Awaken

He grinned in that sweet, slightly childish way of his that never failed to tug on my heartstrings.

“If everyone I loved was happy, of course,” he said, as if it should have been obvious.

It was kind of funny that right as he said this, the doorbell rang.

I uttered a curse word I’d picked up from spending way too much time in the company of Frank and Kayla. Uncle Chris looked at me in surprise. “Piercey!” he said, shocked.

“Sorry.” My heart began to drum inside my chest. I heard rapid footsteps in the hallway.

“It’s Chief of Police Santos,” my mother said, her face a mask of concern. “I saw him on the front porch from the window.”

“There are cop cars all up and down the street,” Alex said, skidding into the kitchen right behind her. “Po- pos here to take us to the big house.”

“You don’t know that,” Mom said to him.

“Oh, yeah? Why else do you think they’re here, Aunt Deb? To help you clean up your lawn after the big storm?” Alex’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Yeah, that’s a special service the Isla Huesos police chief offers to all the attractive new divorcees on the island.”

“Mom,” I said, my heart in my throat. “I think we need to borrow your car.”

“How’s that going to work?” Alex demanded. “Chief Santos parked in her driveway. And don’t think he didn’t do it on purpose to block us from getting her car out of the garage. Are we supposed to ram him?”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. I looked at Alex. “How did you guys get here? In your car?”

“We walked,” Alex said. “Your genius boyfriend had Frank slash all my tires to keep me from going out after Coffin Fest, remember?”

“Oh, right,” I said. That had worked really well, since Alex had gone out anyway and gotten himself killed.

“This is crazy,” Mom said, as the doorbell rang again, this time accompanied by a knock and a deep voice saying, “Dr. Cabrero? We know you’re home. We need to ask you a few questions about your daughter.”

“I’m going to open the door and invite him in and explain the whole situation —”

Both Alex and I had glanced down at the diamond at the end of my necklace. It was the color of onyx. “No!” we cried simultaneously.

“Go out the back,” Uncle Chris said.

I looked at him, startled. I had almost forgotten he was in the room, he’d grown so quiet. Go out the back were the first words he’d said since my mom and Alex had said it was the police at the door.

“What?” I asked him, confused not so much by the words, but that he, my sweet, beloved uncle, was the one saying them.

“The two of you,” he said, pointing first at Alex and me, then at the backyard. “Go out the back way. The wall’s too high to climb, but I saw some bikes by the gate back there. You could get on them, then peddle towards the cemetery. The cops won’t be able to follow you. There’s a big tree down across the middle of the road. They’re still trying to find guys with enough chain saws to cut it apart since it’s too big to lift.”

I stared at him. He meant the tree that had fallen on top of Mr. Mueller.

Alex shook his head at his father pityingly. “Dad, you of all people should know you can’t run from the po-po. Besides, I told you, the driveway is blocked by their squad cars.”

“But we can still get bikes around them,” I said.

“Sure,” Alex said. “But they’ll see us.”

“Not if I create a diversion and distract them,” Chris said. “In prison, we had a name for when we did that.”

Alex and I widened our eyes at him. “What was it?”

“Well, prison riot,” Uncle Chris said with a shrug. “That was the most accurate term for it, although we did try to think of a better one.”

“No,” my mother said, looking outraged. “This is wrong. Christopher, you are not going to —”

“You’d better go,” Uncle Chris said, lifting my tote bag — which I’d left sitting at the bottom of the stairs — and handing it to me.

The thumping on the door had become more fevered. Now I heard the chief of police say, “Dr. Cabrero, I have a search warrant. I don’t want to break down your door, but if you don’t open it, I will.”

“Go,” Uncle Chris said, and pushed us towards the backyard.

Alex faced his father, flabbergasted, but finally grabbed his backpack from the chair over which he’d slung it. “Don’t do anything stupid to get yourself thrown back in jail, Dad,” he said.

“Why would I do that?” Christopher asked, looking genuinely puzzled.

Alex shook his head, wearing an expression that clearly read, This is going to be a disaster.

“Christopher, wait,” I heard my mom call as she raced after her brother, who’d gone striding towards the front door.

I didn’t stick around to see what was going to happen after that. I grabbed the front of Alex’s shirt and dragged him through the French doors and across the back porch, down the steps and around the side of the house, towards the back gate and the bicycles Uncle Chris had said he’d seen.

“This is never going to work,” Alex was muttering. “They’re going to see us. And what about your necklace? There’s obviously a Fury out there. For all we know, it could be Chief Santos.”

“It isn’t him,” I said. I was surprised to see my bicycle sitting beside my mother’s. Somehow she’d retrieved it from the cemetery, where I’d left it locked up, or the police had returned it after I’d gone missing. “My necklace never turned black around Chief Santos before.”

“Well, maybe he’s a Fury now. Maybe they’ve possessed everyone on the entire island except us, like some kind of plague. Oh, hell no.” Alex looked down at the two bikes, mine and my mother’s. “I’m not riding a girl’s bike.”

“Fine,” I said, yanking mine from its kickstand. “Stay here and get arrested. You deserve it for being such a sexist snob. I’m leaving.”

“Get arrested?” Alex grabbed my mom’s bike — which was a red single speed with a simple wire basket — and hurried after me. “I didn’t do anything. You’re the one who —”

“Shhh,” I said. We’d reached the gate that led from the backyard to the driveway. I held up a hand to silence Alex as I listened to what was happening on the front porch.

“I already served my time,” I could hear Uncle Chris shouting. “Don’t I have any rights?”

“Of course you have rights, Mr. Cabrero,” Chief of Police Santos was saying in a patient tone. “We’re not here for you. We’re here to talk to your niece. We understand that she and this fellow we all were so worried had kidnapped her — but who we now come to find out is actually her boyfriend — were at a Coffin Night party last night out on Reef Key and caused a considerable amount of damage —”

“Persecution!” Christopher shouted. “You people are persecuting me and my family!”

“Now, hold on there, Christopher,” Chief Santos said. “Let’s not get excited.”

I heard a crash, then my mother cry, “Oh, Christopher!”

“Come on,” I whispered to Alex, and opened the gate.

Uncle Christopher had been right, I saw, as Alex and I quietly steered our bikes from the backyard, keeping our heads ducked well below the Isla Huesos squad cars parked along my mother’s driveway. Riots really did cause a distraction.

Especially since Uncle Chris had lifted one of the heavy flower planters on my mother’s front porch and thrown it as hard as he could at the stone walkway below, causing the planter to explode into a million tiny pieces of dirt, plaster, and petunias.

Not only were quite a few of my mother’s neighbors (who’d been outside in their yards cleaning up after Hurricane Cassandra) staring, but every single one of the officers accompanying Chief Santos had drawn their firearm and had it trained on Christopher.

This had to be the most exciting thing ever to happen in my mother’s wealthy suburban community, which was guarded twenty-four hours a day by a gated security station. The whole reason Seth Rector and his friends had befriended me my first day of school was because they knew I lived in Dolphin Key, and they believed if they stashed the senior class coffin in my garage, it would be safe from the juniors.