Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry (26 page)

My hand moved to my pocket for the phone I didn't have. Indri didn't have hers either, and neither of us had been able to check e-mail or messages since we were grounded. No way to know if Mac was trying to communicate with me or not. No way to get him any info, either.

I blew out a breath.

Yay for a little freedom, but the whole situation still sucked.

“Guess he's not in that much trouble,” Indri said without looking up from her sketch, which was turning out really good. I could pick out the spire at Ventress, and all the main angles of the old building. “Though I guess escorting Avadelle around town could be its own form of punishment.”

“No kidding.” I tried to go back to my own sketch of the Circle, but my eyes kept drifting up, following Mac and
Avadelle until they disappeared into the Grove. A few minutes later, Ms. Yarbrough came over and inspected our work. Indri's sketch earned an enthusiastic, “Excellent first effort!”

As for mine . . .

“That looks a bit like a treasure map, Dani.” Ms. Yarbrough managed a sort-of smile. “Were you trying to draw the building?”

That had been the assignment, but I hadn't bothered. Stick people, stick houses, stick buildings—yeah, I wouldn't have gotten very far. I shrugged one shoulder. “I didn't figure I could do it justice, so I was working on the greenery.”

Sort of the truth, right?

And it earned me another sort-of smile. “I see.” Ms. Yarbrough didn't comment on my notes with the question marks and cross-outs. “Well, ladies, camp's at an end for today. I'll take you back to the Grove with everyone else to get picked up—except for you, Ms. Beans. You're a walker today, and I believe it's closer for you to head out from here.”

“Yes, ma'am.” I closed my notebook and tucked my pencil behind my ear. Then I gave Indri a quick hug.

“Maybe we'll get our phones back soon?” Her smudged fingers smeared black pencil dust on my arms as she let me go. “For the weekend at least?”

“I hope so,” I told her.

She walked off with Ms. Yarbrough, giving me a few extra waves every few steps, until they passed Ventress Hall and shifted into the Grove's trees. I waved back every time, until
I couldn't see her anymore. Then I glanced down the long sidewalk that ran along beside University Avenue, and knew my father was expecting me to head down it, toward home.
Trusting
me to do that.

Instead, I turned back to the Circle and started toward the Lyceum.

Mom was working late like she had to do every night now. Dad would be gardening until sunset and looking after Grandma, and oblivious to the outside world. So I figured I had almost two hours before Dad would notice I wasn't home yet and come looking for me.

Using the grid I'd drawn, I hurried down the widest wagon-wheel spoke of the Circle, the main sidewalk that would take me to the center flagpole. A few paces down that spoke, I turned right onto the grass and headed to the first little tree. I tried to pretend I was Grandma the night she took the box back from Dr. Harper, in a hurry, maybe confused and thinking somebody was watching me or wanting to steal my precious lockbox. I got close to the little tree, dropped to my knees, set my notebook aside, and pushed my hands into the sun-heated dirt and shavings around its base. Above my head, tiny leaves fluttered, casting shadows across the ground in front of me as I dug.

As I watched my hands plunge into the red mulch and crumbly brown dirt, I couldn't help remembering the black-and-white photos Ms. Manchester had shown us, the ones
from the Meredith riot. If I had been in this exact spot that afternoon, I would have seen carloads and busloads of folks driving onto campus. I would have seen angry people and scared people and curious people. I would have seen furious people with guns and baseball bats, determined to stop progress because they thought change would ruin their lives or end their world or—something.

That kind of hate and violence didn't compute. My heart bumped hard as my fingers moved against pebbles and roots. I wiggled my fingers and pushed my hands deeper, as deep as I figured Grandma could have done the night she fled Ventress hall with her lockbox.

Had the same thing happened to her the night she took the box back? Was she remembering the riot the night when she hid her treasures? Sometimes, for people with Alzheimer's disease, the past could seem like yesterday, or even right now. I hated to think of how scared she might have been—both when she got hurt in the riot, then later, when her disease could have made her relive every minute of that pain.

