When Lightning Strikes (7 page)

On the other side of Rob, Greg Wylie leaned over and went, "Suck on this, Wendell."

"Both of you," I hissed through gritted teeth, "shut the hell up before Clemmings looks over here."

Hank sent his paper football flying in Wylie's direction. But Rob stuck out his hand and caught it before it got to where it was supposed to.

"You heard the lady," he said, in this dangerous voice. "Knock it off."

Both Wylie and Wendell simmered down. Boy. Miss Clemmings had been right. It was amazing what a little estrogen could do.

Okay
, I wrote.
On one condition
.

He wrote,
No conditions
and underlined it heavily.

I wrote, in big block letters,
Then I can't go
.

He'd seen what I was writing before I finished it. He snatched the notebook from me, looking annoyed, and wrote,
All right. What
?

Which was how, an hour later, we were headed for Paoli.

C H A P T E R
7

O
kay. Okay, so I'll admit it. Right here, on paper, in my official
statement
. You want a confession? You want me to tell the truth?

Okay. Here it is:

I like to go fast.

I mean,
really
fast.

I don't know what it is. I've just never been scared of speed. On road trips, like when we'd drive up to Chicago to see Grandma, and my dad would go eighty or so, trying to pass a semi, everyone in the car would be like, "Slow down! Slow down!"

Not me. I was always, "Faster! Faster!"

It's been that way ever since I was a little girl. I remember back when we used go to the county fair (before it was determined to be too "Gritty"), I always had to go on all the fast rides—the Whip, the Super Himalaya—by myself, because everyone else in my family was too scared of them. Just me, by myself, going sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour.

And that still wasn't fast enough. Not for me.

But here's the thing I found out that day I went for a ride with Rob: Rob liked going fast, too.

He was safe about it and everything. Like he made me wear a spare helmet he had in the storage container on the back of the bike. And he obeyed all traffic laws, while we were still within city limits. But as soon as we were out of them …

I have to tell you, I was in heaven. I mean it.

Of course, part of it might have been because I had my arms wrapped around this totally buff guy. I mean, Rob had abs that were hard as rock. I know, because I was holding on pretty tight, and all he was wearing beneath that leather jacket was a T-shirt.

Rob was my kind of guy. He liked taking risks.

It wasn't like there were any other cars on the road. I mean, we're talking country lanes here, surrounded by corn fields. I don't think we passed another car all night, except when we finally made the turn into Paoli.

Paoli.

What can I tell you about Paoli? What do you want to know? You want to know how it started? I guess you do. Okay, I'll tell you. It started in Paoli.

Paoli, Indiana, Paoli's just like any other small town in Southern Indiana. There was a town square with a courthouse on it, one movie theater, a bridal shop, a library. I guess there was probably an elementary school, too, and a high school, and a rubber tire factory, though I didn't see them.

I do know there were about ten churches. I made Rob turn left at one of the churches—don't even ask me how I knew it was the right one—and suddenly we were on the same tree-lined street from my dream. Two blocks later, and we were in front of this very familiar-looking little brick house. I tapped Rob on the shoulder, and he pulled over to the curb and cut the engine off.

Then we sat there, and I looked.

It was the house from my dream. The exact same house. It had the same crabgrassy lawn, the same black mailbox with just numbers, no name on it, the same windows with all the blinds down. The more I looked at it, the more I suspected that, in the backyard, there'd be a rusty old swing set, and one of those kiddie wading pools, cracked and dirty from having sat outside all winter.

It was a nice house. Small, but nice. In a modest but nice neighborhood. Someone who lived nearby had gotten out the barbecue and was grilling burgers for dinner. In the distance, I could hear the voices of children shouting as they played.

"Well," Rob said, after a minute. "This the boyfriend's place, then?"

"Shhh," I said to him. That's because someone was coming toward us on the sidewalk. Someone short, dragging a jean jacket behind him. Someone who, when he got close enough, suddenly veered off the sidewalk and onto the lawn of the little brick house I was staring at.

I pulled off the helmet Rob had lent me.

