“Yeah. Together without a phone.” I want to stomp and scream some more, but two Mercedes Miller Tantrums in one afternoon is too much, even for me. I grab onto Mattie’s shoulders and stare into her eyes. My eyes. I’m so mad my hands are shaking. I say very slowly, “What are we supposed to do now, huh, Miss Plan Ahead Matilde?”

She shakes loose. “Let me think.” Mattie paces, avoids looking over the fence at the useless scrap of technology lying on the bottom of the pool. “We don’t have a phone, but that’s okay, because we already called home. We’ll catch the city bus. Aren’t you glad for Operation D.A.D? At least I kept the schedule.”

I cross my arms over my chest. She’s right. I am glad for the old-fashioned Santa Cruz Transit schedule in her backpack. My breathing slows.

This time it’s Mattie who says, “You have to trust me, okay?”

I inhale. “Okay, fine. I trust you.” Mostly because I don’t have much of a choice.

“Now we have to figure out how to find him. And not lose him again.”

Mattie says the only choice we have is to return to the anthropology department and wait for him. Be patient. Boring! But she’s right; we can’t keep moving from place to place or we’ll miss him again. And we need to stay out of sight of the security guard.

“And no more listening to nice librarians,” I say. I decide right then and there that we’re not trusting any more adults here. So far none of them has helped us even though they keep asking if they can. It’s obvious that they can’t.

From now on, it’s just the two of us—me and Mattie.

CHAPTER 31 Mattie

Losing Mercedes’s phone makes us more determined than ever. We head toward the now-familiar route back to the Humanities building, but just as we turn away from the athletic complex, we run into a crowd of forty or fifty students gathered on the sidewalk.

“What’s going on?” I ask Mercedes.

The college students’ faces are painted with swirling blue-and-green earths, with rainbows, with peace signs. They carry cardboard placards on wooden stakes. THERE IS NO PLANET B. EARTH IS OUR ONLY HOPE. STOP DRILLING THE ARCTIC.

“What do we want?” shouts a guy through a megaphone.

“Clean energy to save the planet!” answers the crowd.

“When do we want it?”

“Now!”

We back up onto the grass and observe, listening to their chants, reading their signs. “It’s a protest march,” Mercedes tells me.