The Exact Location of Home (9 page)

I tighten the life vest one more time and try to figure out how I can get into the water without tipping Gee in with me. Finally, I convince Ruby to hold the kayak steady while I balance over my seat and flip my legs off one side.

I feel like I've plunged into a giant glass of ice water up to my waist.

“Is it cold?” Gianna asks.

I nod. So cold I can't talk. Or breathe, really.

My legs prickle with icy needles for a minute but get numb pretty quickly. I kick my way toward the cave, but waves keep coming at, floating me up and away from where I need to be.

Finally, I make my way to the opening in the rocks and stand up. It's not as deep here—only about three feet, so I can touch bottom. I put my hands on the edges of the rock walls to steady myself. It's slippery with cold algae, and my fingers are numb.

I step into the crevice as a big wave sloshes in. The cave narrows quickly as I move toward the back. I know it can't be too deep, having been carved by waves and wind. My shoulders brush the rocky walls as I walk, but so far my head is clear. I reach up to see if I can reach the ceiling, but my fingers only wiggle in the air.

I thought the light from outside would reach to the back wall, but it doesn't. Even though my eyes have had time to adjust, I can't see ahead of me. There's a big wave, a hollow schlooping sound, and then a squeak that doesn't fit in with the water sounds.

“Hey!” I call to the kayaks floating outside the entrance. “Did you hear that?”

“The water? It sounds cool, doesn't it?” Gianna ducks down to look in the cave. “Can you see in there?”

Before I can answer, there's another squeaking sound. A lot of squeaking sounds, coming from right over my head.

“Ruby, can you aim that flashlight in here again?”

Just as the beam finds the back of the cave, the squeaking sounds explode into a collective fluttering screech. Bats!

“Gahh!” Wings beat against my face and flap in my hair. I splash out of the cave, and the bats swarm out around me.

They disappear around a curve in the cliff—probably into some other cave where no stupid kids decided to go swimming.

I catch my breath and find Ruby and Gianna. They paddled away from the cave entrance when the bats showed up, but now Gianna paddles back and looks down at me, bobbing on the waves. “Eww. You've got bat poop in your hair.”

“It's actually called guano,” Ruby says, as if that might make me feel better. “Here.” She pulls up alongside Gianna and steadies the double kayak so I can climb in. “We better head back to Aunt Barbara's place.”

We paddle without talking for a while. Then Gianna starts giggling. “It
was
called Superhero's Lair, you know.
Bat
man, get it? You can't say nobody warned you.”

 

Ruby's Aunt Barbara is waiting on shore when we pull up in the kayaks. She was worried because the wind was picking up. She steps into the water and pulls the boats onto the sand. She takes one look at my wet clothes and bat-guano hair and sends me in to take a shower.

When I get out, she's standing at the door with her purse over her shoulder and her car keys in her hand.

“Ready for your rabies shot?”

 

My mother meets us at the doctor's office, still in her apron from Alan's.

I rush up to her. “I don't need shots. I didn't get bit, I swear.”

“Sit down.” Aunt Barbara points me to the chair between Ruby and Gianna, and I sit. “They need your insurance card, Laurie.”

Mom looks at the receptionist behind the desk and then back at Ruby's aunt.

“Your insurance card,” she says again.

Mom opens her purse and starts poking through it, but it looks more like she's stirring things around than looking for anything. Finally, she says, “I'll have to bring it in later.” She sits down at the desk to fill out paperwork.

“I guess maybe that wasn't the best idea today, huh?” Ruby pulls out the GPS unit and clicks through the coordinates for the different caches.

“I still don't see how he could have hidden the cache in there with all the bats,” Gianna says. “But it was the only cave big enough for a person to fit.”

I nod. “It must have been back there somewhere. Maybe it was wedged in a crack along the ceiling or something. I should have had the light the whole time, I guess.”

“We should have checked the clue, too.” Gianna pulls a computer printout from her backpack. “I printed it off last night but forgot about it.”

I hold the page in my hands and look down.

