Missing You

MEG CABOT

MISSING YOU 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU

For all the readers who asked for it

Contents

One

My name is Jessica Mastriani.

Two

“Jess,” Rob said, looking past me into the living room,…

Three

New York isn’t like Indiana.

Four

“You need me to WHAT?”

Five

“Are you kidding me?” was what Ruth demanded, after I’d…

Six

At precisely eight o’clock the next morning, I banged on…

Seven

“Better let me in,” I said.

Eight

Rob was on the phone when I tugged open the…

Nine

I returned to my parents’ house to find a party…

Ten

“Everyone, if you could take your seats, please.”

Eleven

I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I just…

Twelve

“But, seriously, Jess,” Rob said. “How’d you know?”

Thirteen

I turned around to find Mom on the front porch,…

Fourteen

When I came downstairs the next morning, it was to…

Fifteen

Both Randys were busy gaping at me when the intercom…

Sixteen

When we emerged from the DA’s office several hours later—I…

Seventeen

It was all about me. Every page in the album—and…

Eighteen

It wasn’t until I’d gotten out of Chick’s truck that…

Nineteen

“Ruth?”

Twenty

He woke up before I did.

Twenty-one

It wasn’t until the ambulance had taken Randy away—in police…

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Meg Cabot

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

My name is Jessica Mastriani.

You might have heard of me. It’s fine with me if you haven’t, though. In fact, I kind of prefer it that way.

The reason you might have heard of me is that I’m the one the press kept calling “Lightning Girl,” because I got struck by lightning a few years ago and developed this so-called psychic power to find missing people in my dreams.

It was this very big deal at the time. At least in Indiana, which is where I’m from. There was even a TV show about me, based on my life. It wasn’t EXACTLY based on my life. I mean, they made a lot of stuff up. Like about me going to Quantico to train as an FBI agent. That never happened. Oh, and they killed off my dad on the show, too. In real life, he’s actually alive and well.

But I didn’t mind (though my dad wasn’t too happy about it) because they still had to pay me. For the right to use my name and my story and all of that. It ended up being quite a lot of money, even though the show is only on cable, not even one of the main networks.

My parents take the checks I get every month and invest them for me. I haven’t even had to touch the capital yet. I just spend a little bit of the interest now and then, like when I run short on cash for food or the rent or whatever. Which isn’t that often lately, because I’ve got a summer job, and all. Not the world’s greatest job or anything. But at least it’s not with the FBI, like on the TV show about me.

I did work for the FBI for a while. There was this special division, headed by this guy, Cyrus Krantz. I worked for them for almost a year.

See, it wasn’t supposed to go the way it did. My life, I mean. First there was the whole getting struck by lightning thing. That so wasn’t in the plans. Not that anyone—anyone sane, anyway—would CHOOSE to get struck by lightning and get psychic powers, because, trust me on this, it completely sucks. I mean, I guess it’s all right for the people I helped.

But it was no bed of roses for me, believe me.

Then there was the war. Like the lightning, it just came from out of nowhere. And like the lightning, it changed everything. Not just the fact that suddenly, everyone on our street back in Indiana had an American flag in their front yard, and we were all glued to CNN 24/7. For me, a lot more changed than just that. I mean, I hadn’t even finished high school yet, and still, Uncle Sam was all, “I WANT YOU.”

And the thing was, they needed me.Really needed me. Innocent people were dying. What was I going to do, say no?

Although the truth is, I tried to say no at first. Until my brother Douglas—the one I’d always thought would be the most against my going—was the one who went, “Jess. What are you doing? Youhave to go.”

So I went.

At first they said I could work from home. Which was good, because I really needed to finish twelfth grade, and all.

But there were people they needed to find, fast. What was I supposed to do? It was awar.

I know to most people, the war was, like, somewhere way over there. Your average American, I bet they didn’t even THINK about it, except, you know, when they turned on the news at night and saw people getting blown up and stuff. “This many U.S. Marines were killed today,” they’d say on the news. The next day, people heard, “We found this many terrorists hiding in a cave in the hills of Afghanistan.”

Well, it wasn’t like that for me. I didn’t get to see the war on the news. Instead, I saw it live. Because I was there. I was there because I was the one telling them which of those caves to look in for those people they needed to find so badly.

I tried to do it from home at first, and then later, from Washington.

But a lot of times, when I’d tell them where to go look, they’d go there and then they’d come back and be all, “There’s no one there.”

But I knew they were wrong. Because I was never wrong. Or I guess I should say mypower never was.

So finally I was like, “Look, just send me there, and I’ll SHOW you.”

Some of the people I found, you heard about on the news. Other people I found, they kept secret. Some of the people I found, we couldn’t get to, on account of where they were hiding, deep in the mountains. Some of the people I found, they decided just to keep tabs on, and wait it out. Some of the people I found ended up dead.

But I found them. I found them all.

And then the nightmares came. And I couldn’t sleep anymore.

Which meant I couldn’t find anyone anymore. Because I couldn’t dream.

Posttraumatic stress syndrome. Or PTSS. That’s what they called it, anyway. They tried everything they could think of to help me. Drugs. Therapy. A week by a big fancy pool in Dubai. None of it worked. I still couldn’t sleep.

So, in the end, they sent me home, thinking maybe I’d get better there, once everything was back to normal again.

The problem with that was, when I got home? Everything wasn’t back to normal again. Everything was different.

I guess that’s not fair. I guess what it was, was thatI was different. Not everyone else. I mean, you see stuff like that—kids screaming at you not to take their father, things blowing up…peopleblowing up—and you’re only seventeen years old, or whatever—hey, even if you’re forty—it makes it hard just to come back home a year later, and, like…do what? Go to the mall? Get a pedicure? WatchSpongeBob SquarePants ?

Please.

But I couldn’t go back to doing what I’d been doing, either. I mean, for the FBI. I couldn’t findmyself , let alone anyone else. Because I wasn’t “Lightning Girl” anymore.

What I was, I was discovering slowly, was something I hadn’t been for a long time:

I was normal.

As normal as a girl like me CAN be, anyway. I mean, I CHOOSE to wear my hair almost as short as some of the marines I worked with.

And I will admit to having a certain affection for hogs. The motorcycle kind. Not the roll-around-in-mud kind.

And I will admit, my idea of a fun day has never been to yak on the phone or instant message my friends, then go see a fun romantic comedy. For one thing, I only have one, maybe two friends. And for another, I like movies where things blow up.

Or at least I used to. Until things around me actually started blowing up on a more or less regular basis. Now I like to see movies about cartoon aliens that come to live with little girls in Hawaii, or fish that are lost. That sort of thing.

Other than those few, minor details, though, I’m normal as apple pie. It took a long time, but I did it. Seriously. I have what, by any standards, could be called a normal life. I live in a normal apartment, with a normal roommate. Well, okay, Ruth, my best friend since forever, isn’t exactly normal. But she’s normal enough. We do normal things, like shop for groceries together, and order in Chinese food, and watch the dumb TV shows she likes so much.

And okay, Ruth tries to get me to go out all the time, like to concerts in the park, or whatever. And me, I’d rather stay home and practice my flute. So maybe that’s not so normal.

But hey, she got me my summer job. And it’s a pretty normal summer job, in that it pays hardly anything. Isn’t that what a normal nineteen-year-old pretty much expects? A summer job that pays hardly anything?

So that’s normal. Fortunately, with my pension from the FBI—yeah, I was on salary. I wasn’t an agent, or anything. But they had to pay me. Are you kidding? Like I was going to work for them for free?—and the interest from my investments from the TV show, plus what Mom and Dad send from home, I get by fine.

Plus, you know, it’s not like I’m out here on my own. Ruth and I split everything, the cost of groceries, the rent—which is pretty high, even though we only have a one bedroom, which we also split. Still, it’s in Hell’s Kitchen, which, in case you didn’t know, is in New York City, the most expensive place to live in the world—everything, down the middle.

Anyway, the job…I guess it’s cool. It helps kids, which, in a weird way, is what I was doing when I first started out with the whole lightning thing, and all (before I started ruining kids’ lives, instead of saving them, by helping to arrest their dads). Ruth got a job at this not-for-profit group. She heard about it off the Summer Employment board at school. She ended up going to Columbia, after being admitted to every single school she applied to.

A lot of people—like Ruth’s parents, and her twin brother, Skip, who went to Indiana University, and who is here in New York for the summer, working as an intern at a company down on Wall Street—think Ruth could get a better, more highly paid summer job, considering she goes to Columbia, which is an Ivy League school, and all.

But Ruth’s all, “I’m making a difference,” which is cool, because she is. What she does is, she organizes musicians and actors and stuff to go around to inner-city day-care centers and camps, and they help the kids put on plays or musicals or whatever, because the city doesn’t have enough money to hire actual, certified teachers for this.

At first I thought this was stupid—Ruth’s summer job, I mean. What can putting on a play during day camp do for some kid whose mom is a crackhead?

Then one day Ruth forgot her wallet at home and needed me to bring it to her. So I did, even though this put a major cramp in my practicing.

But it ended up being worth it. Because I saw right away that I was wrong. Putting on a play at camp can make a huge difference to a kid, even a kid with serious problems at home (not like having a dad in a U.S. detention center, but like having a junkie grandma, or whatever). It’s pretty cool to see a kid who’s never seen a play before suddenly ACTING in one. Or—which is the part where I come in—a kid who’s never played a musical instrument suddenly PLAYING one.

And it’s cool for me, too, since I get to do what I love doing best, which is play my flute. I mean, I suppose I could have gotten a summer job doing this in an orchestra.

But have you ever hung out with people in an orchestra? I’m not talking about kids who are in orchestra at school. I’m talking about actual, paid classical musicians.

Yeah. Well, since I started going to Juilliard last year, I have.

And believe me, it is MUCH more fun to do what I’m doing, which is teach kids who’ve never seen a flute before how to play one. This rules. Because their eyes get so big when I rip through something really fast, like “Flight of the Bumblebee” or some Tchaikovsky, and then I tell them I can teach them how to do it, too, if they just practice.

And they’re all, “No way, I could never do that.” And I’m all, “No, seriously. You CAN.” And then I show them.

That part kills me every time.

Skip says Ruth should have gotten an internship at some advertising company, and that these kids are never going to amount to anything no matter how much art we throw at them. He doesn’t say that kind of thing to me, but that’s only because he wants to get into my pants. The company he’s interning for is paying his rent for the summer (which is why he is crashing on our couch: to save his rent stipend for something he really wants, which, knowing him, is probably something completely asinine, like a Porsche). He’s here right now, as a matter of fact, sacked out on our couch (or, should I say, hisbed ), watchingJeopardy! with my brother Michael, who’s also interning in New York for the summer, and also crashing at our place. (He gets the floor. Skip called dibs on the couch first.)

Mike—who ended up at Indiana University, as well, after having deferred admission to Harvard, due to being in love with a girl who later dumped him for a guy she met doing summer stock in the Michigan dunes. We are no longer allowed to mention the name Claire Lippman in our house—is in New York for a summer job that involves a think tank and computers and tracking cyber-terrorists. Sort of like what I was doing during the war, only he gets to do it from a cubicle on the Columbia campus instead of a tent in a sandy desert.

Sometimes Mike talks about his job to us. We all wish he wouldn’t.

Both Skip and Mikey are yelling the questions to theJeopardy! answers at the TV screen. Skip is getting most of them wrong. Mike is getting most of them right.

It’s cool having one of my brothers around for the summer, even if it isn’t my favorite brother. That’d be Douglas, and he’s back in Indiana, renting a room from my parents.

But at least he doesn’t LIVE with them, which is an improvement. He’s renting a studio apartment above one of their restaurants, Mastriani’s, which was rebuilt after a fire there. He works in a comic-book shop and has been doing some drawing of his own. I think he could have a career as a comic-book writer/illustrator. Seriously. I don’t know if it’s the voices he used to hear in his head, or what, but his stuff is really good.

So that’s cool. Because for a long time, we thought Douglas wasn’t going to make it at all, let alone on his own.

I personally never thought Skip would make it—without someone killing him for being such an annoying parasite—but according to him, when he graduates from the Kelly School of Business, which he is now attending, he will land a job making over a hundred thousand dollars a year.

So I guess I was wrong about Skip, too.

He’s still annoying, though. Sometimes I let him take me out anyway, because, whatever, free food. A girl could do worse. That’s what my mom keeps saying. She would LOVE for me to hook up with old Skip, the hundred-thousand-dollar man.

Yeah. That’s the other normal thing about me: I have no boyfriend. Not that Juilliard—not to mention the nonprofit summer job community—isn’t rife with hot heterosexual guys. (I’m kidding. Because they totally aren’t.) I guess I just haven’t found Mr. Right. I thought I had, once, a long time ago.

But it turned out I was wrong.

So you can imagine my surprise when—just as Ruth was going, “Okay, seriously, you guys, we HAVE to get a share somewhere this summer. I mean it. Skip, are you listening? You’re the one saving all the money, sleeping on our couch, you have to pony some up for the rest of us. I am not spending August sweltering in the Manhattan heat. I am talking Jersey Shore on weekends at least,” and Skip and Mike were both yelling, “Orion! Orion!” at the television—there was a knock at the door and I went to answer it, thinking it was the pizza delivery guy, and instead found my ex-boyfriend standing there.

You would think a psychic would have a little warning about these things.

But then, that’s what sucks about being me: I’m not a psychic anymore.

Two

“Jess,” Rob said, looking past me into the living room, where Skip and Mike were sprawled across the couch like a couple of beached tunas. “Is this a bad time?”

Jess, is this a bad time?

That is what my ex-boyfriend says to me after what turned out to be two years or so of radio silence. Not so much as a phone call.

And okay, yeah, I’m the one who went to Afghanistan. I will admit that.

But need I remind you that it was TO HELP FIGHT A WAR?

It wasn’t like I was out there HAVING FUN.

Not like HE was having, the entire time I was gone. Or so I can only assume, since when I got back, I found him in a liplock with some bleached blonde in a tube top outside of his uncle’s garage.

Oh, sure. He said SHE’D kissed him. For fixing her carburetor. He said if I had stuck around, instead of just taking off like a coward and running, I’d have seen him tell her off.

Yeah. I bet. Because guys just so hate it when blondes in platform heels with spray-on tans and boobs bigger than my head lean over and plant big wet ones on them.

Whatever. It wasn’t like things had been going so great with him before I’d left for Washington and points east. My mom had not been, shall we say, thrilled by the fact that her then not-yet seventeen-year-old daughter was dating a guy who had not only already graduated from high school, but was

a) not going to college.

b) working as a mechanic in his uncle’s garage.

c) from the “wrong side of the tracks,” or, in the local vernacular, a “Grit.”

d) on probation for a crime, the nature of which he would never reveal.

She didn’t exactly make it easy on the two of us. The first (and only) night Rob came over for dinner, she pointed out to him how in the great state of Indiana, it is considered statutory rape if a person eighteen years of age or older engages in sexual intercourse with a person sixteen years of age or younger, a crime punishable by a fixed term of ten years with up to ten years added or four subtracted for aggravating and mitigating circumstances.

It didn’t matter how many times I insisted that Rob and I were not engaging in sexual intercourse (much to my everlasting regret and sorrow). Mom just had to say the words “statutory rape” and Rob was gone, with a promise he’d be back when I turned eighteen.

I never even got to go to his uncle’s wedding with him, the one he’d promised to take me to.

And then the war came.

And when I came back, having turned eighteen and lost the one ability I’d had that set me apart from all the other girls in town (besides my refusal to grow my hair out), I found him with Miss Thanks-for-Fixing-My-Carburetor-Here-Getta-Load-of-These-Head-Sized-Boobs.

He didn’t see me. See him with her, I mean. He only found out I was back in town because Douglas told him when he stopped by the comic shop later that day, which, according to Douglas, Rob does periodically, to pick up the latest Spider-Man (which is funny, because I didn’t even know Rob liked comic books) and shoot the breeze if Douglas is working the counter.

So Douglas told him I was home, and Rob came by my house that very afternoon, purring up on the self-same cherried-out Indian on which he’d given me that very first ride, so many years before.

He seemed pretty surprised when I told him to get the hell off my property. Even more surprised when I told him I’d seen him with the blonde.

At first I think he thought I was kidding. Then, when he saw I wasn’t, he got mad. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about. He also said the Jess he’d known wouldn’t have run away just because she saw some girl kissing him. He said the Jess he’d known would have stuck around and knocked his (not to mention the girl’s) block off.

He also said that I didn’t know what it had been like for him, with me gone and him not knowing where I was, if I was getting blown up or what (because of course it wasn’t like they’d let me call and tell people where I was, or anything like that, when I’d been overseas).

I guess it never occurred to Rob that it hadn’t been any big picnic for me, either. You’d think he might have been able to tell, what with all of the newspapers trumpeting my ignominious return home, and return to normalcy (“Spark’s Gone for Lightning Girl” and “Hero Comes Home, Psychic No Longer—Gave All to War Effort”).

I guess it never occurred to Rob that I WASN’T the Jess he’d known, the one who’d have knocked his block off. Not anymore.

I was the one who’d suggested a cooling-off period.

He was the one who said that maybe that would be a good idea.

And then I got the call from Juilliard: my spot on the wait list—I barely remembered auditioning. It had been during one of my leaves home—had come up. Classes started the very next day. Did I still want it?

Did I still want it? A chance to lose myself in music? The opportunity to get away from myself, the nightmares, the blonde with the head-sized boobs, my mother?

Did I ever.

So I left. Without saying good-bye.

And I never saw him again.

Until today.

Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I guess I should confess that I couldn’t resist forcing others (I would never do it myself, for fear that he might see me) to drive by the garage where he worked, so I, sunk low in the backseat, could try and catch a glimpse of him now and then. Like when I came home from school, at Christmas, and spring break, and stuff.

And he always looked as fine as he had that day I’d first met him, in detention, back at Ernie Pyle High—so tall and cool and…justgood . Know what I mean?

But he never called. Even when he had to know I was home, like over winter break. He certainly didn’t drive by my house in the middle of the night to see if my light was on or to throw pebbles at my window to get me to come down.

I guessed he’d moved on. And I didn’t blame him. I mean, I didn’t exactly come back from my year away…well, whole. I certainly wasn’t who I’d used to be, as he’d been only too quick to point out.

So I decided he wasn’t who he’d used to be, either. Maybe, I decided, my mom was right. Rob and I were ultimately too different to be compatible. Our backgrounds were too disparate. What Rob wants—well, I don’t know what it is that he wants, since I haven’t seen him in so long. And now that I can’t find people anymore, I don’t know what I want, either.

But I do know Rob and I can’t possibly want the same things. Because nowhere in my future do I envision a tube top.

It seems simplest just to tell myself that I want what Mom tells me I should want: a college degree, a decent career, and a nice steady guy like Skip, who’ll make a hundred thousand dollars a year someday. Skip’s a good sort of person, my mom says, for a classical musician to be married to. Because classical musicians don’t make that much money, unless they’re famous, like Yo-Yo Ma or whoever.

And the truth is, I’m too tired to try to figure out what I want. It’s just easier to decide I want what my mom wants for me.

So that’s why. About Rob, I mean. That’s why I didn’t fight for him, for what we’d once had. I didn’t try to fix it. I was just too tired.

So I moved on.

Except that now here he was, a year later, standing in my doorway. He wasn’t keeping his part of the (unspoken) bargain.

And he definitely looked whole to me. MORE than whole, in fact. He looked every bit as good as he had that day after detention, when he’d offered me that ride home. Same pale blue eyes, so light, they’re almost gray. Same tousled dark hair, a little longer in back than my mom likes guys to wear their hair. Same jeans that fit like a glove, faded in all the right (or wrong, depending on how you want to look at it) places.

