The Taking

CHAPTER One

Day One

MY HEAD WAS POUNDING. BUT NOT LIKE A HEADACHE. Like someone was using it as a basketball against the pavement. Or for target practice.

That was it, I realized, prying my eyes open at last. Something was hitting me. Pelting, more like.

There was still too much light to make out anything clearly, but after blinking several times, I was at least aware of shapes around me. I dug my fingers into the ground beneath me and recognized the gravel and sand and asphalt at my back. All around me the smells of oil and gasoline lingered with something sickly sweet—like the smell of warm rot—sparking my gag reflex.

Another hard thing pegged me in the side of the head again, and I flinched, lifting my hand to try to shield myself from the assault.

This time I heard a sound. A giggle, maybe?

I squeezed my eyes, blinking harder, willing them to focus.

It was daylight that blinded me, which seemed wrong for a reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on. But it wasn’t just that—this whole situation seemed wrong. And now it wasn’t just my head that was pounding; it was my heart too. My brain felt scrambled as I grappled to make sense of where I was and why I was waking up here, outside, instead of at home in my bed.

The silhouette of a little boy stood above me, shadowed by the glare of the sun behind him. I blinked harder, still trying to sort it all out, and I could see his expression then, a look of delight. He held one hand behind his back.

Spread out like marbles in front of my face, I saw an array of brightly colored candies that looked suspiciously like gum balls or mini jawbreakers.

“What are you doing here?” the boy asked, the hint of a slight frown shifting the planes of his freckled face.

I searched for an answer, and when I couldn’t find a suitable one, I asked one of my own, “What are you doing here?”

The boy looked back over his shoulder. “Waiting for my mom.” Past him, I saw the gas pumps and a small convenience store behind them. I squinted against the sunlight and read the sign: GAS ’N’ SIP. A woman was at one of the stands, filling the tank of her red minivan.

What the—the Gas ’n’ Sip, really? How the heck had that happened? When had that happened? I shoved the base of my palms into my throbbing eyes, trying to crush the pain away. Eyeing me curiously, the boy absently popped a piece of the candy or gum into his mouth from the hand behind his back as I struggled to sit upright.

It wasn’t easy. Apparently, I’d slept outside all night. And behind a Dumpster at the Gas ’n’ Sip no less. That panicky feeling shook me, and I glanced around uneasily, wincing as I realized that the rotting smell had been garbage.

“Robby!” The woman yelled, and the boy’s head whipped around.

“Gotta go,” he whisper-told me as if we’d developed some sort of bond and I required an explanation for his departure. “You want these?” He held out his hand, palm open to reveal his remaining candies: three red ones, a green, and four yellows.

I thought about turning him down. They looked sticky. But my mouth tasted like I’d just licked home plate, so I nodded instead.

He held them toward me, and I accepted his gummy offering as they peeled, rather than dropped, from his skin. “Thanks,” I said before he skipped away.

I popped the candies into my mouth, letting the sour jolt of them awaken my saliva glands and wash away the tang of dirt that seemed to cling to my tongue.

As always, I got impatient and bit down on one of the candies. Despite their gooey outer shell, inside they were rock hard, something I discovered the moment I felt a chunk of my right-side molar chip away.

Cursing, I spit the rest of the candies in a messy wad onto the ground and ran my tongue over the new, rough edge of my tooth. I’d just been to the dentist last week, something I hated doing, and now this would mean I’d be forced to see him again.

Fishing my cell phone from the front pocket of my uniform pants, I decided it was time to call for backup. I still couldn’t believe I’d ended up behind the Dumpster of a gas station last night. My parents were probably freaking the hell out. I was freaking the hell out.

Not to mention Austin . . .

I dialed him first, not caring that my decision was sure to set off another round of arguments when I got home.

I held the phone to my ear and waited. After a moment I pulled the phone away and inspected it.

NO SERVICE, the screen read.

No service—how was that even possible? I knew exactly where I was. I’d been at this gas station a hundred times; it was maybe a mile from my house—well within our coverage map.

Whatever, I thought, getting tentatively to my feet and waiting till my legs felt steady. I did my best to ignore the headache that continued to pulse behind my eyes. The walk would probably do me good.

