Unwind

and the principal calls in a security guard.

* * *

A minute later, Lev sits in the nurse's office, with the nurse doting on him like he's got a fever.

'Don't you worry,' she says. 'Whatever happened to you, it's all over now.'

From here in the nurse's office, Lev has no way of knowing if they've captured Connor and Risa. He hopes that, if they have, they don't bring them here. The thought of having to face them makes him feel ashamed. Doing the right thing shouldn't make you ashamed.

'The police have been called, everything's being taken care of,' the nurse tells him. 'You'll be going home soon.'

'I'm not going home,' he tells her. The nurse looks at him strangely, and he decides not to go into it. 'Never mind. Can I call my parents?'

She looks at him, incredulous. 'You mean, no one's done that for you?' She looks at the school phone in the corner, then fumbles for the cell phone in her pocket instead. 'You call and let them know you're okay—and talk as long as you like.'

She looks at him for a moment, then decides to give him his privacy, stepping out of the room. 'I'll be right here if you need me.'

Lev begins to dial, but stops himself. It's not his parents he wants to talk to.

He erases the numbers and keys in a different one, hesitates for a moment, then hits the send button.

It's picked up on the second ring.

'Hello?'

'Pastor Dan?'

There's only a split second of dead air, and then recognition. 'Dear God, Lev? Lev, is that you? Where are you?'

'I don't know. Some school. Listen, you have to tell my parents to stop the police! I don't want them killed.'

'Lev, slow down. Are you all right?'

'They kidnapped me—but they didn't hurt me, so I don't want them hurt. Tell my father to call off the police!'

'I don't know what you're talking about. We never told the police.'

Lev is not expecting to hear this. 'You never . . . what?'

'Your parents were going to. They were going to make a whole big deal about it—but I convinced them not to. I convinced them that your being kidnapped was somehow God's will.'

Lev starts shaking his head like he can shake the thought away. 'But . . . but why would you do that?'

Now Pastor Dan starts to sound desperate. 'Lev, listen to me. Listen to me carefully. No one else knows that you're gone. As far as anyone knows, you've been tithed, and people don't ask questions about children who are tithed. Do you understand what I'm telling you?'

'But... I want to be tithed. I need to be. You have to call my parents and tell them. You have to get me to harvest camp.'

Now Pastor Dan gets angry. 'Don't make me do that! Please, don't make me do that!' It's as if he's fighting a battle, but somehow it's not Lev he's battling.

This is so far from Lev's image of Pastor Dan, he can't believe it's the same person he's known all these years. It's like an impostor has stolen the Pastor's voice, but none of his convictions.

'Don't you see, Lev? You can save yourself. You can be anyone you want to be now.'

And all at once the truth comes to Lev. Pastor Dan wasn't telling him to run away from the kidnapper that day—he was telling Lev to run away from him.

From his parents. From his tithing. After all of his sermons and lectures, after all that talk year after year about Lev's holy duty, it's all been a sham. Lev was born to be tithed—and the man who convinced him this was a glorious and honorable fate doesn't believe it.

'Lev? Lev, are you there?'

He's there, but he doesn't want to be. He doesn't want to answer this man who led him to a cliff only to turn away at the last minute. Now Lev's emotions spin like a wheel of fortune. One moment he's furious, the next, relieved. One instant he's filled with terror so extreme, he can smell it like acid in his nostrils, and the next, there's a spike of joy, like what he used to feel when he swung away and heard the crack of his bat against a ball. He is that ball now, soaring away.

His life has been like a ballpark, hasn't it? All lines, structure, and rules, never changing. But now he's been hit over the wall into unknown territory.

'Lev?' says Pastor Dan. 'You're scaring me. Talk to me.'

Lev takes a slow, deep breath, then says, 'Good-bye, sir.' Then he hangs up without another word.

Lev sees police cars arrive outside. Connor and Risa will soon be caught, if they haven't been caught already. The nurse is no longer standing at the door—she's chiding the principal for how he's handling this situation. 'Why didn't you call the poor boy's parents? Why haven't you put the school in lock-down?'

Lev knows what he has to do. It's something wrong. It's something bad. But suddenly he doesn't care. He slips out of the office right behind the nurse's and principal's backs, and goes out into the hallway. It only takes a second to find what he's looking for. He reaches for the little box on the wall.

I am lost in every possible way.

Then, feeling the coldness of the steel against his fingertips, he pulls the fire alarm.

16. Teacher

The fire alarm goes off during the teacher's prep period, and she silently curses the powers that be for their awful timing. Perhaps, she thinks, if she can just stay in her empty classroom until the false alarm—and it's always a false alarm—is dealt with. But then, what kind of example would she be setting if students passing by looked in to see her sitting there.

As she leaves the room, the hallways are already filling with students.

Teachers try their best to keep them organized, but this is a high school; the organized lines of elementary school fire drills are long gone, having been replaced by the brazen hormonal zigzags of kids whose bodies are too big for their own good.

Then she sees something strange. Something troubling.

There are two policemen by the front office—they actually seem intimidated by the mob of kids flowing past them and out the front doors of the school. But why policemen? Why not firemen? And how could they have gotten here so quickly? They couldn't have—they must have been called before the alarm went off. But why?

The last time there were policemen in the school, someone called in a clapper threat. The school was evacuated, and no one knew why until after the fact. Turns out, there was no clapper—the school was never in danger of being blown up. It was just some kid pulling a practical joke. Still, clapper threats are always taken seriously, because you never know when the threat might be real.

'Please, no pushing!' she says to a student who bumps her elbow. 'I'm sure we'll all make it outside.' Good thing she didn't take her coffee.

'Sorry, Ms. Steinberg.'

As she passes one of the science labs, she notices the door ajar. Just to be thorough, she peeks in to make sure there are no stragglers, or kids trying to avoid the mass exodus. The stone-top tables are bare and the chairs are all in place. No one had been in the lab this period. She reaches to pull the door closed, more out of habit than anything else, when she hears a sound that is wholly out of place in the room.

A baby's cry.

At first she thinks it might be coming from the student mother nursery, but the nursery is way down the hall. This cry definitely came from the lab. She hears the cry again, only this time it sounds oddly muffled, and angrier. She knows that sound. Someone's trying to cover the baby's mouth to keep it from crying. These teen mothers