Proud Machinery

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Kess should probably have cleaned up the broken glass. She realized that as she watched Marlie and Breanna doing it instead. The second those girls had seen the dangerous mess they had rushed off to find a trash can and broom. Kess should have thought to do it before the others got there, but apparently her instinct was never to do something useful.

Of course Lorraine didn't have useful instincts either, apparently.

"What am I going to tell Mom and Dad?" asked Samuel, and Kess thought that maybe everyone who had ever said those exact words had sounded exactly the same when they said them.

"They don't know we've been hanging out here, right?" asked Lorraine.

"No. When they ask I say I'm out somewhere with Bradley."

"Then don't tell them anything. They'll find it when they come here themselves and it will be a mystery. Or ask permission to have another party and then tell them you found it this way."

Samuel nodded, though he still looked uncomfortable.

Danny, who had been staring at the glass-edged gaping doorway and looking thoughtful, spoke up for the first time. "We'll have to cover it up for now. Is there a tarp around here somewhere, Samuel?"

And so the boys had something useful to do as well. By the time the glass was cleared up and the open doorway was covered with an electric-blue camping tarp, everyone was there including Paul, the new guy who had shown up near the water tower the night before.

"So what are we going to do about this?" asked Bradley.

"I think we're good now," said Danny. "The tarp should keep out rain."

"I mean about them."

"You said, Danny," said Samuel. "You said we can't let them walk all over us or they'll keep doing it. You said we're not establishing that pattern."

"You're right," said Danny. He didn't look straight at Samuel or anyone else. Instead he was looking at the empty doorframe again, and seemed to be thinking very, very hard.

"They're at Stephanie's, right?" asked Marlie.

"Yeah," said Greg. "Her parents are in Naples."

"Who are 'they' exactly?" asked Paul, who everyone ignored.

"How many of them are there now?" (That was Samuel.) "I think we have two more."

"We need to have ten more," grumbled Breanna. "They can rip our faces off. Like chimpanzees."

Kess was surprised Lorraine didn't say anything. She'd been so furious before, but now she just watched everyone else.

Danny spoke up again. "How about we don't do anything?"

"You said we had to do something."

"That was before we were doing a headcount. Any plan that depends on us outnumbering them is a bad plan."

"They attacked us."

"They broke my parents' door."

"They could have killed Lorraine."

"They came to our place. We agreed on territories, didn't we?"

"They broke my parents' door."

Kess tried to decide if she was really as angry as the rest of them and was just burying it. She had more reason to be angry—the other Blues hadn't been there when the rocks hit the wall. They hadn't been scared. And when she looked for it there was a sort of shocked horror that the Reds had trespassed on their land, that they could have hurt her badly if they wanted to. But she wasn't angry. Maybe she didn't get angry at things that scared her. She hadn't been mad at Silver when she attacked Elias or at Stone when he had threatened her and Priya with a gun.