No, my eyes weren't playing tricks on me. It was Sean Patrick O'Hanahan, all right. Older than he'd been in the picture on the back of the milk carton by about five or six years. But it was him. I just knew it.

I don't know what made me do it. I'd never done anything like it before. But I got down from Rob's bike, crossed the street, and said, "Sean."

Just like that. I didn't yell it or anything. I just said his name.

He turned. Then he went pale. Before he even saw me, he went pale. I swear it.

He was probably about twelve. Small for his age, but still only a few inches shorter than me. Red hair beneath a Yankees cap. Freckles stood out starkly against his nose, now that he'd gone so pale.

His eyes were blue. They narrowed as his gaze flicked first over me, then behind me, toward Rob.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said. He didn't shout it, any more than I'd shouted his name. Still, I heard the undercurrent of fear in his little-boy voice.

I got as far as the sidewalk before I thought I'd better stop. He looked ready to bolt.

"Oh, yeah?" I said. "Your name's not Sean?"

"No," the kid said, in that snotty way kids talk when they're scared, only they don't want it to show. "My name's Sam."

I shook my head slowly. "No, it isn't," I said. "Your name's Sean. Sean Patrick O'Hanahan. It's okay, Sean. You can trust me. I'm here to help you. I'm here to help get you home."

What happened next was this:

The kid went, if such a thing is possible, even whiter. At the same time, his body seemed to turn into Jell-O, or something. He dropped the jean jacket as if it weighed too much for him to hold on to anymore, and I could see his fingers shaking.

Then he rushed me.

I don't know what I thought he was going to do. Hug me, I guess. I thought maybe he was so happy and grateful at being found, he was going to throw himself into my arms and give me a great big kiss for having come to his rescue.

That was so not what he did.

What he did instead was reach out and grab me by the wrist—quite painfully, I might add—and hiss, "
Don't you tell anyone. Don't you ever tell anyone you saw me, understand
?"

This was not exactly the kind of reaction I'd been expecting. I mean, it would have been one thing if we'd gotten to Paoli and I had found out the house I'd dreamed about didn't exist. But it did exist. And what's more, in front of that house was the kid from the milk carton. I'd have staked my life on it.

Only, for some reason, the kid was claiming he was someone else.

"I am not Sean Patrick O'Hanahan," he whispered in a voice that was as filled with anger as it was with fear. "So you can just go away, do you hear? You can just go away.
And don't ever come back
."

It was at this point that the front door to the little house opened, and a woman's voice called, sharply, "Sam!"

The kid let go of me at once.

"Coming," he said, his voice shaking as badly as his fingers were.

He threw me just one more furious, frightened look as he stooped to pick his jean jacket up off the lawn. Then he ran inside and slammed the door behind him without glancing in my direction again.

Standing out on the sidewalk, I stared at that closed door. I listened to the sounds of the birds, of the children I could hear playing somewhere nearby. I could still smell the burgers grilling, and something else: fresh-cut grass. Someone had taken advantage of the unseasonable warmth and mowed their lawn.

Nothing inside the house in front of me stirred. Not a blind Was lifted. Nothing.

But everything—everything I had ever known—was different now.

Because that kid
was
Sean Patrick O'Hanahan. I knew it as well as I knew my name, my brothers' names. That kid was Sean Patrick O'Hanahan.

And he was in trouble.

"Kid's a little young for you," I heard a voice behind me point out, "don't you think?"

I turned around. Rob was still straddling the motorcycle. He'd taken his helmet off, and was observing me with a perfectly impassive expression on his good-looking face.

"Takes all kinds, I guess," he said with a shrug. "Still, I didn't have you pegged for having a Boy Scout fixation."

I probably should have told him. I probably should have said right then,
Look, I saw that kid on the back of a milk carton. Let's go get the police
.

But I didn't. I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to do.

I didn't understand what was happening to me.

"Well," Rob said. "We could stand around out here all night, if you want to. But the smell of those burgers is making me hungry. What do you say we go try to find some of our own?"

