Bang

Bang

Norah McClintock

Orca Soundings

Copyright © Norah McClintock 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

McClintock, Norah
Bang / written by Norah McClintock.
(Orca soundings)
ISBN 978-1-55143-656-2 (bound)
ISBN 978-1-55143-654-8 (pbk.)

I. Title.
PS8575.C62B35 2007   jC813'.54  C2006-907056-3

Summary:
A robbery goes terribly wrong, and Quentin
finds he is left taking the blame.

First published in the United States, 2007
Library of Congress Control Number:
2006940639

Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Cover design: Doug McCaffry
Cover photography: Getty Images

Orca Book Publishers                  Orca Book Publishers
PO Box 5626 Station B                           PO Box 468
Victoria, BC Canada                         Custer, WA USA
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www.orcabook.com
Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on 100% PCW recycled paper.
010  09  08  07 • 5  4  3  2  1

To Tiny, Skinny and Halftrack.

The way the day starts: Sweet. Perfect. Like a cool breeze on a hot day. Mainly because of Leah. She answers the door when I ring the bell and stays to talk until JD comes down.

And then, before we take off on our bikes, she says, “Wait.”

She runs inside and gets her camera. “It's brand-new,” she says. “It's digital. I saved up for it.”

She takes our picture—JD and me with our bikes. Then she says, “Hey, JD, take my picture with Q.” So JD does.

I ask her to make me a copy of it. If she does, I'll put it up on my wall, right over my bed. These days, Leah is most of the reason I spend as much time with JD as I do. I'm trying to work up the nerve to ask her out.

The way the day ends: Like a tornado, sucking my whole life up and spraying out the pieces all over town so I'll never be able to put it back together again.

The first thing we do when we get back to JD's house is strip off all our clothes, right down to our shorts. JD wants those too, but I say no. There's no way I'm going to stand there in his kitchen buck naked.

He sends me up to his room to grab some clothes. When I come back down, JD has stuffed all our clothes into the washing machine, which is in a sort of closet off the kitchen. He pours in a ton of liquid detergent, turns on the water and punches
“On.” I'm pulling on a clean T-shirt of his when Leah walks in.

She looks at me, then at JD, and says, “What are you guys up to?”

“We were riding our bikes in the ravine,” JD says. “Q had this idea we could jump the stream.” He gives me a look. “I should have known.”

Q is me. My name is Quentin, Q to my friends.

Leah shakes her head, like
of course
I would suggest something that dumb.
Of course
JD would want to give it a try.
Of course
that would explain why she's just caught me changing into JD's clothes in the middle of the kitchen.

I stare at JD, trying not to let my face show what I'm thinking, which is: This guy is good. He can lie with the best of them. No, he can lie
better
than most of them.

Leah says, “Well, I hope you didn't total your bike, JD, because if you did, Dad's going to freak.”

I freeze. Our bikes. Geez, they're in JD's garage, but there's nothing about them that
would give people the idea that we tried to jump a stream with them, let alone that we ended up
in
a stream. They aren't wet. They aren't muddy. Nothing like that.

“Don't sweat it,” JD tells his sister.

Even now I can't help noticing for the millionth time how pretty she is. I wonder, How come I only started noticing recently? I've known JD since kindergarten, which means I've known Leah that long too. But for most of the time I've known her, she was like flowery wallpaper, always in the background, always kind of annoying.

Not anymore. Now I can hardly take my eyes off her. She has thick brown hair and dark brown eyes that are the color of coffee, just like JD's. She's tall, like JD, and slender, and she makes my heart pound and my mouth go dry. Her lips are pink and soft looking and, boy, you don't need much imagination to know how it would feel to kiss them. That's been on my mind a lot—that and how JD would take it if I all of a sudden tell him I have a thing for
his sister. Now, I think, I'll never get the chance. Not after what we just did.

“We're going out to the garage right now,” JD says. “We're going to clean everything up before Dad gets home. Our bikes will be as good as new. He'll never know.”

He flashes her a smile. She shakes her head again, but I can read in her eyes how much she loves him. They're twins. They have this bond. He says it's weird having a twin. He says when they were little, they used to finish each other's sentences. He says half the time he's positive she can tell what he's thinking. I look at Leah now and wonder what she knows. I look at JD too. He's grinning at her. I bet he's confident that he's snowing her. I hope he's right.

“Don't make a mess out there while you're cleaning up,” Leah says. Boy, does she ever know JD. “You know how Dad is.”

We go from the kitchen to the garage. Our bikes are dry. There's no mud on them, nothing at all on them that I can see. But JD fills a bucket with soapy water anyway
and hands me a sponge. We set to work washing down our bikes. We rinse them. JD fills another bucket with soapy water. We wash them again and rinse them again. Altogether we soap and rinse three times before JD is satisfied. He looks at me and says, “It's going to be okay. I already told you. Nobody saw. Nobody knows.”

