I was about to ask the same thing. Birdie is never without her bag. She was frantic for it this morning, which might account for her disheveled state.
Birdie shakes her head. “I … I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” I snip. “We always have them with us at school, so where the fuck is it, Birdie? You know you had our cellphone, right?”
“Swearing won’t help,” Blue says to me. “There’s something wrong with her.”
“Yeah. She’s been acting like a selfish jerk since she took up with Daniel Dobbs.”
There is something else off about our middle sister, if I’m being honest. I’m just too short on patience at the moment to care.
Birdie slumps down a tiled wall until she’s sitting knees up to her chin on the grimy floor. The flyer for the school musical she scraped off the wall sails to her feet. The Taming of the Shrew.
Blue crouches next to her. “What happened? Why didn’t you meet us at our spot?”
Birdie grabs small fistfuls of hair on both sides of her head and repeats herself, staring straight into our younger sister’s eyes. “I seriously don’t know. I think I panicked and blocked it all out. Like right before a car accident. They say people can black out before impact.”
I suppress a groan. Keeping my exasperation in check is becoming harder knowing Birdie misplaced her EDC. We carry things most people would find strange if not suspicious. A LifeStraw, Swiss Army knife, compass, glow stick, pepper spray, a lighter, carabineers and paracord, cash, along with the normal stuff for school like notebooks, pens, pencils. And yes, Kevlar. There’s been twenty-three school shootings in America this year with no sign of slowing since our POTUS doesn’t seem capable of thinking logically about anyone’s safety but his own.
“I went to help Daniel,” Birdie says, peering at me this time. “He told me they were going to create a distraction so Ansel could sneak into a chemistry supply closet and get something for his dad. They called it a level one civilian interaction training mission.”
“What kind of something? I’ve never heard of Dieter sending anyone on an off-site mission like this before—in broad daylight. What kind of distraction required the whole school getting put on lockdown?”
“I don’t know,” Birdie answers.
“You don’t know?” I explode. “Birdie, you were there.” Backing Birdie into a cage never goes well, but my brain might be the next thing to detonate if she keeps lying.
“Stop yelling at her,” Blue says, throwing me an exasperated look.
I take a breath in through my nose and wait impatiently for Birdie to explain why on earth she would keep this mission from us.
“I was there, but everything happened so fast. We were on the roof and Annalise got in my face before everything went down. I didn’t think—I don’t know, exactly. But I remember Annalise grabbing my chin and blowing on my face, telling me to relax. Next thing I knew, I was at the edge of the roof, Daniel was shaking my arm telling me to run and hide. My adrenaline must have gone haywire, because I did what he told me to do without question. So maybe, in that moment, he grabbed my EDC.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
Birdie shakes her head and I want to scream, Bullshit.
Annalise is always doing stuff that’s out of the range of normal, even for someone from The Nest. And I understand how things can happen fast. That’s why we train, but—
“Why were you and Annalise there in the first place? And why would Daniel Dobbs take your EDC?”
Birdie avoids my eyes. “Maybe because it had some of the flash-bang grenades we made for the distraction inside it.”
“What the actual hell, Birdie?” My patience evaporates. “That’s why you were freaking out over finding your EDC this morning?”
“Oh boy,” Blue says. “This could be bad.”
“Bad doesn’t come close. What were you doing with flash-bang grenades?” My voice pitches higher as my patience wanes again. “You just go along with whatever Daniel Dobbs says to do now without thinking? Is that what you were doing when you snuck out?”
She nods.
“Are you stupid? Blue and I heard the cops say they caught someone. If it was Daniel and he has your EDC, there’s not much we can do. You didn’t involve us from the beginning. What’s done is done.”
Birdie visibly shudders. “Maybe they caught someone else. Ansel was there. Annalise. Connor.”
“That doesn’t matter. You don’t know what happened after you ran. If any of them got caught with your EDC then you’re implicated in having explosives at school. ABAO.”
All Bets Are Off.
“Shit.”
Yeah. Shit, Birdie.
She opens her mouth to plead her case again and I hold up a hand to silence her. “Shut up and let me think.”
This is one of those moments where I wish Bucky were a real person so I could ask him what he thinks. That’s another problem with confiding in an imaginary friend. He’s imaginary and I’m jumping to conclusions. But Birdie is real and she’s right here, visibly tormented. Even if she is lying through her teeth, she’s my middle. She needs me to help her navigate through whatever she got us into. When it comes to my sisters and me there is no her or she. It’s always us and we.
The whole mission makes zero sense. If Dieter sent the Burrow Boys on an off-site training assignment without telling anyone, why would he send Annalise with them? She’s a Nester, like us. If Mother learns Birdie went along, too, a whole different kind of shit will hit the fan at home. To say nothing of the reaction Birdie might get from Dieter. I don’t know what kind of trouble any of them will face back at the compound.
I vaguely remember Camilla’s brother Connor getting in trouble when we first arrived. I can’t recall the circumstances since everything was so new at the time, only that he was made to stay inside a bunker for several weeks. That scared us, considering we hadn’t seen the inside of a bunker yet. It’s one thing to live and train on the compound and be sent out on assignments. It’s another thing to do that when you’re Dieter Ackerman’s kids or his ward, like Daniel. That alone might get them some leniency. But we’ve never seen what happens to Nesters that get caught doing something reckless, because my sisters and I never act without thinking. We follow the rules and stick to Nest business. Strike that. Blue and I follow the rules. But Birdie knows better. She’s trained for how to react to outside threats, so I don’t get what the hell she was doing going along with the Burrow Boys. Not to mention lying to us about being in shock to the point of memory loss.
“You never answered me when I asked if Dieter told you it was okay to go along with them?”
She shakes her head again and I want to wring her neck.
“What about Annalise?”
“I don’t know. She showed up later than the rest of us with Connor.”
Sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong isn’t unusual for Annalise, either. But being sent on a mission with the Burrow Boys, if she was in fact sent, is off normal protocol.
“Dieter and Mother will be livid if they find out you went without their authority. No matter what happened or happens, we have to deny involvement to the authorities. That’s the compound rule. Since we all know Annalise is too slippery a snake to get caught doing anything, it was probably one of the boys.”