The Fort (Aric Davis)

to be able to do that on my own?
    That was a tougher problem, tougher by a lot. It would be hard enough to find Molly and the man who took her with all three of them out and free, but with his friends on what he could only assume was lockdown, it seemed like it was going to be up to him.
    The thought made Luke slump on his bed. He was just a regular kid, not some twelve-year-old genius detective. This would be hard with all three of us, really hard, but I know I’m not smart enough to do it on my own. Luke didn’t even know where to start an investigation like that. Molly had just disappeared into the trees, and if the wounded man had left any sort of blood trail, the cops hadn’t been able to find it. Why did it have to rain?
    Then an idea began to form in his head. Not a brilliant one, but a small one, that could perhaps be added to with a little bit of luck. Luke figured they were due for some good luck—all three of them were, but especially him. He packed a bag with clothes, a small amount of food, and three Sprite caps. He left a note on the counter saying he would be back in a day or two, tops, and then waved at his zombified sisters as he left. They didn’t even blink.

    Scott had never felt so shell-shocked in his life. He had been ready to try to explain away some part of the story that got muddled because of Luke’s shooting that guy, and maybe to get called out on it, but this was much worse than anything he could have anticipated. Carl had said that he was never going to be able to hang out with Luke or Tim ever again, and his mom had agreed with him—that was the ultimate betrayal. It would have been one thing for Carl to say something like that, and to then have his mom tell him that he was out of bounds, but she went right along with it. Why should Carl get to decide who he was friends with? It’s not like he’s my real dad. Just because he married my mom doesn’t give him the right to ruin my life. It was all just so unfair, and no one was even willing to listen to them.
    Scott couldn’t even feel good about having seen Molly. The police and her parents thought she was dead, and soon she would be, if she wasn’t already, he was sure of it. They had been given a chance to save her, and it had been taken away by adults who didn’t listen when they needed to the most.
    But what am I going to do about it? Nothing, that’s what. He was going to sit in his room for the rest of the ruined summer, and that would be that. Unless, when they do find the body, they realize that it must mean we were telling the truth!
    The realization of what that would mean sank in heavily. Molly would still be dead, and the best that could happen to him was that he might have some rights restored.
    If he wasn’t grounded, he could go look for the guy. They’d all seen him, and Scott knew he’d recognize him from what he’d seen of his face, as well as from what he felt sure would be a serious limp.
    None of it mattered. He wasn’t going anywhere. His mom had quit her job early so that she could be home with him—her choice, but his fault, according to her—and there was going to be no sneaking off to figure out what had happened. One thing did keep coming back to him, though it seemed almost impossible. What if he broke the house arrest but he and his friends figured out who had taken Molly? Could he get in trouble for that? Sure, they’d be mad at first, but they’d get over it, especially since they would have been wrong to ground him in the first place.
    After imagining himself as the returning hero whose criminal past had been redeemed, Scott let the doubts fall out of his head like sand through his fingers: He was just one kid, Tim and Luke were grounded too, and they were the only people who knew that Molly was still in trouble. There was nothing that any of them could do about it, and there was nothing that was going to change that. He’d only just learned the phrase “catch-22,” but that’s what this was, and he was stuck in the middle of it. Scott lay in bed with his hands laced behind his head, wishing for the first time in his life that school would hurry up and get here already.

    Tim walked to Becca’s room after getting out of the shower and getting dressed. His dad had worked him like a dog in the baking sun, making him carry load after load of pea gravel into the backyard. Tim carried so much of it that he could actually see a difference from when they had started. When he tried to