Children of the Uprising by Trevor Shane Page B

reading about the Uprising. Addy wondered if Reggie would make her leave if he found out she’d been reading Dutty’s postings. Since she couldn’t find anyone to ask, Addy simply decided to wait. Whatever everyone was whispering about was going to happen whether Addy was in on the secret or not.

Six
    Evan stood in the hallway in front of his open locker. He’d told his English teacher that he had to go to the bathroom. She knew he was lying. He knew that she knew that he was lying. Even so, she sighed and told him to be quick. The issue was that the school had a no-leniency policy on the use of cell phones in classrooms. Students making phone calls wasn’t the problem. The problem was the texting and the cheating and the porn. The school officials might even have looked the other way if it was just the texting and cheating, but when the third teacher caught one of her students watching porn on his phone during class, the ban was instituted. Students could keep their phones in their lockers, but bringing them into the classroom was an automatic suspension. Evan considered risking it. It was absolutely killing him, sitting in class, not knowing if Christopher had texted him or e-mailed him back yet. He needed to check his phone.
    So instead of going to the bathroom, Evan snuck to his locker and pulled out his phone. He looked down at it. He was up to sixteen unanswered texts and four unanswered e-mails. Christopher was beginning to piss him off. Evan wasn’t getting mad at Christopher for not getting back to him. He was getting mad at Christopher for making him look like a bitch. Evan almost felt like he was stalking his best friend. How could he still not have a message? Evan took his phone and banged it against the wall, trying to see if he could force it into action. He turned the phone off and back on again. He half hoped that it was broken, but the damn thing worked fine. He’d been getting messages from his other friends. Only Christopher was absent.
    Evan knew about the phone call that Christopher made to his parents. They’d called Evan right after they got off the phone with him. They tried to use the fact that Christopher called them to get more information out of Evan. They assumed that Evan knew something. They didn’t believe Evan when he told them that he knew even less than they did. Evan could barely believe it himself. That pissed him off even more, the fact that Christopher took the time to call his parents but didn’t make time to call his best friend—correction, his
only
friend.
    Evan looked up at the clock hanging above the lockers. Only five more minutes before the bell rang. He thought about sending another text to Christopher, blistering him, trying to guilt him into a response, but he controlled himself. He had to keep a little pride. He knew that Christopher would get back to him eventually. He also knew that whenever Christopher did, whatever Christopher was going to tell him was going to be huge. Evan knew that Christopher kept some secrets from him, but Evan always figured that he’d learn everything in due time. Evan wasn’t even sure if Christopher knew his own secrets. That was what made all of this so painful. Evan hadn’t been waiting for answers for three days. He’d been waiting for years.
    Evan also knew about the bodies in the woods. They had to be connected to Christopher’s disappearance somehow. Stuff like that didn’t happen every day—not in their little shit pan of a town anyway. Despite everything, Evan couldn’t imagine Christopher doing something like that, at least not unless he had to, but Evan had no idea what Christopher was capable of if he were ever cornered. The thought of it scared Evan a little.
    So Evan stood in front of his locker, lost in thought. He heard the droning sound of the bell in the clock over his head—the hum that preceded the actual bell. He’d been staring at his phone