Free Flyers (9781481414449) by Daniel Hayes Page A

assistance here and waded out into the intersection and began waving his arms in the hope of getting things moving. The actual effect of this was to clog things up even more, and by the time we reached the intersection in Emmett’s Grand Am (with the personalized SAY NO plates), traffic was backed up toward the school as far as you could see. I ignored (but didn’t forget) Emmett’s head-shaking and sigh of disgust as we all saw what was going on at the intersection. Bo and I jumped out of the car, grabbed Pop, and although Emmett wasn’t exactly thrilled by the transaction, poured him into the backseat. We barely made it out of there before we saw the flashing lights of the Chief’s car trying to squeeze past the stalled traffic. Later, after we got Pop safely home and had come back into town for his car, I felt a hand on my shoulder as I started to get out of Emmett’s passenger seat. The hand was attached to Emmett. His face was twisted into the caring attitude that people like him get, and I knew he was up for some active listening. “You want to talk about it, my friend?” he said.
    And the sad thing was, from then on I was his friend. Because Pop got drunk and waved his arms around a little on Main Street, until the next evening when he returned to Albany, Emmett was stuck to me like gum on a shoe. Concerned gum.
    â€œGabe, and my main man, Bo,” he said. He slapped Bo’s hand and then wrapped us both in a football huddle hug before I could step wide. “How goes it with my posse?” he said after he let us go.
    â€œJim-dandy,” Bo said. “Yourself?”
    â€œTaking things one day at a time,” Emmett saidinstructively. “One day at a time.” He aimed his caring face at me. “And how’re you doing, G-man? Hanging in there?”
    â€œIt’s Gabe,” I said.
    â€œYou’ll make it, man,” he said, his voice dripping with reassurance. “You’re like me. You’re a survivor.”
    Before I could collect myself enough to frame a suitable response to that, Emmett clapped a hand on Bo’s shoulder and said, “Got a minute, Bo-man? We need to finalize some plans for Saturday.”
    Bo shrugged. “Well, I have English. . . .”
    Emmett gave him a drugs-take-precedence-over-that shake of the head. “Bob’ll cover you there. We gotta keep getting the message out, and to do it right we need to get busy. We wanna make sure this is the biggest thing that ever happened to this one-horse town.”
    â€œYeah, right,” I said, thinking that if we did only have one horse, I knew where to find its behind. I didn’t get to share this thought, though, because Emmett was already striding down the hall with Bo. As I watched them leave I was suddenly aware of a strange feeling. Lurking beneath my relief at having gotten free of Emmett so quickly was a vague but unpleasant sense that I’d been dumped as unceremoniously as the two junior high kids. For that day, at least, Emmett felt he had bigger fish to fry.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Emmett was gone before lunch, which was fine with me. He and his SAY NO license plates had to roll off to another school where he’d “get busy” and serve up his drug message to another captive audience. If he was lucky, they’d have more kids there who actually did drugs. And if we were lucky, they’d keep him.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    In the cafeteria Sudie told us she’d finished patchingup Rosasharn’s burnt swamp thing costume and was coming along on the other two costumes she was making—one for Jeremy, and one for Ethan. Jeremy didn’t know it yet, but Bo and I had decided that the unique chemistry that existed between Rosasharn and him made him the perfect choice to play Green Guy’s wife, Green Gal, complete with green wig, a set of oversized lips, and a couple of