Unwind

BY TWO AWOL UNWINDS.

NOD IF YOU UNDERSTAND . . .

When he's done, he tugs the boy's shoulder. It takes two tugs to get his attention.

'Yeah?'

Lev holds out the notebook, making sure he docs it in such a way that it's not too obvious. The boy looks at him and says: 'Hey, that's my notebook.'

Lev takes a deep breath. Connor's looking at him now. He's got to be careful.

'I know it's your notebook,' Lev says, trying to say as much as he can with his eyes. 'I just . . . needed . . . one . . . page. . . .'

He holds the notebook a little higher for the kid to read, but the kid's not even looking at it. 'No! You should have asked first.' Then he rips out the page without even looking at it, crumples the paper, and to Lev's horror hurls it toward the front of the bus. The paper wad bounces off the head of another kid, who ignores it, and it falls to the floor. The bus comes to a stop, and Lev feels his hope trampled beneath thirty pairs of scuffed shoes.

14. Connor

Dozens of buses pull up to the school. Kids mob every doorway. As Connor gets off the bus with Risa and Lev, he scans for a way to escape, but there is none.

There are campus security guards and teachers on patrol. Anyone seen walking away from school would draw the attention of everyone watching.

'We can't actually go in,' says Risa.

'I say we do,' says Lev, acting more squirrelly than usual.

A teacher has already taken notice of them. Even though the school has a day care center for student mothers, the baby is very conspicuous.

'We'll go in,' says Connor. 'We'll hide in a place where there aren't any security cameras. The boys' bathroom.'

'Girls',' says Risa. 'It'll be cleaner, and there'll be more stalls to hide in.'

Connor considers it, and figures she's probably right on both counts. 'Fine. We'll hide until lunch, then slip out with the rest of the kids going off campus.'

'You're assuming this baby wants to cooperate,' says Risa. 'Eventually it's going to want to be fed—and I don't exactly have the materials, if you know what I mean. If it starts crying in the bathroom, it will probably echo throughout the whole school.'

It's another accusation. Connor can hear it in her voice. It says: Do you have any idea how much harder you've made things on us?

'Let's just hope it doesn't cry,' says Connor. 'And if it does, you can blame me all the way to harvest camp.'

* * *

Connor is no stranger to hiding in school bathrooms. Of course, before today, the reason was simply to get out of class. Today, however, there's no class where he's expected, and if he's caught, the consequences are a little bit more severe than Saturday school.

They slip in after the first period bell rings and Connor coaches them on the finer points of bathroom stealth. How to tell the difference between kids' footsteps and adults'. When to lift your feet up so no one can see you, and when to just announce that the stall is occupied. The latter would work for both Risa and Lev, since his voice is still somewhat high, but Connor doesn't dare pretend to be a girl.

They stay together yet alone, each in their own stall. Mercifully, the bathroom door squeals like a pig whenever it's opened, so they have warning when anyone comes in. There are a few girls at the beginning of first period but then it quiets down and they are left with no sound but the echoing drizzle of a leaky flush handle.

'We won't make it in here until lunch,' Risa announces from the stall to Connor's left. 'Even if the baby stays asleep.'

'You'd be surprised how long you can hide in a bathroom.'

'You mean you've done this often?' asks Lev, in the stall to his right.

Connor knows this fits right into Lev's image of Connor as a bad seed. Fine, let him think that. He's probably right.

The bathroom door squeals. They fall silent. Dull, rapid footsteps—it's a student in sneakers. Lev and Connor raise their feet and Risa keeps hers down, as they had planned. The baby gurgles, and Risa clears her throat, masking the noise perfectly. The girl is in and out in less than a minute.

After the bathroom door squeaks closed, the baby coughs. Connor notices that it's a quick, clean sound. Not sickly at all. Good.

'By the way,' says Risa, 'it is a girl.'

Connor thinks to offer to hold it once more, but figures right now that would be more trouble than it's worth. He doesn't know how to hold a baby to keep it from crying. Connor decides he has to tell them why he went temporarily insane and took the baby. He owes them that much.

'It was because of what the kid said,' Connor says gently.

'What?'

'Back at that house—the fat kid at the door. He said they'd been storked again.'

'So what?' says Risa. 'Lots of people get storked more than once.'

Then, from his other side, Connor hears, 'That happened to my family. I have two brothers and a sister who were brought by the stork before I was born. It was never a problem.'

Connor wonders if Lev actually thinks the stork brought them, or if he's just using it as an expression. He decides he'd rather not know. 'What a wonderful family. They take in storked babies, and send their own flesh and blood to be unwound. Oh, sorry—tithed.'

Clearly offended, Lev says, 'Tithing's in the Bible; you're supposed to give 10 percent of everything. And storking's in the Bible too.'

'No, it isn't!'

'Moses,' says Lev. 'Moses was put in a basket in the Nile and was found by Pharaoh's daughter. He was the first storked baby, and look what happened to him!'

'Yeah,' says Connor, 'but what happened to the next baby she found in the Nile?'

'Will you keep your voices down?' says Risa. 'People could hear you in the hall, and anyway, you might wake Didi.'

Connor takes a moment to collect his thoughts. When he speaks again, it's a whisper, but in a tiled room there are no whispers. 'We got storked when I was seven.'

'Big deal,' says Risa.

'No, this was a big deal. For a whole lot of reasons. See, there were already two natural kids in the family. My parents weren't planning on any more. Anyway, this baby shows up at our door, my parents start freaking out. . . and then they have an idea.'

'Do I want to hear this?' Risa asks.

'Probably not.' But Connor's not about to stop. He knows if he doesn't spill this now, he's never going to. 'It was early in the morning, and my parents figured no one saw the baby left at the door, right? So the next morning, before the rest of us got up, my dad put the baby on a doorstep across the street.'

'That's illegal,' announces Lev. 'Once you get storked, that baby's yours.'

'Yeah, but my parents figured, who's gonna know? My parents swore us to secrecy, and we waited to hear the news from across the street about their new, unexpected arrival . . . but it never came. They never talked about getting storked and we couldn't ask them about it, because it would be a dead giveaway that we'd dumped the baby on them.'

As Connor speaks, the stall, as small as it is, seems to shrink around him.