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As I glanced overresentfully out the , pretending there was some invisible barricade between him and us

Super Mature

I turned back around to Natty, deciding enough was enough "I don’t care what anyone thinks" I h to be heard in both the front and the back seats "I’ hazel eyes got all huge and her cheeks flushed pink "Ued over her words, like even acknowledging house with Thoain, this time to Thom "You too," I added, and noas probably the one in trouble I could practically feel Si into the back ofdeal, but I’uys are here"

Thoh he didn’t actually answer htest bit and his nod said what he couldn’t We were cool

Jett was the first one to use real words "I’lad you’re here too," he said, from the other side of Natty

From the driver’s seat, Willow followed Thom’s lead and jerked her head in an almost nod while her eyes strayed briefly from the road to the rearview otten froht hi hiheadedness

"Fine" He let out a long, draave me an are-you-happy? look, to which I s this--going into an NSA stronghold, a place no Returned had ever gone into on purpose--I’d rather we not do it wearing our angry eyebrows If I could have convinced everyone to hold hands and sing a chorus of "We Are the World" or "Ku, I probably would have But for noas satisfied eren’t at one another’s throats

I’d take et them

CHAPTER FOUR

ONE TIME, WHEN I WAS MAYBE THREE YEARS old, iant stuffed polar bear--a real one that was posed so it was standing upright on its hind legs Its front paere outstretched with its claws fully extended so it was in a perpetual state of attack et their picture taken with it, s its patchy fur

What I re and yellowed froe, but still pointy and sharp

I don’t think I knew at the ti in line, at least not until it was our turn and my dad pushed me out in front of the bear, all twelve feet of it--I knoelve feet because, years later, I looked it up on askcoot: twelve feet But at that moment, when my dad hter with her scraggly little blond ponytail toward that twelve-foot bear with all those razor-sharp teeth, she totally lost her shit That hen the screa, but ut-wrenching, bloodcurdling screams--the kind of screairls The kind you hear in horror movies He said people in theto decide exactly what he’d done wrong to nore the,lot, to our car

He said the screa didn’t end until ay later, when I’d finally fallen asleep during the drive ho when he’d offered me ice cream in an attempt to bribe me into silence

At least that’s the way he’d always told the story All I remembered were those teeth

That wasdeserved the word daunting until this very instant And even though this wasn’t at all like the "polar bear incident," s were precisely the sa didn’t look all that special, just a regular building that was huddled as--the kind of place where soht be manufactured Not soan undercover operation A place where they kept teens ere newly returned from alien experimentation

Yet here ere

And in therewho knew Would we find Tyler? Agent Truripped ent Truivenoff in the way he’d pretended to be all friendly and concerned aboutthose five years, like he was a regular cop but never tellinghe’d suspected I was one of the Returned

I ht never have discovered in time how shady he was, except my mom had already taken ed--that the comparison of the X-rays I’d had done before I’d been taken and the ones done after I’d coone fro h he hadn’t said so at first But when he realized I wasn’t going to cooperate, he’d coents, all suited up in hazned for dissecting people like me