Tommy pats us down while another cop waves a metal-detector wand over us in case Tommy didn’t find everything. It goes wild over Shadow’s sack lunch, and when he empties it the cops confiscate his spoon.
“Okay, hand over the cell phones,” Irish Tommy says.
“Not cool!” Shadow cries.
My father looks just as surprised as me. “What if there’s an emergency?”
“Don’t worry about emergencies. We’ve got SWAT teams in every hallway, officers stationed in the bathrooms, and cameras in every class,” Tommy says. “What you need to worry about is some wacko firing a gun through a window because one of these kids called him and told him which room has a fish head in it. No phones.”
My father’s arm tenses. He hates how casually people use that ugly term. If he was allowed, he’d rip Tommy’s head off. But he’s not allowed.
Bex reaches into her pocket and hands hers to my dad. “You keep it. No peeking.”
Shadow’s next. It’s like he’s handing over one of his kidneys. “People should be able to see what happens in there. This is history,” he grumbles.
I set mine into my father’s hand while trying to make it seem like it’s no big deal, but it is a very, very big deal. There are pictures on it I don’t want him to see, pictures from when I was not trying to disappear into the background. They’re ancient but not something I want my daddy to see. Please don’t look through the text messages. Oh, man! Don’t look in the Gabriel folder! My imagination is hyperventilating into a paper bag.
Satisfied, Irish Tommy jams his radio against his ear so he can hear over the din. “Get ready! You’re going in as soon as they get her off the steps.”
“Who?” Bex says.
He points along the barricades and up the stairs to the front door. A middle-aged woman in a blue business suit is blocking the doors and flashing her porcelain veneers to the crowd. You can’t call her smile pretty. It’s a little too saccharine and uncomfortable, like she has to stay focused on its corners to keep it in place. She has crazy eyes, too, the kind where you can see white all around the irises, but the crowd doesn’t seem to mind. They love Governor Pauline Bachman. Most seventeen-year-olds wouldn’t recognize a politician, but I know this one well. My folks have spent endless nervous hours watching her self-declared war against the Alpha. She’s a proud thorn in the Alpha’s side, pushing for laws that deny them medical care (which they’ve never asked for), and blocking efforts to put them in permanent housing (which they would never take). Some of her ideas fall squarely into the evil-and-creepy category, like implanting tracking devices into their bodies, shipping them to Guantánamo Bay, and forcing them to undergo sterilization. Before the president ordered our school system to open its doors to the Alpha, she was crusading for an electrified wall to keep them away from us. Lots of people write her off as a kook. They say her ideas are just theatrics to appease her base of frightened voters and keep the money rolling into her campaign. They call her a clown. I say she’s dangerous. Everywhere this clown goes, she brings her own circus.
She lifts her trademark red-white-and-blue megaphone to her mouth and releases a feedback whine over the crowd.
“The National Guard, Homeland Security, FEMA, local police, and even the president of the United States have asked me to step aside. They want me to go away. They don’t want to know what the good people of the state of New York have to say about this debacle. They don’t want to hear that this misguided plan is putting your children in harm’s way! Well, folks, that’s why I brought a megaphone!”
The crowd’s roar rattles my head.
“Our schools are not the places to run social experiments. I have no problem with educating their . . . I guess you can call them children, but that should be done in their own schools, not ones paid for by hardworking, red-blooded American taxpayers! No, sir! Over my dead body!
“I will block these doors, and not one of them will step foot inside, and I will not move until they drag me away. Hell, no, I won’t go!”
The crowd adopts her chant and it shakes the air.
“All right,” Irish Tommy shouts at us. “Let’s go!”
“What about her?” my father cries as he points to Bachman.
“GO! GO!”
My father grabs my hand and starts up the path.
“No, Leonard,” Tommy shouts. “Just the kids.”
“That’s not what I was told at the precinct!”
“Things are evolving, Leonard. You can’t go in!”
My father looks pained. “Be safe!”
“I will.” I hope it’s a promise I can keep.
“I’ll keep her out of trouble, Big Guy,” Bex says. She grabs my hand and then Shadow’s, and the three of us sprint through the barricades, past the ugly faces and their ugly signs.
Once we hit the top step, Bachman leaps in front of us. She grabs my arm and turns my hands over to study my palms and the skin between my fingers, then my neck. She’s putting on a show for the crowd, and I’m too stunned to protest.
“She’s one of us,” Bachman cheers. “You don’t have to go in there with them, honey.”
And then I hear the thrum. The governor hears it too, and she whips her head around, scanning for its source, but it’s everywhere, a buzzing that grows and grows, and all we can do is watch and wait. Bachman stammers, but words fail her. Like us, she’s trapped inside a pregnant pause in history.