Red Heart Tattoo (2 page)

The team jogged around the football field. Cheers. Kelli and the cheerleading squad flashed pom-poms,
made human pyramids, executed precise tumbling routines. More cheers from the bleachers. The band struck up the school song and air horns sounded out of nowhere. The principal beamed toward the stands. Morgan felt a deep stirring of school spirit and teared up. For a moment, her gaze connected with Trent’s. He blew her a kiss.

And then, without warning, in front of the goalpost at the east end of the field, all hell broke loose.

F
irecrackers went up; bottle rockets and shrieking banshee noises exploded out of a box painted in the school colors that had been sitting innocently between the goalposts. The bleachers erupted with screams and expelled them in waves. Like rats pouring from a sinking ship, kids flowed downward, outward across the field, running in every direction. Simmons grabbed the mike from Morgan, yelled, “Stay calm! Please, don’t run!”

Morgan froze, watched in horror as the cheerleaders were overrun, the band shoved aside. She lost sight of Kelli’s dark hair in the melee. Above, the sky went bright with sprays of colored sparklers, a July Fourth bonanza in September.

“It’s fireworks!” Simmons yelled into the mike. “That’s all. Just fireworks.” No one was listening.

Morgan felt someone grab her arm, turned to see Trent holding her wrist.

“Come on!” he shouted, pulling her down the platform steps. With his arm around her, they dodged fleeing students, jogged to the side of the field and into the tunnel.

She stopped, turned as the last of the noise and fireworks subsided. Pale smoke dissipated into the bright blue sky. By now the field was completely empty of human life aside from Principal Simmons, still standing on the platform and clutching the mike. The ground was littered with paper, shredded pom-poms and a few lost shoes. Morgan was trembling. “Who would do this?”

Trent shook his head. “Some jerks.”

“But why?”

“Probably thought it would be funny.”

“Do you think it’s funny?”

He shrugged. “Maybe not funny. But it sure got noticed.”

“Please don’t tell me you or Mark had anything to do—”

Trent threw up his hands, backed up. “No way. We’d never pull something like that. Not our style. That prank took coordination and planning. We were in class or with the team all afternoon.” He rested his arms on her shoulders, leaned his forehead against hers. “I love you, babe. I wouldn’t ever rain on your parade.”

She believed him. Plus, he was right. The fireworks show had been well planned and executed. Someone had wanted to ruin the pep rally
—her
pep rally, the one she’d arranged, fought for and endorsed. She felt a burning in her chest and stomach as her fear morphed into anger. “I’m going to find out who did this.”

“I guess everyone wants to know.” Trent stated the obvious.

Morgan stared hard at him, fire in her brain. “And when I do, I’m going to make sure they’re tossed out on their butts.”

Her parents were waiting for her when she walked in the front door. “Are you all right?” her mother, Paige, blurted.

“I told you I was fine on the phone.” Morgan was still mad, and she hadn’t expected her parents to shut down their law offices and rush home early. She’d patiently explained that the fireworks drama was a stupid prank and that no one was even near the display when it went off.

“It’s all over town,” said her father, Hal. “Some cell-phone video clips are already up on TV. Kids took pictures while they were running away. Pretty bad video, but you get the sense of panic.”

Morgan knew the clips would go viral in no time. That made her madder.

“Was anyone hurt?” Paige asked.

“Scrapes and bruises in the scramble to get away.” It had taken Morgan thirty minutes to make her own getaway from school grounds and the parking lot, dodging police and firefighter response teams. Her cell had buzzed constantly during the drive home.

“Kids could have been trampled to death,” her mother insisted.

“Any idea who the culprit was?” her dad asked.

“Not a clue.”

“We’ll make sure the book’s thrown at them once you find out.”

Her cell vibrated as another text came in. Morgan looked at the message. She still hadn’t heard from Kelli, although she’d texted her twice. Not Kelli this time either.

Paige stepped up and hugged Morgan. “We’re glad you’re safe.”

“Me too,” Morgan mumbled, swallowing a teary lump in her throat. She wasn’t sure if the lump meant relief from not being hurt or if it was from the pure fiery knot of anger she’d been nursing. Whoever had done this was going to pay.

H
e had always thought she was pretty. Probably because of her red hair and green eyes, a dynamite combo, to his way of thinking. Stuart Rothman—Roth to everyone—had studied Morgan Frierson from a distance ever since sixth grade, when he’d first landed in Edison Middle School. They were seniors now, and she was popular and well liked, with a string of wordy accomplishments attached to her name. He had a list of words after his name too—most of them negative. It didn’t take a degree in rocket science to recognize that she was out of his league. Plus, she was superglued to Trent, the soccer star, a guy Roth had disliked on first sight. Why did the jocks always get the pretty girls? And why did the pretty girls flock to the jerks?

Roth blew through a yellow traffic light in the center of downtown—dead-in-the-water downtown. Grandville,
Michigan, was nowheresville to Roth, a dying town of shuttered factories that had once catered to the auto industry. Now Main Street was Dead Street, with a few businesses still hanging on, including his uncle Max’s tattoo place, the Ink Spot. Roth pulled his pickup truck into one of the many open spaces near Max’s shop.