Seeing him, looking that good, standing outside my door, was a lot like getting…well, struck by lightning.

A sensation with which I am not unfamiliar, actually.

“Ask him if he can break a fifty,” Skip yelled, thinking it was the pizza guy.

“Make sure he remembered the hot-pepper flakes,” Ruth called from the kitchen, where she was taking down the plates. “They forgot last time.”

I just stood there, staring at him. It had been so long since I’d stood this close to him. And everything was flooding back—the way he’d smelled (like whatever laundry detergent his mom uses, coupled with soap and, more faintly, the stuff mechanics use to get the grease out from beneath their fingernails); the way he used to kiss me…one or two light kisses, not even directly centered on my mouth all the time, then one long, hard one, dead in the middle, that made me feel as if I were exploding; the way his body had felt, pressed up against mine, so long and hard and warm….

“This is a bad time,” Rob said. “You’ve got company. I can come back later.”

“Hey, can you break this?” Skip pushed past me, waving a fifty-dollar bill. He stopped when he saw Rob wasn’t holding a pizza. “Hey, where’s the ’za?” he wanted to know. Then he looked at Rob’s face, and his eyes narrowed.

“Hey,” Skip said in a different tone of voice. “I know you.”

Ruth had poked her head out from the kitchen doorway. “Did you remember the hot-pepper—” Her voice trailed off as she, too, recognized Rob.

“Oh,” she said in a very different voice. “It’s…it’s…”

“Rob,” Rob said in that deep, no-nonsense voice that had always managed to send my pulse racing—same as, for some time now, the sound of a motorcycle engine had. It’s like those dogs we learned about in Psych. The ones who would only get fed after a bell rang? Whenever they heard a bell ring after that, they’d start drooling. Whenever I hear a motorcycle engine—or Rob’s voice—my heart speeds up. In a good way.

I know. Pathetic, right?

“Right,” Ruth said, darting a worried look in my direction. “Rob. From back home.” She refrained from calling him her private nickname for him: The Jerk. I thought this showed some real maturity and growth. Ruth’s changed a lot since high school.

Well, I guess we all have.

“You remember Rob, Skip,” Ruth said, elbowing her twin. “He went to Ernie Pyle.”

“How could I forget?” Skip said tonelessly.

Okay, well, I guess all of us have changed since high school except for Skip.

“Right,” Ruth said. “Well. Do you, um…do you want to come in, Rob?”

I didn’t blame Ruth for sounding confused and not knowing exactly what to do. I didn’t know what to do, either. I mean, a guy walks out of your life for a year, only to reappear on your doorstep in another state…It’s kind of disorienting.

“What’s the holdup?” Now Mike was crowding into the tiny front hallway. He hadn’t seen Rob yet. “You guys need change or something?”

“It’s not the pizza guy,” Skip said over his shoulder. “It’s Rob Wilkins.”

“Who?”Mike looked as shocked as I felt.“Here?”

“Look,” Rob said, beginning to look a little impatient. I could tell from the way his dark eyebrows were starting to constrict a little in the middle. It was the same expression he used to wear whenever I’d want to rescue some kidnapped kid using some wacky scheme that Rob thought was too dangerous. “If this is a bad time, Jess, I can come back—”

I could feel everyone’s gaze on me—Ruth’s, filled with concern (she was the only one who could even begin to suspect what kind of emotional whirlwind Rob’s sudden appearance had thrown me into); Skip’s, hostile and questioning (I had, after all, been dating him pretty much exclusively all summer…if you can call the occasional pizza and a movie “dating”); Mike’s, also hostile (he’d never liked Rob, primarily because he’d never tried to get to know him) but also sympathetic…Mike knew how hard I was running from my past.

And Rob was a part of that past.

Naturally, under so many people’s scrutiny, I could feel my face heating up. Plus, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Seriously. My mind was a complete blank. The only thing running through it were the wordsRob’s here. Rob’s here in New York.

And he smells really, really good.

Seriously. It truly was like getting struck by lightning all over again. Minus the hair-sticking-up thing. And the star-shaped scar that had since completely faded away.

Ruth was the one who came to my rescue.

“We’ll just go out and let you two have some time alone together,” she said, starting to put the dinner plates down.

“Go out?” Skip echoed, sounding more indignant than ever. “What about the pizza we ordered?”

“You know what?” Rob turned to go. “I’ll come back later.”

It was only when I saw his broad, jean-jacketed back turning away from me that I realized I felt something. Which, for me, was progress. Since I hadn’t been feeling too much of anything for a long time.

And what I felt was that this time, I wasn’t letting him get away. Not that easily. Not without an explanation.

“Wait,” I said.

Rob paused in the hallway and looked back at me. His expression was completely unreadable. And not just because the super still hadn’t changed the burnt-out bulb above Apartment 5A.

Still, I could see his gray eyes glowing, like a cat’s.

“Let me get my keys,” I said. “We can talk while we grab something to eat somewhere.”

I ducked back into the apartment, going to the skinny hall table where we throw our keys every time we come inside. Mike was blocking it.

“Move,” I said.

“Jess,” he said in a low voice. “Do you really think—”

“Move,” I said, more loudly.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I knew what I was doing. I most definitely did not. Maybe my brother sensed this and that was why he was acting like such a total tool.

Or maybe that’s just how big brothers act when the guy who broke their little sister’s heart shows up from out of nowhere.

“It’s just,” Mike said. “You really seem, um, better than you have in a while now, and I don’t want—”

“Move,” I interrupted, “or I will hurt you badly.”

Mike moved. I scooped up my keys.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” I said, slipping out the door past Ruth, who gazed at me sympathetically through her new contact lenses. She’d given up wearing glasses at around the same time she’d given up on low-fat diets and gone high-protein instead.

“I thought we were having pizza,” Skip called after me.

I’d joined Rob in the hallway.

“Save me a slice,” I said to Skip.

Then Rob and I headed for the stairs.

Three

New York isn’t like Indiana.

Well, you probably know that.

But I mean, it’s REALLY not like Indiana. In the town where I’m from, you don’t walk anywhere. Well, unless you’re my best friend, Ruth, and you want to lose weight. Then maybe you’ll walk someplace.

In New York, you walk everywhere. Nobody has a car—or, if they do, they don’t use it, except for trips out of the city. That’s because traffic is unbelievable. Every street is clogged with taxis and delivery trucks and limos.

Plus, there’s nowhere you’d want to go that the subway can’t take you. And all that stuff about the subway being unsafe…it’s not true. You just have to stay alert, and not look too much like a stupid tourist with your head buried in a map, or whatever.

But even if you are—a tourist, I mean—people will stop and try to help you. It’s not true what they say about New Yorkers being mean. They aren’t. They’re just busy and impatient.

But if you’re genuinely lost, nine times out of ten a New Yorker will go out of his way to help you.

Especially if you’re a girl. And you’re polite.

Walking out onto Thirty-seventh Street with Rob, it hit me: you know, that we really weren’t in Indiana anymore. I had never walked down a street with Rob before. Ridden down streets with him plenty of times. But strolled down a sunny, tree-lined street, with delis and pizza-by-the-slice places on either side, people out walking their dogs, bike-riding Chinese delivery-food guys trying to keep from hitting people?

Never.

He didn’t say anything. He’d been silent down five flights of stairs (Ruth and I couldn’t afford an apartment in a building with an elevator, let alone a doorman to announce our guests. And of course the intercom is broken, as is the lock on the door to the vestibule).

Now, in the busy after-work, trying-to-get-home-in-time-for-dinner crowd on the sidewalk, I realized someone had to say something. I mean, we couldn’t just walk around in dead silence the whole night.

So I said, “There’s a decent Mexican place around the corner.”

But he just nodded. Sighing, I led the way. This was going to be even worse than I’d thought it would.

Inside the restaurant, I headed to my favorite table, the one Ruth and I share most Saturday nights, while I chow down on the free chips, and she plows through the guacamole (Ruth had finally managed to shed those extra forty pounds she’d been carrying around since sixth grade by avoiding anything with flour or sugar in it). The table is by the window, so you can watch all the weirdos who walked by. They don’t call it Hell’s Kitchen for nothing.

“Hey, Jess,” said Ann, our favorite waitress, as Rob and I sat down. “The usual?”

“Yes, please,” I said, and Ann looked questioningly down at Rob. I knew what Ann would say next time I saw her, and Rob wasn’t around: “Who was the hottie?”

“Just a beer,” Rob said, and after Ann had rattled off the restaurant’s extensive list of brands, he picked one, and she went away to get the drinks. And the tortilla chips.

We sat for a minute in silence. It was still early for dinner—people in New York don’t generally even start thinking about dinner until eight or even nine o’clock—so we were the only people there, besides the wait staff. I tried to concentrate on what was happening outside the window, as opposed to what was across the table from me. It was a little overwhelming to be in this place I’d been to so many times, with someone I’d never in a million years pictured being there with me.

Rob was nervous. I could tell by the way he kept rearranging the silverware in front of him. In a second, he would begin to shred his paper napkin. He was looking around, taking in the sombreros on the wall, the chili-pepper lights around the bar, and the people walking by outside. He was looking at everything, in fact, except me.

“So,” I said. Because someone had to say something. “How’s your mom?”

He seemed startled by the question.

“My mom? She’s fine. Fine.”

“Good,” I said. I had always really liked Mrs. Wilkins. “My dad says she quit a while back.”

Then I wanted to kick myself. Because, of course, the only way I could have known that Rob’s mom had quit working in our family’s restaurant was if I’d asked about her. And I didn’t want Rob thinking I cared enough about him to ask my dad how Mrs. Wilkins was doing. Even though that’s exactly what I’d done.

“Yeah,” Rob said. “Well, what happened was, she moved to Florida.”

I blinked at him. “She did? Florida?”

“Yeah,” he said. “With, um, that guy. Her boyfriend. Gary. Did you meet Gary?”

I had met Gary-No-Really-Just-Call-Me-Gary over Thanksgiving dinner at Rob’s house. Apparently, Rob did not remember this.

But I did.

Just like I remembered what happened in the barn afterwards. I’d told Rob I loved him.

If memory served, he never did say he loved me back.

“Her sister lives there,” Rob went on. “My aunt. And things were tight—you know, back home. Gary got a better job down there and asked her to come with him. So she said she’d try it out for a while. And she liked it so much, she ended up staying.”

“Oh,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. Rob had lived with his mom in a pretty nice farmhouse—old and small, but well-maintained—outside of town. They’d been pretty close, for a parent and kid. Rob had more or less been supporting her. I wondered if he resented Just-Call-Me-Gary for taking all that away.

“Well,” I said. Because what else could I say? “I’m happy for her, I guess. For you both. That things are going so well.”

“Thanks,” Rob said.

Then Ann came over with our drinks and the chips and guacamole. My “usual” is a frozen strawberry margarita…only without the alcohol, since I’m not twenty-one. I saw Rob look at it in surprise, and couldn’t help grumbling, “It’s virgin.”

“Oh,” he said. Then he blinked. “It has an umbrella in it.”

“Yeah?” I shrugged. I took the tiny paper umbrella out, closed it, and tucked it into the pocket of my jeans. I am saving them. I don’t know for what. “So what?”

“I just never would have pegged you for an umbrella-drink kind of girl,” Rob said.

“Yeah,” I said again. “Well, I’m full of surprises.”

Rob didn’t say anything more about my choice of drinks after that. There was a brief discussion over specials, but both Rob and I said we weren’t ready to order yet, and Ann went away again, leaving us with the menus and our drinks.

I took a small sip of my margarita. I always take tiny sips, to make it last. The margaritas at Blue Moon—that’s the name of the restaurant—are expensive. Even the virgin ones.

“And your folks?” Rob asked. “How are they doing?”

This was so surreal. I mean, that I was sitting there in the Blue Moon with Rob Wilkins, politely discussing our families. Like we were both grown-ups. It was sort of blowing my mind.

“They’re fine,” I said. I didn’t say anything else. Like, “Oh, and by the way, my mom still hates your guts. And you know, I’m not so sure she has the wrong idea.”

“Yeah,” Rob said. “I see Doug from time to time.”

Doug? My brother hated it when people called him Doug. What was going on here? Since when had Douglas started getting so pally with my ex?

“He told me Mike was spending the summer with you,” Rob went on. “Ruth’s brother, too, I see. Or is he just visiting?”

“No, he’s with us until September,” I said. “They’re both crashing—he and Mike—while they work internships in the city. So did your mom sell the farm? I mean, when she moved to Florida?”

Which was my subtle way of asking what HIS living arrangements were. Because I was trying to figure out what he was DOING here. In New York, I mean. Suddenly, it had occurred to me that maybe he was here to, like, break some kind of news. Like that he was getting married or something.

I know it sounds stupid. I mean, for one thing, what would I care if he WAS getting married? I was just a girl who’d had a puppy-dog crush on him since the tenth grade. He didn’t owe me any explanations, even if I HAD made the mistake once of telling him I loved him in a barn.

And why would he come all the way to New York just to tell his ex-girlfriend he was getting hitched? I mean, who even does something like that?

But these are the crazy things that go through your head when you’re, you know. With your ex.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “We’ve still got the farm. Or, I should say, I’ve got it. I bought it—and the house—from my mom.”

Which didn’t prove anything either way. You know, about whether or not he was seeing anyone.

“And,” I said, desperately trying to think of things to talk about, instead of the only thing I WANTED to talk about, which was what on earth he was doing here in New York. “Are you still working at your uncle’s garage?”

“Yeah,” Rob said, squeezing the slice of lime that had come with his beer in through the narrow opening of the bottle. “Only it’s not his garage anymore. He retired. So he sold it.”

“Oh,” I said. Lots of things had changed in Rob’s life since I’d been away, I could see. “Well, that must be weird. I mean, working for somebody else after working for your uncle for so long.”

“Not really,” Rob said, taking a swig from his beer. “Because he sold it to me.”

I stared at him. “You bought your uncle’s garage?”

He nodded.

“And your mom’s house.”

He nodded again.

Withwhat ? I wanted to ask. Because when I’d known him, Rob had never really been hurting for cash. But he hadn’t been rich, either. At least, not rich enough to buy out someone else’s pretty profitable business.

But I couldn’t ask him that. What he’d used to buy out his uncle, I mean. Because we aren’t exactly on those kinds of terms. Anymore.

“What about you?” Rob asked. “How are you liking school out here?”

“It’s okay,” I said. I wasn’t about to tell him the truth, of course. That I hated Juilliard and had been miserable every freaking minute since I’d started there.

Besides, I was still thinking over what he’d said. He’d bought his uncle’s garage. He was only in his early twenties, and he already owned his own business.

Just like my dad. I mean, my dad owns his own business. Several, actually.

And my momdefinitely approves of my dad.

“Doug says you’re doing really well.” Rob started fiddling with his silverware again. “In school, I mean. First chair in orchestra, or something?”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t point out how many hours a day I had to practice to keep it. First chair in the flute section at Juilliard, I mean. “But I’m taking a break for the summer.”

“Right,” Rob said. “Doug says you and Ruth are doing some kind of summer arts program for needy kids?”

Douglas, I was realizing, had said a lot. I was going to have to call him when I got home and ask him just what in the Sam Hill he was doing, telling my ex so much about me.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty cool. I like it a lot. Better than playing in the orchestra, actually. The kids are fun.”

“You always did like kids,” Rob said, smiling for the first time since I’d opened the door and found him outside it. As always, the sight of that smile did something to my heart. Stopped it, more or less. “You were always great with them, too.”

There was an awkward silence. I don’t know what he was thinking during it. But I know I was thinking that things had been a lot better when I’d stuck to just that. Working with kids, I mean. It was when I agreed to start trying to find grown-ups that everything had gone to hell. Between Rob and me, I mean. And, actually, for me personally, as well.

“That’s kind of why I’m here, actually,” Rob said.

I glanced at him over the rim of my margarita glass. “What? Because of…kids?”

“Yeah, basically,” Rob said.

Without another word, I took a huge slurp of my drink. And got a brain freeze. And choked.

“Whoa,” Rob said, looking concerned. “Slow down, slugger.”

“Sorry,” I said, wincing because of the brain freeze. I stuck the tip of my tongue to the roof of my mouth because that is what is supposed to cure ice-cream headaches, like the one I suddenly had.

But I didn’t know of any cure for the heartache his words had induced.

Because it had all become clear. Why Rob was here, I mean.

He wasn’t just getting married. He was having a kid.

That had to be it.

And why not? He had his own place now, not to mention his own business. He was his own boss at last. The next natural step was marriage and a child.

Which was great. Really. Just great. I was really happy for him.

But why had he felt compelled to come all the way to New York to tell me? Couldn’t he have just sent me a wedding invitation in the mail? That would have been a lot easier to handle than…this. I mean, did he have to come all the way here to rub my face in it?

“The thing is,” Rob said, leaning forward a little in his chair. He had clearly seen that I’d recovered sufficiently from my frozen-drink headache. The heartache? That was still going on, but I guess I was doing a better job of hiding that than I had the brain freeze. “I know things have been…well, weird between us. You and me, I mean. The past two years or so.”

Weird.That’s what he called it.

Whatever. At least he realized how long it had been. Since things had ceased being hunky-dory (they had never been perfect) and started being…well, what he said.Weird.

“But we’re still friends, right?” Rob’s big shoulders were hunched as he leaned towards me. The ladylike little table at which we sat—the one decorated all over in mosaic tiles, which had always suited Ruth and me just fine—suddenly seemed too small, dwarfed as it was by Rob’s man-sized body. “I mean…maybe we aren’t—whatever we were—anymore.”

Right. Whatever-we-were. That was the word for it, all right. Because what had we been, really? We hadn’t really been lovers, because we’d never made love.

But I had loved him. A part of me still did. Maybe more than a part of me.

Because I’m a complete moron.

“But we’ll always be friends, won’t we?” Rob wanted to know. “I mean, after everything we went through together.”

I thought he meant the number of times we’d been unconscious in each other’s presence, from being smacked over the head with various large, heavy objects.

But then he added, “Detention at Ernie Pyle High. That’s gotta bind people for life, right?”

I smiled then. A tiny smile. But a smile just the same. Because itwas kind of funny.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

“Good,” Rob said, leaning back maybe a fraction of an inch and his shoulders losing a pinch of tension. “Good. Okay. So, we’re still friends.”

“Still friends,” I said. And took another fortifying sip of frozen margarita.

Because I really don’t want to go to his wedding. Not even as friends.

“Then it’d be okay if I asked you,” Rob said, starting to tense up again—I could tell by the way one of his denim-clad legs began to jiggle a little nervously beneath the tiny table—“I mean, as a friend—”

Oh my God. What if he’s about to ask me to be his kid’s godparent or something? I wondered who the kid’s mother was. The blonde from the garage that day? God. I had so known he was lying when he’d said there was nothing between them.

“So,” Rob said. “Here’s the thing—”

I took a deep breath…and held it. Really, I’m a very strong person. I mean, I have lived through a lot in my nineteen years, including a schizophrenic brother, various fistfights brought on by people calling said brother cruel names, being struck by lightning, being stalked by the paparazzi because of a superpower caused by said lightning, sent to Afghanistan to help in the war on terror, and so on.

Heck, I’ve even endured two semesters of music theory at Juilliard, which, when I think about it, was almost as bad as the war had been.

But never in my life have I felt more need for courage I knew I didn’t actually have than I did at that particular moment. I held my breath as Rob said the words I so didn’t want to hear:

“Jess. I’m getting married.”

