Greetings from Witness Protection!: Chapters 22–30

Secretly, I’m miffed that everything that helped me establish my routine gets shut down.

At the breakfast table, Jackson and I quiz each other mercilessly.
“Inferencing!” Jackson fires as he waves a bit of bacon at me.
“Reading between the lines,” I declare...

It’s pretty amazing, actually; I’ll bet there are cloisters of monks who don’t move from cell to chapel this quietly.

Ms. Millar will pass out our EOG test scores. We’re not supposed to open them until the final assembly, when our parents will be there to make sure we don’t doctor up, play down, or “accidentally lose” the results. I gather it’s a real agony/ecstasy moment.

“It’s like I want to put it on my desk, whip out a machete, and hack at it until slivers of scores rain down into my hair.”

The shared hysteria is even more profound on the way to the gym.

“But Ma, I was sure! Keel is to boat is not as grass is to cow! The grass! The keels! They are not as is!”

“Yes, Charlotte...did your expert wit and impeccable academic acumen kill us all, or are we safely mediocre yet again?”

With a finger calloused from a lifetime of opening business letters, he rips the results free.

“C’mon, Charlotte!” he says as he crosses over six times in rapid succession.

He goes into another display of behind-the-back bravado, and as he does, my limbs snake out.

There, inches away, is Archer Brantley’s perfect, smug grin.

I wrench around, clambering and fighting against the surge, but it’s no use.

As we’re swept into the parking lot, all I can see is Archer’s perfectly combed hair, sinking into the masses like the disappearing fin of a well-sated shark.

Jonathan picks out a pizzelle of his own and takes a ruminating bite.

We look like some sort of troglodyte clan, just emerging into the sun for the first time.

“No!” I say, way too loudly. It reverberates through the bathroom, almost like the dirty pink tiles and infinitely grouted toilets had finally had enough and were rising up in protest of gossip, girlfights, and middle school melodrama.

I can actually see the hurt beginning to coalesce in her, and I take her by the shoulders, like a field doctor trying to stem the bleeding.

“Our parents are the kind that have that extra gear of angry. They go right past yelling and into—"
“Seething?”

I just found out when the firewall was due to have its update, waited for the two-minute vulnerability window, hacked in, and changed the website’s HTML code.

She trails off, blushing furiously as Jonathan stares at her stoically.

In my ear, I can hear her: “Charlotte? Charlotte? I just got a message that your alarm system was breached. Are you okay? Charlotte?”

Perfectly plausible that Arturo Cercatore came here to make a message out of his turncoat sibling, just as it is perfectly plausible that an ex-convict might find that his only daughter has been taken by a family that is not her own.

“Christian, my family spent considerable resources to set this in motion. We bribed people. We threatened them. And trust me when I tell you that this is not the first time; we’ve grown quite good at this. So, given our efforts here, to what lengths do you think we might go to find a man who disappointed us in the manner you’re suggesting? One who might conceivably testify in court to what he’s seen here?”

“Nephew,” Arturo croons. “Do be so kind as to go get the phone for your mommy?”

“I can shoot her again if she’s too feisty for you to corral.”

My father looks at Arturo, who shrugs cavalierly.

Every thudding step jostles me, and the narrow passage forces my feet and head to scrape along the wall. He tries his best to maneuver, but I still take the brunt of it.

“Now that we’re here,” the deputy marshal says matter-of-factly, flipping through a sheaf of papers, “we can—”

"Don’t be petulant, Nicki. We’ll get you placed shortly, and we’ll assure that you’ve moved on.”