The Awakening by K. E. Ganshert Page B

As soon as I said it, he thanked me for telling him the truth and then he left super fast to go report it. That’s when I grabbed the key from the top drawer in his desk. I thought my heart would burst out of my chest. I had no idea how long he would be gone. When he came back, I apologized over and over again for being your friend.” Leela shoots me a sheepish look in the rearview mirror. “And for not reporting the information sooner. I ended up crying all over again. By then, I was feeling a little sorry for him. My uncle’s never been too comfortable with emotion and there was a lot of it coming out of me.”
    “Did you get the IDs?” Luka asks.
    “I think there are a few that might work.” Leela passes her purse back to us. “As soon as I left his office, I went downstairs to use the restroom. The coast was clear, so I opened up the evidence locker, grabbed all of them I could find, and ditched the key.”
    Luka pulls out a Swiss army knife from the front pocket of his bag. It has a miniature flashlight attachment he uses to study each of the IDs, searching for two that might pass as us, while I wonder over the fact that it worked. The plan was not an elaborate one. Or even a particularly smart one. But it was all we had, and somehow, we succeeded.
    At least so far.
    In the front seat, Leela fills us in on everything we’ve missed at Thornsdale—the police interrogations, the crackdown on the students, the wild rumors that are circulating about Luka’s coinciding disappearance, and whatever she knows about our families. My dad has been suspended from his job and my home is under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Pete has not yet returned to school. She keeps peeking at the rearview mirror as she talks, as if unable to acclimate to our new appearances. I listen while studying each face on the IDs.
    Fifteen minutes in, I think I’ve reached a decision. I hand the card to Luka.
    He peers at the picture. Lily Evans is twenty-one, the youngest in the bunch. There’s no way I can pull off anything older. I mean, I can barely pull off seventeen. Her eyes are slightly lighter than my navy blue. Her chin isn’t as pointy, her nose is a little wider, and her honey-brown hair hangs past the frame of the photograph. This, I think, is a good thing. Perhaps whoever looks at the ID will attribute the difference in facial features to the change in hairstyle. She has the same fair skin and the same big eyes and we also happen to be the same height.
    “What do you think?” I ask.
    “I think I’ll have to get used to calling you Lily.” Luka hands an ID to me.
    Jacob Denton. Age twenty-five. It’s an age that would make me nervous if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes how well he pulled off being a doctor when we broke into Shady Wood last week. There’s something about the way Luka carries himself—with authority, like his father. If any seventeen-year-old boy can pull off a man in his mid-twenties, it’s this one sitting beside me. Plus, his buzz cut adds a maturity to his face that wasn’t there before. He looks older somehow, more serious without the shaggy hair.
    I study Jacob’s picture. His face is thicker, his hair longer. Both of which are easily explained away by weight loss and a haircut. The essentials are there—green eyes, dark hair, and olive skin. Jacob’s face, of course, does not measure up to Luka’s, but perhaps people will think he’s simply not photogenic. “Jacob, huh?”
    “I prefer Jake.” He flashes me that crooked smile of his and takes back the ID when red and blue lights swirl in the back window. Luka clamps his hand over mine and pulls me all the way down to the floor. Everything in me seizes—my heart, my muscles, my lungs.
    “Oh my gosh, what do I do?”
    Luka tells Leela to pull over. Trying to out-race them will do nothing but confirm our guilt and get us all arrested. So Leela does. And the squad car races past us. None of us speak. Luka and I do not move. We crouch in the car