The shoe looked old. Leather decayed and laces gone, flattened by time.
“The light.”
Laneesha didn’t move.
“Laneesha. Give me the light.”
Sara reached for it, and the girl complied. Still on her knees, she hobbled over to the shoe. Using a stick, Sara poked at the tongue, peering inside.
Empty.
“Maybe the cannibals ate the foot,” Laneesha said.
Sara spit—the foul taste in her mouth wouldn’t go away—then got to her feet. “The shoe is old. That bone still had meat on it.”
“How you know the shoe is old?”
“The laces have rotted away. So has some of the leather.”
“How long does that take?”
“I don’t know, Laneesha. A long time.”
“Maybe it takes a long time for meat to rot off the bone, too.”
Sara rubbed the hand that grabbed the bone onto her jeans. “We don’t even know that was a human bone. Could have been from a deer. Or a pig.”
“Be a big freakin’ pig.”
Sara considered looking for the bone again, to prove to Laneesha wrong. And to prove herself wrong, that she didn’t really see cloth clinging to the bone along with strips of skin. But she decided not to. Some things were better not knowing.
“Maybe the cannibals…”
“Laneesha!” Sara knew she was raising her voice, and silently cursed herself for her tone even as she continued. “There are no cannibals. Got it?”
Laneesha wasn’t so easily chided. “Martin said…”
“Martin was trying to scare us. That’s all. We’re the only people on this island right now.”
“So who grabbed Martin?”
“No one grabbed him. He was playing a prank, took it too far, and is now lost in the woods.”
“Like us,” Laneesha whispered.
Sara opened her mouth to dispute it, but stopped herself. Were they actually lost? She resisted the urge to shine the flashlight in all directions, hoping to find the path back to the campfire. But there was no path, and every direction looked exactly the same. She silently cursed Martin for his stupid tricks, and for bringing them all here.
“Camping,” Martin had said, a big grin on his face.
“You want to take a bunch of inner city kids out into the woods?”
“It’ll be good for them. We roast some hot dogs, sing some songs. I know the perfect place. My brother and I have been there. It’s beautiful Sara. You and the kids will love it.”
“You know I’m not good at night time, Martin. And in the woods, in the dark…”
Martin had patted her knee, looked at her like he used to, with love in his eyes. “You’re a psychologist. This is the perfect way to get over that fear, don’t you think? And besides, I’ll be there to protect you. What could possibly go wrong?”
So against her best instincts, Sara agreed. She did it, she knew, out of a need to appease him, make him happy. It had been a while since she’d seen Martin happy. They’d been growing distant for a long time. Sara could even remember the exact moment it began. The inciting incident was when Joe disappeared. But then Cheerese took off, and Martin retreated into himself.
It was more than six years ago. Cheerese Graves was just another confused teenager from a broken family, thrust into their care by the courts. Troubled in the same way dozens or others had been, before and since. And like others, Cheerese preferred to run away rather than deal with Sara and Martin’s rules and regulations.
Runaways weren’t uncommon. While the Center didn’t have the security of even a minimum security prison, it was still a form of incarceration. The windows were shatterproof and didn’t open, the doors all had heavy duty locks. But the kids always found a way. Cheerese had apparently stolen a set of keys, left after lights out.
Martin took it personally. Like he’d failed her. That was ridiculous, of course. Martin had a way of reaching kids, of actually being able to rehabilitate them. The recidivism stats for Center graduates were more than seventy percent lower than kids who went to juvee. They were actually helping kids turn their lives around, and part of that meant trusting them to do the right thing, to serve their time, to better themselves.
Of course, that meant greater opportunities to break the rules. While the Center had a greater success rate than any other state-run program, it also had the highest number of runaways.
But Sara didn’t want to think about any of that right now. She took the Center’s closing as hard as Martin did. It had been his idea, but she’d been there from the beginning, and she felt the loss. Sara hadn’t even begun interviewing for another job. She knew she’d be able to find work, either through the state or in the private sector. But even though she’d been headhunted, practically offered other positions, she chose to remain loyal to the Center until the very day it closed.
Now, possibly lost in the woods and growing increasingly frightened, Sara wondered if she shouldn’t have detached herself much earlier.
“We’re not lost.” Sara regained control over her emotions, assuming the role of responsible adult. “This island is only two thousand acres. That’s about three square miles. If we walk in one direction, we’ll eventually reach the shore. We can follow the shore to where we landed, then follow the orange ribbons back to camp. It might take all night, but we’ll find the others.”
Laneesha seemed to relax a notch. “Which way we goin’?”
Sara wished she had a compass. Martin had been carrying it earlier, and for all she knew he still had it on him. That would make going in a straight line more difficult, but not impossible.
“You pick.”
Laneesha put her hands on her hips, craning her head to and fro, then finally pointed to her right.
“This way. I got a feeling.”
Sara nodded, walking next to the teen. “Okay. Let’s go.”
“What about Martin?
Sara cupped a smelly hand to her face and yelled, “Maaaar-tin!”
They both waited for an answer. Every muscle in Sara’s body clenched, hoping she wouldn’t hear a reply, hoping Martin had the decency to quit this stupid game.
A few seconds passed. Sara unbunched her shoulders, relaxed her jaw. She was just about ready to release the breath she’d been holding when they heard the scream.
High-pitched. Primal. Definitely not Martin. It was one of the girls, and she sounded like she was in excruciating pain. Cindy, or Georgia.
And she sounded less than twenty yards away.
When Meadow was a little boy, he wanted to be part of a family. He never knew his dad, and his mama did drugs and kept making him live with cousins and second cousins and neighbors and sometimes complete strangers. She didn’t want him, and neither did they. He craved love even more than his little tummy craved food, and he got very little of either.
So when he was thirteen years old, he stood in a circle of Street Disciples—a Folks Nation alliance on Detroit’s East Side—and let eight of the biggest members beat on him for twenty full seconds without fighting back.
Meadow had been scared. Of the pain, of course, even though he’d gotten beat on for most of his life. But mostly he’d been afraid of his own reaction. If he tried to defend himself, even in the slightest way, the initiation wouldn’t count, and he’d have to do it again later in order to be accepted into the gang.
So he put his hands in his pockets, closed his eyes, and let his homies have at him while he concentrated hard as he could not to follow his instinct and cover up, run away, throw a return punch.
They blooded him in good, breaking his nose and two ribs, kicking him in the kidneys so many times he pissed blood for a week afterward. But Meadow took it all, denying every impulse to save himself, staying on his feet for most of it because he knew if went down the stomping was even worse than the kicks and punches. And it was.