I felt a tear in my eye. “So what do I do now?”

“You’re already doing it. You have your assignment.”

“What, you mean this guy Ema met online?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“She will need to discover the truth. You have to help her.”

“Okay.”

“And, Mickey? We don’t always make the rescue.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your search. It may not end well.”

“Why do you—?”

The door behind us opened. As the nurse started to come in, Lizzy Sobek moved with a speed that defied her age. She blew through the door, muttering an excuse-me to the confused nurse, and vanished down the corridor. I started toward it, but the nurse blocked my exit.

“Excuse me,” she said to me, “but who was that?”

“Just another nurse,” I said, and pushed past her.

When I reached the corridor, I looked left, then right. Nothing.

The Bat Lady was gone.

Chapter 17

The next day, Ema and I were at our usual outcast lunch table. I was about to fill her in on Bat Lady’s visit when I saw Ema’s eyes widen and leave mine.

“What?”

Ema didn’t reply. She was looking over my shoulder, and judging from the expression on her face, some horror movie zombie was slowly approaching me from behind, ready to pounce and sink his teeth into my flesh.

I slowly turned to see what had caused Ema’s terror.

Troy Taylor was walking toward us.

He carried an overloaded lunch tray. Three cartons of milk, a sandwich the size of a throw pillow, a heaping pile of French fries, Jell-O, I don’t even want to know what else. He walked with an ease and confidence that Ema and I would never have in this room.

“What the . . . ?” Ema whispered. “He’s not planning on—”

Troy stopped in front of us. He flashed a smile that almost made me reach for sunglasses and said, “Hey, mind if I sit with you guys?”

Before we could overcome our surprise enough to reply, Troy dropped his tray with a heavy thud and pulled out a chair. He sat as though someone had cut his legs out from under him. Then he picked up his sandwich with both hands.

“So how are you guys doing?”

He took a huge bite and started to chew.

Ema looked at him as though he’d just dropped out of a horse’s behind. “What do you want?”

“Who said I want something?”

“Well, you don’t normally sit here.”

“I’m trying to broaden my horizons. Is that a problem?”

“You usually sit over there,” Ema said, pointing at the “cool” table. “If you even so much as glance over here, it’s usually to moo at me.”

Troy put down his sandwich, wiped his hands on a napkin, and gave Ema the most solemn look I had ever seen on a teenager. “I wanted to apologize for that.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, Ema—can I call you Ema? Or do you prefer Emma?”

Caught off guard, she said, “Uh, Ema is fine.”

“Great, thanks. No, Ema, it is I who needs to be excused, not you. I was wrong.”

“You were wrong every day?” Ema asked. “Every day since, oh, sixth grade or so?”

“I was, yes. I was horrible. I have nothing to say in my defense. Sure, I could blame Buck. You know that he was the leader of all that kind of stuff. Maybe I felt peer pressure, I don’t know. You might think it’s easy being at that table, being—yeah, I know how this sounds—one of the kings. But like Mrs. Friedman taught us in European History, ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.’”

Ema and I sat there, mouths agape.

“So maybe it’s because Buck is gone now,” Troy continued. “Maybe recent events are making me see things more clearly. But really, Ema, I want to apologize and try to start anew.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Troy looked wounded. “I’ve never been more serious.”

“You must think I’m an idiot.”

“How so?”

“You’re a user, Troy.”

“Ema,” I said.

Her head snapped toward me. “What? You’re buying this?”

“No, but—”

“You’re being used, Mickey. He’s not here because he’s had some great epiphany or because Buck is gone. He’s here because he wants us to help him get off for failing a drug test.”

“Ema?”

It was Troy. She slowly turned her head toward him.

“You may be right,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m not claiming Mickey and I are going to be best friends,” he went on, “but we’re teammates. It’s a bond that’s hard to understand. We both want to win—and we want to win with our teammates by our side.”

“You did it, Troy. We both know you’re guilty.”

“Then the last thing I’d want to do is keep the whole mess front and center, right?” Troy said. “If I was guilty, I’d stay quiet. That’s what my old man wants me to do.”

That quieted Ema for a moment.

“I understand how you feel,” Troy said.

“No, you don’t,” Ema said. “How would you have reacted if I’d sat at your table? You’d probably start mooing or something.”

“That’s a good question,” he said with a nod. “It hurts to hear. But it’s a fair point.”

“So you fail a drug test and now you want us to believe that you’ve seen the light?”

Troy thought about it. “The truth is, I need Mickey’s help. You have no idea how hard that was to admit. Brandon really helped me see that. And, yeah, I know how this sounds, but maybe talking to Mickey, you know, face-to-face and all, maybe that’s what it was. It’s easy to hate at a distance. It’s not so easy to hate face-to-face, like this.”

Ema just frowned.

“But when I was talking to Mickey, I started thinking about everything. My whole life, I guess. Here was some guy I’ve been a total jerk to and he’s willing to help me. I’d have never done that. I’m being honest here. It made me think. It made me wonder about what kind of guy I am and what kind of guy I want to be. I took a long, hard look at myself. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. Things have always come easy to me. Maybe I needed this, I don’t know. Either way, I took a long, hard look in the mirror—and I didn’t like what I saw.”