I watched this happen like five times, and each time, I fell a little more in love with the girl. I kept moving closer to her hiding place, too, until I was right on top of her. “Jeez,” she finally said, “crouch down or something if you’re gonna be there. He’s not that dumb.”

I joined her in the hunter’s blind. She gave this big sigh, like she didn’t really want company, but then she offered me her cigarette pack. I went to take one and realized they were candy cigarettes—so, maybe not a member of my tribe after all. But I took one anyway, just to be friendly.

“So is that guy your brother?” I asked.

“My stupid brother,” she said. “Felipe.”

Her brother was Phil, too?

Yeah. Weird coincidence. And not the only one: her name was Carlotta. Carlotta Juanita Diaz. “I’m Jane Charlotte,” I told her, and she nodded like she already knew that, and said, “You’re staying with the Fosters.”

“For now,” I said. “What about you?”

“I’ve always lived here. My parents came up from Tijuana when Felipe was a baby.”

“Your family owns the gas station?”

“And this place.” She jerked her thumb at the diner. “And my dad’s a deacon in the church.”

“Wow,” I said. “Important people.”

“Yeah, we’re the kings and queens of nowhere, all right.”

Across the way, Felipe had settled back into the lawn chair he was using for a cot. Carlotta handed me the slingshot. “Remember,” she said, “aim high.” I did, and I did manage to hit the roof, although instead of rolling back the orange popped up over the peak and fell down the other side. No matter: Felipe jumped up just the same, and this time, instead of going back to his siesta, he ran inside the gas-station office. When he reappeared a moment later, he was dragging an extension ladder.

“So Carlotta,” I asked, “how long have you been out here doing this?”

“You mean like today, or just in general?”

“This is a regular thing for you?”

She shrugged. “There’s no movie theater in town, so I gotta make my own fun…Here we go.”

Felipe had gotten the ladder set up and started climbing. Carlotta waited until he was on the roof, then used one last orange to knock the ladder away. Game over.

“So,” she said, “you want to get ice cream?”

Carlotta’s parents both worked in the diner. Her mother ran the cash register and waited tables. Her father managed the kitchen—although Señor Diaz’s management consisted mainly of sitting around, reading the Bible and the sports pages, and occasionally yelling at the cooks for not moving fast enough.

“Hey you!” he called, as Carlotta led me in the back door. “Where have you been?”

“Walking to and fro on the earth,” said Carlotta, with a nod to the Good Book in her father’s lap. The crack earned her a scowl that could have come from the Old Testament God Himself.

“That’s not funny, Carlotta. Your mother has been looking for you. She needs help out front.”

“Yeah sure, in a minute,” Carlotta said. She ducked into the walk-in freezer, leaving me alone with Jehovah.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Jane.”

Señor Diaz cleared his throat like he was going to spit. He started to return to his Bible study, then looked up again and gave me this long, thoughtful stare.

“You’re the new girl,” he finally said. “At the Fosters’.”

“Yeah, that’s me. The new girl.”

“You’ll be staying with them a while?”

“Looks like.”

“So you’ll be going to school here, then.”

I hadn’t given it any thought, but of course he was right. The prospect didn’t thrill me. “I guess so.”

He nodded. “And how are you planning to get to school?”

“I don’t know. I guess…Is there a bus?”

“Ah! A bus!” He waved the idea away. “Why would you want to take a bus to school?”

“Well…”

“I’ll tell you something—Jane, is it? — the school bus here, it’s not very good.”

“No?”

“No. I would never let my daughter take the bus. We drive her to school. You could ride along with her, if you’d like.”

“I could?”

“Yes. In fact, I think that would be an excellent idea.”

It sounded like an OK idea to me, too, but there was obviously a catch. “Well,” I hedged, “of course I’d have to ask my aunt and uncle first…”

“Oh, I’m sure they won’t object. You just let me talk to them. Here!” He stood up, and dusted off the stool he’d been sitting on. “Here, sit down, relax! Would you like some ice cream?”

Later, Carlotta told me what was up. The previous spring, she’d been kicked off the school bus twice for fighting, and after the second time, the driver refused to let her back on without a written apology. But Señor Diaz wouldn’t hear of it: “He wanted the bus driver fired, you know, for violating my civil rights? But the superintendent wouldn’t do that, so now my father wants to send me to a private school, only he wants the superintendent to pay for it. So we’ve got this lawsuit, but until we win, I’ve still got to go to the public school.” But not by bus. Instead, Carlotta’s mother would drive her to school in the morning, and her brother would pick her up at the end of the day. “Which is OK, except it means a lot of waiting, especially in the afternoon. Felipe can’t leave the gas station before somebody else takes over for him, and some days that’s not until five or six.”

“So you’ve just got to hang out at the school until then?”

“Well, I don’t have to—I could walk back, it’s only like two miles—but my father gets real mad if I do that. He says it’s too dangerous, especially now, with the death angel.”

“The who?”

Most newspapers referred to him as the Route 99 Killer—an anonymous somebody who’d been traveling up and down the highway for the last year, grabbing kids out of rest stops while their parents were distracted—but a couple of tabloids, noticing that he only took boys, had given him a new name.

“The Angel of Death,” Carlotta said. “Like the one in Egypt, who killed the firstborn sons? And I told my father, ‘Hey, I’m not a boy, what do I have to worry about?’ but he said, ‘What if the guy makes a mistake? You think once he gets you in his car and sees you’re a girl, he’s just going to let you go?’”

Which explained why Señor Diaz wanted me riding along with his daughter: he figured with someone to keep her company, she’d be less likely to get bored and go for a stroll along the roadside. Plus, of the two of us, I was definitely the more butch-looking, so if the worst happened, chances were the Angel would take me.

Señor Diaz sounds like a great humanitarian.

Eh, you know. Parents. I couldn’t really bring myself to be offended. Anyway, this is going to sound twisted, but it was kind of exciting, thinking about the danger. I mean that’s one reason people believe in the bogeyman, right? It makes the dark more entertaining.

And it’s not like I thought we were ever actually going to run into the guy. If I had any doubts on that score, they disappeared the minute my aunt and uncle said OK to Señor Diaz’s offer. I had to figure if there was any real risk, they’d have made me take the bus.

Instead, first day of school, my aunt got me up extra early so I’d be ready when Carlotta’s mom came by. That was the only time I had second thoughts, when my bedroom door banged open at five a.m. Half an hour later I was in the car, and by quarter to six Carlotta and I were in front of the school, eating candy cigarettes with a handful of other early birds.

Around six-fifteen the school librarian showed up. She let us into the building and had us come upstairs to the library until classes started. Then after final bell, we went back up there and killed time until Felipe came with his pickup.

Did the school library have Nancy Drew?

A full set. The Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins, too. Carlotta was nuts about the Bobbsey Twins, which I never got—she really was a strange girl in a lot of ways.

What about your classes? What were those like?