Rhythm & Clues: A Young Adult Novel Read Free

catch up to her, ready to mouth off my defense, but she takes off again before I can. She rounds a corner I know we should avoid. “Wait! Not that way.”
    She pauses, crossing her arms. My lungs pump desperately as I put all my strength into catching up with her.
    “They monitor the exits,” I say. I know we can try and play the lost sheep on the first day card, but I doubt anything we say will grant us permission to the school parking lot. I pull Sabrina in the opposite direction until we reach the empty wood shop. “Electives aren’t used for home rooms.”
    Inside the wood shop, I step up on the radiator—I’m too short to reach the window locks otherwise—and flip them open. “Where’s Gavin?” I glide the window open, a cool breeze sneaking in through the crack.
    Sabrina laughs. “You really must not be dating my brother. Because you obviously don’t know him at all.”
    I slip my legs through the opening and slide like dough in a pasta maker onto the soft grass. With his back to us, a security guard places bright cones by the exit across the parking lot. Because cones prevent students from ditching school. I guess the security guards rival the maintenance crew in terms of incompetency.
    Students still trail in, checking the time on their phones. A teacher ticks off names as the students enter the doorway we just avoided.
    Sabrina follows me out the window and lands on her feet like a cat.
    My lungs burn and my chest aches but I force myself to keep going. We beeline to my car, so dilapidated, the only way the bumper will stay attached is with a long rope tied with boy scout knots. It’s parked at the back of the lot, surrounded by two empty spaces. Even the other cars don’t want to be near me.
    “Girls! You can’t leave.” The security guard drops his cones and rushes toward us.
    The passenger door always sticks. I yank it open as hard as I can and then circle around to my own side. The engine putters to a start, and instead of shifting into reverse, I put the car in drive. Toward the copse of trees beyond the field.
    Sabrina checks her seatbelt to make sure it’s tight and clutches the door handles. “What are you doing?!”
    “Getting us out of here.” I gun the pedal and the car crashes into the curb. The wheels get caught, and I smell burning rubber. We’re stuck. In the rear-view mirror, I see the security guard waving a few feet behind me.
    I take a deep breath. I want to close my eyes for this part, but that would be kind of irresponsible. I back up from the curb a few inches, as much as I can without getting booked for manslaughter, and then slam my foot on the gas. The car lurches forward and the front wheels clear the curb this time. The car wobbles as the back wheels bump onto the grass, and I steer in the direction of the sparse trees that surround our school like anorexic bouncers. A toothpick fence.
    “You’re going to hit one!”
    I shrug. My car’s made it through worse.
    Sabrina hyperventilates as the security guard screams warnings at us, trying to catch up. I squeeze my car into the widest distance between the trees and continue to weave through them. They scrape against the sides, and we’re moving at such a slow pace that the security guard bangs on the trunk.
    I see the road between two poplars so I don’t look back. I spin the wheel when trees get in my way and try to hit as few of them as possible. Sabrina’s face is whiter than her old well-pressed shirts. Cars rush by us on the road. The security guard tries to wrench open Sabrina’s faulty passenger door. I pause one, two, three seconds, the entire time my heart beating faster than a techno backbeat. This is it, I think. My car and I will go out the same way. But then the road clears and I smash the pedal. The security guard remains behind on the grass, probably memorizing my license plate.
    Once on the road, I start to relax. “So where am I going?”
    Sabrina leans back in her seat and lets out a breath, her