I wasn’t sure how much good the walk had done me, but at least my head had stopped throbbing. I still felt off and couldn’t quite pin down what, exactly, was bothering me.

I had this strange sense of déjà vu that clung to me. It was like a wet second skin, all itchy and maddening, making me glance, and glance again, at everything I passed. It all seemed familiar yet not at once. Like I’d been here before but was seeing it all for the very first time.

Considering I’d been born and raised in Burlington, Washington, a town that barely rated a dot on most maps and definitely not worthy of a mention by name, I was chalking it up to the fact that I’d spent the night outside and still had no memory of anything after the fight with my dad.

Why I’d decided to camp out behind a Dumpster was beyond me—I was claiming temporary insanity, because there was no other feasible explanation.

Going home was sure to play out one of two ways, the way I figured it. My dad was either gonna be super sorry about our argument, and the fact that I’d gotten out of the car in the middle of the road and just . . . disappeared.

Or he was going to be massively pissed at me for being so dramatic that I’d decided to stay out all night, even though I had zero recollection of making that decision at all.

Either way, I was still trying to decide how to explain the part about having no memory of getting from there to here. That’s why I’d been hoping to talk to Austin first. He was good at those kinds of things. Good at talking me off the ledge and trying to see my parents’ side of things. He was reasonable and even-tempered in a way that I didn’t seem to be capable of when it came to them.

When I saw my house, on the same block I’d lived on my whole life—right across the street from Austin’s house—that sense of déjà vu returned full force, nearly buckling my knees. For a moment I just stood in front of it, running my tongue over the sharp edge of my chipped tooth. I studied the gray-blue paint that my mom and dad had agonized over when they’d had to repaint the house last summer; and the azalea bushes out front, which suddenly seemed bigger and bushier than I’d remembered them; and the place in the sidewalk where I’d pressed my hands in the wet concrete when I was four and my mom had written my initials with the end of a stick: KA. Kyra Agnew.

I turned to glance at the house across the street. If Austin’s car had been parked out front, I would’ve gone there first. I was suddenly nervous about going inside my own home.

But his car was gone, so I was on my own.

Walking up to the front steps, I tried the door, but it was locked. I reached up to the top of the doorjamb, stretching because I wasn’t really tall enough unless I stood on my toes, and felt for the spare key we kept there. My fingers fumbled along, slipping over the grit, and all the while my pulse felt like it was choking me, it was beating so fast, so hard. But no matter how many times I checked, and double-checked, there was no key.

I searched around my feet, thinking it must have fallen, but it wasn’t there either. Maybe my parents had decided to teach me a lesson for my tantrum. Maybe they’d locked me out to force me to face them at the door before letting me back inside, which of course they would. To show me that they’re still in charge.

Finally, when I couldn’t think of anything else to do and when I couldn’t put it off any longer, I knocked. My throat felt suddenly too tight, which seemed silly. Of course they’d be mad, but they’d forgive me too.

It was an accident, me staying out all night. Somehow I’d have to find a way to explain that to them. To make them believe that I didn’t know exactly what had happened the night before.

I shifted nervously back and forth as I waited, thinking of a million ways to say I’m sorry. The seconds seemed to stretch and bend and last an eternity, and just when I was about to give up, when I was sure that neither one of them was home, I saw the curtain on the other side of the door—the one above the couch in the living room—part.

A face appeared.

A child’s face.

I was confused, startled by the appearance of the toddler.

I was an only child—the product of parents who’d spent my entire life doting on me, and only me. I was the center of their universe. Their sun and their moon and their stars, as my dad liked to say when I was little.

The little boy lifted his hand in a motionless wave, pressing his chubby fingers to the window and leaving a steamy impression around them. I thought of my mom, and the way she’d always told me not to touch the windows because it left fingerprints.

But when the man appeared behind him, I physically jolted. I looked at the door again; a sense of dread filled every crevice of my being, like I’d made some terrible mistake and gone to the wrong house. Like there was some other blue-gray house with my handprints forever imprinted in the walkway.

