Don’t do it, Zane. Don’t do it. But my mouth was way ahead of my brain. “What’s my name?”
She gave me a dumbfounded look. And I didn’t stop there. Oh no, I had to go in for the kill. “You said you know every kid’s name in this school,” I said. “What’s mine?”
She pushed back her chair, stood, and walked over to me real slow like she wanted to me to sweat, or maybe she wanted to give me a head start. But I stood my ground and just kept on smiling.
I wasn’t smiling a second later when she made me write the Hail Mary twenty times on Post-it notes.
That afternoon, Mr. O picked me up after detention, since the bus didn’t wait around for rule-breakers. He drove an old Cadillac, the big gas-guzzling, V-8–engine kind. It was black and looked like an undertaker’s car, but he loved it. When I got in he was belting out some Spanish love song that was on the radio, repeating the word amor over and over. The window was wide open, and a group of kids on the corner busted up laughing.
Mr. O was so lost in amor-land he didn’t even notice. Me? I shut my eyes and visualized knocking them in the teeth.
“Did Ms. Cab agree to go out with you or something?” I asked after we were in the clear.
The guy was grinning ear to ear. “Not yet,” he said. “But I am very close to sharing my discovery with you.”
Mr. O kept a little greenhouse in his backyard and grew all sorts of different chile peppers. He was working on something top secret that he couldn’t tell me about yet, but he’d promised I’d be the first to know. I had to admit, I was curious.
“How close?” I asked.
Mr. O gave me a sidelong glance and waggled his bushy eyebrows. “Tonight.”
When we pulled up to my house, Brooks was sitting on the front porch, scratching at the sand with a twig. She was wearing all black again, but this time it was a pair of jeans and a wide-necked sweatshirt. My heart ricocheted off my ribs. (Note to the gods: You better never let her read this.)
“New amiga?” Mr. O said.
“Just some girl,” I said casually, raking my hand through my hair. “Thanks for the ride. See you tonight.” I hopped out of the car and went over to her.
Brooks stood and looked at me with a deadly serious expression. When she did, the amber flecks in her irises shimmered. “You’re in danger, Zane. Big danger,” she said, tossing the stick to the ground.
“Hello to you, too.”
“The plane crash, it was a…” She hesitated, her eyes roaming the darkening sky like she was searching for the right word. “A sort of…”
“Demon from Xib’alb’a?”
She looked surprised for a moment, but then she quickly recovered. “Right. But there’s much more to it.”
Hearing her confirm the impossible made my stomach plummet. So I hadn’t been hallucinating….
“How the heck did it fit into that plane, let alone fly it? Is there some kind of flying school for demons?”
She gave me an are-you-all-there? look. “That doesn’t even matter right now.”
“What could matter more?”
Brooks let out a frustrated groan. “How about that you’re in danger?”
“Yeah, you already said that, and I sort of figured that out when a demon crashed into my volcano.” I kicked a rock across the dirt.
“Your volcano?”
“Yeah. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s in my backyard, and I’m the one who…”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Who what?”
I wasn’t ready to tell her about my secret entrance. I’d wait to see what she had to tell me first.
“And why did you lie to me?” I said. “You don’t go to my school.”