Except that’s not what came out of his mouth. What came out of his mouth instead were the words:

“Jess. I need you to find my sister.”

Four

“You need me to WHAT?”

He lowered his gaze. Apparently, it was too much for him to look me in the eye. Instead, he stared at his beer bottle.

“My sister,” he repeated. “She’s missing. I need you to help me find her. You know I wouldn’t ask you, Jess, if I wasn’t really worried about her. Doug’s told me you don’t…well…dothat anymore. He told me the war—well, that it really messed you up. And I totally understand that, Jess. I do.”

He looked up then and hit me with the full force of those baby blues.

“But if there’s any way…anyway at all. If you could just give me ahint about where she is…I’d really appreciate it. And I swear afterwards I’ll go away and leave you alone.”

I stared at him.

I should have known, of course. That it wasn’t ME he wanted. Not, you know, that I’d ever once entertained the idea, since opening my door to find him standing there, that that’s what he’d come for. To try to get back together, I mean.

And I will admit, it was a big relief that he wasn’t here to tell me about his impending nuptials with Karen Sue Hankey, or whoever. Not that I cared what he did anymore, or who he married.

I just don’t feel like I should have to know about it.

But to have come all this way to ask me to find someone—when he knew perfectly well how all of that finding people crap had messed me up—

Well, okay, he didn’t know, really, since I’d barely spoken to him since it happened. The war, I mean. And the part I’d played in it.

Still, he had to have read it in the papers. He had some nerve coming here and asking me to—

Then suddenly something else hit me, and I looked at him confusedly.

“You don’thave a sister,” I pointed out.

“Yes,” Rob said evenly. “Actually, I do.”

“How could you have a sister,” I demanded, sounding angrier than I’d meant to, “and not even tell me?”

“Because I didn’t know about her myself,” Rob said, “until a few months ago.”

“What?” I couldn’t believe this. I really couldn’t. I mean, first my ex-boyfriend shows up at my door, and not even because he wants to get back together with me. Then he pulls out some kind of ghost sister. Seriously, this is the kind of thing that only happens to me. Wait’ll the TV show’s producers got a load of this. “Did your mom put her up for adoption, and not tell you, or something?”

“She’s not related to my mom,” Rob said.

“Then how can she be your sister?” What was he trying to pull? Did he think I’d lost my MIND during the war, and not just my psychic powers?

“She’s my dad’s kid,” Rob said.

And then I remembered. You know, that Rob had a dad, too. I had never met him, because he’d left Rob’s mother when Rob had been just a baby. Rob had always been reluctant to discuss his father—didn’t even go by his father’s last name, which was Snyder, but his mother’s—until the day I’d accidentally stumbled across a photo of him, and dreamed about his whereabouts.

Which happened to be—for want of a better word—jail.

Rob had been even MORE reluctant to talk about his dad when he realized I knew where he was.

I just sat there staring at him. Because I seriously couldn’t figure out what he was talking about.

“So…your dad’s out of jail?”

It was Rob’s turn to wince.

“No,” he said. And I realized I’d never actually said it before. You know. TheJ word. It had always been an unspoken acknowledgment between us, back when we’d been—whatever-we-were. “No, he’s still there. But before he got sent away, after he and my mom got divorced, he met someone else—”

Understanding finally dawned.

“So she’s your half sister,” I said.

“Right.” Rob reached for a tortilla chip, scooped up a large amount of guacamole with it, put it in his mouth, and chewed. I doubted he was even tasting it. He was just eating it to be doing something with his hands, which always seemed to have needed to be doing something, since the day I’d first met him, either messing with an engine or folding over a paperback or kneading a rag. “I didn’t know about her until she wrote to me this spring. See, she wasn’t getting along with her mother, and so she started writing to my dad and he told her about…about me and my mom. So one night she called, and…well. It’s something, to find out you have a little sister you never even knew you had.”

“I can imagine,” I said. Actually, I couldn’t. I was just saying that to say something.

“Her name’s Hannah,” Rob said. “Hannah Snyder. She’s a great kid. Really funny and kind of…well, feisty. Like you, a lot, actually.”

I smiled wanly. “Great,” I said. Because, you know, that’s the image I want the guy I’m in love with to have of me. Funny and feisty, like his little sister. Yeah. Thanks for that.

Not that I’m in love with Rob. Anymore, I mean.

“Things were…well, Hannah said things weren’t great for her at home,” Rob said. “I mean, with her mother. She was into some things—Hannah’s mom—that she shouldn’t have been into. Drugs and stuff. And men.” Rob cleared his throat and concentrated on dipping another chip. “Men who Hannah said made her feel uncomfortable. You know, um. On account of her getting older, and them—”

“Paying unwanted attention to her?” I asked.

“Right,” Rob said. “And I didn’t think that was such a hot environment for her to be growing up in. So I started looking into what it would take for me to become her legal guardian until she turns eighteen. It wasn’t as if her mother wanted her around. Since school was out, she—Hannah’s mother—said it would be all right if Hannah came for a visit.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. But I wasn’t really listening. A part of me was wondering how Rob could ever think he could get a court to give him guardianship of his little sister when he was on probation.

Then I realized he probably wasn’t on probation anymore, for whatever it was he’d done. He’d been a juvenile back when he’d done it, and now he was over twenty-one. That was probably part of some sealed court record somewhere, and now that he was a business and home owner—a contributing member of society—it couldn’t come back to haunt him.

And I would probably never, ever know what it was he’d done that had got him put on probation in the first place.

“So a week ago, I picked her up from her mom’s place in Indianapolis,” Rob went on. “And Hannah came to stay with me. And everything was great. I mean, it was like we’d grown up together and never been apart, you know? We both like the same stuff—cars and bikes andThe Simpsons and Spider-Man and Italian food and fireworks and…I mean, it was great. It was really great.”

For the first time since we’d sat down, Rob’s hands stilled. They lay flat on the table as he looked at me and said, “Then day before yesterday, I woke up, and she was gone. Just…gone. Her bed hadn’t been slept in. All of her stuff is still in her room. Her mom hasn’t heard from her. The cops can’t find a trace of her. She’s just. Gone.”

“And you thought of me,” I said.

“And I thought of you,” Rob said.

“But I don’t do that anymore,” I said. “Find people, I mean.”

“I know,” Rob said. “At least, I know that’s what you tell the press. But, Jess. I mean…you used to tell the press that before. To get them off your back. When they wouldn’t let you alone, and it was upsetting Doug. And then again, later, when the government was after you to come work for them. You pretended then, too—”

“Yeah,” I interrupted him. Maybe a little too loudly, since the couple who’d just walked in looked over at us, kind of funny, likeWhat’s up with them?I lowered my voice. “But this time it’s not pretend. Ireally don’t do that anymore. Ican’t .”

Rob regarded me unblinkingly from across the table.

“That’s not what Doug said,” he informed me.

“Douglas?”I couldn’t believe this. “What doesDouglas think he knows about it? You think my brother Douglas knows more than the thirty thousand shrinks the army sent me to, to try to get it back? You think Douglas is some kind of posttraumatic stress expert? Douglas works in a comic-book store, Rob. I love him, but he doesn’t know anything about this.”

“He might know more,” Rob said, looking completely unaffected by my rather impassioned speech, “about you than the shrinks the army sent you to.”

“Yeah,” I snapped. “Well, you’re wrong. I’m done, okay? And this time, it’s for real. It’s not just a put-on to get me out of the war. I’m out. I’m sorry about your sister. I wish there was something I could do. And I’m sorry if Douglas misled you. You shouldn’t have come all this way. If you’d called instead, I could have just told you over the phone.”

And spared myself having to see you again, just when I’d thought I’d finally gotten over you.

“But if I’d called instead I wouldn’t have been able to give you this,” Rob said, and reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. I wasn’t exactly surprised when he pulled out a photo—one of those school portraits taken on picture day—of a young girl who looked a lot like him. Except that she had braces and multicolored hair. I mean it. She’d dyed her hair, like, four different colors, blue, hot pink, purple, and a sort of Bart Simpson yellow.

“That’s Hannah,” Rob said as I took the picture from him. “She just turned fifteen.”

I looked down at Hannah, the girl who was responsible for bringing Rob back to me.

But not, of course, because that’s where he wanted to be. I knew the score. He was only back because ofher .

And because, according to him, he and I are stillfriends .

“Rob,” I said. I think at that moment I kind of hated him. “I told you. There’s nothing I can do for her. For you. I’m sorry.”

“Right.” Rob nodded. “You said that. Look, Jess. I don’t know what you went through during the—” He caught himself before he could say theW word and changed it to “—year before last. When you were…overseas. I can’t even pretend to be able to imagine what it was like for you over there. From what Doug says, when you got back—”

I glanced up at him sharply. I was going to kill Douglas. I really was. What had gone on in our house after I’d gotten back—night terrors, the doctors had called them—wasmy business. No one else’s. Douglas had no right to go around talking about them. Do I discuss Douglas’s mental state with his exes? Well, no, because he has no exes. He’s still going steady with a neighbor girl, Tasha Thompkins, whom he’s been seeing for almost three years now, while she’s taking classes at Indiana University and traveling back and forth every weekend to see him.

But if Douglashad had an ex, I wouldn’t have discussed his private anguish with her. No way.

Rob must have noticed the angry flush I’m sure was suffusing my face, since he said in a gentle voice, covering my hand that held his sister’s picture, “Hey. Don’t blame Doug. I asked, okay? When you came back, you were so…you were—” He nodded at the small cactus sitting on the windowsill, amid more chili-pepper lights. “You were like that plant. Covered in prickles. You wouldn’t let anybody get anywhere near you—”

“How would you know?” I demanded, angrily snatching my hand away and letting the picture drop to the middle of the table. “You were so busy with Miss-Thanks-for-Fixing-My-Carburetor, I’m surprised you even noticed.”

“Hey,” he said, looking wounded. “Take it easy. I told you—”

“Let’s cut to the chase here, Rob,” I said, my voice shaking. Because I was so angry, I told myself. That was the only reason. “You want me to find your sister. Fine. I can’t find her. I can’t find anyone. Now you know. It’s not a lie. It’s not a stunt to get people off my back. It’s real. I’m not Lightning Girl anymore. But don’t try to snow me with fake sympathy. It’s not necessary, and it won’t work.”

Clearly stung, Rob blinked at me from across the table. “My sympathy,” Rob said, “isn’t fake, Jess. I don’t know how you could say that to me, after everything we’ve been through toge—”

“Don’t even start,” I said, holding up a single hand, palm out, in the universal sign for Stop. Or Tell It to the Hand. “You only seem to remember everything we’ve been through when you want something from me. The rest of the time, you seem to forget it all conveniently enough.”

Rob opened his mouth to say something—probably to deny it—but he didn’t get the chance, since Ann came up to the table and asked, sounding concerned, “Everything all right here, guys?”

I noticed the only other couple in the place was glancing at us surreptitiously from behind their menus. I guess our conversation HAD gotten pretty heated.

“Everything’s great,” I said miserably. “Can we just get the check?”

“Sure,” Ann said. “Be right back.”

The minute she was gone, Rob leaned forward and, elbows on the table—his knees brushing mine beneath it and his fingers just inches from where mine lay by the picture of his sister—said in a low voice, “Jess, I understand that you went through hell the year before last. I understand that you were under unbelievable pressure and that you saw things no one your age—or any age—should have seen. I think it’s incredible that you were able to come back and lead a life that bears any semblance to normalcy. I admire that you didn’t crack up completely.”

Here his voice dropped even lower.

“But there is one undeniable fact that you seem to be overlooking about yourself, Jess, that apparently everyone but you can see: You came back from wherever you were broken.”

I sucked in my breath, but he went right on talking, right over me.

“You heard me,” he said. “And I’m not talking about the fact that you can’t find people anymore. I’m talking about YOU. Whatever it is you saw out there—it broke you. Those people—the government—used you until they had everything they wanted from you—until you had nothing else to give—and then they cut you loose, with a thank-you and smile. And you came back. But let’s not kid ourselves here: You came back broken. And you won’t let anyone near enough to try to help you. I’m not talking about shrinks, either. I’m talking about the people who love you.”

Again I tried to interrupt. Again, he stopped me.

“And you know what?” he said. “That’s fine. You’ve rescued so many people, you think you’re above letting anyone try to rescueyou ? That’s fine, too. Rescue yourself, then…if you can. But let’s get one thing straight: You may have been able to find missing people at one time. But you were never a mind reader. So don’t presume to tell me what I’m thinking and feeling, when you really have no earthly idea what’s going on inside my head.”

He leaned back as Ann approached with the check.

I stared down at the photo sitting between us on the tabletop, not really seeing it, I was so blinded by anger. That’s what I told myself, anyway. That I was angry. How dare he? I mean, seriously, where did he get off? Broken?Me? I wasn’t broken.

Messed up. Sure. I was messed up. Who wouldn’t be after a year of basically no sleep, because every time I shut my eyes, I heard and saw things I really never wanted to hear or see again.

But not letting anyone try to help me? No. No, I had let people help me. The people whoreally cared about me, anyway. Wasn’t that what I was doing, working with Ruth on her inner-city arts program? Wasn’t that what letting Mike live with us was all about? Those things were helping me. I was beginning to sleep again. Most nights, all the way through.

No. No, I’m not broken. The part of me that used to be able to find people, maybe. But not ME.

Because if that were true—what he was saying—then the past twelve months of coldness between us—Rob and me, I mean—were…what? MY fault?

No. No, that wasn’t possible.

Rob was fishing through his wallet for a couple of bills to pay the check. He wasn’t looking at me. Instead, he stared out the window at a guy in a Sherlock Holmes outfit who was walking his pug. We see this guy a lot on our street. We call him the Sherlock Holmes Guy. Hey, it’s New York City. It takes all kinds.

If Rob noticed the tweed hat with the ear-warmers and the curved wooden pipe, he didn’t mention it. His strong jaw was set, as if to guard against saying anything more. He’d taken his jean jacket off, because the air-conditioning at Blue Moon wasn’t the best. I couldn’t help noticing the way the round curves of his biceps disappeared into the sleeves of his black tee.

No one at Juilliard has biceps like that. Not even the tuba players.

“I gotta go,” I said in a strangled voice, and stood up so fast, I knocked my chair over.

Rob looked surprised. “You’re going?” he asked. And his gaze fell to the picture in my hand.

Yeah. I’d picked it up. Don’t ask me why.

“I’ve got stuff to do,” I said, starting for the door. “I have to practice. If I want to be first chair in the fall, I mean.”

Rob knit his brows. “But—” Then he glanced at my face. And stood up as well. “All right, Jess. Whatever you say. Just…look. I don’t want there to be any hard feelings between us, okay? What I said—I didn’t say it to hurt you.”

I nodded. “No hard feelings,” I said. “And…I’m sorry I can’t help you. About your sister, I mean. I’m sorry I can’t…” Can’t what? Be his girlfriend anymore? See, that’s just it. He hadn’t ASKED me to be his girlfriend.

He never had.

“I’m just sorry,” I said.

Then I left the restaurant just as fast as I could.

Five

“Are you kidding me?” was what Ruth demanded, after I’d told her—in the privacy of our bedroom, since I didn’t want Mike and Skip to overhear—what Rob had come to New York for. “Find his long-lost sister? He has some nerve, after the way he treated you.”

“How did he treat me?” I asked. Because at this point, I was so confused, I didn’t know what to think anymore.

“How did he treat you?” Ruth looked shocked. “Jess, he was making out with some other woman the last time you saw him.”

“Not the last time I saw him,” I said. “The last time I saw him, I was spying on him from the back of your car.”

“I meant the time before that,” Ruth said.

“The time before that, I told him we needed to take a break.”

“And,” Ruth said meaningfully.

“And,” I echoed. “And what?”

“And helet you.” She was perched on the end of her mattress, her blond curls framed by the purple sari she’d draped over the head of her bed, to give the room more “elegance.” Though how you could hope to lend elegance to a room that was literally like, six feet by twelve feet, with a single window over which we’d had a metal gate installed so burglars couldn’t get in, and more than its fair share of cockroach sightings, I don’t know.

“He only did what I asked,” I pointed out. “Look, he’s not such a bad guy. I mean, I was head over heels in love with him in high school. He could have taken advantage of that. But he never did.”

“Because he didn’t want to go to jail,” Ruth said.

I grimaced. “Thanks for that.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Jess,” she said. “What do you want me to say? He was a great guy? A perfect catch? He wasn’t. And I don’t care if he owns his own business now. He’s still the guy who let you walk away when you needed him most.”

“He says he tried,” I said. “He says I was like a cactus when I got back, covered in prickles, and wouldn’t let anyone near me. Plus, you know…there was Mom.”

That’s the nice thing about having a best friend. You don’t have to elaborate. Ruth knew exactly what I meant.

“If he really cared about you,” she said, “he wouldn’t have minded the prickles. Or your mom.”

I thought about that. The thing is, I wasn’t sure. Both, I imagined, would have seemed plenty formidable—especially to a guy like Rob, who for so much of his life, didn’t have much of anything…except his pride.

Which I’m pretty sure both my stubborn independence and my mom’s disdain for him had injured…maybe even beyond repair.

Although…

“He saysI ’m the one who’s broken,” I murmured. “He says no one can fix me but myself, because I won’t let anyone rescue me.”

“Oh, so now he’s a psychiatrist? What’she been doing for the past year?” Ruth asked with a sneer. “WatchingOprah ?”

I sighed, then flopped back against my own mattress, which was covered with a nondescript brown bedspread from Third Street Bazaar. I had done nothing to lend more elegance to the room. The part of the wall above my bed was blank. I stared at the cracked, peeling ceiling.

“I just thought,” I said to the cracks in the ceiling more than to Ruth, “that coming here would make me happy.”

“Aren’t you happy?” Ruth asked. “You seemed happy today, when you were showing that kid how to breathe from his diaphragm.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That part makes me happy. But school…” I let my voice trail off.

“No one likes school,” Ruth said.

“You do.”

“Yeah, but I’m a freak. Ask Mike. Well, okay, he’s a freak, too.” I restrained myself from pointing out that Ruth and Mike seemed to have a lot in common these days. I mean, they had both been übergeeks in high school who had “found” themselves—their true selves—in college.

And I would have to have been blind to miss the surreptitious looks I sometimes saw Mike shooting Ruth when she was in a cami and cutoffs, trying to beat the New York heat. Not to mention the looks she sometimes shot him when he came out of the bathroom with just a towel on, or whatever.

It was kind of revolting, actually. I mean, my brother and my best friend. Yuck.

But hey, if it made them happy…

“Skip,” Ruth said brightly. “Hehates school.”

“Because school is just something he has to get through,” I said, “until he can start pulling in that hundred grand a year.”

“True,” Ruth said with a sigh. “But I’m just saying. Most people don’t like school, Jess. It’s a necessary evil you have to live through, to get you where you want to be in life.”

“But that’s just it,” I said. “I don’t know where I want to be. And what little clue I do have…well, it doesn’t involve playing in an orchestra, let’s just say.”

“But you like to teach,” she said. “I know you do, Jess. And having a degree from Juilliard will look a lot better for that than having no degree at all.”

“Yeah,” I said.

I knew she was right. And the fact was, I was living many a musician’s dream. I was in New York City, attending one of the finest music colleges in the world. I had instructors who were internationally famous for their skills. I spent all day immersed in the music I loved, doing what I loved doing best—playing my flute.

Ishould have been happy. I had seized the opportunity when it came along, because I knew it was the kind of opportunity thatshould have made me happy.

So why wasn’t I?

There was a tap on the door, and Ruth said, “Come in.”

Mike poked his head in.

