Save the Enemy Read Online Free Page B

he said he was sorry; he hadn’t realized he was going to be out so long. Then he said sometimes a person’s best ideas come to him (or her) in a flash. And then he said, “All good ideas come while walking. Nietzsche said that.” Then he said that the goal in life is to develop the wisdom to know which of these ideas to pursue, and then to muster the resources to pursue them.“Self-awareness and honest insight”—I think that came from the same speech, now that I remember.
    I would like both of the above right now to know if I need to be panicking. Or calling the police. I really have no idea.
    On top of that, I keep having this terrible feeling that if I call the police, the police will realize that a seventeen-year-old girl and her overly literal fourteen-year-old brother are living unsupervised, and will dispatch us somewhere. Possibly somewhere unpleasant. I guess conceivably we could stay with my Mom’s brother, Uncle Henry, and his wife, on their remote Rhode Island alpaca farm, if they would have us. Or with Molly, my former best friend, who has not spoken to me since Mom was killed, if she’s finally forgiven me for sleeping with her boyfriend. (The boyfriend she’d broken up with when it happened, in my defense.) These are possibilities, maybe? None ideal. None even really possible. We have school. We can’t just go and
leave Dad
. What if Roscoe comes home?
    “We should go to school,” I say to Ben.
    He looks up from his ice cream and
The Wall Street Journal
. “Okay,” he says.
    “Or maybe we’ll skip school today. Go look for Dad and the doggie.”
    “Okay,” he repeats. Same tone, same everything. I appreciate his unexpected flexibilty in our schedule.
    “No, school is better.” I run upstairs, shower, put on my school uniform. I then remember that we have an away game today. I strip off my uniform and fling it on the floor and wriggle into my lacrosse clothes.
    In a daze, I’m aware of Ben and me as we enter the world: heading over to King Street to take the trolley up the hill, and then catching another bus over to Shenandoah. It’s nearlynoon by the time we get there. I want to be talking to Ben about Dad—
that we haven’t seen him in over 24 hours
—but I don’t want to worry him if I don’t have to. Plus, he’s my little brother. I need to protect the little freak as best I can. Okay, “freak” is harsh. But love and anger are all tied up together: another valuable lesson I learned from Dad, apropos of god-knows-what.
    “Bye,” I say to Ben.
    “Bye,” he repeats. He turns and marches off to the middle school. I’m impressed by how calm he is. My knees are actually trembling. I head over to the upper school and into the lunchroom. Just as I walk in, with movie-set timing, the girls from the lacrosse team are finishing leading the other students in a big cheer: “Gooooo Librarians!”
    Librarians. That’s right. That’s our team. No wonder Dad chose Shenandoah for me.
    On the bus to the game, and on the bench at the game itself, I have some good thinking time. Nobody asks why I was three hours late for school; I am the Tragic Figure. For once, I am relieved that I own this identity. I come up with what might be the best plan for dealing with this Missing-Dad problem: if he is not there when Ben and I get home, I will call Uncle Henry and ask him what to do. He is next in line as an authority figure in my life, after Dad, which is not ideal—but his wife, Aunt Lisa, is very smart and would probably know the right thing to do. I’m worried they think we should be homeschooled, though. Uncle Henry, born and raised a Jew, got wicked into Jesus at some point along the way. And the alpaca farm isn’t close to any public schools, I’m pretty sure.
    Shenandoah wins the game. I don’t know the score.
Good for them! I mean us! The Librarians!
    I picture the scene on the bus ride back to school: Dad is there in the parking lot, waiting for me. Roscoe is in the car with him.