This Is Not a Drill Read Online Free PDF

suspension, she told me I’m gonna grow up to be a juvenile delinquent. But how can you
grow up
to be a
juvenile
anything? And it was a cell phone infraction—not exactly a capital offense. I swear, you can’t fart in our school without getting in-house suspension.
    The Christine butts into every conversation I try to have with my dad. Since they’ve been together, it’s like he doesn’t hear me anymore. The night he picked me up at the police station, I tried to tell him it wasn’t my weed and I hadn’t been smoking. It was clear he didn’t believe me at first—and then he went off on me for not telling the cops it was Cole’s.
    I was so sure Cole would tell them it was his. I get it that you’re assumed to be guilty if you’re caught with somebody who’s smoking; my dad’s warned me about that. But I also knew from other kids’ experiences that I’d have a good chance of getting off if Cole owned up and told the truth. I kept looking at him in the car on the way to the station, but he just looked away. The cop even asked us after he brought us in if anybody had anything else to say, so it wasn’t like Cole didn’t have every opportunity to speak up. I was pretty shocked when he didn’t and all three of us were charged.
    I asked him the next day why he let me take the heat, too, but he didn’t answer. I was so mad, I didn’t speak to him for a couple of weeks—but eventually I let it go. Maybe I did deserve to be punished, too; I could have made him put it away that night, but I didn’t.
    The only thing I can figure is, Cole’s dad’s pretty rough on him, so he might have thought he’d get beat worse if he said it was his. I’ve seen marks on his legs that look like he was hit with a belt, but he won’t talk about that, either.
    It’s hard to stay mad at Cole. He’s more like family to me than my own family. Since my brother, Stephen, left for college, Cole is the one who’s got my back.
    When my mom died and my dad had to go away on business a week later, Cole sat with me for days, watching TV while I drank myself into a stupor. He didn’t say ten words, but he stayed right there with me. Finally he took the whiskey bottle away and said, “Let’s get you some food, Willoughby.”
    I wish Emery could get past Cole’s badass image; honestly, he just keeps that going for fun. They’d get along great if they weren’t so busy judging each other. I mean, I made an effort to get along with her friends. Molly’s pretty easy to like, but Tab is moody as hell. And she hates Cole ’cause he calls her STD. Man, what were her parents thinking when they named her Sarah Tabitha? Didn’t they remember their last name was Deason?
    • • •
    Stutts keeps looking out the door, and Patrick is standing next to him, eyes on the floor. Hell, I can’t stand seeing that kid up there all by himself. I pick up a word search puzzle and pencil, grab his backpack off his chair, walk to the front, and hand them to him. Then I pull out a chair for him at the learning center table nearby. He glances nervously at his dad, but Stutts ignores him, so Patrick takes a seat and looks at the page in front of him.
    I lean down and show him the word
pumpkin
in the grid and in the word bank below the puzzle. Patrick circles it, and I squeeze his shoulder. He looks up at me and actually smiles a little.
    In a sudden move that catches both of us off guard, Stutts lunges across the table, rips the puzzle out of Patrick’s hands, crumples it up in his fist, and throws it on the floor. “I
said
don’t tell my boy what to do,” he growls at me.
    I stare back at him. I want to hit him so bad it hurts. Emery looks up in shock at Stutts’s cruelty.
    Alicia interrupts the moment, keeping me from saying something I shouldn’t. “Mrs. Campbell, hey, Mrs. Campbell.” She’s waving her hand like mad in the back of the room. “You said we could go outside for a nature walk today. Can we still go?”
    “Honey, let’s do that