Free If the Witness Lied by Caroline B. Cooney Page A

with Cheryl’s plans to get on television. She is never without her cell phone, so he texts.
    Tris + I at soccer game. Home 4 supper.
    This too presents problems. It’s now twelve-fifteen. What’s he going to do for the next five or six hours? No three-year-old boy—and for that matter, no fifteen-year-old boy—can just sit around that long.
    Jack can’t believe he’s still fifteen. He feels as if he’s been fifteen for years. The Fountain family dates pile up in winter—Dad and Tris with November birthdays, Jack and Madison in January, Smithy in February. Oh, to be sixteen.
    Even the slowest pedaling eventually moves a bike to the next block. Jack is now approaching the library. The pretty little central dome is what’s left of the original library from 1888. Wings have been added every twenty or thirty years. The children’s room, extending out the back, is the newest.
    Jack locks his bike to the rack, in full view of every arriving vehicle. Not that Cheryl reads, uses the library or would think of coming here. Still.
    “Where’s the soccer game?” asks Tris.
    “It starts later,” says Jack, which isn’t wholly a lie. If there were a soccer game and they were going, it would start later.
    Tris is fine with that because he loves the library. Freed from his bicycle seat, he races on ahead. “I’m going to climb the tree!” he shouts, because the children’s room features a treehouse to read in. “And drive the boat!” because there’s a real dinghy filled with pillows. “And then build castles!” because the fat red cardboard bricks are such fun to pile up and knock down.
    The picture-book side of the children’s wing is filled with bins, low tilted shelves and regular library shelves. Jack takes an armchair, but this isn’t good enough for Tris, who races from one tree house window to the next. “Watch me, Jack!” he shouts. Jack circles below him, saying, “I see you!”
    Jack often wonders what Tris thinks about. Tris lives in the present, as far as Jack can tell. At least, he hopes so, because the past is grim and the future is iffy.
    His cell phone rings. Dreading Cheryl’s response, Jack looks at his phone through slitted eyelids.
    It’s Madison. He’s astonished. Madison, calling Friday during school? Madison, calling ever?
    “No cell phones!” calls the distant librarian in a friendly voice.
    Jack nods and waves. He reads the text.
    am home. cheryl plans tv show 4 tris. Where r u?
must talk.
    Jack is sick. Cheryl already has Madison lined up. Madison’s job is to bring Jack around.
    He’s been thinking of his sisters as allies. Unavailable, but allies. Of course this isn’t true. They are so completely not allies that they don’t even stay home and pretend.
    At first, when Madison’s godparents took her for the weekend, Jack figured she’d be home on Monday. But she was gone all the next week, as if there were no such thing as school. Then he found out Madison had enrolled in another school! The Emmers’ school district! She came home for clothes and Jack tried to ask her about it, but he couldn’t form a sentence.
    His younger sister had no convenient godparents. Mom and Dad didn’t get around to booking people for that duty with Smithy or Jack. What Smithy had was a set of beloved mystery books where the heroine lives at boarding school. Smithy went online, did a little research, presented a convincing argument to their trustee, Wade, and in a few weeks, she too left home.
    Where r u? must talk.
    Madison is right about that. Jack has to make her see how lousy this is. He can’t call from here, not with the librarian eyeing him. He can’t have Tris listening, either. And now that Tris is happy up in the tree house, he won’t want to leave. Jack will have to drag him out, and Tris will grab table legs and computer wires to prevent it from happening. Jack doesn’t have the time or energy for a scene. “Do you have to go potty?” he whispers up to Tris. “Want to go out