Page 7 of Trapped

“But there were certain words—like corn instead of grain that would give you away.”

He nodded.

“If you used the wrong word—the one in the pony— you’d get an F for the day.”

“Yeah,” he said again. Just an hour ago, his early life had been a big fat blank, but now he remembered hating Latin class. He’d be sitting there across the room from the big clock on the wall. Every time a minute passed, the big hand would make a clicking sound and move. And he’d watch it, praying that it would move around to the time for the bell to ring before the old witch called on him. Sometimes she was in the mood to torture him. And sometimes she let him alone. He’d never known from day to day which it would be.

“Why did you take Latin?” she asked, “If you didn’t want to do the work?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, feeling an inward stab. That was a lie. He’d taken it because Sophia was in the class.

To change the subject, he demanded, “Tell me something else.”

Partly he was testing her. And partly he was testing himself. Or whatever you called it. Because when she spoke, she brought scenes and people back to him.

So, what the hell did that mean?

“You and Roger Berg and Kevin Drake used to sit at table twenty-two in the cafeteria. All of you wearing black tee shirts and faded jeans with holes in the knees. And you’d decide which guys could sit with you. The tough guys. But they had to be tough enough. Didn’t Tony Swazey steal a radar detector from a car—to prove he was up to your standards? Only the cops caught him. And he ended up in reform school.”

“I never told Tony Swazey to steal anything!”

“But he did it to prove that he was good enough to sit with you.”

“Not my fault.”

She caught her breath, and he wondered what she was thinking.

“What?” he asked, watching her closely.

She swallowed. “You know he’s dead?”

Cash’s stomach clenched. “Yeah. He was in a helicopter crash in Iraq.”

“Yes.”

Another memory. That one from after he’d left . . . “He wanted to ask her the name of the town where they’d gone to school, but he didn’t want to give that much away.

She was speaking again. “You remember the drama club production of Bye Bye Birdie? You were Birdie and I was one of the fan girls. You were the star. But I was just one of the extras—one of the screaming teens who idolized you.”

The star of the show. Yeah, he remembered that. The part had been perfect for him.

Sophia had deliberately dragged his mind away from the death of Tony Swazey. But he was tired of playing the game by the rules she’d set up. Or maybe he was tired of her talking about the time when he’d been unsure of himself with her. He wanted to leap past that period in his life to something a lot more satisfactory. But he wasn’t going to be the one to bring up that night.

“Stop talking about the high school scene,” he growled. “Tell me something about us.”

He saw her swallow again.

“Okay. We liked each other. We used to watch each other across the room—and in the halls. My girlfriends used to tease me about you. But neither one of us had the guts to cross that gap—until that night.”

“That night,” he repeated, relieved that she’d finally brought it out into the open. “Go on.”

“I went to that bar to meet . . .”

“A guy named Kip Weld,” he finished the sentence for her. “Only he never showed up. And I stopped some ratty-looking moron from hitting on you.”

She kept her gaze steady. “Actually, I was lying. I was there to meet you. Because I heard you’d be there. I made up the Kip Weld story.

He stared at her, thunderstruck.

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