He went inside, where Max was inking a fat man’s shaved back. The air smelled of fresh ink and antiseptic cleaners. Max looked up, the hum of his tattoo needle pausing. He pushed his glasses up onto his forehead. The fat man never stirred, although Roth knew that inking was painful, even with numbing cream. He wore his uncle’s ink art on his own body, so he knew how it felt to be tattooed. “You all right? What happened at the high school?” Max asked. “It’s all over the news.”

“I’m fine. Someone set off fireworks to celebrate the pep rally.” Roth crossed to the minifridge and dug out an apple.

“And you know nothing about it?”

“Not a thing.”

Max gave him a long, hard, skeptical look. He was a big man, a former marine with a permanent limp from an accident that had ended his military service. “No injuries?”

“A few kids got knocked around in the stampede out of the stadium.”

“But not seriously?”

Roth didn’t meet his uncle’s gaze. He took a big bite of the apple. “That’s what I heard.”

“You know, if whoever did this is caught, they’ll be expelled.”

“I think whoever did it will be smart enough not to get caught.”

“Better be.” Max held Roth’s gaze for a long moment, lowered his glasses and set back to work.

“Where’s Carla?” Roth asked.

“Running errands. She’ll head straight home and start on supper. You should go to the house too. She’ll be worried about you.”

“I’ll go tell her I’m right as rain.”

“Got homework?”

A history paper due on Monday, two workbook pages of advanced algebra and a hundred pages to read in a novel for English
. “Naw. Not a lick,” Roth said.

“We always had homework when I was a senior,” Max said without looking up.

Roth shrugged. “Times change.”

Max blew air through his lips in disbelief. “I expect you to graduate next June. It’s not optional.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be up there ready to walk.”

“Tell Carla I’ll be home in an hour.”

Roth finished the apple and walked outside into the crisp late afternoon. The air had turned cooler, and the oak trees along Main were tinged with color. Leaves had already fallen into the bed of Roth’s older-model pickup. He liked keeping the blue truck spotless. It had been a gift from Max and Carla when he’d turned seventeen the year before, the one possession Roth counted as truly belonging to him. All the rest of his life was on loan—his home, his family.

He’d been orphaned at the age of seven, his biological
parents blown up in a meth lab cook gone bad, and had become a ward of the state. He’d passed through three foster homes by age ten. His uncle Max had stepped up and taken him when Roth was eleven and Max’s military career was over. Max had no idea about raising a kid, especially an emotionally wounded one, so there had been a lot of adjusting at first, with Roth pushing every boundary, waiting for Max to get rid of him too.

Max had been hard on him, a drill sergeant who knew nothing about being a parent. Roth had no one else and he didn’t want to return to foster care, so Max made a pact with him. “Look, we’re family. This isn’t the way it should be for either of us, but it is. Took me a while to wrestle you from the state, but here we are. We’re all we got.”

Max had given Roth a slice of his family history too, stuff Roth had never known. “Your dad—my bro, Jake—started on drugs in middle school. He got hooked young. Our parents sent him to rehab twice. I was older and in the military, so I missed a lot of the drama. Mom would write me about him, but there was nothing I could do.”

Roth had listened closely. The father he remembered was mercurial, moody, sometimes happy, sometimes mean. Roth had steered clear of him, hiding in a closet when his dad became explosive. “And Mom?” he’d asked Max.

“Nancy was a sweet girl. No one could believe it when she married Jake. It was between rehab stints, I think. Loved him, she told me. But the drugs were too strong; he couldn’t kick them. The drugs broke him in every way.”

“But she helped him cook meth. She was a druggie too.”

“Not for a long time. Not while she was carrying you either. She loved you, Roth. Your dad’s and my parents passed within months of each other and your mom’s parents were dead too. I was stationed overseas. She had no support system. Jake couldn’t hold a job; they were head over heels in debt. She started using too.”

Roth remembered some of this tender, nice mother, the one who had held him whenever he got hurt, hid him when Jake was acting crazy.

“They started their own meth lab to make money,” Max explained. “But she always made sure you were out of the house when they cooked. That stuff … the chemicals … they wreck your brain one way or another. She would lock you in their car and park it away from the house so you wouldn’t breathe the fumes.”

And one night the house had exploded and all Roth could do was watch it burn to the ground. Still, hearing the story from Max had helped Roth feel he’d been loved once. So he had settled down—sort of. No drugs was the one thing they agreed upon. School attendance and good behavior, not so much. Everything had gotten easier for both of them once Carla came into Max’s life, married him and moved in.

Carla was a strong, kind, well-inked woman with a smoker’s voice and a soft spot for Roth. He needed that. He was haunted by the image of a fireball that lit up the yard and the house. He’d tried to get out of the car, tried to
run and rescue his mother. He could do nothing. When the firefighters and police found him, he was a pale, shivering, wide-eyed kid who refused to cry.

So who was he now? A freak who pushed the edges of life’s envelope, a nowhere kid—not bad, not good—wondering where he fit. Roth turned on the truck’s radio, tried to find a local station that wasn’t reporting on the pep rally fireworks, but couldn’t. He sighed, turned off the radio and drove home.