the soft fabric of his cornflower-blue T-shirt, and I remembered with a pang that I’d once had a major crush on the guy. Dustin might be a little dumb, but he was hot. The door creaked alarmingly, and with one final tug it came away from the frame with a splintering crack.
“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t think that would actually work. You’re really strong.”
Dustin blushed modestly. “It’s just, like, laminate,” he mumbled.
“We’re going to be in so much trouble,” I said, looking at the ruined lock.
“Nah,” he said. “Nobody comes in here. They won’t notice for years.”
Eagerly, I looked over his shoulder at the contents of the closet: a teetering stack of dusty cardboard boxes, piles of faded fabric, and, weirdly enough, a rusty old hoe. That was it. The entire historical archive of Flat Hill, Kansas.
“I guess this place was always a dump,” I said. Dustin pulled the top box off the stack, grunting with surprise at how heavy it was. I lifted the lid, revealing a stack of ancient yearbooks. The top one was dated 1967.
“Far out,” Dustin said, leafing through it. “Check out this dude’s hair.” He pointed to a blissed-out-looking hippie guy with shampoo-commercial-worthy blond waves past his shoulders.