Black Tuesday by Susan Colebank Page B

She turned toward the backseat. “Ellie, get your bag, stay close, and don’t answer any of their questions. Got it?”
    Jayne opened the door without waiting for a reply and plastered a small smile on her face. In the distance, she saw the principal making his way down the steps.
    The vultures screamed, “Jayne, Jayne!”
    She heard her name but everything else was a jumble of words. The ten or so reporters were talking over one another. She kept the smile in place. Forty yards. I can make it that far. Just keep heading straight and don’t say anything .
    One of the reporters, a woman who was on the network that came in second after Jayne’s mom’s, shoved a mike about two inches from her nose. “Jayne, how do you feel after hearing the news?”
    Hearing the news? After watching it? What was this woman yammering about?
    The woman had a follow-up: “How do you feel knowing six-year-old Brenda Deavers is brain-dead?”
    Brain-dead? Jayne’s feet stopped working and she came to a standstill. Cameras flashed around her. But she didn’t see them. That little girl was on a ventilator. Jayne hadn’t heard anything about her brain being . . . dead.
    She didn’t have an answer for this lady. She didn’t have an answer, period. But she had questions. A lot of questions.
    â€œJayne.” Ellie hissed the word in her ear. “Jayne, get going. C’mon.”
    She had to get to the library. To the computers. Computers always had the answers if you searched them correctly.
    And she was a master researcher.
    Jayne slowly started walking again as she focused on the front doors. As she did, a tiny voice chanted.
    Brain-dead. Brain-dead. Brain-dead.
    Â 
    The first-period bell had already rung by the time Jayne made it through the double doors. Behind her, she heard the principal shout, “You’re not allowed on school grounds. Get off my campus!”
    She beelined it toward the library.
    â€œJayne!” Ellie had stopped in front of the door to her classroom. “Isn’t your homeroom down the other hall?”
    â€œYep.” But she wasn’t going there.
    Her dress shoes, a respectable pair of two-inch pumps, clicked down the hallway, away from Ellie. She was momentarily transported to the day her mom click-clacked into her hospital room. The day all of this started.
    Minutes later she was seated at a computer terminal, the Internet up. She clicked onto one of the sites that had made her stay away from the computer for the last few days.
    A news site.
    Once the Phoenix Herald home page popped up, she clicked on a link buried low on the page:
    Local Newscaster’s Daughter Leaves Little Girl Brain-Dead
    The words, in black and white, made her really, really regret she’d eaten anything today. She didn’t cry, though. She thought she should’ve felt like crying.
    But she didn’t. She didn’t feel anything. Not even the shoes pinching her toes.
    Jayne concentrated on each word of the article. She hadn’t known any of this. Then again, she hadn’t wanted to know any of this. And her family, whether they had known about the details or not, hadn’t told her about any of this.
    For now, she forgot about her family and what they didn’t tell her. Instead, she read about six-year-old Brenda Deavers.
    About how she wasn’t wearing a seat belt.
    About how the air bag hit her after the head-on.
    About how the impact snapped her neck.
    And broke it.

10
    SOMETHING WAS DIGGING into her arm. Jayne glanced down. A piece of notebook paper, folded into a triangle, was poking into her.
    It was third period. Honors English Lit. It was her first class of the day. After two periods in the library, Mrs. Fullerton had prodded her to go to class. It wasn’t an order, though. The librarian had helped Jayne with enough research papers to know that the sixteen-year-old was a bright, conscientious student not given to ditching