“Is this a private party,” he asked, “or can anybody join?”

Ruth glanced at me. I said, “Come in, stay out, whatever. I don’t care.”

Mike came in. I saw him avert his gaze from Ruth’s jewel-tone bra, which lay draped across the radiator. I saw her notice him notice it, and blush.

Oh, for God’s sake,I wanted to groan.Would you two just Do It already, and spare the rest of us?

“So Skip and I were just talking,” Mike said, and I noticed that Skip had crept in behind him.

“Yeah,” Skip said. “And if you want us to, Jess, we’ll beat him up for you.”

I regarded the two of them from where I was sprawled across my bed.

“You two are volunteering to beat up Rob Wilkins?”

“Yeah,” Skip said.

“Well, not beat him up, exactly,” Mike said, darting a look at Skip. “But have a word with him. Tell him to leave you alone. If you want.”

“That,” I said, touched in spite of myself, “is so sweet, you guys.”

“Are you insane?” Ruth asked both boys. “He could beat the crap out of both of you with one hand tied behind his back.”

“Aw, come on,” Skip said. “He’s notthat tough.”

Ruth said, “Skip, we had to take you to Promptcare once because you got a quarter-inch splinter under your pinkie nail and you wouldn’t stop crying.”

“Come on,” Skip said, looking embarrassed. “I was twelve.”

“Yeah,” Ruth said. “You know what guys like Rob Wilkins were doing when they were twelve? Smashing beer cans against their foreheads, that’s what.”

“Nobody needs to beat anybody up for me,” I said to ward off a sibling-smackdown. “I’m fine. Really. Thanks for the concern.”

“So what are you going to do?” Mike wanted to know.

“About what?” I asked. “Rob?”

He nodded.

I shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. I mean, there’s nothing Ican do. I can’t find his sister for him, however much I might want to.”

“How do you know?” Mike asked.

Both Ruth and I turned our heads to stare at him as if he’d lost his mind.

“I’m serious,” he said in a voice that cracked. He cleared it. “I mean, you haven’t tried to find anyone in, what, a year? How do you know you don’t have it back? You’ve been sleeping through the night lately.”

Everyone, including me, looked at the beat-up wood floor. The fact that I woke up everyone in the apartment with shrieks of unmitigated terror on a semi-regular basis was a fact that had always previously gone unmentioned by mutual agreement.

“Well,” Mike said indignantly. “It’s true. You seem to be doing better, since you started working with—”

“Don’t say it,” I interrupted quickly.

Mike looked confused. “Why not? It’s true. Ever since you started—”

“You’ll jinx it,” I said, “if you say it out loud.”

I didn’t know whether or not this was true. But I wasn’t taking the chance. I hadn’t had a nightmare in quite a while. All summer, practically. And I wanted to keep it that way.

“But just because she’s sleeping again doesn’t mean she’s got her you-know-what back,” Skip said.

Ruth looked at him. “Skip,” she said. “Shut up.”

“You know what I mean,” Skip said. “Her powers. You know. To find people.”

“Skip,” Ruth said again.

“And what if she does get it back?” Skip wanted to know. “That means they’ll make her come work for them again, right? The government? Or the FBI, or whoever. Right? And then what’s Ruth supposed to do? Find a new roommate?”

“SKIP!”

“I’m just saying, if she’s got the ability back, why would she even bother with school and stuff when she could be raking in a fortune, hiring herself out as—”

“SHUT UP, SKIP!” Mike and Ruth both shouted together.

Skip shut up but looked defensive about it.

“Come on,” Mike said to him. “CSIis on.”

“I hate that show,” Skip complained. “All we have to do is look out the window, and we canlive that show.”

“Then we’ll watch something else, okay?” Mike shook his head as he steered Skip from our room. “Can’t you tell they want to be alone?”

“Who? Ruth and Jess? What for?”

The door closed, as Mike tried to explain it to Skip. Ruth, meanwhile, looked at me.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked, sounding worried.

“I’m sure,” I said, and picked up Hannah’s picture again and gazed at it.

“I can’t believe he had a sister all this time,” Ruth said, “and didn’t even know it. And he really wants to—what? Adopt her?”

“Be her legal guardian,” I said. “I guess her mom’s a crackhead, or something.”

Ruth sighed. “Thank God you guys broke up. Right? Because it sounds to me like he might be in over his head. With a missing teen sister and all. Believe me, Jess, you would not want any part of that.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess not.”

Ruth rolled her eyes. “Oh my God,” she said. “Don’t even tell me you’d help him. You know, if you still could. After the way he treated you.”

“I wouldn’t be helping him,” I said. “I’d be helping her. Hannah.”

“Right,” Ruth said sarcastically. And got up to get ready for bed.

Right.

Six

At precisely eight o’clock the next morning, I banged on the door to room 1520 at the Hilton on West Fifty-third Street.

Rob came to the door looking bleary-eyed, wrapped in the comforter from his hotel bed, his dark hair sticking up in some very interesting tufts.

“Jess,” he said dazedly, when he saw it was me. “What are you—how did you—?”

“Nice hair,” I said.

He reached up and tried to mash down some of the tufts.

“Wait,” he said. “How did you know where to find me?”

“I called your house,” I said. “Why? Were you trying to keep a low profile? Because Chick was more than happy to tell me where you were staying.”

“No,” Rob said. “No, it’s okay. I asked Chick to stay there in case Hannah turned up while I was gone. I just…Sorry. I’m not really awake. Here. Come in.”

I followed him into his room. It wasn’t spacious—no hotel room in New York (that I’d ever seen, anyway) ever is. But it was nice. Rob was obviously making some decent change out of the garage these days, if he could afford digs like this.

“You want some breakfast?” he asked, still wandering around with the comforter trailing after him, like the train of a bride. “I can order us up some pancakes if you want. Oh, hey, there’s a coffeemaker. Want some coffee?”

“Sure,” I said. “But it would be simpler just to have it at the airport.”

He threw me a startled glance from the little alcove where the coffeemaker sat. “Airport?” he echoed.

It was hard not to notice how adorable he looked, straight out of bed. Even with the hair. He kept the room very tidy, too, in spite of the fact that it was just a hotel room. His jean jacket was even hung up on one of those hangers you can’t take off the pole.

“Airport,” I repeated. “Do you want me to find your sister, or not?”

He said, still looking perplexed, “Well, yeah. But I thought—”

“Then I need to go back to Indiana with you,” I said.

“But…” He’d loosened his hold on the comforter a little in his confusion, and I was awarded a glimpse of his naked chest. It was a relief to note that even though he was a responsible business owner now, he still had a six-pack. “But I thought you said…I mean, yesterday you told me—”

“I know what I said yesterday,” I interrupted him.

“But—”

“Don’t talk about it, okay?” I found that I was hugging myself, my arms crossed against my chest. I dropped my hands. “Let’s just go.”

He reached up to run a hand through his thick dark hair—which just made the tuft-problem worse. And also allowed the comforter to slip even more, so that I saw the waistband of his Calvins.

“Okay. But…” He stared at me. Having that blue-gray gaze on me, so searching, so penetrating, was almost more than I could take. I had to look at the floor instead of back at him. “You know where she is?”

“I seriously don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “Can we just go?”

But Rob couldn’t let it rest at that.

“Honest to God, Jess,” he said. “I didn’t mean for—I mean, I just thought this whole thing with you saying you can’t find people anymore was to get out of having to work for that Cyrus guy. Like it was last time. I didn’t know it was real. I don’t want you to do anything you aren’t ready for. I don’t want to…to disrupt this new life you’ve built for yourself.”

Too late for that, isn’t it?That’s what I wanted to ask.

But what would have been the point? He obviously felt bad enough. No sense rubbing it in.

Which is not to say I wasn’t glad he felt bad. Heshould feel bad, after what he’d put me through. I wasn’t about to mention the fact that waking up an hour ago knowing where his sister was, after more than a year of not being able to find my shoes, let alone another human being, had thrilled me beyond words. I mean, that didn’t have anything to do with HIM, really. It just meant that I was finally beginning to heal, after everything I’d been through. That was all.

And that maybe Mike was right. About the fact that since I’d started working with those kids of Ruth’s, I’d started to dream again, instead of tossing around all night, lost in the throes of a never-ending nightmare.

“Look,” I said to Rob in a hard voice. Because I wasn’t about to let him know any of this. “Do you want your sister back or not?”

“I do,” he said, nodding vigorously. “Of course.”

“Then don’t question,” I said. “Just do.”

“Sure,” Rob said, reaching for the phone. “Sure, I’ll call and book you a seat on the same return flight I’ve got. We’ll go right after I’ve had a shower.”

“Great,” I said.

And watched as he dialed, asking myself (for the thousandth time that morning) what the hell I thought I was doing. Was this really something I wanted to get myself involved in? I mean, the progress I’d already made, just by being able to come up with an address for Hannah, was incredible. The shrinks back in Washington would have been throwing their hands into the air with joy if they knew, calling it a breakthrough. Why was I trying to push it, by going WITH him to find her? I mean, I could just give Rob the address and be done with it. Wash my hands of it. Go to work with Ruth, teach some more kids that there’s more to life than video games and pizza by the slice.

But for an hour last night, before I’d been able to fall asleep, I’d lain there thinking over what he’d said. The part about me being broken, I mean. What if he was right? I was pretty sure he WAS right. Part of mehad come back from overseas…different. Broken, I guess you could even call it.

And not just the part of me that knew how to find people in my sleep, either.

Maybe I HAD been a little hasty to condemn him for the Boobs-As-Big-As-My-Head girl. Clearly we had never worked as a couple, Rob and I. First the age difference, then the cultural difference, and then finally, the fact that I’m a huge biological freak had come between us.

But we could still be friends, like he’d said.

And friends help each other out. Right?

Rob didn’t, I notice, ask me any questions on the way to the airport. He was following my advice to a T: doing, not questioning. Once we got through airport security, he bought me an egg-and-sausage biscuit—breakfast of champions—and an orange juice and himself some kind of waffle thing, which we ate in silence in the crowded, noisy food court at LaGuardia.

Maybe,I thought to myself,he still isn’t quite awake. Maybe he doesn’t know what to make of my sudden change in attitude towards him and his problem.

Which wasn’t so odd, actually. I didn’t quite know what to make of it myself.

Ruth had seemed to think she did, though. She’d rolled over at six, when our alarm went off, took one look at me, lying there staring at the ceiling, as I’d been doing since I’d wakened at five, and went, “Oh, crap. It’s back, isn’t it?”

I hadn’t taken my eyes off the ceiling. There’s a crack up there that looks a lot like a rabbit, just like in those books I’d loved when I was little about a badger named Frances.

“It’s back,” I’d said quietly, so as not to wake the boys.

“Well,” Ruth said. “What are you going to do? Call Cyrus Krantz?”

“Um,” I’d said. “Trynot .”

“Oh my God.” Ruth rose up on one elbow. “You’re going home with him, aren’t you? Rob, I mean.”

I tore my gaze from the ceiling and blinked at her. “How did you know?”

“Because I know you,” she said. “And I know how you operate. You can never leave well enough alone. You can’t just save the world. You have to micromanage every aspect of its rescue. That’s why,” she added wearily, swinging her legs from the bed and sitting up, “you’d make a crappy superhero. You’d stick around after the big save to make sure everybody’s okay with what you just did, instead of just flying off into the sunset, the way you’re supposed to.”

It was good to know I had the support of my friends, I’d said sarcastically. To which Ruth had replied, with her usual early-morning cheerfulness, “Oh, shut up.”

“Will you tell the kids I’ll be back in a few days?” I asked her.

“You won’t be back,” Ruth said.

I’d stared at her. “What are you talking about? Of course I will. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

“You won’t come back,” Ruth said again. “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. For you, it probably isn’t. But just face it, Jess. You aren’t coming back.”

“What? You think I’m going to DIE tracking down Rob Wilkins’s runaway little sister?”

“Not die, no,” Ruth said. “But you just might let yourself get rescued after all.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ll figure it out,” she said darkly.

I didn’t let her negativity towards the whole thing bother me. The truth is, Ruth’s never been much of a morning person.

There are flights from New York City to Indianapolis every few hours from LaGuardia. Rob managed to get me onto the one he’d been planning on taking home. It wasn’t a big jet, like the kind they used to shuttle people from New York to LA. After 9/11, the airlines downsized, and now when you fly to Indiana from New York, it’s on one of those small planes you walk out onto the tarmac to get into. They only seat about thirty people, at most. And the quarters are cramped, to say the least. Rob had gotten us seats together—without, I’d like to point out, asking me if that was what I wanted. The flight wasn’t full, and there were plenty of empty rows behind us where I could have gone and stretched out. Well, sort of.

But I told myself we were friends now, and friends stick together. Right?

It was a quick flight. I’d barely finished the in-flight magazine before we were landing. Rob just had a carry-on, same as me, so we didn’t have to wait for our baggage to get unloaded. We walked straight out to where he was parked.

And I saw that he’d traveled to the airport on his Indian.

“Sorry,” he said when he saw my face. “I didn’t think you’d be coming back with me. We can rent a car, if you want.”

“No,” I said. It was stupid that the sight of that motorcycle should freak me out so much. “No, it’s fine. Do you still have the spare helmet?”

He did, of course. The same one he used to loan me back when we—well, whatever we were doing back then. I put it on, then straddled the seat behind him, wrapping my arms around his waist and trying not to notice how good he smelled—like Hilton Hotel shower gel and whatever laundry detergent his mom—I mean,he —was using these days.

It was weird to be back in Indiana. The last time I’d been there had been over spring break. Buds that had only just been starting to show back then had now burst into midsummer bloom. Everything was lush and green. Everywhere you looked, you saw green. There’s green in New York—trees line almost every street. But the overall color is gray, the color of the sidewalks and streets and buildings.

Here all I could see was green, stretching until it met a cloudless, achingly blue sky.

I hadn’t realized, until then, how much I’d missed it.

The sky, I mean. And all that green.

When we reached the outskirts of our town, an hour later, I saw that other things besides the buds had changed since I’d last been there. The Chocolate Moose was gone, sold out to Dairy Queen. Same building, new sign.

When we stopped at the red light in front of the courthouse, Rob turned his head to ask me, “Where to?”

“My house,” I shouted back, over the thunder of his engine. “I need to drop my stuff off.”

He nodded and roared off in the direction of Lumbley Lane.

And I soon saw that even the house I’d grown up in looked different, though the only thing that had changed was the color of the trim, which my mother had had spruced up to white from its former cream.

But the place seemed…smaller, in a way.

Rob turned into the driveway and cut the engine. I hopped off the back of the bike, then took off the helmet and handed it to him.

“I’ll call you later,” I said to him. “Will you be at home or the garage?”

He’d pulled off his own helmet. Now he looked at me oddly—as if he thought he’d done something wrong, but couldn’t figure out what.

Welcome to my world.

“What about—” he started to ask.

“I said I’ll call you.” I didn’t know how else to make him understand that I needed to be alone for this next part.

He looked a little angry as he jammed his helmet back on.

“Fine,” he said. “Call me at home. That’s where I’ll be. I should check to see—I mean, maybe she came back by now.”

“She didn’t,” I said.

He studied me through the clear plastic screen of his helmet. There was something he wanted to say. That was obvious.

But he seemed to think better of it and settled for saying instead, “Fine. See you later.”

Then he turned around and drove away…

…Just as the screen door on the front porch of my house squeaked open, and my dad came out and went, “Jess? What are YOU doing here?”

I didn’t tell them the truth. My family, I mean. That I was there for Rob,or that I had my power back…for now.

Sure, all they’d have to do was call Mikey. He’d have cracked under the pressure eventually—though I’d left him with firm instructions not to say a word to anyone about Rob’s visit OR my apparently rejuvenated ability to dream.

But I knew it would be a while before Mike succumbed to the peer pressure to tell. Especially if he wanted to stay on Ruth’s good side. Which I suspected he did.

Instead—after giving our German Shepherd, Chigger, the kisses he leaped up on me and demanded in his joy at seeing me home—I just told my mom and dad that I’d missed them, and had decided to drop in for a quick visit, using some of my airline bonus miles. It’s amazing what parents will believe, if they want to believe it enough. Mine would never, I knew, shut up about it if they learned what I’dreally come home for—to find someone. Worse, to find someone related to Rob Wilkins…whom my dad had actually always liked, up until I’d made the mistake of telling him about Miss-Boobs-As-Big-As-My-Head. Even then, he’d just gone, “But, Jess, are you sure about who was doing the kissing? I mean, if Rob says she was the one who started it, and he was just an innocent bystander, it’s not fair of you to blame him for it.”

Dads. Seriously. They should just stick to handing out the allowance.

My mom was delighted to see me, but mad I hadn’t called first.

“I would’ve planned a barbecue,” she said. “A welcome home barbecue, and invited the Abramowitzes and the Thompkinses and the Blumenthals and the—”

“Yeah, that’s okay, Mom,” I said. “I’m here for a couple of days. There’s still time to plan something if you really want to.”

“We could have a brunch,” my mom said all gleefully. “On Saturday. People like brunch. And if they already have plans for the rest of the day, they can still do them, after brunch.”

“Douglas is at work?” I asked, after dumping my stuff off in my room and noticing that they’d converted his room, across the hall, to an office for my dad, who’d formerly done the books from the restaurants at the dining room table.

“Probably,” my mother said, as she fussed around, saying things like my sheets weren’t freshened up, and how I should have called so she could run them through the wash first. “Or one of those city council meetings.”

“What?” I grinned. “Douglas’s interested in politics now?”

My mother rolled her eyes. “Apparently. Well, not politics, exactly. You know they’re shutting down Pine Heights—” Pine Heights was the elementary school all of us had gone to. It was three blocks away—so close, we’d come home for lunch every day—a building constructed during the Depression by WPA workers, ancient enough that it still had two entrances, one for boys and one for girls.

At least according to the scrollwork over the doorways. No one, when I’d attended it, had ever paid any attention to the signs.

“There aren’t enough children in the neighborhood anymore to fill it,” my mother said. “So the school board’s shutting it down. The city wants to convert it to luxury condos. But Douglas and Tasha”—Tasha was Douglas’s girlfriend and the daughter of our neighbors across the street—“have some big idea about—well, he’ll tell you about it when you see him, I’m sure. It’s all he ever talks about anymore.”

“Maybe I’ll stop by the store and see him,” I said. “If you think he’s working now.”

“He probably is,” my mother said, rolling her eyes. “It’s all he ever does. Besides this Pine Heights thing.”

Which was funny, because just a few years ago, none of us would have believed that Douglas would ever do something as normal as hold down a job. It hadn’t been that long ago, really, that we’d all despaired of Douglas ever even leaving his room, much less supporting himself.

“Invite him for dinner,” my mother called as I banged out of the house. “Tasha, too, if she’s around. I’ll make your father grill some steaks.”

“Hey,” my dad yelled from his office-slash-Douglas’s old room. “I heard that.”

I left them squabbling and went down to the garage. Opening the barnlike doors—our house is a converted farmhouse, and almost a century old like most of the houses in our neighborhood—I went in and found what I’d been looking for: the baby-blue 1968 Harley my dad had bought me, as he’d promised he would, for high school graduation.

Not that I’d specified a year or color. Any bike would have suited me fine. The fact that he’d gotten me such a perfectly pimped ride had really been the icing on what was already some pretty delicious cake.

Still, with one thing or another—the war, and then my acceptance to Juilliard—I had only gotten to ride her a couple of times. I hadn’t dared bring her to New York, where she’d have been stolen in—well, a New York minute. She was a real beauty, the color of the sky on an Easter Sunday—not quite turquoise, but not exactly teal, either. I loved her with an affection that probably wasn’t normal. I mean, for an inanimate object.