My panic subsided somewhat when I saw the worn gold numbers running alongside the front door: 9-6-1-2.

My address.

My house.

My home.

I was definitely in the right place. So who were these people? These strangers staring at me from the other side of my window?

I glanced back, but they were gone, the curtains fallen back in place. The only reminder that they’d been there at all was the outline of the boy’s hand. I felt sick, still dizzy, when I heard the door.

I glanced up just as it opened, and I found myself staring into the man’s intense brown eyes. He didn’t say anything, just gave me that look that people give you when they answer their doors. The look that says, Can I help you?

Suddenly indignant, I took a step forward, reaching for a door handle I’d turned a million times before. “Are my parents here?” I’d meant to sound forceful, but my voice had a wavering quality that made me sound nervous instead.

I’m not sure it would have mattered, though. He’d stopped me anyway. “Who are your parents?” he asked, and that uneasy feeling settled deeper.

I looked once more at the numbers, double-checking, triple-checking them. “This is my house.”

The little boy appeared between the man’s knees. He had messy blond hair and round cheeks covered in what I could only imagine was jelly. He reminded me of a smaller version of the boy from the gas station, except that this boy didn’t have freckles. Or pants. His chubby legs were white, and his bare feet were wide, looking vaguely like flippers.

The man moved, pushing the boy back inside and positioning himself between me and the toddler. Like I was a danger, a threat. “Who are your parents?” he asked, his voice slower now.

His patronizing tone rubbed me wrong. I pursed my lips. “What are you doing here?” I asked, unwilling to give him too much information, and suddenly worried that there was a strange man in my home. Where were my parents anyway?

The man’s eyes narrowed, and I couldn’t decide if he was studying me, or suspicious, or both. I saw him reaching for his pocket, and my stomach tightened. Behind him, the boy was clamoring to get around his legs. “Me see . . . me see . . . me see . . . ,” he kept repeating.

When the man’s hand emerged, he was holding a cell phone. “Do you need me to call someone for you?”

This time when I reached for the handle, I was faster than he was. “No!” I was nearly hysterical now as I managed to push my way past him. The little boy jumped out of the way of the swinging door. “I need you to tell me what you’re doing here!” I searched the entry frantically. “Mom!” I shouted. “Dad!”

I’d only made it one step before the man had ahold of my arms and was dragging me back out the door. I heard his phone fall, clattering on the tile floor. He wasn’t gentle, and my heart was racing, slamming against my ribs, bruising them. I didn’t know what he planned to do to me. The little boy was crying, but the man didn’t release me as he hauled me down the steps. I tripped over my own feet as he pulled me along the walkway until we were standing on the sidewalk out in front.

“I don’t know what you’re problem is,” he hissed, trying to keep his voice low, his eyes shifting back and forth from me to the screaming boy with no pants at the front door. “But this is my house, and you’re scaring my son. If you need help, then call 9-1-1. I can’t do anything for you.” He released my arm but didn’t leave right away. He just stood there looking at me, waiting for some sort of acknowledgment that I’d heard what he’d said.

I had. I’d heard him. I just couldn’t make sense of it.

His house?

Is that what he’d said? His house?

But that wasn’t right. This was my house.

My house.

I tried to find something in all of it to cling to, something that would clear things up. I replayed the last few minutes, when I’d burst through the front door, and tried to recall what I’d seen.

It was the same house I remembered. The same, but different.

How could that be?

Tears burned my eyes as I looked, too, not at the boy, but at the house in front of us. The house I’d grown up in.

The man gave me one last piteous look before shaking his head and going back to his son. The boy raised his arms to his father, who scooped him up and carried him back inside, closing the door without looking back at me.

I wanted to explain what I was going through, to tell him who I was and who my parents were, but all I could manage was “But I . . . I live here.”

The house across the street was almost as familiar to me as my own, which right now wasn’t entirely reassuring. The pounding in my head was back, starting behind my eyes and radiating down the back of my neck. FML.

Despite the past few minutes, I wasn’t hesitant as I neared the perfectly edged grass and tidy flower beds, because it was all so familiar. All so comforting.

Everything was exactly as it should be.

