Ask Him Why by Catherine Ryan Hyde

o’clock, I got a call from Kendrick. My heart leapt again, the way it had when I saw Joseph had come home. Then I felt myself draw in. Guard that feeling. Because the antiaircraft fire could not have been far behind.
    I was learning.
    He called on my cell, of course. Because that was the only number I’d given him. So I was able to talk in private, up in my room. Where I was trapped in suspension exile.
    “We need to meet,” he said.
    “Did you find out something?”
    He gave a snorting laugh. “In a manner of speaking,” he said.
    I wasn’t sure what that meant. What difference did it make how you said it? I didn’t ask.
    “I’m not supposed to leave the house,” I said. “But I might be able to sneak out for a few minutes.” I’d get in trouble if I got caught. But I really didn’t care. I cared whether meeting him could be prevented. Not whether it would be punished. “I couldn’t get all the way down to your office.”
    “You want to meet near your house? Give me your address.”
    “Don’t come here, though,” I said. “It’s a circus. You’d end up on the news.”
    “Where should I meet you?”
    “You know that Starbucks on Wilson?”
    “Yeah. All right. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Fifteen tops.”
    “Can’t you just tell me now? On the phone?”
    “I need to give you your money back,” he said.
    Which I knew was not a good sign.

    There was something very adult about the way he was waiting for me. Like a real meeting. The kind a real grown-up would have.
    At any other time, I would have been elated by it. But there was no space left inside me for elation.
    I sat down across from him, and he laid my hundred and eighty dollars on the table. I grabbed it up fast and stuck it deep down in the front pocket of my jeans.
    “So you don’t know where he is.”
    “Oh, no,” he said. “I do.”
    “You do? Where is he?”
    “Back with the army. In pretrial confinement.”
    I felt myself sinking. It felt like falling down the shaft of a well. One I thought I’d already been lying at the bottom of for a long time.
    “They caught him?”
    “He turned himself in.”
    I wasn’t sure what I thought about that. I didn’t know if I thought it was stupid or brave, honorable or unimaginable. I just knew I wished like hell it wasn’t the case.
    “Do you know where they’re holding him?”
    “No. But it won’t be all that hard to find out. You’re family. You can do that without me.”
    “Why are you not charging me for finding all this out?”
    He held up the morning paper, which I hadn’t seen. Hadn’t known he had with him. Apparently, it had been folded on his lap.
    “Not really fair to charge you for what I read in the paper over my morning coffee,” he said.

    When I got home, I wasn’t in any trouble. Nobody had noticed I was gone.
    I should have been relieved. I wasn’t. I was insulted and disappointed that nobody even cared enough to enforce my punishment.
    I felt as if I didn’t exist in anybody’s world at all.

Chapter Seven: Ruth

    I wasn’t surprised when one of the other girls started in on me, and I wasn’t surprised that it was Stacey Bingham. I was more surprised that it was between second and third periods, and nobody had so much as ruffled my feathers all morning. It almost felt good to get it over with.
    She stood in the hall in front of me with her hands on her hips, her forehead all knitted up as though she could be fierce, with her anorexic body and her breasts that never got smaller no matter how much weight she lost. I always figured there had to be a surgeon involved in an equation like that, but the boys loved it, no questions asked.
    I didn’t want any part of it, whatever “it” was, so I turned and walked back the other way, toward my locker. But that’s a bad strategy. It only draws them in, like when you back away from a mean dog. It only makes him feel more powerful and reminds him he’s winning.
    A moment later, she was hovering near my