shakes her head. “Imagine the panic if it were. The bomb squad came to my dad’s bank last February. That’s definitely their trailer.”
Of course it is. Princess Einstein knows it all. “We should leave the park, then. Why are we going closer?”
“Because I want to know more.”
As we reach the school, Ping wags himself crazy. He rears on his hind legs and bounces on only two paws. Dog body language for Look at me, pay attention to me. Friends, friends!
Pong wags, too, and his mouth opens into a grin.
The dog running around the edge of the roof looks like a German Shepherd–retriever cross, gold and black with floppy ears. Sniffing along the edge, he stops to give the Ping Pong team a yip and a wag.
“Would you kindly leave the area,” the police officer calls down. “Your dogs are distracting Troy, here.”
“Troy distracted them from their walk.” Renée may think she’s just explaining, but to me, it sounds like she’s back-talking the police officer. “Shouldn’t he be trained to ignore them?” she asks.
“Yeah, well, no one’s perfect. And he’s bored.”
“Not finding anything?” I ask, trying to smooth things over.
“A bologna sandwich,” Mrs. Klein answers. “You kids should eat your lunches.”
“Clear out,” the cop says more firmly.
Suddenly, Troy forgets our dogs and rushes off barking. He leaps down to a lower level of the roof, nose down, tail wagging, and sniffs at some large pipes. Those pipes lead to the furnace room.
“Let’s go,” I tell Renée and pull Pong away from the schoolyard.
“Wonder what they found …” Renée says.
I break into a jog now.
“Slow down. What’s your hurry?”
“We could blow up!” I answer.
“Nah. We just have to dive to the ground and cover our ears,” she says.
“They’ve gone back inside. Troy must have smelled a bomb in the furnace pipes.” My hands get sweaty and I breathe more quickly.
“Or another bologna sandwich. Don’t you want to know?” she asks.
“I owe these dogs an hour. A safe hour. We’re heading back toward the library.”
“Sure, we can check out the school on our way back.”
“Hurry!” I run again, giving her no chance to argue. We need to put distance between ourselves and a possible explosion. We breeze by the skateboard park. There are some kids riding their BMX bikes up and down, but no one’s in the tennis court. “In here.” I take Pong into the court, and she follows with Ping and shuts the gate. There, I throw the ball for them, and we chase them to get it back. Great exercise … for us.
When Renée’s phone plays a bar from Beethoven’s Fifth, she checks for texts. “It’s my brother,” she says, as though I’ve asked. “Attila’s in the house now, so I can go home.”
“Did you just call your brother Attila, as in Attila the Hun?”
“Yeah, I know, strange name. But my parents are Hungarian. It’s popular there.”
“Wait a minute, is he the Attila who spray painted graffiti on Champlain High’s wall?” Dad read me the story from InsideHalton.com, so I knew all about it.
“How many could there possibly be?” she snaps at me. “He cleaned the wall and finished his community service.”
I wince, starting to feel sorry for her now. “Your parents think you can’t be alone without him there?”
“Um, no,” she lowers her voice. “My parents are fine with me being alone in the house. It’s me. I don’t like to be by myself.”
“Bombs don’t scare you but you can’t be alone?”
“I’m not afraid ’cause I’m with you,” she explains. “In the house, when I’m by myself, I hear noises, and instead of thinking, ‘Oh, that’s just the fridge,’ I imagine things. Like it’s a burglar or a serial killer moving around.”
“I imagine things, too,” I admit. “Not so much in my own house, though. Dad’s almost always around.” I straighten up and puff my chest out. I like that she’s anxious about being alone; it makes me feel stronger. And I like that I give her courage.
Out of breath we walk toward the school again. It’s still in one piece, so no bombs went off yet.
I see a couple of people near the white trailer. One is wearing a helmet and strange bulky green suit and helmet. The other holds a black box of some kind in his hand. Mrs. Watier’s car is gone.
“Oh my gosh, they must have found a real bomb,” Renée says.
“Let’s head a different way,” I suggest.
“Nooooo! I want to take pictures with my phone.”
“Does your phone have a zoom lens?” The question becomes pointless as she and Ping tear off. Pong drags me after. Closer and closer to the school we go.
Ping begins barking.
Something is moving, jerking back and forth, actually. It looks like a remote-control transformer, only it’s the size of Renée, who is on the short side.
We draw closer. It’s a robot with tractor treads. From its outstretched arms, a large, lime-coloured backpack dangles. Wires hang from the bottom.
“What is that thing doing with Reuven’s school bag?” Renée asks as she trains her phone in the dir-ection of the robot.
“Shouldn’t we be diving down and covering our ears?” I don’t ask how she knows whose bag it is.
We watch as the robot zigs and zags its way to the sandpit. Then, it drops Reuven’s bag into the sand and backs away. Once the robot returns to the white trailer, there’s a loud bang and a burst of sand.
“I don’t believe it. They blew it up!” Renée says.
“Did you get a good shot of the explosion?” I lean over her shoulder and she shows me. When I look up again, I see the guy in the strange outfit — he looks like an astronaut — heading for the sandpit.
When he gets there, he stirs through the sand, putting the bits of Reuven’s bag into a bin. Ping barks like crazy at him but Renée drags him away.
We walk toward the white trailer, where the robot now stands, motionless. The police officer pulls out a ramp from the back of the trailer. Then, he uses the black remote to manoeuvre the robot slowly up the ramp.
Ping finds a new reason to bark himself hoarse, which attracts