Even the car in the driveway—Austin’s mother’s—the same as always.

Austin would know what was happening. He’d clear things up for me.

I checked my phone again and saw the same NO SERVICE message blinking at me from the screen. If Austin’s car had been there, I would have gone to his window. Instead, I went around back to the kitchen door and rapped softly.

When Austin materialized on the other side, peering at me through the panes of glass that separated us, I leaned forward, sagging against the door as relief loosened the knots in my chest and the tension in the back of my neck. I pressed my hand against the window, the same way the little boy had in my house when he’d waved to me through my living-room window.

Austin was here!

Everything would be fine now. Austin would make everything okay.

The door opened, and I moved with it, tumbling inside as I fell into him. His arms opened, catching me before I could fall all the way to the floor.

“Thank god,” I mumbled against his chest, the only place that felt safe. I no longer cared that I was still wearing my uniform, dirt and sweat stains making it rank. “Thank god you’re here. I’ve had the strangest morning. The strangest night. I have no idea what’s going on.”

The arms around me tightened, but only slightly, and then I heard his mother’s voice, so achingly well-known to me that tears brimmed in my eyes. “Tyler? Who is it? What’s going on?”

I hadn’t noticed Tyler, Austin’s kid brother, but it was a relief to know I was no longer alone, that I was surrounded by familiar faces when everything else was so out of whack.

I drew back from Austin so I could see his mom. “It’s just me,” I told her. “I just came over because—” I wasn’t sure how I’d planned on finishing my explanation, but I never had the chance.

Tamara Wahl dropped her coffee mug. The ceramic shards became projectiles as it shattered, sending pieces flying in every direction. Coffee pooled at her feet, but she just stood there, staring at me, her mouth gaping.

“Mom, it’s Kyra . . . ,” Austin said, and for the first time I realized that this was all wrong too. I looked down at the arms, still at my waist, and noticed the wiry hairs on them. They should have been flaxen, closer to blond than brown. Even the arms, the skin, seemed somewhat too pale, as if this version of Austin hadn’t just finished his annual lifeguard certification—something my Austin had most definitely done.

His voice, too, was not right. It was deep, yes, the timbre just shades away from Austin’s.

I was almost afraid to look at his face.

And that was when he caught me for the second time. The moment I realized that he wasn’t Austin at all; he never had been.

This was Tyler Wahl. Tyler, who looked far too much like his older brother—my seventeen-year-old boyfriend—in looks, in stature . . . and, most of all, in age.

Tyler, who, the last time I’d seen him just the day before, had been only twelve years old.

CHAPTER TWO

“KYRA, ARE YOU SURE I CAN’T GET YOU SOMEthing?” Tamara Wahl asked, her disembodied head looming out of the darkness as she peered into the bedroom.

I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten here, but at least I knew where I was. Or thought I did. Everything felt topsy-turvy at the moment.

“No. I don’t think so.” I shifted on the Batman sheets that I’d laid on almost as many times as my own. “No. I’m okay.”

I glanced around at a room I had memorized. I knew right where the poster of Mark Spitz (the Olympic swimmer Austin idolized) was—the one with the preprinted autograph Austin had tried to replicate above it when he was eleven in scribbly purple marker. The furniture was arranged exactly the same as always: his bed, his dresser, his corner desk plastered with a mishmash collection of sports and music and bumper stickers he’d collected.

But despite the sameness of it, it was missing his everyday clutter. His overflowing clothes hamper, the discarded Coke cans and water glasses on top of his dresser, messy homework piles on his desk. Even the bed was too neat, the sheets too fresh and smooth, as if they’d just been changed.

As if I were inside a diorama of Austin’s room. A perfect, unused replica.

His mother had tried to explain things to me, but nothing she’d said made any sense. It was like she’d been speaking gibberish.

Five years, she’d kept saying. It had been five years since anyone had seen me last.

She was wrong, of course.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

It hadn’t been five years. It had been one night. I knew because I had been at my softball game. The championship game.

I knew because I was still wearing my uniform, and it still smelled like grass and sweat, and I still had the ribbons threaded through my hair.