QR URELQ LQ WKLV FDYH, EXW BRX'OO IRQG SOHQWB RI EDWV!

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABC

My hair drips onto the puzzle. “Got a pencil?”

Gianna hands me one, and I get to work on the cipher. Dad used the same code of all his caches, so it's not too tough. I figure it out, letter by letter, and if today had been any kind of different day, if this week hadn't been so awful, if things weren't so just plain crummy, I probably would have laughed at the message.

Instead, I just stare at it as the nurse calls my name.

“Kirby Zigonski? Time for the first of your seven shots.”

“Here.” I hand it to Gianna on my way through the white door. “Another message from Dad. He always was a funny guy.”

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABC

QR URELQ LQ WKLV FDYH, EXW BRX'OO IRQG SOHQWB RI EDWV!

NO ROBIN IN THIS CAVE, BUT YOU'LL FIND PLENTY OF BATS!

“Hey, bat boy!” Kevin Richards shouts from the top step of the school entrance. He drops his backpack so he can flap his arms up and down.

I hold the door for Gianna and Ruby. “How'd he get hold of that one so fast?”

“Remember the doctor's office receptionist with the big hair?” Ruby says.

“Yeah.”

“Mrs. Richards.”

Really, can this day get worse? I woke up this morning freezing because I left my window cracked open last night. I couldn't find socks without holes. And I couldn't stop thinking about what day it was. October first. The date on the letter. The “or else” date.

When I got up this morning, Mom was sitting at the table surrounded by papers and envelopes, scribbling in her checkbook. She looked like she'd been up all night.

She offered to fix me breakfast. I didn't have the heart to tell her we've been out of cereal for two days. “Nah,” I said. “I'll grab something at school.”

I didn't. Now my stomach feels hollow and the rest of me is all shaky.

“Good morning, boys and girls!” Our principal, Ms. Hempstead, used to teach elementary school and starts the morning announcements every day as if we're all six years old. “It's a lovely day outside, and we have some important news from the student council. There will be a school dance on November first. And checking our calendar today…it's October first.”

No kidding.

I open my locker, lean in to get my computer class folder, and hear Kevin Richards laugh as a giant hand shoves me between the shoulders.

My head catches the edge of the locker, but what's worse is the pain in my arm when I slam it into the locker door trying to catch myself. It gets me right where I had the shot yesterday. And I have to go back for another one tomorrow and three more after that. I'm going to be seeing a lot of Kevin's mom.

I watch Kevin saunter down the hall to gym class at the other end of the building, and I feel my face flush. I imagine myself running down the hallway—or flying after him, like the real Batman, tackling him to the floor. Then I have a better idea.

Mr. Teeter always makes us run laps if we're late. I call down the hall.

“Hey, Richards!”

He turns and stops, surprised that the meek and bruised Kirby Zigonski has spoken to him. “Yeah?”

“Did you finish that crossword puzzle you were working on the other day?”

“What's it to you?” He sneers at me but doesn't leave.

“Just concerned about your academics,” I say. “You know, poor achievement in middle school is considered a key indicator when it comes to the likelihood of future incarceration.”

“What're you talkin' about?”

“Oh, never mind, I guess.” I count down with the second hand on my watch. “I better get going.”

Science class is right next to my locker, and I step in just as the bell rings. Mrs. Loring starts to close the door but not before I hear Kevin swear from all the way down the hallway.

He's always hated running laps.

 

The mental picture of Richards running in circles makes me feel a little better. So does our science lesson—a lab on pulse and exercise where we get to use special probes to measure one another's heart rates. The equipment feeds the data into a laptop computer Mrs. Loring has set up and graphs it so you can see changes.

“Want to go first?” I ask Gianna. She and Ruby and I always try to work together. Today, we're in groups of four. Mrs. Loring put Robert Rensliver with us because he didn't have a partner. Ruby's telling him all about Birds First, hoping for a new recruit to show up at the next city council meeting.

Gee and I start to get the lab set up.

“Okay—how's it work again?” Gianna holds the wires and looks up at me.

