Dark Hope by Monica McGurk Page B

the school’s media center, she had slipped on a pair of thick cat-eye glasses, giving her an odd middle-aged-lady look. “Only thing outpacing it is meth lab raids.”
    She shoved a piece of paper at me. “Here’s the list of organizations I was able to find. They’re all downtown. Do you think your parents will let you go?”
    “To do what?” I asked, swiveling in my chair to face her, unsure of where the conversation was headed.
    “To meet some of the girls,” she said, never skipping a beat. “We’ll be sure to get an A if we do original research and not just regurgitate all this stuff on the Internet.”
    I paused. I was sure my mother wouldn’t care, would probably in fact encourage me to go. But I wasn’t sure I could do it. Even though I couldn’t remember it, my own abduction had shaped my life so much. The idea of talking to someone who had experienced it too—and so recently—made me think twice.
    Tabitha’s eyebrow arched above the rim of her glasses, a skeptical look I was beginning to recognize.
    “You can’t possibly be scared of going to talk to them,” she demanded, hands on hips.
    “No!” I protested, perhaps a little too strongly.
    “Then it’s settled,” she said smugly. “I’ll call around and see what we can set up.” She stared down at her boots, reaching down to rub out an imaginary scuff while she tried to hide her self-satisfied smile. “You just clear it with your parents, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
    “Do you always get your way?” I asked, somewhat in awe.
    “Only when I’m right,” she smiled with a wink, sweeping up her books and heading out the door.
    I looked at the books and papers strewed about our study carrel and sighed. It seemed as if I might have to get used to being the one to clean up after Tabitha’s big ideas and the mess that followed. I began tidying up, separating the books and magazines into piles for reshelving.
    I looked at the clock. I still had time to kill before I could catch the extracurricular bus home. Idly, I typed my homepage into the browser and scanned the news. Celebrity gossip, another big company merger. There was nothing of interest until at the bottom of the page, I spied a link labeled “Miracle in Africa.” I clicked through. Some Ethiopian refugees were claiming that a miraculous light from Heaven had suddenly appeared and rescued them from the middle of a firefight between two warlords. The locals said it was the seventh or eighth time they’d seen the light.
    As I was reading, the slow prickle of someone’s eyes on me worked its way up the back of my neck. I turned, half hoping it was Michael coming to see me. My heart fell. There in the stacks stood Lucas, eyeing me speculatively. I flushed, and he grinned, one eyebrow arching as if he knew exactly what I had been thinking. Hurriedly, I grabbed my things and abandoned the carrel, my fingers drifting up to touch my Mark and ward off his gaze.

    After a week of work, we’d learned it wasn’t going to be as easy as we’d thought to set up the interviews with the human trafficking victims. Tabitha was persistent, but every place she called protested in the name of client privacy. We sat around my kitchen table, staring at the big red circle Tabitha had made on our research plan.
    “We’re already behind,” she moaned. “If we can’t get anyone to talk to us, I don’t know what we’ll do.”
    Mom muted her phone. She had an uncanny ability to follow a conference call and keep up with our conversation. Without turning from the presentation on her computer screen, she interjected, “I have a client on the board of Street Grace. Do you want me to call her and ask her for help?”
    Tabitha squealed with delight, clapping her hands like a child. “Oh, Mrs. Carmichael, could you? That would be so awesome.”
    “I’d be happy to, Tabitha. It sounds like a good cause, at any rate,” she said, carefully eyeing me.
    Tabitha didn’t notice the look as she