One night, I kept insisting while my head and my throat ached. My dad and I had had an argument, and I’d run off to have a few minutes to myself—that was all. I must’ve wandered until I’d fallen asleep. At the Gas ’n’ Sip. Behind the Dumpster.

One damn night. Not five long years.

But she’d given me some time alone to absorb it, to let it sink in before coming back to check on me.

She patted my hand now, her voice cautious, as if I were held together by wishes and hopes. “Well, your mom should be here soon. Maybe she’ll do a better job of explaining things than I did.”

I shot upright. “My mom?” My throat constricted around the anticipation. “She’s coming?” My words barely made it through my airway, and the last one came out as a squeak. I didn’t want to cry, but just hearing that my mom was on her way made everything better somehow, and there was no way to stop the tears.

And then Austin’s mom, who I couldn’t remember not knowing, had her arms around me, comforting, reassuring, holding me in the way only a mother knows how. “It’ll be okay, Kyra. Everything’s gonna be okay now.”

Waiting, the same way I used to do when I was a little girl and I knew it was time for my mom to come home from work, I was standing at the window when I saw her pull up. She was driving a car I didn’t recognize: black and shiny and sporty.

If what Tamara Wahl had said was true, which I still couldn’t wrap my brain around because it was utterly-completely-totally insane, but if I allowed myself even to consider that I’d really lost five whole years of my life, then more than just who drove what had changed.

I know Austin’s mom believed what she said, and she definitely had some evidence to back up her story. Austin was off at college, or so she’d told me—living the life we’d always planned, attending his last year at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. And Tyler—pipsqueak Tyler, who used to follow us around the house, intruding on conversations and telling the same annoying jokes that we used to tell when we were his age—was now a junior at Burlington Edison High, the same school Austin and Cat and I had once gone to. I couldn’t deny that part, that he’d changed—I’d seen it with my own two eyes.

And, obviously, my mom and dad had moved.

All those things made it hard to argue with her. But that didn’t change the part where everything inside of me said she was wrong.

I wanted to cry and scream at the same time, and I was so ridiculously confused, I could hardly think straight.

Five years was a lifetime. An eternity.

I was surprised, then, when my mom stopped her sleek black car, not in front of Austin’s house, but in front of our old house. Habit, I supposed. It was the first place I’d gone too.

I watched as she emerged from her new car. Her hair was more highlighted than I remembered and shorter too, skimming her shoulders rather than falling to the middle of her back.

I wondered if I looked different too. I’d tried to wash up and had examined myself in the mirror. I didn’t feel changed, and I couldn’t see anything that said five years had gone by, right down to the farmer’s tan where my uniform sleeves hit, from spending hour after hour practicing in those last days of softball season. I even had the same bruise on my right shin from where I’d banged it against our coffee table when Cat and I had been wrestling over the remote last weekend.

Well, last weekend plus five years.

But how was any of that possible? How could I have the same bruise and suntan? How could I still be wearing my uniform and the ribbons threaded through my hair, and smell like sweat and softball field if five years had passed?

Those were the things that made me hesitate, no matter how logical Tamara Wahl’s explanations might seem. No matter how much Tyler had grown.

Outside, my mom faltered for a moment, looking up at the blue-gray house I’d tried to barge into before she made her way across the street toward Austin’s house.

Toward me.

My stomach fluttered nervously.

“This must be so weird for you.” Tyler’s voice came from behind me. It was the first time I’d heard him say anything in his new, deep voice since that moment I’d collapsed in his arms in the kitchen. Vaguely, I could make out the shape of him, still too tall to reconcile with the Tyler I remembered, in the reflection of the glass. But all my focus, all my energy was directed on her . . . on my mom.

I nodded and then slipped away from the window to meet her at the front door. She didn’t go around back like I had.

I opened it before she could knock, startling her.

Seeing her there, her face looking drawn the way it did, her lips pinched and her eyes strained, I could almost believe that everything I’d been told was true. It truly had been five years since I’d last seen her.

Tyler looked five years older. My mother looked five years wearier.

