“We’ll have to break in downstairs, son. Just hold on tight, all right?”
I nodded in the dark and let my head flop back on the ground. I felt so relieved. It was over. Someone else was taking charge. I could hear the police talking up above, making arrangements to get me out. I would see Mom and Dad again soon. I bet Wills was glad that it wasn’t his horrible friends who had found him, even if he was scared stiff that the police would lock him away. And then I realized that it wasn’t all over for Wills. It had only just begun. When they broke through to where I was lying, I wanted to be awake enough to tell them that it wasn’t his fault.
The rest was a blur. There was a lot of banging and sirens and more voices and walkie-talkies and waves of dust and cobwebs and great gasps of air, when the doors gave way, and paramedics lifting me and Mom hugging me and Dad saying all right son and Wills leaning over me, saying, “I did it, Chris, I went and got help,” and the bright light in the ambulance and the IV in my arm and Mom holding my hand, while Dad listened to Wills talking and realized that it wasn’t all over.
Chapter Twenty
I lay on the hard hospital bed, my right leg in a cast to halfway up my thigh, my chest strapped because I’d broken three ribs, and stitches underneath a wad of bandage on my other leg where I’d gashed it.
“You won’t be playing soccer for a while, then,” observed Jack.
“I could beat you one-legged, no problem,” I said.
“In your dreams,” he retorted. “I got picked for captain even though my best friend didn’t help me practice.”
“Shows you didn’t need me, then,” I shrugged.
“It’s only your cookies I’m after,” he laughed, and grabbed one from a packet on my bedside table. “Still no chocolate ones, I see. Speaking of which, has that Penny been in to see you?”
I nodded. “She’s the one who brought the cookies.”
“How’s her friend?” Jack asked.
“She’s going to be all right.”
“Lucky for Wills, eh?”
“It wasn’t his fault,” I said quickly, and for the hundredth time. “They told him all he had to do was keep an eye on the caretaker out back. He thought they were just going to scare her and see if she had any money. I know that’s bad enough, but he didn’t know they were going to use a knife. He didn’t know they were going to trash the place.”
“It’s been in the newspaper,” said Jack, “about thugs causing fifty thousand dollars’ worth of damage and threatening the librarian with a knife.”
“Did it mention Wills?”
Jack shook his head. “But there was another piece about brothers William and Christopher Jennings creeping around in a dangerous building, and Christopher falling through the floor.”
I groaned. Mom and Dad would have hated that. I hated that.
“Wills went to get help, even though he was terrified those thugs would get him for running away,” I said.
“So Wills is a hero now,” Jack smirked.
“Course he’s not,” I said, “but at least he tried to do something to make things right.”
“So he should, after what he did to you.”
“Wills is the one who got hurt the most,” I murmured.
“You’re the one who got hurt the most,” argued Jack.
“Only my body,” I said. “Not my head.”
I knew as I said it that it was more than that. We had all been hurt. Mom and Dad were tearing themselves and each other apart trying to work out where they had gone wrong, what they could have done better, why they hadn’t taken enough notice of the warning signs that Wills was running off the rails. They kept saying sorry to me that they hadn’t protected me more. I kept saying sorry to them that I hadn’t told them more about Wills’s horrible friends and the knife and the money under the bed, money that his horrible friends had given him for distracting onlookers while they used the knife to frighten store owners into opening their registers. Wills kept running around like a headless chicken saying sorry to everyone, but it didn’t stop him from having to spend hours down at the police station explaining exactly what he had been up to over the past few months.
“Wouldn’t make any difference to Wills’s head,” sniggered Jack. “He’s a nut anyway.”
“Only I’m allowed to say that,” I said sharply. “Anyway, he’s not a nut. He’s just—Wills, that’s all.”
“You can say what you like,” said Jack. “I’m glad he’s not my brother.”
I’d had enough then. I wanted Jack to go away. It was all a joke for him, a bit of entertainment. It wasn’t for me, and it wasn’t for Wills. Mom had told me that Wills was in serious trouble. He might not have been the one to threaten the librarian, but he was an accessory, whatever that was, and he admitted that he had been looking after the knife for his friends. He admitted, too, that he had been shoplifting with them.
“What’s going to happen to him?” Jack asked.
“Don’t know,” I said. “I’m tired. I want to go to sleep now.”
I did know. Mom had told me that the police had cautioned Wills, and that if he got into trouble again he could expect the consequences to be serious. He was going to have to change schools, because our school wouldn’t have him back after what he had done. They said they had done their best for him, but that perhaps it was time for him to make a fresh start somewhere else.
“Wills will hate that,” I said. “He hates going anywhere where he has to meet new people who don’t know about his Acts Dumb and Dumber.”
“Don’t call it that,” Mom said sharply. “You’re not to call it that. Anyway, he doesn’t have a lot of choices. And we’ve got you to consider as well.” She began to get tearful
