Inside I can hear the TV, which means Dad is out of his room and hopefully getting ready to open the restaurant rather than sit in the blue TV haze all day with the shades down. They’re going to need him down there without Ro and Trey. I feel a twinge in my gut, but I have to ignore it. Today is not the day for that. I slip past the living room and knock lightly on Trey’s door.

He opens it and lets me in, closing it behind me. “You ready?” I whisper. “Mom will be home any minute.” Trey sighs. “Yeah, about that,” he says. “I think I need

to stay here for the afternoon, at least. You’re pretty sure this thing is happening in the evening, right?”

I nod.

“I’ll meet you guys out there before dark. I just think I should be here for when they find out about Rowan, you know? So they don’t call the cops.”

I sit down on his bed and rub my temples. He’s right, of course. And he’s the best one to handle them.

“Yeah, okay,” I say.

“If anything crazy happens, call me. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

“Okay,” I say again. On an impulse I reach out and hug him around the neck. My cast clunks against his head.

“Ouch. When are you getting that stupid thing off?” he asks, laughing.

“Friday morning. If we all live that long.”

“And we have multiple opportunities to die,” Trey says. “Death by exploding heads. Er, I meant Dad, not . . . the other.” He cringes.

“That was bad.”

“I know. Sorry.”

I rap on his chest with my knuckles. “We’ll be in the quad. I’ll call you if anything changes.”

His lips press into a wry smile. “Be careful,” he says. “It’s not worth dying for, okay?”

I nod. And I know. “We’re calling the police as soon as we have an idea of what’s happening, and when, and where.”

I open Trey’s door and almost run into my dad. “Oh. Sorry.”

He startles too and hits one of the stacks of Christmas tins. Finally, after years of waiting, they come crashing down, making way more noise than something so lightweight should make. I stoop down and help pick them up, putting them back on the precarious pile as best as I can with my dad blocking the hallway. I hand the last one to him, not quite looking him in the eye.

“Thank you,” he says.

I nod and back into Trey’s doorway again so he can get past me.

“And thank you for helping your brother and sister yesterday,” he says gruffly. “Mom will add those hours to your final paycheck.”

“That’s fine.”

He doesn’t ask me if I want my job back. And I’m too proud to ask for it.

Scary how much like him I am.

Thirty-Five

Dad goes into his bedroom, I duck into mine, grab my backpack, make sure I have my phone, and scoot out of there. As I descend the stairs, I hear my dad calling for Rowan, and I can’t run away fast enough. “Trey Demarco, you are a saint,” I mutter under my breath. I owe him big for handling this.

The sky is dark. Occasional giant drops of rain splat on the pavement in front of me, and I wish I’d thought to bring an umbrella. I grab the bus to Sawyer’s neighborhood, call him to let him know I’m coming, and just miss a wave of pouring rain. It’s only spitting by the time I hop off. And when I look down the street toward Angotti’s Trattoria, I see Sawyer walking toward me.

“Okay, so here’s what I know,” he says in greeting. “Main shooter girl is holding a Glock 17 Gen4. It holds at least seventeen bullets. She doesn’t have an additional magazine on it.”

“Hmm,” I say. This information means nothing to me, other than the fact that the killer woman can shoot at least seventeen times. Which is more than eleven.

Sawyer grips my hand as the almost empty bus pulls up and he buys two fares. We grab a seat in the back. “Also, I finally managed to figure out a few words on the whiteboard. Musical terms and composer names.” He flashes a triumphant smile.

“How did you manage that?”

“Every time I tried to zoom, the pixels went nuts and I couldn’t read anything. But I finally thought to use my mother’s reading glasses to magnify the words—she’s, like, totally farsighted—and I got these words: Rachmaninoff, Vespers, E A Poe, The Bells.”

I frown. “Edgar Allan Poe is a writer, not a musician.”

“Right, but I looked up ‘The Bells,’ which is by Poe, and Sergei Rachmaninoff turned it into a symphony.”

I feel a surge of hope for the first time in a long time. “So it’s a music classroom, you think?”

“That’s what I think.”

“So, wait—the victims are not the Gay-Straight Alliance people? It’s, like, a regular music class?”

Sawyer’s breath comes out heavy, and his face is strained. “All I know is that the GSA is meeting in the Green Room, and the room in the vision is a regular music classroom. So the two events don’t appear related.”

“But that means . . .”

“We’ve got everything wrong. But at least we know it’s probably not going to happen today—there are no classes in session until tomorrow.”

I think for a moment. “But the weather is supposed to be sunny tomorrow, and you said it’s cloudy and the pavement is wet in the vision.”

He shrugs. “Maybe there are sprinklers on the quad. Or maybe it rains when it’s not forecasted—wouldn’t be the first time.”