“You have to clip it on your belt,” I say. “Here.” I lean over with the clip end of the probe to help her before I realize she's not wearing a belt and her shirt—this fluffy, ruffly thing—ends right at the top of her pants. I reach over to clip on the probe without touching her, but she erupts into a fit of giggles and doubles over.

“Zig, that tickles!”

“I didn't touch you.” My face is hot. I turn to Ruby. “I didn't even get close to her, and she just started laughing, I swear.”

Ruby's grinning the way Gee's Nonna does when she teases us about us getting married some day. Nonna does that pretty much whenever she remembers who I am. Ruby holds out her hand for the probe. “Maybe I better help her.”

No argument here.

Gianna keeps glancing over at me. Her face is red, too. Maybe it's because of the exercise. I doubt it, though. Someone who runs three miles every morning isn't likely to be flushed and winded over twenty jumping jacks for an experiment.

 

Gianna acts weird in lunch, too.

She sits by me—she always does that, so that's not the weird part—and she keeps looking over with her mouth open like she's going to say something. But she never does.

“
What
?” I finally ask Gianna when Ruby gets up to recruit more kids for her city council meeting.

“Huh?” she says.

“You keep almost saying something.”

“How do you know what I'm almost saying?” Her cheeks start to flush again.

“I don't. That's why I'm asking you what you keep almost saying.”

“Maybe I'm not almost saying anything,” she says.

“Okay.” I put away my peanut butter sandwich and pull out an apple.

“Hmph,” she says. I pretend not to hear. She'll just say she didn't say it anyway.

I take a bite of my apple and look over the soccer players' table, past their red and gold jerseys, out the window. It's getting cloudy.

“Hmph,” Gianna says again.

I turn back to her. “Hmph?”

She sighs. “Never mind.”

“Okay.” I take another bite of the apple.

Gianna takes a deep breath and spits out, “You-know-there's-a-dance-next-month-right-because-I'm-thinking-about-going-and-I-was-wondering-if-you-think-you'll-probably-think-about-going-even-though-dances-are-kind-of-dumb-and-not-your-thing-I-just-still-wondered-if-you-thought-you-might.” She bites her lip and looks at me. I have a mouth full of apple.

“Or not,” she says and starts to stand up with her tray.

I swallow fast. “No, hold on,” I say. She sits back down. “I … uh …” Did she just ask me to the dance? No, she definitely didn't do that. Gee would never do that, plus she doesn't even like dances, I don't think. At least she didn't used to like them.

“It's okay if you don't want to go.” She looks disappointed.

“No, I'll probably go.”

“You will?” She looks surprised.

Actually, I'm surprised, too. “I mean … well … I could go. I'm not really sure it'd be the greatest or anything, but if you think it would be fun and you and Ruby are going, then I guess I could go. If you want.”

She nods and stands up. “They usually have Rice Krispie Treats at the snack table,” she says, like that clinches it.

And I have to be honest. It kind of does.

I have another bite of my apple and watch the milk truck guy wheel in a crate of cartons.

Gianna wants me to go to that dance. I think. And I think I might actually want to go. How about that?

The warning bell rings, so I toss my apple core and grab my books. The milk guy pulls away from the curb, and the soccer team leaves in a big clump to go to their lockers. My feet carry me to social studies, where my eyes stay focused on the movie about the civil rights movement, but my brain keep bouncing back to Gianna and the dance.

And Rice Krispie treats. Lunch feels like a long time ago.

Finally, the last bell rings. Ruby has some meeting, and Gee has cross-country practice, so I walk home on my own. My shadow is long in the late afternoon sun. My arm hurts a little, but the rest of me feels great. I unzip my jacket.

“Hello there, young man!” Mr. Webster's coming down the steps of the library. I wave, just like I used to when I'd see him out for his walk when I was delivering papers in the morning.

A warm wind plays around with the leaves that have fallen already, whipping them into miniature tornadoes. I pick up a red one.

I don't even remember that today is October first—the “or else” date.

Until I get home.