Free The Terrorist by Caroline B. Cooney Page A

do in America but watch television.”
    Laura could not stand this kind of American. London was crammed with them: American kids who had never lived in America. They’d grown up in foreign countries and knew America from TV shows or by visiting relatives in the summer. They looked American. They talked American. But in some creepy way, they were not American.
    “Expatriate” was the term. Sort of like ex-husband or ex-wife. They were ex-country. They had no use for America, (although they would never have surrendered their very useful American passports), and Laura despised them.
    But she did not rouse herself to tell Kyrene off. Laura’s speech was dwindling away. Nobody wanted to hear her talk about the only important thing: Billy’s killer.
    Jimmy, proving he was a Ten whether he looked like one or not, said to Kyrene, “Have I mentioned that if one more person says there’s nothing to do in America but watch television, I’m going to shoot her?”
    Several people laughed, but it wasn’t funny. Loyalty wasn’t funny, and no loyalty was less funny.
    Who knew where the loyalties of expatriates lay? Laura thought. Expatriates would say terrible things about America, and the president, and the political party in control, and the way crime was so high, and people were amoral, and California was disgusting.
    If they trashed their own country for nothing, what would such people do for pay?
    For enough money, would they kill?
    What if my first guess was wrong? thought Laura. What if it’s not a foreigner who killed Billy? What if it was an American?
    Thomas Williams pulled off the road.
    He kept losing track of his destination, and having to sit for a moment and get his bearings. Oh yeah, he would think, staring at his map. Oh, yeah, I’m headed to Birmingham.
    Then he would try to remember why anybody would want to go to Birmingham. He’d have to open his briefcase and leaf through his papers to jog his mind.
    He was okay once he got wherever he was going. It was the journey that threw him. He could think only of his son’s journey. Billy’s last journey on earth, up a set of moving stairs … and then the final journey, where Thomas could not follow and could not help.
    He could not stand it that no group claimed responsibility for Billy’s death. He wanted somebody to blame this on. I could bury my son better, he thought, if there was a reason. A stupid reason, an evil reason—but at least a reason!
    It cannot be chance. You don’t hand out bombs by chance.
    If he stayed close to where it had happened, Thomas thought, there was a possibility of figuring out the reason. But if the Williams family left, who would care anymore about Billy or the reason?
    So Thomas was doomed to keep driving these English roads and ending these English jobs and living this English nightmare, even when everybody, including the company, wanted him home.
    He still wanted to go to Russia for Christmas.
    Laura, Tiff, and Andrew were the only students in French class who were not multilingual.
    Laura could not imagine another language living inside her head and coming off her tongue. She wondered if speaking other languages made it easier to switch countries? Should she look for a person who could change tongues, and therefore loyalty and patriotism?
    The teacher liked to work separately with each student because the class was on such different levels. The Americans, in foreign language, were at the bottom. Samira was summoned to the teacher’s desk.
    Jehran tried to entertain Laura by writing down the French conversions in Arabic. Arabic was a flowing vertical script, like the tide coming in, with flecks of spray dotted above. It was impossible to believe it had meaning.
    Jehran was startlingly glamorous in comparison to the torn jeans and drab sweatshirts of American girls. She was very petite, almost childlike, yet wearing a brocade dress that Laura’s mother would have found too mature. Jehran’s thick hair hung down her back,