One By One (editing)

Chapter Eighteen

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My eyelids fluttered open and I groaned as the police car sped over a hard bump. Rubbing my head, I found both Gabe and I shoved into the backseat of the police car.

"Carter," Gabe whispered next to me. "Are you okay? Does your head hurt? Does anything else hurt? I'm so sorry."

"Whoa," I stammered out. "Way too much at once there. Head hurts a little bit but that's it. What about you? I heard the gun go off."

"Yeah," he shrugged. "He's not a good aim."

"You have the right to remain silent. Just wait until we get back to the police station, kids," one of the cops demanded in a suggestive tone from the passenger seat. "Then you can talk. Not such a good idea right now." I shifted to catch a glimpse of what he looked like from the streetlights. Probably around the age of Granma Jo, he had graying hair framing a wrinkly face with bushy eyebrows. For the most part, he looked like a kind man. I didn't have a good enough view on the other man to see what he looked like but he seemed like a younger man. That meant that Gabe's dad was at the station or out, and Gabe was probably anxiously awaiting their encounter.

Gabe and I both kept our mouths shut for the rest of the drive, me using it to overanalyze the previous events. I laid my head against the cool car window and stared out into the black velvet night, watching as the houses raced by. Unconsciously replaying the scenes over and over again in my head, I couldn't help but feel in a tiny part of me a twinge of helplessness or guilt that I had been so close yet so far away. I was up on that porch, almost past the man, when it was over. Over in a second, and now Gabe and I were on our way back home.

I snuck a glance over at him. His muscles were taut from being crossed over his chest in such a firm and stiff position, and he was staring out the window like I had been a moment ago. His back was hunched in an almost defeated way and I knew he could feel the difference in the air between us like I could. Just an hour earlier we had been skipping school, holding hands and laughing with the hard-to-ignore high school romance cliché feeling encasing us. We were in our own little bubble of giddiness and nervousness. But now we were sitting on two opposite sides of the backseat of a cop car, silent, and worried about the inevitable consequences that would be piled on us when we arrived to the police station in our town. Now we were back to normal with no distractions, or as normal as you could get if half of your siblings had vanished into thin air. In that moment, Gabe shifted in his seat and caught me looking at him. His brown hair was disheveled and his gray eyes held its usual spark in them, but my gaze caused him to smile in a boyish smirk. I quickly looked away, biting my lip and fighting the urge to smile back.

Ok so maybe no distractions was a stretch.

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The holding cell door clanged shut behind me and Bushy Eyebrows, whose nametag read 'Jim', locked it. He shuffled through some papers on the desk beside the cell, the only real piece of furniture in this back area, before retreating around the corner back to where the main lobby and entrance to the police station was. I shuffled over to the sorry excuse of a metal bench bolted to the wall in the corner of the small square space, head in my hands. When I had called my mom on the police station phone, for the first time tonight I was on the verge of tears of what I did. Her disappointment in me for ending up in jail, even if it was just a holding cell, was painfully clear and I bit my lip to stop the tears from falling. She said she would pick me up in ten minutes and when she did "we would talk about it". "It" probably meant I was grounded until I was eighty.