Hit and Run by Norah McClintock

and headed back up to Danforth. It was nearly midnight, but none of us felt like going home.
    â€œHey,” Vin said. He thrust an arm across my chest as he came to a stop. “Check it out.”
    It
was a delivery truck. A bakery delivery truck parked on a side street just south of Danforth. Theback of the truck was wide open. Vin approached it and peeked inside. I followed at a distance, glancing around to see if anyone was looking because, if they were, they might think we were planning to grab stuff, which we weren’t. At least, I wasn’t.
    â€œLook at all that stuff,” Vin said.
    There were boxes of two-packs of cupcakes—chocolate, vanilla, strawberry swirl—and doughnuts. Packages of brownies and chocolate chip cookies. There were coffee cakes, lemon cakes, lemon tarts, butter tarts. There was angel food cake and devil’s food cake. There were miniature apple pies and cherry pies and chocolate-coated chocolate cakes with cream inside.
    Vin stared at the stuff, then backed away a few paces and glanced around.
    â€œWhere do you think the driver is?” he said.
    What difference did that make? It was quiet on the street where the truck was parked and just as quiet on Danforth. Music drifted out from one of the bars down the street, but all the stores nearby were closed.
    â€œMaybe he’s taking a leak,” Sal said.
    Vin looked around again. Then, before I knew what he was doing, he jumped up into the back of the truck.
    â€œCatch,” he said, and threw a box of something at Sal. I looked around nervously. “Vin, I don’t think—”
    He chucked another box at me. I caught it by reflex. Cream-filled chocolate cupcakes with squiggles of vanilla icing on top. Supper was a distant memory by this time, and just looking at the cakes was making mymouth water and my stomach rumble. I could almost taste those squiggles of vanilla. But just to
take
the stuff?
    Vin jumped down out of the truck with a third box tucked under his arm. “Come on!” he said as he ran down the street and ducked into an alley.
    I glanced at Sal, who was looking in disbelief at the box in his hands. Then he shot off after Vin. I hung near the back of the truck for a moment, staring at all the boxes inside. Then, as I sprinted down the street, I told myself that no one would even miss what we had taken. Halfway down the block, a voice popped into my head.
What would your mother say …?
It sounded an awful lot like Riel’s voice. I slowed and threw the box over a fence into someone’s yard.
    Vin and Sal were way ahead of me. I turned on the speed to catch up. We wove through alleys and down side streets—“just in case,” Vin called back breathlessly—before ending up in Vin’s backyard to see what we had. Vin’s box was filled with little single-serving apple pies. Sal had brownies. They both looked surprised to see that I was empty-handed.
    â€œI tripped coming down Logan,” I said. A lie. “I dropped it.”
    â€œLet’s go back and get it,” Vin said. “They were cupcakes.”
    â€œYou crazy?” Sal said. “What if someone sees us?”
    In the end, we didn’t go back. We gorged ourselves on pies and brownies. Well, Vin and Sal did. I don’t know why, but I had trouble swallowing.

CHAPTER FOUR
    I took my history assignment to the school office first thing the next morning and asked one of the secretaries to put it in Riel’s mailbox. Riel had it in his hand when he walked into history class later. He had read it and marked it. He came down the aisle and dropped it on my desk. D-minus.
    â€œWould have been a solid D if you’d got it in on time,” he said. He wasn’t smiling, so I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. In fact, he wasn’t even looking at me. Something outside seemed to have caught his eye. He walked over to the window and looked out. He stood there for so