Free When by Victoria Laurie Page A

it was our fault. You tried to warn Mrs. Tibbolt, but she wouldn’t
listen. None of this is your fault. I should’ve been the one to vouch for you.”
    I sighed. “It’s not your fault, either, Stubs. If you’d gotten on the phone, or gone over there, she might’ve called the cops on both of us.”
    “Or she might’ve listened,” Stubby countered, his voice heavy with regret. We were both quiet for a minute and then Stubs said, “What’d Donny say?”
    I curled my knees up onto the chair and hugged them tight. “He says they don’t have a case, but…”
    “But what?”
    “I can tell he’s worried,” I whispered, more afraid of sensing that from Donny than anything else that’d happened to me that day. “He doesn’t even want me to
do readings anymore. He told me flat out that I’m not allowed to tell
anybody
their deathdate until this thing blows over. If it blows over.”
    I heard Stubby sigh. “Well, if he says there’s no case, then I’d believe him. And don’t worry, they’ll find out who really did this. And then those agents will owe
you a big apology.”
    I squeezed the phone and closed my eyes. It was so typical of Stubby to think positively. I thought it must be in his DNA or something, because he always found the good in everybody and in every
situation. But he hadn’t seen the photograph of Tevon’s body. He hadn’t seen the hard, accusing eyes of Agent Wallace.
    I could feel myself starting to get really upset again, so I tried to end the call. “Yeah, okay. Listen, I think Donny’s calling me. I gotta go.”
    Stubby seemed to know I was rushing him off the phone. “You gonna be okay?”
    “Sure.”
    “Meet you at the diner tomorrow night?”
    “Yeah. Listen, I really gotta go.”
    “Okay,” he said. “Text me later.”
    I nodded, but my throat had filled with emotion and I couldn’t get any more words out. After I hung up, I cried in my room for the rest of the day.

BY THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY AFTERNOON I knew it wasn’t my imagination. It started with Mrs. LeBaron (11-18-2060), my homeroom teacher. She kept
glancing in my direction during the twenty minutes before classes started. And it wasn’t a nice look. It said,
I know what you did, and I think you’re terrible.
    I tried to shrug it off. Tevon’s murder was all over the news and it was all anybody could talk about at school, but I didn’t think anyone knew that I’d been called in by the
FBI. Well, except for Stubs, and he’d never tell anyone.
    But then my chemistry teacher, Mr. Pierce (3-12-2029), called me over as class was letting out and he said, “Hang in there, Maddie. In this country you’re innocent until
proven
guilty.” And I understood then that all the teachers knew.
    Worse yet, Mr. Pierce seemed to be the only teacher who was on my side. In French class Mrs. Johanson (2-2-2031) snapped at me for using the wrong preposition while Mike Dougherty (5-6-2067) had
done the very same thing right before and she hadn’t even blinked. Stubs leaned forward from behind me and whispered, “Why’re they all acting so weird around you?”
    I didn’t answer him, because out in the hallway I heard Harris call to a student caught out of class after the bell. It suddenly dawned on me that maybe nobody knew I’d been called
into the FBI offices over the weekend, but they could know about the meeting in Principal Harris’s office. The faculty’s reaction was too intense for them to have just learned that
I’d met with the agents. They seemed to know the details of the conversation in Harris’s office, which meant it could only have come from Harris himself.
    I didn’t know if he was allowed to tell the other teachers about what was said, but it was pretty obvious that he had, and it really upset me. I started to wonder who else he’d told.
The news reporters covering the story were saying what a monster Tevon’s murderer was, and after seeing the photo of his dead body, I knew that firsthand. It