But she was just so perfect, with her cream-colored leather seat and shiny chrome trim. My dad had gotten me a matching cream-colored helmet, which I put on after dragging her out from behind my mom’s trim paint cans.

A second later, I was gunning the engine. It rumbled like the finely tuned instrument it was. Four months of disuse had done nothing to dull this beauty queen.

And then I was out on the street with her, feeling the tension that had settled in my neck—around about the time I’d opened my apartment door to find Rob there—finally starting to dissipate.

There is nothing like riding a really finely tuned motorcycle to get rid of stress.

But instead of turning towards downtown, where Douglas’s comic-book store was, I turned Blue Beauty—yeah, okay, so I’d named my bike. I think we’ve already established that I’m a freak—towards the newer part of town, over by the big, multimillion dollar hospital they’d finished a few years ago. New apartment buildings had sprung up all around it to house the several thousand people who worked there.

Not the doctors, of course. They all lived in my neighborhood. The orderlies and nurses lived in this one.

Hannah Snyder, as I’d learned from my dream about her, was crashing in Apartment 2T at the Fountain Bleu complex just behind the Kroger Sav-On, right next to the hospital. I was surprised to see that there really was a fountain at the Fountain Bleu apartment complex. It was kind of a lame one, but it bubbled away in front of the complex in a somewhat soothing manner. All it needed, really, was a couple of swans, and it would be like the real Fountain Bleu it was named for, over in France. Or wherever.

I parked the bike and stored my helmet in its carryall. Then I strolled across the parking lot and thumped once on the door to 2T.

“Who is it?” a girl’s voice asked.

“Me,” I said. “Open up, Hannah.”

She had no idea, of course, who I was. Not yet, anyway.

Still, I’ve found, over the years, if you answerMe whenever anybody wants to know who it is, they’ll nearly always open the door, thinkingthey ’re the dumb one for not recognizing your voice.

Rob’s little sister stared at me a full five seconds before she realized I wasn’t the “me” she’d been expecting.

But she definitely recognized me. Even though we’d never had the pleasure of making each other’s acquaintance before. I guess she was up on her local history. Either that, or Rob had a picture of me somewhere.

Okay, probably she recognized me from TV.

She said a very bad word and, looking panicked, tried to slam the door in my face.

But it’s hard to slam the door in someone’s face when they’re holding a motorcycle-booted foot against the door frame.

Seven

“Better let me in,” I said.

Hannah made a face.

But she let go of the door.

“I can’t believe this,” she was grumbling as I pushed the door all the way open and invited myself into a stark white, fairly small living-room-dining-room-den combo. The paint still smelled fresh, and all of the furniture—a cheap leather set that reeked of no-payment-down—looked brand-new.

“He said you two were broken up.” Hannah looked hot-cheeked and accusing.

“Yeah,” I said. “We are.”

I noticed a large-screen TV against the wall. She’d been watching Dr. Phil’s most recentFamily in Crisis . I wondered if she’d noticed any similarities between their lives and her own. I found the remote on the couch and flicked it off.

“Where is he?” I asked her.

“Who?”

Hannah had started to cry. Not because she was unhappy, I didn’t think. I think because she was frustrated. And maybe a little scared. It’s no joke when America’s foremost psychic hunts you down. Especially when she’s wearing motorcycle boots.

I guess Hannah doesn’t read the papers much or she’d have known—you know. That I hadn’t exactly been in top form lately.

I thought about telling her that she ought to be gratified that I’d found her at all. She was my first find in over a year. That had to be an honor, of some kind.

Except that to her, it probably wasn’t.

“You know who I’m talking about,” I said to her. “Where is he?”

“My brother?” Hannah sniffed. “How should I know? At the stupid garage, I suppose.”

“Not your brother,” I said. “Your boyfriend.”

Hannah’s mascara-rimmed eyes widened in an unconvincing attempt at looking innocent.

“What boyfriend?” she asked. “I don’t have a—”

“Hannah,” I said, “I didn’t come a thousand miles to listen to lies. Somebody’s paying the rent on this apartment. So tell me where he is, or I swear to God I’ll have Child Protective Services here in five minutes flat.”

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket to illustrate the seriousness of my intent. Although truthfully, I didn’t exactly have the number for Child Protective Services on my speed dial. I’d stolen that line fromJudging Amy , one of Ruth’s favorite TV shows, which she makes me watch in syndication at least five times a week. It is oddly addictive.

Hannah seemed to realize she was up against a force greater than her own, since she said with a defeated sniff, “He’s at work. He’s very important, you know.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” I said sarcastically. “What does he do?”

“His dad owns this place,” Hannah said with a flicker of In-Your-Face-Girlfriend ’tude. “The apartment complex, I mean. He helps run it.”

Well, that explained the apartment, anyway.

But not the rest of it.

“So you picked a real winner, there,” I said. Again with the sarcasm. “If he’s such a catch, how come your mom didn’t approve? And don’t even try to tell me she did. Is it because he’s too old for you?”

“She’s such a bitch,” Hannah said from the little ball she’d curled herself into on the leather couch. She was wearing jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. Between the shirt and her hair, which was still dyed to resemble spumoni ice cream, she was a veritable rainbow of color. “I mean, she brings home a different guy every week practically. But I tell her about Randy and she completely flips!”

I went to the window and pulled back the curtain liner. I could see the other side of the complex. There had to be over a hundred units altogether, making up Fountain Bleu Luxury Apartments. In the center of the complex was a pitifully small, kidney-shaped pool. A young mother sat beside it, as her kids paddled around in the shallow end.

“Where’d you meet him?” I asked, dropping the curtain and turning back towards Hannah. “Internet?”

She nodded. “A manga chatroom,” she said. “Randy’s a big manga fan. You know what manga is?” The look she darted me was sly.

“Japanese illustrated novels,” I said. I wasn’t about to mention that my brother had one of the foremost manga collections in southern Indiana. “Go on.”

“Well, he asked me to meet him in a private chat room, so I did.” Hannah was picking at the threads in a hole in the knee of her jeans. “And he was just…everything I’ve ever dreamed of. He asked me to spend the weekend with him, but when I asked my mom, she was like, no.”

“So you told your newly discovered big brother, who is unfamiliar with the lengths teenage girls will go to get what they want, that your mom’s boyfriends were putting the moves on you.” I didn’t need psychic powers to tell I’d hit the nail on the head. The truth was written all over her face. “And Rob believed you and invited you to stay with him on a trial basis. And you ditched him for this Randy guy the minute you got the chance.”

She had the grace to look ashamed.

“I wanted to tell Rob where I was,” she said. “Really, I did. But Randy said—”

“Oh, wait,” I said, holding up a hand to stop her. “Let me guess what Randy said. Randy said your big brother wouldn’t understand. Randy said your big brother would try to make something dirty out of it and maybe call the cops.” Though most likely, Rob would have just beaten the guy to a bloody pulp. “Randy said that a love like the one you and he share is a sacred thing, not easily understood by us mere mortals. Did I leave anything out?”

Hannah blinked at me, looking hurt.

“You don’t need to make fun of it,” she said. “Just because things didn’t work out between you and Rob, leaving you a bitter old maid, is no reason to assume every guy is a jerk.”

“Oh,” I said. “I see. Hannah, how old is Randy?”

“He said you’d ask that,” Hannah said, getting up suddenly to go to the kitchen to get a glass of water. But I know she’d only gotten up so she wouldn’t have to meet my gaze. “Well, not you, exactly, since I never thought—I mean, Rob said you were broken up. But Randy said people would try to make something dirty out of it, just because he happens to be a few years older than me—”

“How much older than you, Hannah?” I asked in an even voice.

“He’s twenty-seven,” she said, plunking down her water glass on the imitation granite counter. “But Randy says age doesn’t mean anything! Randy says he and I knew each other in a previous life. He says we’re destined to be together—”

“Hannah,” I said in a hard voice. “You are fifteen. He is twelve years older than you are. His having a sexual relationship with you is actually illegal.”

“Randy says the laws of man don’t recognize a love that is as true as ours—”

“Hannah,” I said. “If you tell me one more thing Randy says, I am going to smack you back into last week. Do you understand?”

She blinked at me, a little taken aback, but mostly still defiant. At least she was meeting my gaze now, though.

I leaned on one hip and said, “Look. You aren’t stupid. You can’t be, because you’re related to Rob. So why are you acting like such a world-class sap?”

Her mouth fell open to reply, but I cut her off.

“You know all that stuff about the two of you meeting in another life is a load of bull. You know this Randy guy is after you for one thing. That’s why your mom didn’t approve, because she knew it, too. And you know the only reason you like Randy back is because he buys you things and pays attention to you and lets you live in this cool apartment where you can watch TV all day. Speaking of which, it’s a beautiful day outside. Why aren’t you at the pool?”

“Randy says—”

“Randy told you not to go to the pool, because someone might see you and start asking questions. Right? Doesn’t that tell you something right there, Hannah? If this Randy guy really loved you, he’d have tried to get in good with your mom, not steal you from her. He’d have waited for you until you were legal, then asked you out, not hide you away in some apartment his dad’s paying for. Sure, things are great right now. You can lounge around and do whatever you want. But what about when school starts in the fall? Are you just going to drop out? Be Randy’s love slave for the rest of your life? That’s a worthy aspiration for a girl of your intelligence.”

She raised her chin at my sneering tone. She had spunk, anyway. I’d give her that.

“I hate high school,” she said sullenly. “Everyone there is such a phony. Randy said he’d help me get my GED online—”

“Oh, right. And then what? Online college?”

“Randy says—”

“Oh, listen to yourself,” I snapped. “Randy says this, Randy says that. Don’t you have a mind of your own? Or do you just automatically do whatever Randy says?”

“Yes,” Hannah said. She was crying openly now. And not from fear or frustration.

“Yes, you have a mind of your own? Or yes, you automatically do what Randy says?”

“I can see why my brother broke up with you,” Hannah said with sudden venom. “You’re really mean!”

“Oh,” I said, smiling. “You think this is mean? I haven’t even gotten STARTED yet. Get your stuff. Now. We’re leaving.”

She stared at me, dumbfounded. “What?”

“Get your stuff,” I said. “I’m taking you back to your brother’s house. And then I’m calling your mother, and we’re all going to have a little talk about what is REALLY going on back at her house. And I’m betting she’s going to say none of her exes ever hit on you. And guess what? I believe her.”

Hannah looked about as shocked as a person who has grown totally used to getting her own way could look, upon suddenly finding things not going her way.

“I—I’m not going anywhere,” she cried. “You try to drag me out of here and Randy—Randy will kill you!”

“Hannah,” I said. “Let me tell you something. I just spent a year working with U.S. Marines, whose only job was to track down and detain men who’d trained at terrorist death camps. Compared to that, some twenty-seven-year-old pimp named Randy who doesn’t even own his apartment is NOTHING to me. Do you understand? NOTHING.”

Hannah’s lower lip quivered. Her gaze darted around the apartment, as if she were looking for something to throw at me. I regarded her calmly, however, from the front doorway, which I was guarding in case the ever-fabulous Randy happened to come in unexpectedly.

“Randy’s not a pimp” was all she could come up with.

“Not yet,” I said. “Give him time. I’m sure, with the love of a girl like you behind him, he’ll live up to his potential.”

“I—I HATE you!” Hannah screamed at me. “You are such a BITCH! My brother is so WRONG about you! He goes on about you like you’re some kind of PRINCESS. Did you know he keeps a SCRAPBOOK about you? Yeah, he does. Every time anything about you appears in the paper or some magazine, he clips it out and SAVES it. He’s got like ten thousand pictures of you—God, he never even misses an episode of that STUPID TV show about you. He even made ME sit and watch it. All he ever talks about is how great and brave and smart and funny you are. I wasdying to meet you someday, even though you totally ripped out his heart and stomped on it. And now I finally do meet you, and I find out you’re nothing but a huge, giant, überbitch!”

I could only blink at her, stunned not so much by her outburst—okay, not at ALL stunned by the outburst—but by its content. Rob keepsscrapbooks about me? Rob watches the TV show about me? Rob thinks I’m brave and smart and funny? She thinks I broke ROB’S heart?

Boy, had she ever gotten THAT one wrong.

Could she possibly have been telling the truth? Could any of that stuff be even remotely—

“I HATE YOU!”

I ducked just as the lamp whizzed past my head.

Good thing, too, since the thing was made of brass, and ended up denting the cheap drywall, instead of my skull.

I straightened and glared at her with narrowed eyes.

“Okay,” I said, “that’s it. You don’t get to pack your stuff. You’re coming with me now, just as you are.”

And I reached out and grabbed her by her ear.

Sure, it’s an age-old technique, used by mothers worldwide to control fractious offspring.

But did you know the U.S. Marines use it occasionally as well, to quell a recalcitrant suspect? They do, actually.

Because it not only works, but it doesn’t leave a mark. On the victim, I mean.

Oh, yeah. I learned a lot of useful stuff like that while I was overseas.

Hannah balked at first over being dragged by her ear from her boyfriend’s cushy apartment to my motorcycle. But, as I explained to her, it was either that or I called the cops, and Randy got an extra-nice surprise when he got home from work that night, in the form of an arrest for statutory rape.

She finally gave in, but not exactly what you’d call graciously. I was strapping my helmet on her—I didn’t have a spare, so I was going to have to risk my precious cranium to transport the little brat home—when she stiffened.

I knew without even glancing over my shoulder what she was looking at.

“Where is he?” I asked evenly. “And don’t get any ideas about calling him over here. I can dial nine-one-one faster than anybody you’ve ever seen.”

“He’s getting out of his car,” Hannah said, her gaze devouring the object of her affections the way Ruth devours éclairs—or would if she went off her no-flour-or-sugar diet. “He’s going to be really upset when he sees I’m gone.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “I bet five dollars you never hear from him again.”

“Are you kidding?” Hannah shook her head. “He’ll go to the ends of the earth looking for me if he has to. He told me. We’re soul mates.”

Straddling the bike, I glanced in the direction she was staring, and saw a tall, skinny guy getting out of a Trans Am.

Seriously. Why do they always drive a Trans Am?

But instead of heading for Apartment 2T, old Randy headed straight for Apartment 1S. Hannah and I watched in silence as he thumped once on the door. It opened and a dark-haired girl, who looked even younger than Hannah, peered up at him. He leaned down and pressed a kiss on her that appeared to make her knees melt, since he had to drag her back into the apartment, as her legs apparently failed to work properly anymore.

Behind me, Hannah made a faint noise, like a kitten who has only just woken from a long, deep sleep.

“Huh,” I said, gunning the engine. “Looks like Randy’s got more than one soul mate, doesn’t it?”

Then I got us out of there just as fast as I could. Without going over the speed limit, of course.

Eight

Rob was on the phone when I tugged open the screen door and then pulled a very humbled Hannah into his living room.

His jaw dropped when he saw us. Then, remembering himself, he said into the phone, “Gwen? Yeah. She just walked in. I don’t know. No, she looks fine. Yeah.” He held the phone out towards Hannah. “Your mother wants to talk to you, Han.”

Hannah’s face crumpled. Then she turned and ran dramatically up the stairs, weeping the whole way. A second later, we heard a bedroom door slam.

Rob looked at me. I rolled my eyes. He said into the phone, “Gwen? Yeah. She’s a little…upset. Let me go talk to her. Then I’ll call you back. Yeah. Bye.”

Then he hung up and stared at me some more.

“She’s in love,” I said, nodding my head in the direction Hannah’s sobs were floating from.

“But she’s all right?” he asked in a tight voice.

“Physically,” I said. “I think a little visit to the ob-gyn might be in order.”

His legs seemed to give out from beneath him. He sagged onto a chair at the dining room table.

“Thank you, Jess,” he said faintly, speaking not to me, but to the carved wooden fruit bowl in the center of the table.

I shrugged. Gratitude makes me uneasy.

Particularly when it comes from someone who looks as fine as Rob does in a pair of jeans. It was so unfair that he should be so hot and at the same time so unattainable.

Unless any of that stuff Hannah had told me back at the apartment complex was true.

But how could it possibly—

To keep my mind from straying into this dangerous territory, I looked around Rob’s place. It had been totally redone since I’d last been there. The chintz his mom had loved so much was long gone and replaced with masculine-looking—but still nice—olive-greens and browns. The flowered couch was nowhere to be seen, replaced by a brown suede one. The old nineteen-inch Sony was now a sleek plasma screen, mounted to the wall above a dark wood bookcase filled with CDs and DVDs.

Whatever else Rob might have been through since I last saw him, he wasn’t hurting for cash. He’d converted his mother’s place into a bona fide bachelor pad.

“You got any soda or something?” I asked. Because thinking about all the girls he might have been entertaining in said bachelor pad had left me feeling a little weak.

“In the fridge,” he said. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the fruit bowl. There were three red apples and a banana ripening in it. If I wasn’t mistaken, Rob Wilkins appeared to be in shock.

I went into the kitchen. It, too, had been totally remodeled, the old white farmhouse cupboards replaced by sleek unpainted cherry wood. The lucite counter was gone and a black granite one gleamed in its place. The appliances were all new, too, and were stainless steel instead of white.

I found two Cokes in the fridge and brought one out to him before taking a seat in a chair across the table from his. I figured, judging from the way he couldn’t stop staring at that fruit bowl, his electrolytes had sunk as low as mine. Or something.

“Where’d you get the money for all this?” I asked, popping open my Coke can and nodding towards the plasma screen. My mom would have killed me if she’d heard me—it’s totally impolite to ask someone how they got the money to pay for something. But I figured Rob wouldn’t care.

He didn’t.

“Dentists,” he said. And looked away from the fruit bowl long enough to open his own soda can.

“Dentists?”

He took a long slug from the Coke, then sat the can down again on an expensive woven place mat.

“Sorry,” he said. “Yeah, dentists. They’re about the only people who can afford Harleys anymore. Well, and retired doctors. And lawyers.”

I remembered the bike he’d been fixing up in his barn two Thanksgivings before. The bike he’d been fixing up when I’d told him I loved him. The time he hadn’t said he loved me back.

“I get it,” I said. “You’ve been buying old bikes, fixing them up, and selling them?”

“Right,” he said. “The market for antique bikes is incredibly hot right now.”

I thought about my bike, parked out in his gravel driveway. I wondered where my dad had gotten it. I can’t believe I had never thought to ask. Had Rob—

But no. No, that would just be too weird.

“That’s great,” I said instead. “The place looks…” Move-in ready. God, what is WRONG with me? “The place looks really nice.”

“Not nice enough, apparently,” Rob said with a grimace and a glance up the stairs.

“Yeah,” I said. “About that. She lied to you, you know.”

“About what was going on with her mom?” Rob nodded. “I know. Now. Gwen—that’s her mom—and I have been talking. Hannah snowed us both pretty good, it looks like. She told Gwen I was suicidal over a girl and that I’d begged her to come stay with me a few weeks to help give me a reason for living.”

I thought back to what Hannah had said, about my breaking Rob’s heart. So I guess it hadn’t been true after all. It had all just been to get back at me.

But what about the scrapbook? And making her watch the TV show?

“She met him on the Internet,” I said, and filled Rob in on the details about “Randy.”

“I’ll kill him,” Rob said simply, when I was through.

“Well, you may have to stand in line,” I said, and told him about the girl we’d seen in Apartment 1S. “I don’t think Hannah’s taking off is going to upset him for long. Looked to me like he had plenty of other sweet young things to choose from.”

