What Remains of White Sands

Chapter Four

“So everyone’s in agreement,” Konner whispered to me conspiratorially after the ceremony. Everyone was wandering around the fields, eating cake—we weren’t officially allowed to leave yet, and the cake kept most people captive anyway. I wasn’t sure why Konner was whispering; we were hiding under a pine tree, and I was pretty confident that no one could see us through the branches, let alone hear us—the tree was at least twenty feet away from the goalie net that was farther away from the school. Our entrance must have seemed suspicious, but why would anyone care?

Then I realized my friends may have seen me come back here. They were among those engrossed in the cake, but Zahina and Temira’s skills of perception could always be trusted—I didn’t doubt that they had missed my presence and possibly even tracked my whereabouts. Hetal most definitely would have missed me by now, but most of her conversation remains trained on herself, and the notion that she would convince our group to come looking for me was almost laughable. Almost. She was an unfailingly loyal friend, but lacked common sense. Yet even now, I could almost hear Karida yelling about “fraternizing with the enemy.” Shuddering, I replied in a whisper of my own.

“Yes! So what’s our next step?”

“Uh …” Konner said. I glared at her. “No, I know! We have to force them to let us go.”

I frowned. “That’s not going to work. We should make a well-developed argument about why we should go and present it to the school board and our parents. Zahina can help us with that, I’m sure. And Tadi—she can be the presenter. She’s a great public speaker and super, super persuasive.”

“No,” Konner spat.

“Yes,” I replied.

“No! You are not taking over this project,” Konner insisted.

I threw my hands up in frustration. “I’m not! I want this project to succeed, so I’m trying to help!”

“You’re making things worse,” Konner insisted.

“How?” I asked derisively.

“You just are,” Konner said, leaning forward. I kept my eyes locked on hers, unwilling to step down and to prevent an unwelcome view of down her clingy short black dress. “It’s like you spread poison everywhere you go. I don’t know how it works, but it does.”

I had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but anger bubbled up inside me. “Why you little—”

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately—who knows what I would have said), my sentence was cut off when a soccer ball flew through the branches of the tree and hit me in the head. Crying out as I fell, I clutched my head and whimpered in pain as I knelt in the needles. Konner gasped, and when footsteps from the field approached, she ducked out the other side of the tree.

I muttered a few choice words that summed up my current opinion of Konner and tried to crawl after her.

“I got it!” shouted a boy as he came to fetch the ball.

“I’ll beat you to it!” replied another.

I blew a raspberry in annoyance. The boys were Austin and my brother. If it hadn’t been them, I wouldn’t have had to explain my presence; but since it was, knowing their speed, I had no time to follow Konner safely out of the tree.

But I was fast too.

I hardly had time to think; I acted on instinct as I raced up the trunk of the tree. I’d always wanted to climb this tree, but we weren’t supposed to climb trees in school. Now, for some reason, this rule didn’t seem to matter.

Safe in the branches halfway up the tree, I arranged myself so that I wouldn’t fall on their heads. Belatedly I realized that Konner would have seen my preternaturally quick escape up the tree … and she would have questions. Lots of them. Especially after the field trip incident last March, where she had seen some things she should not have … It was too late now, I sighed, feeling nauseous.