I went all around the soft dirt area of the first tree, but I didn't find anything. I didn't find anything under the second tree, either, so I moved to the next, and the next, until I'd poked around all the little trees in that first section of wagon wheel. Each time I gave up on an area, I patted the dirt back down and smoothed out the shavings, then drew a line through the tree on my sketched grid.

People passed by me as I dug, but nobody said anything. So I just kept digging. Fifteen more minutes, then fifteen more. About half an hour later, digging behind the second bench I had marked on my grid, I had managed to collect a green toy soldier with a chewed-off leg, a golf ball, three acorns, and a quarter. I also had about a pound of dirt crammed under my fingernails and caked all over my jeans, and sweat trickled down both sides of my face.

I sat against the back of the bench, picked some of the dirt out from under my thumbnail with my teeth, and spit it off to the side.

“Hey!” somebody yelled. “Ew!”

And I closed my eyes, because I knew that voice.

“Truce, okay?” Mac said. “No more spitting.”

I opened one eye and looked up at him. He stood between me and a bunch of trees and Ventress Hall, with late-afternoon sunlight streaming all around him like a halo. The bright light made his shirt and jeans look almost neon.

I shaded my eyes. “You don't sparkle in the sunlight. Your vampire powers must be fading.”

“I vaaannnt to feeed,” he said with a horrible Dracula accent. “For zee sparklies to come back, you know?”

I didn't even bother with groaning. I was pretty sure people on the other side of University Avenue could see my eye-roll.

Mac eased out of the sun's glare, and sat down in front of me near the bench. His gaze moved from my dirty clothes to
my dirty hands, and finally to my face. “Do I want to know why you're digging up the Circle?”

“Do I want to know where Avadelle is?” I wiped more dirt off my hands, then off my jeans. “Is she about to swoop down on me like a fedora-wearing bat and hit me with her cane?”

Mac laughed. “No. My aunt picked her up ten minutes ago.”

“Thank goodness.” I wiped sweat off my cheek, then realized I had probably smeared dirt all the way to my chin. “Not up for bats and canes right now. I'm trying to find Grandma's lockbox. I thought she might have buried it somewhere in the Circle the night she took it from Dr. Harper, since it disappeared from her hands between Ventress and the Lyceum.”

Mac glanced around. “There's, um, a lot of ground to dig up, if you're planning to search everywhere in this wagon wheel. You know that, right?”

“I thought I'd try to find the old steam tunnel entrance Ms. Manchester and Dad told us about, if it's still here, and check out the spots with loose dirt, the ones that would have been the same a year ago. You know, the little trees and benches. Maybe the flowerbeds.” Why did I always seem to be filthy, or in trouble, or sweating down the back of my neck when Mac showed up? Why did I even care? I wished I didn't care.

“You're not serious about those flowerbeds,” he said. “They'll never let you paw around in the tulips. Even if you come back at night, the lights will rat you out and security'll be all,
Miss, we need your parents' names
.”

I banged my head on the back of the bench. “That box has to be here somewhere. Dr. Harper said she left Ventress with it, and she didn't have it by the time she got to the Lyceum.”

Mac studied me with his eyebrows raised, letting his gaze drift around to the different trash cans and sidewalks.

“No.” I held up one dirt-crusted palm. “I know what you're thinking, but I refuse to believe Grandma threw that box in the trash, or that some stranger picked it up, and now they're sitting on it somewhere with no idea what they've got.”

“Okay,” he said, and he stopped giving me the you're-goofy look. Just like that. Wow. I had forgotten Mac could be easy to get along with, like Indri. “I've tried to call you,” he added, “to see how you were. Your phone's been off for days.”

“Yeah, still grounded.” I picked up my notebook and stood, and Mac stood with me, and he followed me as I walked around the bench to stand on the main wagon spoke sidewalk, staring toward the Lyceum and the big flower beds he said I'd never be able to explore. “But thank you for getting the key back for me. That was amazing.”

“I owed you,” he said. “But I would have done it anyway.”

I stopped walking, suddenly feeling nervous. Mac stopped too. Together, we looked at the Lyceum's six huge white columns, the ones that most everyone in the South recognized in pictures. Somewhere, sprinklers had come on, and water made a gentle whooshing sound, turning the air damp. The scents of grass and dirt and trees and fresh tulips mingled with hot concrete and asphalt.