Rob gazed at me concernedly across the fruit bowl. “I don’t want Hannah to have to deal with cops and testifying and things like that. I mean…she’s only fifteen years old.”

“I thought that’s how you might feel about it,” I said, absently picking up some papers that had been lying farther down the table, since it hurt to meet his gaze. “Hey. What’s this?”

I held up the papers I had seized. They were a course catalog for Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences, and a slip of paper with various numbers written on it.

“My fall class schedule,” Rob said casually. “I’ve been taking night classes. You want another soda?”

“Sure,” I said, looking at the courses he’d listed. Intro to Comparative Lit. Freshman Psych. Biology 101. “Geez, Rob,” I said. “You own the garage, fix up old bikes, AND go to college part-time? And you thought you’d just add a teen kid sister to all of that?”

“I had it under control,” Rob said in a voice that indicated his jaw was gritted. “At least—”

“Until the kid sister came along,” I said. “Still. What were you thinking?”

“I didn’t think she’d be…well, the way she is.”

“What’d you THINK she’d be like?” I asked, taking the second can of soda from him.

“I thought she’d be more like you,” he said, causing me nearly to choke to death on what I’d just swallowed.

“ME?” I gurgled. “Oh my God, you have to be kidding me. I was the biggest pain in the ass in the world when I was her age.”

“That’s not how I remember it,” Rob said. But not in what I would call an affectionate manner.

“Yeah? Well, you can ask my parents,” I said.

“You weren’t like Hannah,” Rob said, shaking his head. “I mean, yeah, you got in trouble. But it was for punching people, not shacking up with guys you met on the Internet. You would never have…”

His voice trailed off. The only sound in the house was that of Hannah’s sobs, still coming loud and clear from what could only, I assumed, have been Rob’s old bedroom. He’d have moved into the master bedroom his mom used to sleep in. I was pretty sure it probably wasn’t pink anymore, either.

“Well,” I said, because I couldn’t, for the life of me, think of a solitary other thing to say. I mean, I wanted to ask him, of course. If what Hannah had said was true—about his having a scrapbook about me, and the part about me having broken his heart—

But Hannah had already told so many whoppers, it didn’t seem likely that the ones I wanted most to be true were actually going to be the only truths she’d told.

Especially since Rob wasn’t exactly giving off any Let’s-go-back-to-whatever-we-were vibes.

On the other hand, he HAD just found out his kid sister had been seduced by a twenty-seven-year-old Trans Am owner named Randy.

“I better go,” I said. “I’m sure Mom’s got dinner ready by now.”

“Sure,” Rob said. “I’ll walk you out.”

And the next thing I knew, we were strolling across his well-groomed lawn to my bike.

I wanted to ask him, then. You know, if it was one of his. But the truth was, a part of me already knew.

“She’s a beauty,” Rob said, nodding towards the bike.

“Blue Beauty,” I said automatically, before realizing how cheesy it would sound out loud.

“She runs good?” he asked.

“Like a kitten,” I said.

“I can’t believe somebody ever gave you a license,” he said with a chuckle.

“One of the few perks,” I said, “of working for the government.”

Then wished I hadn’t. Because Rob’s smile vanished.

“Right,” he said. “Well. Thank you. I mean, for bringing her back.”

I felt like a total and complete jackass. There was so much I wanted to say—so much I wanted to ask.

But all that came tumbling out of my mouth instead were the words, “I’m sorry.”

He looked down at me in the purpling light, as the sun sunk down below the treetops, past the fields that surrounded the farm.

“Sorry?” he asked. “For what?”

“For,” I said uncomfortably.For everything, I wanted to say.For being such a freak. For listening to my mother. For ever letting you out of my sight.

“For all that stuff I said to you last night” was what ended up coming out of my mouth. “For acting like such a total—um, überbitch, is how I believe your sister put it.”

Something happened to his face, then. It seemed to twitch, almost as if I’d slapped it.

But instead of looking angry about it, an expression of—well, something I couldn’t identify—spread across his face. And the next thing I knew, he had put his hand over mine, where it rested on the gearshift.

“Jess,” he said.

Who knows what would have happened next if he hadn’t been interrupted by a tinkling crash from the upstairs bedroom Hannah had locked herself inside? The crash was followed by an enraged scream. Hannah was having a tantrum.

The truth is, even if she hadn’t…well. I doubt anything would have happened next, anyway.

“You better go deal with that,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound much like my own. That’s on account of how dry my throat had grown, despite the two Cokes.

“Yeah,” Rob said, dropping his hand from mine and glancing back towards the house. “I guess I better. Listen. Will you call me this time? Before you go back to New York?”

His eyes seemed to blaze in the twilight.

“So we can talk about what we’re going to do about Randy, I mean,” he added quickly, lest I make the mistake of thinking he actually, you know. Cared about me. As more than just a friend.

“Sure,” I said. Even though I was totally lying. Because the truth was, I knew I could never bejust friends with him. This was good-bye—whether he knew it or not. “See ya.”

“See ya,” he said. And turned and walked slowly back to the house.

I tugged on my helmet, relieved that, if he should happen to turn and look back—fat chance of that happening—the plastic shield would hide the tears that had sprung suddenly into my eyes.

God, I am such an idiot. First for falling for Hannah’s lies, and then for ever believing—

But whatever. Really, what had changed? Nothing. He was still just a guy I’d—whatever-we-were—for a while.

Still. I mean, at least Hannah, messed up as she was, had taken a chance on the guy she loved. Sure, he was a jerk and obviously didn’t care about her at all.

But at least she’d gotten some pleasure out of it. At least, I hoped so.

What had I gotten out of my relationship with Rob? Nothing but heartache.

The funniest thing? Those things Hannah had said Rob had told her about me—they weren’t true.I wasn’t the brave one. No, that was Hannah. Sure, I’d risked my life, plenty of times. But Hannah had risked something that, in the end, proved much more painful to lose:

Her heart.

I didn’t look back as I drove away. Because I didn’t want to see him close the door on me.

Again.

Nine

I returned to my parents’ house to find a party in full swing.

It’s really something what my mom can do when she puts her mind to it. She’d decided she wanted to have a party to celebrate my (temporary) homecoming, and by the time I got back from rescuing Rob’s little sister, a party was what was going on.

And okay, it was a bit on the small side for Mom.

But both Ruth and Skip’s parents were there from next door, as was Douglas, with his girlfriend, Tasha. Even Tasha’s parents, the Thompkinses, from across the street, were there, Dr. Thompkins out on the back deck with my dad and Mr. Abramowitz, swapping barbecue tips (not that my dad, a restaurateur and himself an amazing cook, was listening to any of theirs).

I had always felt uncomfortable around the Thompkinses, since their only son, Tasha’s brother, Nate, disappeared three years ago, and I had failed to find him…until it was too late.

But to their credit, none of them seemed to hold a grudge. This might be because in the end, I had brought their son’s killers to justice.

Still, you would think seeing me would just bring back memories. A lot of people—including me—were kind of surprised the Thompkinses stayed on Lumbley Lane at all, considering the fact that the place could hardly have had good memories for them.

But they stayed. And came over to my parents’ house for dinner quite often. Often enough, it would seem, for their daughter and my brother Douglas to have formed what was now the longest-lasting—and probably emotionally healthiest—romantic relationship of any of the three Mastriani kids so far.

“Hey, Jess,” Douglas said when he saw me, and gave me what was, for him, a very uncharacteristic greeting in the form of a kiss on the cheek.

Sure, it was a shy one. But still. It was a far cry from how he’d barely been able to bring himself to touch another human being just three years ago.

“So Rob found you, huh?”

He asked this in such a quiet voice, at first I didn’t hear him.

“Huh?” I blinked at him. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, he did.”

“And did you help with that situation of his?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The situation is…no longer a situation anymore. She’s home safe.”

“That must be a big relief to him,” Douglas said, looking relieved himself. “He was really worried.”

I studied my brother’s lean face, with its fuzz of a beginning of a beard. And felt a spurt of irritation with him. “Thanks for the heads-up that he was coming, by the way,” I said. “I mean, you could have called and warned me.”

“So you could have run away to the Hamptons for the weekend?” Douglas grinned. “He asked me not to say anything.”

And, apparently, Rob asking him not to say anything was more important to him than my emotional health.

“You and Rob certainly are chummy these days,” I commented, not without some bitterness.

“He’s a good guy” was all Douglas had to say in reply, before moving away from me to bring my mom a bottle of homemade vinaigrette from the fridge.

“Hi, Jessica,” his girlfriend said, giving me a hug. I liked Tasha, not just because she’d followed my advice, and hadn’t broken Douglas’s heart. Which was a good thing, since I’d promised if she did, I’d break her face.

“How’s New York?” Tasha wanted to know, in the wistful manner of someone who wanted to move to the Big Apple, but didn’t feel like they had the guts.

“There,” I said. I like New York. I really do. But. You know. It’s just a town to me. A bigger town, maybe, than what I’m used to. But still just a town.

“And Juilliard?” Mrs. Abramowitz wanted to know. Mrs. Abramowitz always made a big deal about the fact that I was going to Juilliard…maybe on account of the fact that she’d secretly suspected I’d end up in a women’s state penitentiary, and not one of the country’s leading music colleges. She’d never come right out and said this, but I had my suspicions.

I started to give my standard reply—“It’s fine”—but something stopped me. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was just being home.

But suddenly, I knew if I told her school was fine, I’d be lying. School wasn’t fine. New York wasn’t fine. I wasn’t fine.

I definitely wasn’t fine.

Only how could I tell her that? How could I tell her that Juilliard wasn’t quite what I’d expected? That whatever free time I had, I had to spend in a practice cubicle, playing my guts out, just to keep up with the rest of the flutists at my level? That I hated it? That I wanted to drop it, but didn’t know what I’d do instead? That New York was great, it was thrilling living in the city that never sleeps, but that I missed the smell of freshly mown grass and the sound of crickets and the gentle weeping of Ruth’s cello coming not from the other room, but from the house next door?

I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her any of that.

“Fine” is what I said instead.

“And Ruth was good when you left her?” Mrs. Abramowitz wanted to know, as she helped herself to another margarita.

“Yes,” I said, wondering how Mrs. Abramowitz would react if I told her of my suspicions…that there was something going on between her daughter and my middle brother.

She’d probably be delighted. Mike, like Skip, is well on his way to becoming a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year man, only in computers, not business.

But whatever was going on between Mike and Ruth, it wasn’t anything yet, and might never even come to be. So I didn’t mention it.

“And Skip?” my mom asked in a teasing voice. Because, of course, my mom is head over heels for the original hundred-thousand-dollar man. Or at least the idea of his supporting me on that hundred thousand dollars.

“He snores,” I said, and grabbed a bowl of dip to take outside, where we were eating.

“It’s his sinuses,” I heard Mrs. Abramowitz tell my mom. “And his allergies. I wish he’d remember to take his Claritin—”

“There’s my girl,” my dad said with a big smile as I came outside with the dip. Chigger was suddenly all over me again, but this time it wasn’t to say hello, but because I was holding something that contained food.

“Down,” I said to Chigger, who obediently kept down, but who nevertheless followed me to the table with the assiduousness of a bodyguard.

“That dog,” Dr. Thompkins said with a chuckle.

“That dog,” my dad said, “knows over fifteen commands. Watch this. Chigger. Ball.”

Chigger, instead of running to fetch his ball, as he normally did when he heard the word, stayed where he was, panting in the warm evening air, waiting for someone to spill some dip.

“Well,” my dad said embarrassedly.

“He’d go get it, if there weren’t food around.”

I took a seat on the deck, lightly stroking Chigger’s ears, and listened to my dad chat with his neighbors, looking out across the yard and the treetops beyond. It seemed weird that just that morning, I’d been looking through metal bars at fire escapes and into other people’s apartment windows, and now I was gazing at a scene so pastoral and…well, DIFFERENT. I’m not saying one is better than the other. They’re just…different.

I wondered what Rob and his sister were doing. I wondered what Randy and the girl I’d seen were doing. Well, scratch that. I had a pretty good idea what THEY were doing. I wondered instead what I should do about it. My options were somewhat limited, if Rob didn’t want his sister to have to testify against the jerk.

But what about the dark-haired girl I’d seen? Surely she was underage, as well. If I went over there and happened to let the truth about old Randy having a little something on the side—right upstairs in 2T, as a matter of fact—would she come around?

But why should I? I didn’t know the dark-haired girl. No one had asked me to find her. She wasn’t my responsibility.

Maybe Ruth was right. Maybe Iwould make a rotten superhero. Because I really was incapable of just riding off into the sunset.

Mrs. Thompkins came outside, holding a salad, with Douglas following on her heels like Chigger had followed on mine.

“—should really come along,” Douglas was saying as Tasha trailed after him, holding a platter of corn on the cob. “It’s our community. We’ve got to take it back from the developers and yuppie corporate scum.”

“But I just don’t see the NEED for an elementary school in this neighborhood, Douglas,” Mrs. Thompkins said a little helplessly. “The people who can afford to live here have kids in college, like we do, not kindergarten.”

“That’s why we’re proposing a high school,” Tasha said, her dark eyes alight with excitement. “Not an elementary school.”

My mom had followed them out, holding her prizewinning scalloped potatoes in pot-warmered hands.

“Not this alternative high school thing again,” she said wearily. “Can’t we have one meal where we don’t have to talk about this alternative high school idea of yours, Douglas?”

Which was pretty ironic, considering that just a few years ago, my mom would have given her right arm to have Douglas even SIT with us at the dinner table, rather than hide in his room.

“Fine,” Douglas said, not taking offense. “But there’s a community board meeting at eight. I’m hoping at least some of you can come.”

“No politics at the table,” my dad declared, brandishing a dozen perfectly charbroiled steaks. “Or religion, either. Both topics spoil the appetite.”

Everyone ooohed and ahhhhed at the steaks, the way my dad had intended us to, then dug in. I ate with more gusto than usual, not having had much since my Egg ’n Sausage McMuffin that morning.

Sure enough, no sooner was dinner over than Douglas looked at his watch and announced it was time for the community board meeting, and that anyone who cared an iota for the neighborhood should stroll over to the Pine Heights auditorium with him and Tasha to hear what the board had to say about the future of the school.

None of the adults volunteered. Which was hardly surprising, considering the amount of beef and tequila they’d just consumed.

“Great,” Douglas said sarcastically, when he saw this. “I thought you Woodstock generationers actually cared about the world.”

“Hey,” my mom said in a dangerous voice. “I was way too young for Woodstock.”

“Jess?” Tasha had stood up to follow my brother out the door. “Want to come?”

I did not. What did I care what happened to my old elementary school?

“Jess doesn’t even live here anymore,” my mom said with a laugh. “She’s a jaded New Yorker now.”

Was that what I was? Was that why everything in my hometown looked so shabby and small to me now? Because I was a jaded New Yorker?

“Come on, Jess,” Douglas said from the doorway. “Every locally owned business in this town is selling out to the chains. Look what happened to the Chocolate Moose.”

“Not every locally owned business is selling out to the chains, Douglas,” my dad pointed out dryly, meaning the restaurants we still owned.

“Do you really want to see the place where you played the mouse inThe Lion and the Mouse in your third grade program turned into condos?” Douglas asked me, ignoring our father.

Well, it wasn’t as if I’d had any better offers. No one else had asked me to do anything with them that evening. And if I stayed home, Mom would just put me on dish patrol.

I was touched Douglas even remembered that I’d played the mouse in my third grade program.

“I’ll go,” I said, and stood up to follow Douglas and his girlfriend.

They spent the three-block walk over to the elementary school filling me in on their proposal to turn Pine Heights into a high school—“An alternative high school,” Douglas said. “Not like Ernie Pyle, which was so big and impersonal. That place…it was like an education factory,” he added with a shudder.

Which was interesting, because I hadn’t seen a whole lot of educating going on there.

“The alternative high school would put an emphasis on kids working at their own pace,” Tasha, who was an education major over at IU, said.

“Yeah,” Douglas said. “And instead of the standardized state curriculum, we’re going to have an emphasis on the arts—music, drawing, sculpture, drama, dance. And no sports.”

“No sports,” Tasha said firmly, and I remembered that her brother had been a football player…and how much attention he’d gotten because of it, whereas she, a shy and studious girl, had been almost the family afterthought.

“Wow,” I said. “Great.”

I meant it, too. I mean, if I had gone to a school like the one they were describing, instead of the one I’d gone to, maybe I wouldn’t have turned out the way I had—broken. I definitely wouldn’t have been struck by lightning. That happened to me walking home from Ernie Pyle High. If I’d have been walking home from Pine Heights, which was so close to my house, I’d have made it home well before the rain started to fall.

It was weird being back inside my elementary school after all these years. Everything looked tiny. I mean, the drinking fountains, which I remembered as being so high off the ground, were practically knee-level.

It still smelled the same, though, of floor wax and that stuff they sprinkle over throw-up.

“Remember that time you banged Tom Boyes’s head into that water fountain, Jess?” Douglas asked cheerfully, as we walked by an otherwise unremarkable drinking fountain. “For calling me—what was it? Oh, yeah. A spastic freak.”

I didn’t remember this. But I can’t say I was surprised to hear it.

Tasha, on the other hand, seemed so.

“Why did he call you that?” she wanted to know. “Just because you were different?”

Different. That was one way to put it. Douglas always HAD been different. If you could call hearing voices inside of your head telling you to do weird stuff, like not eat the spaghetti in the school cafeteria because it was poisoned, different.

“Yeah,” Douglas said. “But it was all right, because I had Jessica to protect me. Even though I was in fifth grade, and she was in first. God, Tom couldn’t hold his head up all year after that. The snot beat out of him by a tiny first grade girl.”

Tasha smiled at me admiringly, but I know there was nothing all that admirable about that situation. My high school counselor and I had worked long and hard to combat my seemingly uncontrollable temper, which was always getting me in hot water. I’d finally succeeded in getting control of it, but only after seeing for myself firsthand what could happen when someone with a bad temper got too much power—such as some of the men I’d helped catch in Afghanistan.

We walked into the school’s combination auditorium, complete with stage, gym (basketball hoops), and cafeteria (long tables that folded up into the walls to get them out of the way during PE or Assembly). The room seemed ridiculously small compared to the way I remembered it. About ten rows of folding chairs had been set up before a long table, on top of which sat a scale model of Pine Heights school, only with the windows and landscaping redone, so it looked more like an upscale condo complex than a school.

Standing behind this model, glad-handing what had to be a bunch of city planners and local politicians, was a pot-bellied businessman in an expensive new suit…which couldn’t have been all that comfortable in the summer heat, considering the school had no air-conditioning.

And standing next to the beer-bellied man was another guy in a suit, although this one was more appropriate for the weather, being silk. Also, the guy in it wore the jacket over a black T-shirt instead of a button-down and tie.

Except for the change of clothes, though, he was still perfectly recognizable as someone I had seen—albeit from a distance—just a few hours before.

Hannah’s boyfriend, the two-timing Randy.

Ten

“Everyone, if you could take your seats, please.”

The city councilperson called everyone who was milling around, greeting one another—including my suddenly civic-minded brother—to order. We took our seats and sat there in the evening heat, some people fanning themselves with handouts Randy’s dad had left on all our seats. The handouts described the complex he wanted to convert Pine Heights school into—a brand-new luxury condo “experience,” with a gym and a coffee shop on the first floor. Apparently, more and more DINKs—double income, no kids—were moving to our town, commuting from it to Indianapolis. Such a condo “experience” would perfectly suit their needs.