He's forgetting one thing.
I
saw.
I
know.

The guy died. I'm not surprised. Also, I'm relieved. I can't believe I feel that way, but I do. I'm actually relieved because if he's dead, that means he can't say anything.

I'm staring at the
TV
. The news is over. The guy's death was the last item and now the weather guy is doing his thing. In the kitchen, the phone rings. A moment later, my mother appears and hands me the cordless. She says, “It's JD.”

The first words out of JD's mouth are “You should get a cell phone.”

Right. “You gonna pay for it?” I say.

As usual, he doesn't answer. Instead he says, “You heard, right? It's like I told you, we have nothing to worry about.”

I realize he's talking about the dead guy. He must have seen the news too.

“You're okay, right, Q?” he says. “You're cool, right?”

“Yeah,” I say. I'm thinking, They said the guy is dead. But they didn't say exactly
when
he died. Was it before the paramedics arrived? I can't believe I'm thinking it, but I am—it would be best if he died before the paramedics showed up. But what if he didn't? What if he was alive long enough to talk to them? What would he have told them? What
could
he have told them?

“Hey, Q, you haven't talked to anyone, have you?” JD says.

“No,” I say. But JD isn't satisfied.

“Why don't you come over here?” he says. “Spend the night.”

“It's all good,” I insist. “Really.”

JD is...
was
...my best friend. We've slept over at each other's places since kindergarten. Boy, the things we've done. But tonight there's no way I want to go to his house. No way I want to be anywhere near him.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” I say.

“I'll pick you up,” he says, meaning he'll swing by my house on the way to school. “First thing,” he says.

At first I can't sleep. I keep seeing it and hearing it and even tasting it. How can you sleep when you've seen a thing like that? The next thing I know, my mother is hammering on my door, telling me to get up or I'm going to be late. Telling me my lunch is in the fridge. Telling me she's leaving for work now and if I'm late and I get a detention—
again
—and have to be late for my after-school job and get fired and have no money for the stuff I like to waste money on, that's not going to be her problem. In other words, telling me the same thing she tells me every morning
before she rushes off to work herself. I yell through the door that I'm awake and I'm getting up. What I'm thinking is, I can't believe I slept. I feel as guilty about that as I do about what happened.

Five minutes later, I'm dressed and shoveling some Cap'n Crunch into my mouth. I can't believe I can eat after what happened. I hear footsteps out in the hall and someone rings the bell. I peer through the peephole. It's JD. The cereal starts to roll around in my stomach like it doesn't want to be there anymore, like it wants to get out,
now
.

“Hey, Q,” JD calls through the door. “Open up.”

I unlock the door and swing it open. JD looks as calm and cool as he always does. It's obvious he's slept well. It's obvious he doesn't have a care in the world. He looks me over and says, “The main thing is you have to relax. If you relax, if you act normal, it's gonna be okay. No one saw anything. We're in the clear.”

Act normal? The guy died, and JD wants me to act normal? I think he must be crazy. But you know what? Even though the guy died, I remember to take the brown paper bag containing my lunch out of the fridge and put it in my backpack. I remember to grab my geography homework off the end of the dinette table. I put it in my backpack too. And just as I'm going out the door, I remember that even though school started only two weeks ago, my history teacher has already planned a field trip to the museum. This is the last day to hand in the permission slip. So I go back into the kitchen and get it off the fridge door where my mother stuck it after she signed it. I lock up after myself. We take the stairs instead of the elevator because at this time of the morning, with everyone headed off to school or work, the elevator takes forever.

At school I'm kind of surprised to find that no one is talking about the only thing that's on my mind. I say that to JD when
we're at the far end of the football field at lunchtime. I say, “You don't think it's weird that no one's even mentioned it?”

He looks out across the field and says, “Why would they? I bet you no one here even heard of the guy. Stuff happens to people all the time and no one notices, not unless they know the person it happened to.”

That's when I start wondering about the dead guy. Someone must have known him. Maybe a lot of someones. And
they're
probably talking about him. They're probably wondering who did it and why. Some of them are probably crying. Was he married? Did he have kids? Maybe he was looking after his old granny. Or maybe his mother is sick and he was looking after her and now there's no one to take his place. I think about all that and I start to shake.

JD says, “What's the matter with you?” like he can't even begin to imagine. Then he says, “You better smile right now because here comes Leah.”

And there she is, swinging along toward us, wearing a T-shirt and a short skirt.
Her long legs are still tanned from the summer.