Tamara had said that, after a few years of private investigators and police, my parents finally had to go on with their lives and had left it at that, even when I’d tried to probe to find out what exactly “go on with their lives” meant.

I guess I was about to find out.

“Kyra?” My mom’s voice was more like a question. A terrified, hopeful, incredulous question. And suddenly she was just my mom. The same mom I’d had breakfast with yesterday. The same mom who shared dorky memes on Facebook and who laughed at my dad’s lame jokes and who’d continued making me Mickey Mouse pancakes on Sunday mornings long after I’d told her I didn’t care if my pancakes were shaped like cartoon characters.

“Mom . . .” Just saying the word made it real, and I started to cry, but really only because she was crying, while at the same time she did the mom-thing and wrapped me in her arms and started whispering nonsense words that tumbled over one another. Words like how she never thought she’d see me again and how I hadn’t changed a bit and how she was never letting me out of her sight again.

I stayed inside the circle of her embrace, listening to it all. She made promises and we cried, and she hugged me and I hugged her until my arms ached and hers probably did too. When her grip loosened, I finally found the words to ask “Where’s Dad? Is he coming too?”

I thought she might have stiffened, but I couldn’t say so for sure. I didn’t have the chance to decide, because we were interrupted by that man, the one from across the street. The one who’d chased me out of his house earlier.

His actions made sense now, I guess, since I was a complete stranger who’d been trying to shove her way into his home; but it didn’t make me bristle any less when he appeared at my mother’s back.

Or when his hand fell on her shoulder.

Like he knew her.

Knew her, knew her.

Her brow crumpled when she turned to face him. “Grant.” She spoke to him in such a familiar way, in a way that made my stomach drop. The same way she spoke to my father. “I haven’t had a chance to tell her yet.” When she looked back to me, her expression was apologetic. “Kyra.”

“I’m so sorry,” the man said. “I should’ve recognized you. From your pictures.”

I looked up at him, really looked at him. Tall and dark eyed, and, even now, holding the little blond boy in his arms. She didn’t explain who he was. She didn’t have to. The toddler reaching for my mother said it all when he squealed, “Mommy!”

She took the little boy, and he clutched her, looking more like a monkey than a child the way he clung to her. He dropped his head on her shoulder and sighed contentedly, and I briefly wondered if I’d done that, too, when I was his age.

I looked at the boy, and then my mom, and then the man again, at the way his hand stayed on her shoulder.

Five years . . .

My parents had gone on with their lives. . . .

But not with each other.

This was her new family. This was her son. And her husband. Her new husband . . . shiny and sleek and new, like the car parked in front of the house.

“I didn’t want you to find out this way,” she told me, reaching for me with her free hand. She squeezed my arm, trying to pull me to her, to make me part of the embrace with her and the little boy in her arms.

Maybe she didn’t get it, how much this was for me. That this was happening too suddenly, and it was too, too, too much. Or maybe she did, because then she said, in a voice that was almost too hopeful, making me wonder if she was talking to me or to the little boy in her arms, “This is Logan. Your brother.”

I tried to look at him—this replacement child—but I couldn’t. He might be my brother, but I’d never asked for him. I didn’t want him. I wanted my old family. The one I’d had yesterday. “Where’s Dad?” I finally asked, turning to look at my feet, the only place that felt safe.

“He’s coming, Kyr. He’s on his way.” She was trying to sound sympathetic; I knew she was.

“Good. I’ll be inside. Let me know when he gets here.”

“What else do I need to know?” I asked when Tyler appeared in the doorway to Austin’s bedroom, the only place that seemed semifamiliar and nontoxic at the moment.

Tyler smiled at me from where he leaned against the doorjamb, and I realized why I’d mistaken him for his brother when I’d first seen him. His hair was slightly darker and longer and more mussed, and his skin was lighter than Austin’s, as if he spent more time indoors than out, but there was that same confidence about him. Those same green eyes that crinkled when he grinned his sideways grin.

Tyler shrugged. “Flying cars, for one.”

“Shut up,” I scoffed from where I was sprawled on my back on the bed. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Well, not so much flying as hovering, but we’ve almost got the technology down.”