People stood up and started talking, but the truth was, I didn’t hear a word they said. I wasn’t listening. Instead, I was staring at Randy Whitehead.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, we live in a pretty small town. If a guy’s dad owns one apartment complex, chances are he’s going to own more than one. I mean, look at my dad. He owned not one, but three of the most popular restaurants in a town barely large enough to support a single McDonald’s.

Still, it was a shock to see Randy, up close and personal. He seemed to be there strictly in a “supportive son” role, not saying much, and handing his dad things when it was Mr. Whitehead’s turn to make his presentation. There was no denying that the guy was hot. Randy, I mean. If you like the hundred-dollar-haircut, loafers-without-socks type. Which I guess, to an inexperienced girl like Hannah, would seem pretty exotic.

To me, though, he looked like he would smell. Not of BO. But of too much cologne. I hate it when guys smell of anything but soap. Randy Whitehead looked as if he were DRIPPING in Calvin Klein For Men.

“The overall cost of each of these units,” Mr. Whitehead was saying, “would be in keeping with the rising cost of real estate in a town that is fast becoming an extremely sought-after bedroom community for upwardly mobile workers in nearby Indianapolis. We’re talking low to mid six figures, depending on the type of amenities buyers choose to incorporate into the overall design plan they select. In no way will the Pine Heights community suffer an influx of undesirably lower-income residents through this conversion.”

Randy, while his father spoke, softly tapped a pencil. He didn’t look like a man wondering where his soul mate had vanished to earlier in the day. He looked like a man who wanted to go home to watch some HBO and have a Heineken or two.

The community listened politely to Mr. Whitehead’s spiel, asking one or two questions pertaining to parking and the school’s baseball field, which was still utilized on a somewhat sporadic basis by families who enjoyed an impromptu game of softball on a summer evening. The baseball field would go, turned into a “lush green park area, open to the public, complete with a duck pond.” This, in turn, led to questions about mosquitoes and West Nile virus.

What, I asked myself, was I still doing here? In Indiana, I mean. I had done what Rob had asked me to do. Why wasn’t I on a plane back to New York by now? That’s where my life was these days. Not here, listening to people freak out about a baseball field.

Of course, back in New York, I never really felt as if I belonged, either. I mean, everyone in New York was so excited about going to Broadway shows and having picnics in Central Park. Everyone but me.

Maybe the problem wasn’t Indiana or New York. Maybe the problem was me. Maybe I wasn’t capable of happiness anymore. Maybe Rob was right, and I was broken. Permanently broken, and would never find happiness again—

My musings on my seemingly permanent state of not caring about anything were interrupted by, of all people, my brother Douglas as he stood up and said, “I’d like to know how far the city council has gotten on its review of our proposal for Pine Heights to be turned into an alternative high school.”

There was considerable murmuring about this. But not because people thought it was so out there or weird, as people have murmured over things my brother’s said in the past. There was a general note of approval in this murmur. Someone at the far side of the gym shouted, “Yeah!” while someone on the other side said, “We don’t want teenagers roaming around loose in our neighborhood.”

“Alternative doesn’t mean unsupervised,” Douglas was quick to point out. “State certification will be required of teachers wishing to apply to work at Pine Heights Alternative High School. And like any school, loitering on school grounds after hours will not be permitted.”

“But kids who go to so-called alternative schools,” a woman I didn’t recognize, but who evidently lived in our neighborhood, stood up to say, “are generally kids who’ve been expelled from mainstream schools. The troublemakers.”

There was a murmur of assent from the crowd.

“Not our school,” Tasha Thompkins stood up to say. “Our school will have strict admittance policies. Applicants will need to have references.”

Back and forth it went between the supporters of an alternative high school and those who felt it would cause real estate values in the neighborhood to plummet. I sat there, not so much interested in the fight than in the fact that my brother—my brother Douglas—was leading it. My brother Douglas, who years previously had been interested in comic books and keeping to himself, in that order. Now he was leading—really, leading—a charge for change in a neighborhood he didn’t even live in anymore.

And people were LISTENING to him. The boy who used to come home crying every day from school because some bigger kid had stolen his lunch money and called him a spaz. He was LEADING a group of citizens concerned about the direction their town was going.

And he was leading because he had a heretofore unknown—to me, anyway—talent for public speaking.

“The reason we’re even here,” he was saying, “is because the young people in our community can no longer afford to raise their children here. They’re being priced out for homes in this community by people who don’t even own businesses in this community, but choose to live here rather than in Indianapolis, the big city where they do business. Soon this town will become completely unaffordable to people my age. We’re losing young people to big cities like New York and Chicago because there’s no work for them here. Talented teachers are slipping away because there are no openings for them in our overcrowded public schools. Why not give us an opportunity to employ some of these people, pull them back into the local community, while at the same time, affording teens who might otherwise feel lost at the monstrosity that is our local public high school a chance to really shine?”

A few people clapped. Really, clapped, for something my brother Douglas said. It brought tears to my eyes. It really did. After the meeting ended—with an assurance by the city councilperson that both the proposed alternative high school and Mr. Whitehead’s condo plan would be thoroughly reviewed and a decision made by the end of the month, I turned to Douglas and said, struggling to keep my emotions in check, “That was good, Dougie. Really good.”

“Yeah,” he said, still looking angry. “Well, not good enough. I think I swayed a couple of them, but that bastard Whitehead—he really has them snowed about the property values and turning this neighborhood into the Beverly Hills of Indiana….”

“Don’t worry,” Tasha said, giving my brother a comforting rub on the back. “My dad knows the mayor. He promised to put a word in. I mean, after all, it’s his neighborhood, too. And it’s an election year.”

“It would just be so cool,” Douglas said, “if we could turn this place back into a school—the right kind of school, I mean. The kind of school you wouldn’t have hated, Jess.”

I laughed—not very easily—and then moved away as people came up to congratulate Douglas on his speech and strategize as to what the next step ought to be in their plan.

And I found myself standing not five feet away from Randy Whitehead, who was putting his dad’s model into a big white box.

Before I even thought about what I was doing, I strolled over to him, leaned down, and said, “Nice model.”

Randy glanced at me and gave me a big, capped-tooth smile.

“Thanks,” he said. “You new around here? I’ve never seen you at one of these community board meetings before.”

“You might say I’m new around here.” I smiled back at him. “You?”

“Just moved here from Indy,” he said. “Last year.”

“That must be quite a change,” I said. “Small town living, after life in the big city.”

“It’s surprisingly the same,” he said. “I mean, mostly work, very little play.”

I smiled even harder at him. “Come on,” I said. “A guy as good-looking as you? You must get LOTS of play.”

He ducked his head modestly, allowing some of his hundred-dollar haircut to fall over his eyes. “Well,” he said. “Now and then, I suppose. How about you?”

I tried to look surprised. “Me? Oh, I don’t have much time for playing.”

“Really?” He’d successfully wrestled the model into the box. “Why not?”

“I’m too busy finding people, usually,” I said.

“Finding people?” He regarded me with eyes that were the same color as Rob’s. But somehow I suspected Randy’s misty gray irises were the result of contacts. “What are you? A truant officer?”

“No,” I said. “I’m Jess Mastriani. Maybe you haven’t heard of me. I’m the girl who was struck by lightning a few years ago and developed the psychic power to find missing people.”

He stared at me for a full beat. Then recognition dawned.

“No kidding?” He looked delighted. “Hey, I watch that show about you, sometimes. The one on cable.”

“Huh,” I said, in a small-world kind of way.

“Wow,” Randy said. “It’s really cool meeting you. I had no idea you were so young. In real life, I mean.”

“Huh,” I said again, this time in a gee-whillikers way.

“It is a real honor to meet you,” Randy said, reaching out his right hand to shake mine. “I’m Randall Whitehead Junior.”

“I know,” I said, pumping his hand with vigor.

“You do?” He looked psyched to hear it. “Oh, right. Well, I mean, of course you do. You’re psychic!”

“Not that kind of psychic,” I said. “Actually, I know you through a friend of yours. Hannah Snyder.”

Randy was a smooth one, all right. He didn’t quit pumping my hand. But I felt it grow a little cooler in mine. And he blinked, twice, hard, at the name.

Then he said, “Snyder? I don’t believe I know the name.”

“Oh, sure, you do, Randy,” I said in the same warm voice. “She’s the underage runaway you were stashing in Apartment Two-T over at the Fountain Bleu apartment complex by the hospital. I found her there myself earlier today.”

Randy dropped my hand. Like it was hot.

“I…I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure, you do, Randy,” I said. And wondered what I was doing. My job was done. Why wasn’t I riding off into the sunset?

But something in me just wouldn’t let go. It was the only part of me, I suspected, that hadn’t come back broken.

“Tell me something, Randy,” I said. “Just between you and me. How many girls have you got living rent-free there, anyway? Two? Three? Or are there more? And how do you keep them all from finding out about each other?”

“I really—” Randy was shaking his head. “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m afraid you do, Randy,” I said. “See, I know all about—”

“Hannah Snyder is a very disturbed girl,” Randy interrupted. “I’ll just say she lied to me about her age, if you try going to the cops. And that she came on to me.”

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse, Randy,” I said. “If a person eighteen years of age or older engages in sexual intercourse with a person sixteen years of age or younger, it’s a crime punishable in the state of Indiana by a fixed term of ten years with up to ten years added or four subtracted for aggravating and mitigating circumstances.”

Randy blinked at me. “Th-there’s no proof, though,” he stammered. “Th-that it’s me in the videos. You can’t p-prove it’s me.”

Wait. What?

I smiled at him. “Oh,” I said. “I think we can prove it’s you, all right.”

What was hetalking about?

“I—I have to go now,” Randy stammered. He’d gone as white as his dad’s model of Pine Heights Condos. Then he practically fell over himself in his haste to get away from me.

A few minutes later, Douglas and Tasha found me sitting by myself on one of the folding chairs, trying to remember my lines fromThe Lion and the Mouse and failing.

“Ready to go?” Douglas asked me. “Tash and I usually go out for a cup of decaf after meetings. Want to tag along?”

“No,” I said, standing up. “I thought I might go for a ride.”

“Oh,” Douglas said. But he was smiling. “Of course. You must really miss that, back in New York.”

“You have no idea,” I said. I wasn’t talking about the bike.

“Well, thanks for coming along,” Douglas said. “It was probably pretty boring for you, but, you know. I think it might have impressed a few people, seeing Lightning Girl sitting on our side.”

“Yeah,” Tasha said. “Randy Junior looked like he was about to barf after he got done talking to you.”

“Well, you know,” I said. “That’s what I bring to the table.”

“Shut up,” Douglas said.

But he was laughing.

It felt good, I was discovering, to hear Douglas laugh. It was a sound I could get used to.

Not that I intended to, though. I had done, I felt, enough damage for one evening. I headed back to the house…and to my bike.

Eleven

I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I just wasn’t. Thinking, I mean.

My bike just seemed to sort of drive itself to the Fountain Bleu Apartments. There was no conscious decision on my part to go to that part of town. It was as if I looked up, and I was there, pulling back into the same parking lot I’d vacated several hours earlier.

Only this time, there was something there that hadn’t been there before. And I don’t just mean a lot more cars, since most of the residents of the complex appeared to have gotten home from work, and were currently enjoying their evening repast and/or a situation comedy on a major network (some of them, possibly, might even have been enjoying the show purportedly about me. If they had cable, that is).

No, I was talking about one car in particular. And that was a newish black pickup parked well to the back of the lot, where it wouldn’t be noticeable, even though it happened to be in the exact spot I would have chosen, had I decided to perform any sort of recon on the place.

And since that’s exactly how I’d decided to spend my evening, this put something of a crimp in my plans.

Until I saw just who it was behind the pickup’s steering wheel.

That’s when I decided to tap on the driver’s-side window, having stashed my bike in the lot next door in an effort to remain unobtrusive.

Rob, startled, rolled down his window.

“What are you doing here?” he asked in some surprise.

But he couldn’t have been as surprised as I was. Because I could hear what he was listening to inside the pickup’s cab.

And it was Tchaikovsky.

“I thought I’d pay a call on the young lady living in One-S,” I said. Why was he listening to classical music? Did he evenlike classical music? I guess so. All this time, and I never even knew that about him. What else didn’t I know about him? “How about you?”

“I’m waiting for young Master Whitehead to get home,” Rob replied pleasantly. “After which point, I’m going to beat him senseless.”

“Hannah told you his full name?” I was surprised. I hadn’t thought she’d be so forthcoming with her half brother, who she must have suspected did not have Randy’s best intentions at heart.

“No,” he said. “I Googled who owns the Fountain Bleu apartment complex, and found a pic of Randy Junior. I was going to kick his ass tomorrow, after Hannah’s mom got here to pick her up. But Chick volunteered to keep an eye on her while I was gone, so I was able to change my plans.”

“You’re not going to let Hannah stay?” I asked.

Rob made an incredulous noise. “Are you kidding me? I’m clearly the last guy who should be raising a teenage girl. She snowed me as easily—well, as you used to snow your parents.”

I chose to ignore that.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked him. “You’re just going to wait until he pulls up, then have a blanket party?” I was referring to the age-old Hoosier tradition of throwing a blanket over a victim’s head, then beating him with a baseball bat, or bars of soap slipped into the end of a sock.

“No,” Rob said mildly. “I’m skipping the blanket. I was thinking I’d like to see his face as I grind it into the pavement.”

“Right,” I said. “Well, good luck with that. I just saw him at a city council meeting, where I told him I was onto him, so he’s probably either already been here to pick up his other girlfriend and left, or is going to stay far away from this place for the time being.”

Rob looked crushed. “Are you kidding me?”

“I’m not,” I said. “Sorry. But you can still make yourself useful.”

He lifted a quizzical brow. “Really. How?”

“Honk if the cops show up,” I said with a wink.

Then I turned to head towards the apartment complex.

As I’d expected, behind me, a car door opened, then slammed shut. A second later, Rob’s voice sounded just behind me.

“Mastriani,” he said, sounding suspicious. “What are you doing?”

“Oh,” I said with a shrug. “Randy mentioned something that made me want to come over here and check the place out. That’s all.”

“What do you mean, check the place out?” Rob demanded. It was quiet in the Fountain Bleu apartment complex. Except for the burbling of the fountain and the trill of crickets, that is. Even the swimming pool was empty. The only other sounds were our footsteps, as we headed towards Apartment 1S.

“Just something Randy said,” I told him. “It could be nothing. Or it could be something. But I’m pretty sure you’re not really going to want to be a party to what I’m about to do, since it will probably involve some breaking and entering. And with your police record…”

“I don’t have a police record,” Rob said. “I have a juvenile record. And it’s sealed.”

I don’t know why he added this last part. What did he think I was going to do, log on to some kind of government computer and try to look up his file to see what it was he’d done so long ago that had gotten him into so much hot water? Because of course I’d already tried that, and gotten nothing.

“Fine,” I said. “Then you can be the lookout.”

“Lookout nothing,” Rob said. “I’m in this, Mastriani. You’re not shutting me out. Not this time.”

I stole a glance up at his face. His jaw was set, his brow lowered with irritation. Me, shuthim out? Wasn’t it the other way around?

But I didn’t ask the question out loud. Instead I said, “Fine. But if you’re going to tag along, you have to do things my way. And my way doesn’t involve anyone getting beat senseless.”

Rob actually looked surprised. “Now you reallyare kidding,” he said.

“Actually, I’m not. I don’t do violence anymore.” I was careful not to look at him as we headed towards the door marked 1S. “I’ve learned there are more effective ways of solving problems than ramming your fist into your adversary’s face.”

“I’m impressed.” A glance at his face showed me that he wasn’t being sarcastic. He was smiling a little. “Mr. Goodhart would be proud.”

I thought about my high school guidance counselor, and his efforts to curb my quick temper—and fists. None of his suggestions had been as effective as seeing for myself, firsthand, the kind of devastation a too-hasty decision to act first and ask questions later could cause.

“Yes,” I said, thinking fondly of Mr. Goodhart. “He would, actually.”

Then I reached up and thumped on the door to the apartment Randy apparently shared with the dark-haired girl I’d seen him kissing earlier. When, to my surprise, no one answered, I tried the knob. Hey, you never know.

But it was locked.

“This where you found Hannah?” Rob wanted to know.

“No,” I said. “Hannah was in Two-T.”

“Oh. So, what now?” Rob wanted to know, even as I was digging in my back pocket for my wallet.

“Now it’s time for a little B and E,” I said. “Try to look casual. Hey, you got a credit card on you?”

“That you can destroy trying to open that door? No.”

“Never mind,” I said, finding a card I could use in my wallet. “I’m good.” And I slipped the card between the doorjamb and the knob. It was a trick that would never have worked on our apartment in New York, where we had a dead bolt.

But who needs a dead bolt in a sleepy town like this one?

Unless, of course, you’re Randy Whitehead, and you’re up to the kind of things I suspected Randy was up to.

“Hey,” Rob said softly, when he saw the card I was using to push the lock back. “Aren’t you going to need that in the fall?”

I looked down at the photo of my own face, staring back up at me from the front of my Juilliard ID card. You’d have thought, seeing as how the day I’d had that picture taken, I was starting a whole new life, at a school I’d always wanted to go to, where I’d be doing what I loved best to do in the world all day long, that I’d have looked excited and happy in my photo.

Instead I looked cranky and sort of annoyed. I had gotten lost on the subway on the way to my appointment, and I had been hot and exhausted, and a homeless guy had just spat on me for no reason.

Oh, yeah. I love New York, all right.

“I can always get a new one,” I said with a shrug, not mentioning the forty-dollar lost ID replacement fee. Or the fact that the thought of going back to school in the fall made me feel like I might barf.

And then, just as my photo got nearly all the way peeled off the card, the door opened a fraction of an inch.

I put my finger to my lips and looked meaningfully at Rob. Then I pushed the door the rest of the way open and called into the apartment, “Randy? You around?”

But I could see by the fact that none of the lights was on that no one was there.

I reached around the doorjamb and flicked on the overheads. They shined down on an apartment that was almost exactly like the one upstairs in which I’d found Hannah, even down to the same hideous leather living room set.

I signaled for Rob to follow me into the apartment, then shut the door behind us.

“So,” he said, looking around the nondescript—and, frankly, depressing—living room. “What now? We going to wait and jump him when he gets home?”

“No,” I said. “I told you. I don’t do that kind of thing anymore. And if you’re going to hang around with me, you can’t, either. There are better ways to make someone sorry for what they’ve done than smacking them.”

“Really?” Rob had stooped to pick up a magazine someone had left lying on the glass-topped coffee table in front of the flat-screen television.Teen People . “I’d be interested in hearing about them.”

“Watch and learn, my friend,” I said, heading to the bedroom. “Watch and learn.”

The bedroom was as depressing as the living room. Not because it was drab or poorly furnished. The opposite, in fact. The king-size bed was covered in a tasteful beige spread, the walls decorated with nicely framed Monet prints. There was an expensive gilt mirror above the long, modern-looking dresser, and the bathroom fixtures were top of the line.

It was a room that simply bore no hint of the personality of the person who lived in it. There was a hairbrush on the vanity, and a scattering of makeup. In the closet hung a few dresses and tops of a style that indicated their owner was young and reasonably attractive—or at least assured of her own good looks, since they were pretty skimpy.

But there were no photos, no books, no CDs—nothing at all, really, that gave any hint as to who the dark-haired girl really was.

“What are we looking for?” Rob wanted to know, pulling open dresser drawers and finding only jeans and—somewhat provocative—underwear in them.

“I’ll tell you when I see it,” I said, looking around the room. There was a smoke detector on the ceiling, centered directly over the bed.

“Maybe he went to his parents’ house,” Rob said, meaning Randy. “They live right here in town, you know. Over in that new subdivision behind the mall.”

