I whirled around, fast. ‘What?’ I demanded way more sharply than I needed to. ‘What about them?’

‘I think they’re dead!’

Fourteen

I ran so fast that later, Sister Mary Claire, the track coach, asked me if I’d like to try out for the team.

But Cee Cee was wrong on all three counts. Father Dominic wasn’t dead. Neither was Bryce.

And there’d been nothing accidental about it.

As near as anyone could figure out, what happened was this: Bryce went into the principal’s office for something – nobody knew what. A late pass, maybe, since he’d missed Assembly – but not, as I’d hoped, because Father Dom had got hold of him. Bryce had been standing in front of the secretary’s desk beneath the giant crucifix Adam had told me would weep tears of blood if a virgin ever graduated from the Mission Academy (the secretary hadn’t been there, she’d been out serving coffee to the cops who were still hanging around the courtyard) when the six-foot-tall cross suddenly came loose from the wall. Father Dominic opened his office door just in time to see it falling forwards, where it surely would have crushed Bryce’s skull. But because Father Dominic shoved him to safety, it succeeded only in delivering a glancing blow that crushed Bryce’s collarbone.

Unfortunately, Father Dominic ended up taking the weight of the falling cross himself. It pinned him to the office floor, smashing most of his ribs and breaking one of his legs.

Mr Walden and a bunch of the sisters tried to get us to go to class instead of crowding the breezeway, watching for Father Dom and Bryce to emerge from the principal’s office. Some people went when Sister Ernestine threatened everyone with detention, but not me. I didn’t care if I got detention. I had to make sure they were all right. Sister Ernestine said something very nasty about how maybe Miss Simon didn’t realize how unpleasant detention at the Mission Academy could be. I assured Sister Ernestine that if she was threatening corporal punishment, I would tell my mother, who was a local news anchorwoman and would be over here with a TV camera so fast, nobody would have time to say so much as a single Hail Mary.

Sister Ernestine was pretty quiet after that.

It was shortly after this that I found Doc pressed up pretty close to me. I looked down and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ since the little kids are supposed to stay way on the other side of the school.

‘I want to see if he’s all right.’ Doc’s freckles were standing out, he was so pale.

‘You’re going to get in trouble,’ I warned him. Sister Ernestine was busily writing people up.

‘I don’t care,’ Doc said. ‘I want to see.’

I shrugged. He was a funny kid, that Doc. He wasn’t anything like his big brothers, and it wasn’t because of his red hair, either. I remembered Dopey’s teasing comment about the car keys and ‘Dave’s ghost’, and wondered how much, if anything, Doc knew about what had been going on lately at his school.