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get the hell out of Dodge and put an end to this rotten day. Go home. Try to eat something. Get some sleep, hopefully. Figure out how I was going to get through tomorrow. How I was going to stay under the radar.
    But Mrs. McKinley, my English teacher, was pegging something to the bulletin board by the library entrance and caught me.
    “Oh, hey, Kendra,” she said around a mouthful of thumbtacks (
“Oh, fey, Fendra!”
). She pulled them out and dropped them into a pocket on the side of her flowy brown skirt, which looked as though it had come straight out of the back of a Volkswagen bus. “I was going to talk to you about tonight’s NHS meeting.”
    “Oh,” I said, inwardly cursing. I’d totally forgotten about this month’s National Honor Society meeting, which couldn’t be at a worse time.
    “I was thinking,” Mrs. McKinley continued, which must have meant that my fear wasn’t visible on my face, “as head of the community outreach committee, maybe you should do a little presentation at tonight’s meeting about your plans for the rest of spring semester. Nothing fancy or formal, of course, but I know you have that program with the preschoolers coming up and—”
    “I can’t,” I blurted out. And then I tried to paste on my best goody-two-shoes smile. “I’m sorry, Mrs. McKinley, but…” I paused, feeling a brief pang of guilt for using my brother twice in one day, but then figured I had nothing else. I couldn’t tell her I had to stay away from the school because I might find myself in huge trouble by morning. For the first time, I realized that if I was found out, I would definitely be kicked out of National Honor Society. Worse, Mrs. McKinley would know what I’d done and would be so disappointed in me. And she wouldn’t be the only one. Probably the whole world would be disappointed in me. The thought made tears spring to my eyes, but I cleared my throat and said, “My brother came home from treatment yesterday, and I want to be home for him tonight. I’m going to miss the meeting.”
    Her face fell momentarily, but then she smiled understandingly. Mrs. McKinley had had Grayson for Americanlit his sophomore year. She used to let him file papers for her in the back of the room while she was lecturing; filing calmed him. Anything regimented calmed him.
    “Of course,” she said. “I’ll have Alison Wells do it, then.”
    “Thanks,” I said.
    “And tell Grayson I said hello and I hope he’s feeling better.”
    I nodded and moved around her, heading for the science hallway, where my locker was.
    The crowd in the hallways had thinned out. Locker doors were slamming, and the squeak of the west entrance opening over and over again filled the air. I turned the corner, looked toward my locker, and stopped dead in my tracks.
    There, at my locker, was the custodian everyone called Black Lung, his giant key ring jingling and clanging, metal against metal. He poked a key into my combination dial and pulled the door open, then stepped back.
    Mrs. Reading, who had been standing behind him, stepped forward and began pulling things off the shelves, letting them drop with echoing slaps onto the floor. Mr. Floodsay, down on one knee, sifted through my stuff as it landed.
    For a minute, it was as if nothing existed in this world but those three people and the
slap, slap, slap
of my books and notebooks on the tile. Everything else just sort of faded away—the squeak of the west entrance door, the chatter ofpeople on their cell phones, the metallic rattle of lockers shutting, and the shuffle of feet going up and down the stairways.
    My arms hung slack at my sides, and my mouth opened as I tried to catch my breath. Someone had sold me out. Chub, probably. Or maybe Bryn. Could’ve been anyone, really. I knew they wouldn’t find anything—I wasn’t that stupid—but the fact that they were even looking meant I had reason to worry. Okay, to panic.
    This is it
, my mind kept repeating.
This is where you get