Don't Go by L.J. Breedlove (series like harry potter txt) 📕

citizen?” she asked. She ate another nacho fastidiously. He watched her, fascinated. Who took bites of a nacho?

“Not much,” he admitted. “Policies but not specifics.”

She nodded, chewed and swallowed, before she continued. “I looked it up yesterday, because at heart I’m a romantic, and I wondered the same thing. It’s a long and complicated process because she came into the country illegally. She’d have to leave, and apply from Mexico, I guess. It’s expensive. And it’s not guaranteed. It’s why so many people here without papers, who are undocumented, just stay quiet and hope not to be noticed.”

She paused to eat another nacho. “And here’s the other, other thing? She doesn’t have papers for Mexico either. I mean, I’m sure she can find her birth certificate on file down there. Somewhere. If her father didn’t change her name up here. If her biological mother is still alive and will vouch that Teresa is her daughter who has been gone for 20 years. That doesn’t sound like a simple task either.”

Ryan sat back in his chair. “They are truly children without a country,” he said slowly.

She nodded. She pointed to the nachos and raised an eyebrow until he ate another one.

“Have you talked to Cage?” she asked.

He shook his head, still thinking about children without a country.

Emily told him what Cage had learned, and what they all had talked about last night. “What do you think? You’re the keeper of the payroll papers, and volunteer lists, and class rosters. Do we have vulnerable things to protect? Can we go after this story, come what may?”

He considered that question, almost grateful to have something to focus on besides the journal in front of him. He tidied the pages into a neat stack and handed it over to Emily. She wiped her hands on a napkin, before taking the journal and sliding it into her bag, a brown leather thing that could double as a suitcase.

“The payroll list is solid,” he said. “Or as solid as the university’s checks and balances can make it. I’m not allowed to even ask about the students in the class. Volunteers?” He shrugged. The university made him keep track of the students who volunteered to write for EWN, Folio, or the literary magazine upstairs, the Portland Review. And they had to be students. The Provost had been very clear about that. “I suspect I’m not allowed to ask directly either.”

“Well, that’s going to suck,” she said. “I mean, I can see why student privacy should be protected. But shouldn’t we give folks a heads up? And we can’t just walk up to any POC we have and say, are you legal?”

Ryan nodded and didn’t correct her about the POC part, although he was pretty sure that one of their staff had overstayed their student visa from Ireland, overstayed by a lot. Not that ICE came for the white people who were here illegally, he thought bitterly.

“When we get closer to actually running stuff, I could send out a general staff alert,” he said slowly.

“Then you’d better start thinking about what to say, because I think Cage is going to have footage from the protest where the protesters replace the posters on the school fence.”

“And an answer for McShane when he says that is not our neighborhood?”

“Well about that. Joanne says by that logic, we shouldn’t be covering PSU sports at the arena because that’s across the river.”

Ryan felt the smile develop across his face, and he started laughing. “Damn I wish I’d thought of that,” he said and reached for another nacho. He was hungry, he discovered.

“I told her you’d be jealous,” Emily said.

Ryan let out a long sigh. “Thanks, Em,” he said.

“No problem.”

She got up to leave. He looked at the clock. “I’ve got an appointment up Pill Hill,” he said. “Don’t let that journal get out of your hands.” He locked everything else up in his desk again.

She looked at him. “Everything OK?”

He nodded. “Going to talk to the doc who helped me get clean,” he said. “This day keeps getting better and better.”

She frowned briefly, and he suspected she’d have more questions for him on that later. But she let him escape for now. He squeezed her shoulder in thanks as she sat down at her workstation.

“Flip the lights on, will you?” she said as he went through the gate at the front counter. “It’s weird in here when it’s dark.”

Ryan found a place to park, not too far from the clinic where he was headed. It was truly fall out, he thought, as he looked down over the city. The trees had turned, drifts of yellows, birches, he thought, punctuated by the reds of maples and oaks, and more maples with bright orange. All offset by the evergreens of the conifers. Portland was a city that meandered through parks, small ones scattered about, with bigger parks like Forest Park cupping it from the hills.

Reluctantly, he turned away from the vista — in the distance he could see that Mount Hood had fresh snow. It was the vista he’d seen during his teen years growing up in the Portland Heights, just at a slightly different angle. If you lived in the city itself, like he did now in NW Portland, or in Goose Hollow like Cage, you forgot about the views from the hills that rich people enjoyed.

He went into the small clinic. It specialized in child and adolescent psychiatric needs, and so it was set apart from the labyrinth of Oregon Health Sciences University. PSU students, many of whom were still adolescents, were sent up here when needed. And three years ago, Cage had hauled his ass up here because he was convulsing from some drug he had taken at a party.

Saved his life.

And Dr. Erica Clarke had taken it from there. She’d helped Ryan recover from the drug overdose and then dragged him into confronting where he was headed if he didn’t stop his destructive behavior.

“Some people can drink socially, and that’s