Sanctuary by Meg Cabot Page B

clutched in one of his enormous hands, and it dropped down onto the drawing I’d made. Chick brushed it away with a set of hairy knuckles.
    “Yeah,” he said, squinting down at the drawing in the blue-and-red neon light from the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign behind the bar. “Yeah, that’s it, all right. They all got it tattooed right here.” He indicated the webbing between his thumb and index finger. “Only you got it sideways, or something.”
    He turned the drawing so that instead of looking likeit looked like.
    “There,” Chick said. There was sauce in his goatee, but he didn’t seem to know it … or care, anyway. “Yeah. That’s how it’s supposed to look. See? Like a snake?”
    “Don’t tread on me,” Rob said.
    “Don’t what?” I asked.
    It was weird to be sitting in a bar with Rob. Well, it would have been weird to have been sitting in a bar with anyone, seeing as how I am only sixteen and not actually allowed in bars. But it was particularly weird to be in this bar, and with Rob. It was the same bar Rob had taken me to that first time he’d given me a ride home from detention, nearly a year earlier, back when he hadn’t realized I was jailbait. We hadn’t imbibed or anything—just burgers and Cokes—but it had been one of the best nights of my entire life.
    That was because I had always wanted to go to Chick’s, a biker bar I had been passing every year since I was a little kid, whenever I went with my dad to the dump to get rid of our Christmas tree. Far outside of the city limits, Chick’s held mystery for a Townie like me—though Ruth, and most of the rest of the other people I knew, called it a Grit bar, filled as it was with bikers and truckers.
    That night, however—even though it was a Saturday—the place was pretty much devoid of customers. That was on account of all the snow. It was no joke, trying to ride a motorcycle through a foot and a half of fresh powder. Rob thankfully hadn’t even tried it, and had come to get me instead in his mother’s pickup.
    But he had been one of the few to brave the mostly unplowed back countryroads. With the exception of Rob and me, Chick’s was empty, of both clientele and employees. Neither the bartender nor the fry cook had made it in. Chick hadn’t been too happy about having to make his own sandwich. But mostly, if you ask me, because he was so huge, he didn’t fit too easily in the small galley kitchen out back.
    “Don’t tread on me,” Rob repeated, for my benefit. “Remember? That was printed on one of the first American flags, along with a coiled snake.” He held up my drawing, but tilted it the way Chick had. “That thing on the end isn’t an arrow. It’s the snake’s head. See?”
    All I saw was still just a squiggly line with an arrow coming out of it. But I went, “Oh, yeah,” so I wouldn’t seem too stupid.
    “So, these True Americans,” I said. “What are they? A motorcycle gang, like the Hell’s Angels, or something?”
    “Hell, no!” Chick exploded, spraying bits of meatball and bread around. “Ain’t a one of ‘em could ride his way out of a paper bag!”
    “They’re a militia group, Mastriani,” Rob explained, showing a bit more patience than his friend and mentor, Chick. “Run by a guy who grew up around here … Jim Henderson.”
    “Oh,” I said. I was trying to appear worldly and sophisticated and all, since I was in a bar. But it was kind of hard. Especially when I didn’t understand half of what anybody was saying. Finally, I gave up.
    “Okay,” I said, resting my elbows on the sticky, heavily graffitied bar. “What’s a militia group?”
    Chick rolled his surprisingly pretty blue eyes. They were hard to notice, being mostly hidden from view by a pair of straggly gray eyebrows.
    “You know,” he said. “One of those survivalist outfits, live way out in the backwoods. Won’t pay their taxes, but that don’t seem to stop ‘em from feeling like they got a right to steal all the water and