“I don’t fantasize about fights.”

“I broke Troy’s jaw. They’re wiring it shut right now at the army hospital. Luke tore his MCL and meniscus. I was a machine. They couldn’t touch me.”

“They couldn’t touch you on the football field, either—until they did.”

“I’m telling you, it wasn’t me doing the kicking and punching. I mean, it was, but I knew stuff that I shouldn’t know, like I’d been trained by a fighting master but didn’t remember it.”

“You’ve watched The Matrix too many times. I hope you don’t have to dodge any bullets.”

“You think you’re being funny, but everything really did slow down for me.”

I seated myself in the rickety wooden swivel chair behind the office’s main desk.

“Jordan,” I said, “you just beat up Troy Cameron and Luke Bowman, two of the biggest douchebags in school. You’re going to be hero of the nerds. So suspension aside, that can’t be the bad news.”

“Well, I probably have a target on my back now if I ever show my face on the south side of town. Fortunately, I’m not visiting the Mansions of Mount Hope anytime soon.”

“How about the Tastee Freeze?”

“Uh, rain check?”

“Sure,” I said, trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

“But, yeah, the bad news for Luke is that after what I did to his knee, he’s out for the season. And the good news for me is that just before he suspended me, Coach made me the new starting quarterback.”

CHAPTER 9

Maggie

AFTER I HUNG up with Jordan, I kicked myself for wimping out about not telling him my bad news. I’d thought of revealing it over ice cream, not that that wouldn’t have been awkward, too. I almost called him back, but now wasn’t the time. I needed to confirm that it actually was bad news.

My mind racing, I walked into the exam room, turned on the light, and stepped over to the new X-ray machine. We’d installed it only a few months before the evacuation, and it was one of the first things Mom checked on when we came back. It was super expensive, and the bills for it had been piling up. One good thing about the evacuation was that the government stepped in to freeze all of Mount Hope residents’ payments: cars, mortgages, X-ray machines …

I slipped a CD into the old boom box sitting beside a yellowed lamp. We didn’t have a lot of music choices among the discs stacked crookedly on the shelf, but Devo’s Freedom of Choice had become a personal favorite and not just because of the band’s red flower-pot hats. It’s hard to feel completely forlorn when listening to Devo and that herky-jerky beat.

“She’s just the girl, she’s just the girl …”

I took off my hoodie, leaving on my “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!” T-shirt, which I found in a thrift store and couldn’t resist. I’d taken X-rays before but only on animals. Their fur was thicker than my shirt, so I figured this would work.