Free I&#39ll Be There by Holly Goldberg Sloan

the
printout.
    The map showed that most of the dots were in one neighbourhood. South. Near River Road. He didn’t get out there much. It was the low-rent part of town, because if the river flooded, so did
the neighbourhood. Even though that really didn’t happen much any more. But people still at least thought that it could.
    The last time he was on River Road was the night he went to IHOP. It made sense that the thieves lived over there. He was sitting in IHOP when someone stole the heart of the girl he liked. That
much he knew for certain.
    The next day after school, Jessica Pope asked Bobby to go get a coffee with her. He thought about it, and even though she looked cute in her low-cut pink shirt, he made an
excuse. Jessica Pope wasn’t Emily Bell.
    Bobby told Jessica that he had to do some work for his mother. People always bought that excuse. They assumed he was up to something interesting and important. So after telling Jessica a lie,
the idea was planted in his brain.
    Bobby had kept his mother’s crime-incident map. He wasn’t sure why. But it was in his backpack. He dug it out, got into his SUV, and drove across town to check out some of the places
where there had been problems.
    The yellow dots.
    Bobby was in the southbound lane of River Road, in the middle of the afternoon on a cloudy day, when he suddenly saw the guy Emily had run after that night. He was with the same little kid, and
Bobby knew for sure it was them, because they were dressed in the same clothes. And the little kid was even carrying something against his chest, just like before.
    On instinct Bobby went to the next traffic light, turned the car around, and headed back to follow them.
    And that’s how he found out that the two boys lived in a crappy house at the end of a line of run-down places out on Needle Lane.
    Sam was relieved.
    He’d been fighting thinking about Emily, and he’d lost. And now that he’d admitted defeat, it felt like winning. He never felt like he won at anything, so that further
complicated things.
    That week, at the end of every day after leaving Riddle at a picnic table at a park downtown with a candy bar and something new to draw, Sam went to her house. He didn’t go inside but
always just took a walk. Emily seemed to understand, without his even explaining much, that his life had complexities.
    Emily had never met anyone like him. He was so different. He didn’t seem to know about television shows or famous people. She couldn’t tell most of the time if he was kidding around
with her or if he really had never heard of most of the things kids her age talked about.
    At the end of the week, she said that her parents wanted to meet him. She presented it as a good thing. He had seen them in the house, mostly shadows passing through a room. She said he should
come over the next night and stay for dinner. He finally agreed.
    But what was he going to do with Riddle when he went to her house? Leaving for a few hours in the afternoon was one thing, but staying for longer gave him much more reason to be anxious.
Especially at night.
    There was a large cardboard box leaning against the back shed, and Sam knew his father had to have taken it from someone. When he got his hands on big stuff, Clarence got himself in trouble. It
was one thing to take someone’s hedge clippers; it was another to lift their flat-screen TV.
    And this time, if Clarence announced that they were leaving, Sam knew it wasn’t going to be so easy to get into the truck and just drive away.
    But Sam wouldn’t let himself think about that right now. He was going to think about what to do with Riddle. He decided, in the end, on taking him to the movies, paying for his ticket, and
telling him to sit through the show twice.
    Movies were a big deal to them. They could count on two hands how many times they’d been in a real theatre. Sam only hoped Riddle didn’t go after the loose popcorn that accumulated
on the carpet. Once before,