Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan

Jeff would be tired and hungry. He never ate before a game and was always starving afterward. It was not inconceivable that he and Betsy and Mark might stop somewhere for a hamburger, and time would slip by. It would be Betsy’s curfew. Jeff would have to take her home, and then there would be just himself and Mark. Jeff was the one who owned the car, and if he was worn out from the game-“They wouldn’t do that,” David said again, but his uncertainty showed in his voice.
     
    “At least, I don’t think they would.”
     
    “We can’t take the chance,” Susan said. “We’ve got to go up there right now.” “Up to the mountains? Are you kidding? Just you and I—without Mark?” “We can untie him and bring him down as well as they can. It’s gone too far, Dave. It isn’t fun anymore. When you told me about it at first—at the picnic—I thought it would be—fun. But it isn’t. It’s—it’s awful.” She was crying now. In the faint light from the streetlamp at the corner, David could see the glitter of her tears sliding out from under the rim of her glasses and making shiny streaks down the sides of her face. The sight upset him more than he would have expected. “Well,” he said, “hell—I guess we could. It’s just that Mark would be so pissed off. When he plans something he likes it to go his way.” “Why should what Mark wants matter so much?
    We’re in this just as much as he is, aren’t we? Why shouldn’t what we want matter?” “You don’t understand,” David told her. “Mark isn’t like other people. He’s—he’s—” He struggled to find the words he wanted and was unable to do so. Mark was Mark. It was that simple.
    You didn’t try to explain Mark, you just accepted him. “But Mark’s not here now, and we are. Please, David, we’ve got to go up there! We can’t leave him a minute longer!” Her words came out in a strangled sob, and David felt his heart twist suddenly within him. “Okay,” he said gruffly. “Okay, you win. Just stop the sniffling, will you?” He
    threw the car into gear and stepped on the accelerator. They didn’t talk much during the drive to the mountains. David, whose experience in night driving was almost nonexistent, kept his eyes focused on the limited strip of road that lay exposed in the path of the headlights.
    He was acutely conscious of the girl on the seat beside him. She was sitting very straight and still with her hands gripped together in her lap. Her head was bent, and her hair fell forward so that when he glanced sideways he could not see her face. At one point he asked, “Are you still crying?” “No. Not anymore.” “Do you want to move over this way?” Wordlessly she slid over on the seat so that she was close beside him, her shoulder touching his. She reached up and took off her glasses and wiped the lenses on the front of her blouse. “I didn’t mean to make such a fuss,” she said in a small voice. “It’s just—the thought of him up there alone-” “I know. It’s okay.” To his surprise, he found he really meant it. At the moment he felt calmer—better—happier than he had for a long time. The car interior was a world in itself. He and this girl, whom he had hardly known before the past week, were its only inhabitants. Outside the car windows darkness poured past them and drew together behind them, blocking out further reality. With his hands upon the steering wheel and the gas pedal under his foot, David knew a strange, exhilarating sense of freedom. His mother, his grandmother, school, sinks full of dishes, bowls of lime-colored gelatin, were left far behind him. What would it be like, he wondered, to keep on driving, to never come back?
    What if he didn’t turn north onto the road into the mountains but stayed instead on the highway, following it as far as it went, all the way to the coast? He tried to imagine what it would be like there, the air moist and salty, waves pounding upon sparkling beaches,