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3

Riley

Mom dropped me off in the Lone Butte High School parking lot early Saturday morning with my overnight bag. The sun was still rising over the horizon, bright as an orange slice. Small bonus: Mom had just gotten off her hospital shift and her red-rimmed eyes were clouded with fatigue, one of the drawbacks to being a doctor, but a major advantage when you didn’t want her to notice stuff. It helped that we had to drive into the sun. That was probably why she hadn’t commented about my fave tie-dyed pink baseball cap being tugged superlow over my forehead. I had to hide the results of Doctor Drew’s secret BOTOX concoction handiwork. I was lucky it hadn’t turned into an infection or a rash or worse. It looked like a couple of ant bites, just as Drew had warned me. She’d conveniently forgotten to tell me, though, that my forehead would feel like plastic. Whenever I wrinkled my nose, my forehead stayed as frozen as stone. Most people wouldn’t notice, but most people weren’t my mom.

“When should I pick you up?” Mom yawned as I opened the passenger door of her Mercedes. Two yellow school buses waited next to the curb, their engines idling. Students had already begun to board. I recognized a few from Lone Butte, a couple sophomores and juniors, but nobody that I knew well. Most of the ones that I didn’t recognize were from other Phoenix schools. One guy was actually wearing a cowboy hat so I figured him for Queen Creek, way out in the boondocks where people still had ranches and dairy farms. Kind of lanky-cute in a Jake Gyllenhaal way.

“Tomorrow night,” I said. “We’re supposed to be back here by six.”

“What time did your brother get home last night?” she asked, her eyes narrowing with newfound sharpness.

I pulled the rim of my cap even lower. “Not late,” I lied. “Probably around ten.” Another lie. More like midnight.

Mom smiled, just like I’d known she would. “Good. Well, have a good time. Where are you going again?”

“Woods Canyon,” I said, but the door had already shut. I had left all the brochures and information about the leadership conference on the kitchen counter, perfectly stapled and organized with pink paperclips and Post-it notes, and, seriously? She’d signed my registration form two weeks ago, so it wasn’t like she didn’t already know. I didn’t want to have this conversation with people staring at us from the bus windows. That was kind of why I didn’t wave, either. I mean, it wasn’t like she was dropping me off for my first day of kindergarten or anything.

Life would be so much better when I got my own car.

Instead, I pulled out my cell phone from my pocket and fired off a text while I walked to the bus:

The conf is @ Woods Canyon. Info on the kitchen counter. Bye. Love u.

I hoped she got the message. Mom didn’t totally get texting and hated that she had to pull out her reading glasses to see the keys. But I wasn’t going to call her when I was within spitting distance from the bus. Even though the windows were tinted, I could see the outlines of faces staring down at me and I was a little distressed to see that almost every seat, at least on the parking lot side, was taken.

Two seconds later, Mom surprised me with a reply: Okay. Have a nice time. Love you back. Always. Mom

Mom always signed her texts Mom as if I didn’t know it was her.

I reached the front of the bus and drew back a steadying breath. Maybe going to this conference was a lame idea, after all. I mean, what normal teenager goes to a leadership conference on a perfectly good Saturday? I should be at the mall with Drew.

I hoisted my bag higher on my shoulder. It wasn’t really a backpack but it wasn’t luggage, either. It happened to match my pink baseball cap. Pink, in case you hadn’t noticed, was my all-time favorite color. Given the choice of pink and anything else, I always went pink. Cheesy, I know, but the color was one of the few things in my life that made me happy. Whenever I saw shades of pink, I smiled inside. I kept waiting to graduate to a more mature color preference, like blue or retro green, but it just wasn’t happening. Maybe when I left for college.

Scott Jin stood at the bus door with a clipboard. His eyes dropped to his sheet when he saw me, presumably to find my name. Scott knew me through my brother, like most upperclassman. I think he may have been on the golf team with Ryan before he traded golf for Math Club and Debate, but he always dressed like he was ready to play—brown shorts with perfect creases and golf shirts buttoned right up to his neck. “Riley Berenger,” he said, very official-like, without looking at me. “You’re in bus number one. This one.” He pointed to the door with a blue pen.

“What about when we get to Woods Canyon?” I said. “Where will I be assigned there?”

“Girls will be in one cabin. Guys in the other,” he said. He might as well have added “Duh” at the end of his sentence.

“Oh,” I said, mildly relieved that this wasn’t a sleeping-in-tents-with-an-outhouse affair. The brochure hadn’t been completely clear on that point, and camping was not my thing. “I didn’t know.”

He tapped his clipboard, dismissing me, and I climbed inside.

There was excitement on the bus but it wasn’t, say, going-to-a-football-game-at-a-rival-school excitement. This was, after all, a collection of some of the smartest kids in all of Phoenix. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I was considered one of them, especially on the days when I felt like the biggest idiot in the world. Like yesterday, when I let Drew inject my forehead with toxic chemicals. What was I thinking?

The bus driver was reading a newspaper, his baseball cap turned backward on his head. He was chewing on a toothpick that looked as if it had been spinning between his teeth for the past six months.

When I reached the top step, I looked across the bus and saw that all of the seats were taken except for the first two rows behind the bus driver and one empty row near the back of the bus. It might have been my imagination but the excitement on the bus dimmed a smidgen. I pulled my cap lower as I surveyed the real estate. I didn’t see any sophomores from Lone Butte, and the juniors and seniors were already sitting with people, talking. There was no way I was walking all the way to the back, so I slipped into the second empty row behind the bus driver. At least I’d have a whole row to myself, so I guessed that arriving late had its advantages.

Behind me, Scott Jin hopped up the stairs, trailed by Mr. Romero, one of the school’s guidance counselors. Instead of his usual dark pants, white shirt and either red-or blue-striped tie, Mr. Romero looked almost human dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt that said Someone in Bozeman, Montana, Loves Me on the front. But his brow was furrowed as if he were anxious about something—and who could blame him? No doubt he’d rather be anywhere than camping with two busloads of teenagers. “Time to roll,” he finally instructed the bus driver.

Scott and Mr. Romero took the first seat behind the bus driver, thank god. Mr. Romero was okay, but I really didn’t want to talk to him for two hours about college applications and test scores, not when I’d downloaded four episodes of Friends to my iPod along with five new songs that I was dying to listen to.

The bus driver tucked his newspaper next to his seat, reached for the handle that cranked the door shut and steered the bus away from the curb.

We hadn’t even made it to the street when Mr. Romero stood and yelled, “Stop!”

I wasn’t the only one to look up in surprise. I hadn’t even scrolled down to my first Friends episode.

A blue pickup truck sped into the parking lot and headed straight for us.

“What the...” the bus driver muttered as the bus jolted to a stop. It looked like the truck was going to play chicken with our school bus.

I gripped the seat in front of me as a black cloud spewed from behind the truck, which, by the way, looked ready to explode. When it got closer, I could make out two faces behind the cloudy windshield. Boys. The one in the passenger seat was waving his arm out the window.

“Good!” Mr. Romero said, a smile in his voice as Scott returned to his clipboard.

“I thought we had everybody?” Scott said.

“We do now,” Mr. Romero said.

Scott’s brow furrowed as he continued to study his clipboard. He flipped through a stack of white pages. “Who’d I miss?” he said, as if it were not humanly possible for him to miss anything. Which, for him, was probably true. I’d heard that he’d gotten a perfect score on the math section of the SATs. I mean, who scored perfect on that? That was borderline freakish.

“Sam Tracy,” Mr. Romero said as he stared out the front windshield. “But let’s cut him some slack, okay? He traveled a long way to get here.”