Second Alarm

Elijah Ruiz is fifteen the night a house five doors up his street burns and takes a boy he sat next to in school. The engine takes eleven minutes to arrive because the four people on it were asleep in four different houses. On the sidewalk afterward, an exhausted volunteer named Walt Brennan hands him a card and tells him the truth: there were four of us, and there are supposed to be more of us. Second Alarm is the story of what a kid from a written-off neighborhood does with that sentence: four hundred hours of night classes, an hour-long walk down a dark road fifty-eight times, a mistake that burns a friend's hand, a mother's cancer, an offer from a man who knows exactly what his family needs, and one question in a background investigation that he could have lied his way past.