“What new subdivision behind the mall?” I asked, startled.

“The one Randy Whitehead Senior built,” Rob said, looking surprised I didn’t know about it. Then he said, “Oh, that’s right. It was while you were gone. Well, he built a new subdivision. It’s full of five-, six-bedroom homes with three-car garages and in-ground pools.”

“McMansions,” I said.

“Right. I bet that’s where we’ll find Randy,” Rob said. “Holed up with Mom and Dad. They probably have a security system, even the subdivision is gated.”

I raised my eyebrows. “A gated community? Here in town? Seriously?”

“Keep out the riffraff,” Rob said. “And enraged older brothers who want to beat Randy’s face in.”

“We’re not looking for Randy,” I said, staring at my reflection in the gilt mirror above the dresser. The king-size bed was directly behind me.

“Well, whatare we looking for?” Rob wanted to know.

“I told you,” I said. “I’ll let you know when I find it. Help me move this mirror.”

Rob looked at the mirror, which was huge. “No way. It’s probably bolted to the wall.”

“It isn’t,” I said simply, and moved to put my hands under one end of the frame. “Come on. Lift.”

Rob went to the other end of the mirror, and together we lifted it off the wall. It wasn’t easy—the thing weighed a ton. And with the dresser in the way, it was hard to balance.

But eventually we got the mirror down, and leaned it up against the bed.

Then we both stared at the spot in the middle of the wall where the mirror had hung. The spot where a section of the wall had been cut out and a video camera tucked inside, where it had apparently been filming through the glass in the mirror, which was apparently not a mirror at all, but a piece of two-way.

Rob, seeing the camera, said a very bad word.

“Remember how you told me to tell you what we were looking for?” I said. “And I said I would when we found it? Well, we found it.”

Twelve

“But, seriously, Jess,” Rob said. “How’d you know?”

“I didn’t,” I said. We were sitting on the floor of the walk-in bedroom closet of Apartment 1S. Around us lay a pile of men’s shoes. They were what we’d pulled down from the closet shelf on which the video camera sat, pointing through the hole in the closet wall into the bedroom. Randy had obviously hidden the camera from view under piles of Adidas and JP Tod’s driving moccasins.

“I just guessed,” I said. “Something he said.”

Rob looked at the tapes we’d pulled down from a closet shelf high above our heads—I’d had to be lifted to reach it. Randy obviously used a stepladder. Each tape was neatly labeled with a name.CARLY .JASMINE .ALLISON .RACHEL .BETH .

There were multiple copies of each. Sadly, I think we were going to have to watch them in order to see if they were multiple copies of the same tape, or different movies of the same girl.

Not that it mattered. Except that if they were multiple copies of the same tape, it meant they weren’t merely for home use, but for distribution.

I wasn’t sure whether or not this had occurred to Rob yet, and I wasn’t about to bring it up. He looked pale enough as it was.

“He’s taping them,” he said dazedly from where he sat on the closet floor…which was carpeted in—what else?—beige.

“Some of them,” I said. I’d been relieved there’d been no tapes markedHANNAH . I just hoped the reason why—that the tapes of Hannah, if they existed, were upstairs in 2T—didn’t occur to him.

“You don’t think he’s got tapes of Hannah somewhere?” Rob demanded.

Ooops. So I guess ithad occurred to him.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I said.

But it was too late. Rob was already on his feet.

Damn it.

I struggled to put all the videotapes we’d pulled out back into the boxes they’d come from.

“Rob,” I said. “Wait. Don’t do anything—”

“Don’t do anything what?” Rob demanded, whipping around to glare down at me from the closet doorway. “Hasty? Violent? What? Jess, what do you want me to do? That’s mysister .”

Then he turned around and stomped from the room.

Damn it again. I shoved all the videos I could grab into the box I was holding, and staggered out after him. I’m not kidding, that box was heavy. There were a lot of videos in it.

“Rob,” I called. “Rob, don’t—”

But it was too late. He’d left the apartment.

I knew where he was going, though, and I hurried after him, lugging the box of tapes.

“Rob,” I said, lurching out into the warm evening air and following him up the outdoor cement steps to the second floor of the apartment complex. “You don’t want to do this.”

“Actually,” he said, as he breezed past 2S, and found himself outside 2T. “I really do.”

“Well, at least let me—”

But it was too late. Before I had a chance to take out my ID card, he’d kicked the door open with a single powerful blow from the heel of his motorcycle boot.

“Well,” I said, putting down the box of tapes and following him inside, “that was subtle. No one noticed that, I’m sure.”

Two-T looked exactly the same as I’d left it a few hours before. And the setup was exactly the same as it had been in the apartment below. The camera was in the bedroom closet, behind the mirror. Only the names on the videotapes were different. There were, unfortunately, several markedHANNAH.

“That’s it,” Rob muttered. “He’s dead.”

“No, he isn’t,” I said tartly, taking the videotape from his hands and putting it back in the box it had come from. “You aren’t going to do anything to him, Rob. I mean it. The police can handle it.”

Rob’s breathing was on the heavy side. He seemed to be trying to force down something that wouldn’t stay put.

“That’s what you’re going to do with those?” he demanded, thrusting his chin towards the box I was holding. “Hand them over to the police?”

“Eventually,” I said. “First, I’m going to watch them.”

Rob made an incredulous face. “You’re going to—?”

“I have to,” I interrupted quickly. “Somebody’s got to try to find out what happened to all these girls, don’t you think?”

Rob’s expression changed. “You think he—?”

Again, I interrupted. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. And then…well, I plan on using them as leverage.”

“Leverage?” Now it was Rob’s turn to follow me. He trailed after me as I left 2T, putting the box I held on top of the box I’d taken from 1S. “Leverage for what?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I said, straightening. “But one thing I do know—this is a lot bigger, Rob, than just one guy shacking up with multiple girls. This looks like it might be a little home-based business Randy’s got going on the side, and that’s different than if he was just a horny jerk with a penchant for teenage runaways. You see that, don’t you?”

Rob’s breathing was still pretty heavy. In the quiet evening air, it was all I could hear, aside from the crickets and the occasional laugh track from someone’s TV inside their apartment.

The gaze he focused on me in the glare from the outdoor overhead bulb was laser sharp.

“Jess,” he said. His voice was laden with suspicion. “What are you doing?”

“Let’s not talk about it here,” I said as a woman with a golden retriever on a leash came out of 2L and looked at us questioningly before heading down the stairs. “Come on. Grab a box.”

Rob—to my surprise—did as I asked…only he grabbed both boxes, and started down the stairs.

“Moving out?” the woman asked me pleasantly as we went by her on our way to the parking lot.

“Yeah,” I said.

“He’s much better looking than your last boyfriend,” the woman said with an approving wink, nodding towards Rob’s departing back.

“I’m not—” I started to stammer, realizing she thought I lived in 2T with Randy. “He’s not—” Then, blushing scarlet, I just said, “Thanks,” and hurried to catch up with Rob.

“What did she say?” he asked me as he headed towards his truck.

“Nothing,” I said. I hoped he couldn’t see how red my face was in the glow from the streetlamps. “Will you follow me home and drop these off with me? I can’t take them on my bike.”

Rob looked like he wanted to say something, but he just nodded and climbed into his truck, after stowing the boxes in the back. I went to the next parking lot and got my bike—trying not to think about how nicely Rob’s backside had looked in those faded jeans as he’d climbed into his truck—then cruised over to where he was waiting.

Then we both headed out of the Fountain Bleu apartment complex, and towards my house on Lumbley Lane.

It was a warm summer night in southern Indiana. Downtown, the high school kids were out in full force, tooling up and down Main Street in their parents’ cars, and gathered in clusters outside what had been the Chocolate Moose but what was now a Dairy Queen. As I stopped at a red light—had there always been a traffic light there or was that new, too?—and gazed at the kids clutching their Peanut Buster Parfaits, it was hard not to think how young they looked, even though it hadn’t been so long ago that I’d been in one of those clusters myself….

Although, now that I thought about it, I hadn’t, really. Ever hung out much downtown, I mean. I hadn’t had that many friends in high school, aside from Ruth, who’d always been on a diet, anyway. I know how much my mom had longed for me to be like the girls I saw now, swinging their long hair and laughing up in the faces of the clean-cut looking guys who’d brought them there.

But I’d always worn my hair short, and the only boy I’d ever been interested in wasn’t exactly one my mom approved of….

“Jess?”

I turned my head. Had someone said my name?

“Jess Mastriani?”

There it was again. I looked around and saw a woman standing on the curb, her arm through the arm of a dark-haired guy in an IZOD and jeans.

“Oh my God, thatis you!” the woman cried, when I flipped up the glass shield on my helmet to get a better look at her. “Don’t you recognize me, Jess? It’s me, Karen Sue Hankey!”

I stared at her. Itwas Karen Sue. Only she was looking much, much different than the last time I’d seen her.

Then again, considering the fact that one of the last times I’d seen her, her nose had still been in a splint from when I’d broken it, this wasn’t much of a surprise.

Still, she looked totally different than she had in high school. She had done something to straighten her hair, and had ditched her usual frills for a sophisticated sleeveless sheath of some kind, in cream.

And obviously, she’d had her nose done.

“God, I can’t believe it’s you,” Karen Sue enthused. “Scott, look who it is! Jessica Mastriani. You remember, the one I told you I went to high school with? Lightning Girl? The one that television show is based on.”

Scott—whom I took to be some kind of frat guy Karen Sue had brought home from whatever Ivy League college she was attending, in order to meet her parents—drawled, “Oh, sure. Jessica Mastriani. I’ve read all about you, of course, and the incredible things you’ve done for our country. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

I just stared at them. The last time I’d seen Karen Sue—well, close to the last time, anyway—I’d had my fist in her face. And now she was acting like we’d been the best of friends?

This is what happens when you get even a little bit of fame. Everyone—even your sworn enemies—tries to make nice with you.

“You do remember me, don’t you, Jess?” Karen Sue didn’t look worried. She let out one of her annoying, tinkly laughs. “I’d heard you lost your powers, and all, but nobody said you’d lost your memory! Listen, what are you doing tomorrow morning? Want to have brunch? Maybe we could do some shopping after. Call me. I’m at my parents’ for the week. Just visiting down from Vassar.”

The light turned green. I flipped my visor down.

“Or I guess I could call you,” Karen Sue screamed.Now she was looking worried. “You’re at your parents’ place, right? Jessica? Jess?”

I gunned the engine and took off. Whatever else Karen Sue said was lost in the roar of my muffler.

I didn’t slow down again until I’d reached my driveway. I cut the engine and was pulling off my helmet when Rob pulled up alongside me.

“What was that all about?” he wanted to know. “Who was that girl?”

“No one,” I said. “Just someone I used to know.”

Rob studied me through the open driver’s-side window. “Someone you used to know, eh,” he said tonelessly. “Guess there’re a lot of people around here who you could say that about.”

“Guess so,” I said, not rising to the bait…whatever it was. “Can I have my boxes, please?”

Rob shook his head. But he got out of the truck and went around to get the boxes of tapes, and set them gently on my lawn.

It was quiet on Lumbley Lane, which wasn’t exactly a main thoroughfare. There were only a few lights on in Tasha’s parents’ house across the street, and only a few on in my own house, as well. People in southern Indiana go to bed early—after the eleven o’clock news, at the latest. It’s not like in New York, where sometimes the parties don’t even start until midnight, or two or threeA .M. The only things still up at two or threeA .M. in this part of the world were crickets.

“Are you going to let me in on the plan,” Rob wanted to know, breaking the evening’s stillness, “or are you going to keep on shutting me out?”

I felt my jaw clench. “I’m not the one shutting people out,” I said.

“Oh, right.” Rob actually laughed at that.

“I’mnot ,” I insisted. How dare he laugh?He was the one who wouldn’t level with me about Miss Boobs-As-Big-As-My-Head. Not that I’d brought her up lately. But still.

“I can’t sit around and do nothing about this guy, Jess,” Rob said.

“I know that,” I said. “And we won’t be doing nothing. We’re just not going to hurt him. Physically, anyway. Look. You’re just going to have to trust me on this.”

Which was when he looked down at me and said, an incredulous look on his face, “Oh, right. You mean the way you trust me?”

I knew what was coming then.

And I also knew I was nowhere near ready for it.

“I gotta go,” I said, and whirled around to seize one of the boxes and head for my parents’ front porch.

But Rob—just as I’d feared he would—slipped out a hand to catch my arm.

“Jess.”

His voice, in the still evening air, was gentle…though his grip, as I tried to shake it off, was most definitely not.

“I seriously don’t want to talk about this right now,” I said through gritted teeth, keeping my gaze rooted on my parents’ front door. No way was I going to look him in the eye. Noway. I’d melt if I did. I’d melt into a puddle of tears right there on the lawn.

“We have to talk about it sometime,” Rob said in that same gentle voice. But his grip didn’t loosen one iota. “I’m not letting you go until we do. Not this time.”

“You have to let me go,” I said, still keeping my gaze glued to the front door. My mother had painted it blue. When had she done that? It had always been red before. “The paper boy will call the cops in the morning if he gets here and finds us like this.”

“I don’t mean we have to do it tonight,” Rob said. And now he did relax his grip. I yanked my arm away and turned to glare at him. It was safe, I knew, to look at him. So long as he wasn’t touching me.

“But we’ve got to talk about it sometime before you leave to go back to New York,” Rob went on. His expression, in the light from the moon that was just beginning to rise, was as serious as I’d ever seen it. “I know you don’t want to, but I do. I have to. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to move on if we don’t.”

I had to laugh at that one.

“Oh,” I said. “You haven’t moved on?”

He frowned. “No. What makes you think I have?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” I said sarcastically. “Maybe it was that blonde I saw you making out with.”

The frown deepened. “Jess. Itold you. That—”

“Jessica! There you are!”

My mother’s voice rang out across the lawn.

Thirteen

I turned around to find Mom on the front porch, looking down at us.

“Aren’t you going to invite your friend inside?” Mom wanted to know.

Then she flicked the porch light on and saw who “my friend” actually was.

“Oh,” she said, startled. “Hello, Robert.”

Rob looked as if he tasted something foul. But his voice, when he spoke, was friendly enough. “Hey, Mrs. Mastriani.”

“Well,” Mom said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—I didn’t mean to interrupt—”

“It’s okay,” I said, bending over to retrieve my boxes. I lifted them both without a problem. That’s how freaked out I was. I didn’t even notice how heavy they were. “You didn’t interrupt anything. We were just saying good night.”

“Right,” I heard Rob say as I hurried to cross the lawn. “We were just saying good night.”

“Call me in the morning, Rob,” I said, climbing the steps to the porch. “So we can talk about what we’re going to do about thatsituation .”

“I’ll do that,” Rob said, behind me. “Good night.”

“Good night, Robert,” my mother called to him. Then, to me, as I was crossing the porch, she said pleasantly, “What have you got there, Jessica?”

“Just some videotapes,” I said, brushing past her and heading into the house in the hopes of getting away before she noticed how red my face was…and how hard my heart was slamming into my ribs.

Fortunately, Mom didn’t seem to notice how discombobulated I was. She wasn’t interested in what was in the boxes I held, either. She was more interested in finding out what was going on between Rob and me.

“Videotapes?” she echoed, closing the front door behind us. Outside, I heard Rob start up his truck. “I see. Well. I didn’t know you and Rob Wilkins were back in touch.”

“We’re not,” I said. “Well, not really. We’re just…we’re working on a project together, that’s all. Something to do with his sister.” I had started towards the door to the basement—my dad had set up a den down there where he could watch sports undisturbed.

“I didn’t know Rob had a sister,” Mom said.

“Yeah. Well, neither did Rob.”

“Oh.” My mom had always been able to put more meaning in a single word than anyone I knew. ThatOh spoke volumes—mostly about how not surprised she was that someone of Rob’s ilk would turn out to have an illegitimate sibling.

“And what about that girl?” Mom wanted to know. “That one you said you saw him kissing that day?”

Now more than ever, I wished I’d kept my mouth shut about Miss Boobs-As-Big-As-My-Head. At least where my parents were concerned.

“Was that his sister?” Mom asked.

“God, Mom. No!”

“Oh,” Mom said. “Well, what, then? Are you just going to forgive him for that? You were off, risking your life, fighting a war, while he—”

“Mom,” I said with a groan. “Knock it off, okay?”

“Well, I’m just saying,” Mom went on, “if it happened once, it will happen again. That’s the problem with boys like that.”

I paused in the basement doorway and looked back at her from over my shoulder.

“Boys like what, Mom?” I asked her in a very quiet voice.

“Well, you know,” she said. “Boys who haven’t had the same advantages you had growing up.”

“You mean Grits,” I said, impressed at how even I managed to keep my tone.

“No, that is not what I mean,” Mom said, looking offended. “I’m sure Rob is a very nice young man—his penchant for kissing other girls behind your back aside. But you know perfectly well he’s never going to leave this town.”

“What’s wrong with living in this town?” I demanded. “You and Dad live here. Douglas lives here. If it’s good enough for you, why isn’t it good enough for me? I mean, for Rob?”

“How can you even ask that?” Mom asked with what I’m positive was genuine wonder. “Jessica, you have so much potential. Why would you want to waste all that staying here in this backwater town, when you could have a real career—travel, meet exciting new people, make a real difference in the world?”

“You know what, Mom?” I said. “I’ve actually done all that. And look where it got me.”

She gave me a sour look.

“You know what I mean, Jessica,” she said. “You’re a sought-after inspirational speaker, thanks to your former powers and all the good you did with them. Why, I’ve had letters from groups asking if you’d address their organization from places as far away as Japan. They’d pay all your expenses and as much as twenty thousand dollars in speaking fees. You have a very profitable career ahead of you….”

I looked her dead in the eye—which was kind of hard because I’d started down the steps to the basement and she was standing above me, and she’s taller than me under normal circumstances anyway.

“And that’s the future you see for me,” I said. “Traveling all around the world, talking to people about a power Iused to have, the good Iused to do. What about doing good now? Without benefit of my powers? Because there are things I can do now, Mom, that don’t involve extrasensory perception.”

“Well, of course, sweetheart,” my mother said. “All of your professors say you could easily become part of a world-class orchestra if you’d just apply yourself. You could tour the globe, playing in exciting places like Sydney, Australia. And since Skip will probably get a job with an investment firm in New York City, if you got a position with the Philharmonic, why, that would be just perfect! You two could get a little apartment together, and come back to visit us at holidays, and…well, who knows? Maybe even get married and start a family of your own!”

I just looked at her. What could I say? I couldn’t admit that the thought of being in a world-class orchestra made me want to run screaming down the street. I couldn’t admit that I was so sick of traveling, I balled up every single one of those speaking gig requests she forwarded to me, and threw them down the incinerator. I couldn’t admit that the thought of marrying Skip made me feel like I’d never stop barfing.

Because if I said any of those things, I know she’d be like,“Well, then what do you want to do instead?”

And if I told her, she’d be the one who’d never stop barfing.

So I just said, “Look. I have stuff to do.”

And continued down the stairs to the basement.

“Well,” Mom said to my departing back. “Don’t stay up too late! That nice Karen Sue Hankey called a few minutes ago. She wants to take you to brunch in the morning. I’m so glad you two made up. I never understood why you didn’t like Karen Sue. She’s such a nice girl.”

Great. I rolled my eyes. I was still rolling them when I got down to the basement and found my dad sitting in front of the television, which he’d put on mute, evidently so he could eavesdrop on my conversation with Mom.

“I always thought that Karen Sue girl was a bit of a drip myself,” he said to me. “But maybe she’s improved with age.”