It should have been relaxing. And yet . . . “You owing me—you mean, because you blew me off the last day of school?” I squeezed the binding of my notebook hard, and didn't look at Mac.

“Yeah.” His voice seemed too quiet.

My brain shifted into high gear and full speed. So, he
was
apologizing. Sort of. Well, he did at Mom's office, and he gave me my key back like a peace offering. Did hurting my feelings the last day at school add up to something Mac couldn't fix by saying he was sorry?

Guess that was up to me.

Setting sunlight glared off each one of the fourteen windows behind the Lyceum's columns, yellow and pink and searing white, making my eyes tear up from the brightness. That had to be it, because I so wouldn't go all misty over Mac apologizing and wanting to be friends again, right?

“So all that stuff you said when you shook my hand and gave me the key at Mom's office, did you mean it?”

Silence.

My jaw started to hurt. I realized I was grinding my teeth, so I stopped, but I kept squeezing my notebook and staring at the bright, bright windowpanes behind the Lyceum's columns.

“My parents threatened to take away my guitar and music lessons,” Mac said. “They told me they'd break up my band if I stayed friends with you. It was so stupid, but they said we'd end up being some national news story because of our
grandmothers, and the reporters would never leave us alone. I got scared about the music stuff. I'm really, really sorry. You meant a lot to me. You mean a lot to me, but my music—” He stopped. Kicked at something on the ground next to my foot. “Just, sorry, this is coming out all wrong.”

I let myself blink, but even with my eyes closed, outlines of the bright windows stayed etched on my eyelids. “I get that. Your music's important.”

Mac kicked the ground again. “I didn't know how to say
no
to them, even when I knew they were wrong, and I really wanted to.”

I thought about Mom at work, assuming I was already home, and Dad out in his garden, trusting me to show up when I said I would. “I get that part too,” I said.

Then we both stopped talking for a few seconds, or maybe a few minutes. My eyes roved the Lyceum, from the clock at the top to its big columns to the windows to the redbrick face to the five marble steps leading to its white doors with the golden handles.

Mac pointed to one of the columns near the top, then to a spot over the Lyceum's main door. “Supposed to be bullet holes in those places,” he said. “Some from the Civil War and some from the Meredith riot.”

“I still can't believe it happened here,” I told him. “I mean, I can. It's just that everything feels so different now.”

“My folks got grumpy when I tried to ask them about it,” Mac said. “Dad griped about how the South, and Ole Miss
especially, never gets to move on from the past. Everybody still sees us as a bunch of psycho racist rednecks.”

I shrugged one shoulder, and the side of my hand brushed Mac's arm. All of a sudden, the evening seemed very, very warm. Almost stuffy. I wanted to step away from him, but at the same time, I didn't. Confusing.

“Well, there
are
a lot of psycho racist rednecks around here,” I reminded him.

He groaned. “There are psycho racist rednecks everywhere. Indri's dad probably even meets guys like that all the way over in Afghanistan.”

I stared at the columns, then the flowerbeds, then all the big, old trees lining the sidewalks. Words from
Night on Fire
came to life, just like those photo images from Ms. Manchester's books. Tear gas clouds covering the exact spot where we sat, drifting over dozens of exhausted-looking men wearing gas masks and carrying rifles. It was hard to imagine, but that's what Avadelle and my grandmother drove into. By the time Grandma got out of her car, rioters had taken the Circle and raised the Confederate flag, right where the center flagpole was now. They were trying to run over the marshals or break into the Lyceum driving trucks and bulldozers.

Was Grandma scared? Probably terrified. The thought made my teeth clench again—but I knew Grandma. She came to get books for the kids she was teaching, so she would have gone straight on with her plans, determined to finish what she intended to do.

“My grandmother wanted to get to Dr. Harper's office,” I said, finally opening my eyes all the way again, and pointing back behind the Lyceum. “And I think Avadelle would have helped her. With where his office was in 1962, they would have had to cut to the left of where we're standing.”