I gave the little brick house one last look.
Sean
, I thought to myself,
I know that's you in there. What did they do to you? What did they do to you, to make you so afraid to admit your own name?

"Mastriani," Rob said.

I turned around and got back onto the bike.

He didn't ask me a single question. He just handed me my helmet, put his own on, waited until I said I was ready, and then he hit the gas.

We left Paoli.

It wasn't until we were doing ninety again that I perked up. It's hard to keep a speed freak down when she's doing ninety. Okay, I reasoned to myself as we cruised. You know what you have to do. You know what you have to do.

So after we'd pulled up to the burger place Rob had in mind—a Hell's Angels hangout called Chick's that I'd always wanted to go to, since we drove past it every January 5 on our way to the dump to get rid of the Christmas tree, only Mom would never let me—I did it.

I went to the pay phone by the ladies' room and dialed.

"1-800-WHERE-R-YOU," a woman's voice said after it had only rung twice. "This is Rosemary. How may I help you?"

I had to stick a finger in my other ear, the jukebox was pumping John Cougar Mellencamp so loudly.

"Hi, Rosemary," I shouted. "This is Jess."

"Hi, Jess," Rosemary said. She sounded like she might be black. I don't happen to know any black people—there aren't any in my town—but I have seen them in movies, and on TV and stuff. So that's how I knew. Rosemary sounded like an older black lady. "I can barely hear you."

"Yeah," I said. "Sorry about that. I'm in a … well, I'm in a bar."

Rosemary didn't sound too shaken to hear that. On the other hand, she had no way of knowing that I am only sixteen.

"What can I do for you today, Jess?" Rosemary asked.

"Well," I said. I took a deep breath.

"Listen, Rosemary," I said. "This is going to sound kind of weird, but there's this kid, Sean Patrick O'Hanahan. You guys have him on a milk carton. Anyway, I know where he is." And then I told her.

Rosemary kept going, "Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh." And then she said, "Honey, are you—"

Rob shouted my name. I looked toward him, and he held up two red plastic baskets. Our burgers were up.

I went, "Rosemary, I gotta go. But real quick. That Olivia Marie D'Amato? You guys'll be able to find her at—" And then I gave her a street address, a city in New Jersey, and a zip code, for good measure. "Okay? I gotta go. Bye!"

I hung up.

It was funny, but I felt relieved. Like I had gotten something off my chest. Isn't that weird? I mean, I know Sean had told me not to tell anyone.

Told
me not to tell? He'd
begged
me.

But he had also looked so scared at being found out that I couldn't imagine whoever he was with could be any good for him. Not if they were making him lie about his name and stuff. What about his parents? He had to know they were missing him. He had to know they would protect him from whoever these people were who had him.

I had done the right thing, calling. I had to have. Otherwise, why would I have felt so good?

I ended up having a good time. Rob, it turned out, had quite a few friends at Chick's. All of them were guys who were way older than he was, and, for the most part, they had really long hair and were heavily tattooed. Their tattoos said things like
1/31/68
, which I remembered from World Civ was the day of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam war. Rob's friends seemed strangely astonished to see me—although they were very nice—which led me to believe that either:

a) Rob had never brought a girl to Chick's before (unlikely), or
b) the girls he'd brought there had looked more like the girls who were hanging around the Hell's Angels—i.e., tall, blond, excessively made-up, named Teri or Charleen, and who probably never wore gingham in their lives (more likely).

Which might be why, every time I opened my mouth, the guys would all look at one another, until finally one of them said to Rob, "Where'd you
get
her?" to which I replied, because it was such a stupid question, "The girlfriend store."

Everybody but Teri and Charleen laughed at that one.

So, overall, when I got home that night, I was one happy camper. I had saved a kid's life—maybe even two kids' lives, although there was no way I was going all the way to Jersey to check Olivia D'Amato's situation. And I had spent the afternoon and part of the evening with a totally hot guy who liked going fast, and who, if I wasn't mistaken, seemed to like me, too. What could be better than that?

Not having my parents find out about it, that's what.