I lifted my head, unwilling to allow myself to smile. My eyes glanced over to the clock on the wall, and I wondered how much longer it would be till my father would get there.

“Oh, and mind reading.” His teasing half grin grew to a full-blown smile, dazzling me because it was so reminiscent of his brother’s.

A pang of longing threatened to do me in.

I threw a pillow at him, and he dodged it. “Can I call him?”

I didn’t have to explain who “him” was, and Tyler came inside, joining me as he sat on the end of the bed. It was strange to be here with him. In one sense I’d known Tyler his whole life. I’d been to all of his birthday parties, teased him when he had a lisp because he lost his front teeth, walked him to school on his first day, pushed him on the swing set until he cried mercy because it was too high, and built snowmen with him on snow days.

In another sense he was a virtual stranger, someone I barely knew.

But at this very moment he felt like the only link I had to Austin.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Mom called and left a message, letting him know you were back. I’m sure he’ll try to get in touch with you.” Even his voice was too similar. It was so freaky uncanny.

I pulled out my phone, suddenly understanding why I didn’t have service. Life went on, cell phone contracts didn’t. “I don’t have a phone.”

Tyler thought about it for a second and then handed me his.

“What’ll you use?”

“I already told you . . . mind reading. No phones necessary.” He shrugged when I raised my eyebrows at him. “I’ll get a burner. Besides, your mom’ll probably get you a new one in a couple’a days.”

Now it was my turn to shrug. “Or my dad.” He didn’t say anything to that, so I ran my thumb over the screen of his fancy phone, rubbing away the fingerprints he’d left there. “How long have they been divorced, anyway?”

He shifted on the bed, and I figured I’d made him uncomfortable. He rubbed the back of his neck and leaned forward, balancing his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know about the divorce, but your dad moved out about a year after you . . . you know. . . .” His words trailed away. “I don’t know if I should even say this, but it got weird. After a while there were accusations. I don’t know who started them, but people started saying it was him, your dad. That he was the one responsible for . . . well, for you going missing—”

“No,” I interrupted. “No! No way. Not my dad. We were fighting, yeah—arguing over college and Austin. Stupid stuff, really. I got mad and decided to walk. But my dad would never hurt me.” I shouldn’t even have to say that, I thought, defending the man who would’ve thrown himself in front of a bus for me.

Tyler made an apologetic face. “That’s what my parents always said too. They said rumors are dangerous, and people talk when they have nothing better to do. My dad said no one believed it, at least no one that mattered.”

I nodded, relieved, at least that his parents had believed that my father was innocent. Austin’s dad was a cop, and I felt better knowing that the police, even if he was the only one, hadn’t suspected my dad of anything shady.

Then Tyler’s eyes met mine, and he asked me the question I’d been asking myself over and over again. “So where were you then? This whole time you’ve been gone, where were you?”

If I had an answer I would have given it to him. Surely I wasn’t asleep behind the Dumpster for the entire five years—the Rip van Winkle of the Gas ’n’ Sip. The same went for wandering along Chuckanut Drive after my fight with my dad. I had no memory of anything past getting out of his car that night.

Just the flash of light. And then nothing.

Five years gone in a blink.

I glanced again at the clock, but its hands hadn’t moved since the first time I’d looked, perpetually frozen at 3:34. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t remember anything at all. For me it’s like it was yesterday.” I shook my head, as baffled as everyone else by the question. “They looked for me?”

“Of course,” he offered, his green eyes earnest as they sought mine. “Everyone. Not just your parents or mine, but the entire school. The whole city, maybe the entire state. There were flyers and alerts, and private investigators. You were like one of those milk carton kids.”

“And Austin?”

His head bobbed. “Austin too. And Cat. They searched with everyone else.”

Cat. I hadn’t even thought of her, and my eyes stung all over again. My face crumpled as I clutched Tyler’s phone even tighter in my fist. I’d have to call her tonight. She’d want to know I was back. Of course she’d want to know.

He studied me, silent for a long, tense moment. “Can I tell you something strange?”

I half choked on a sob. “Stranger than me reappearing after all this time with no memory at all of the last five years?”

The corners of his mouth slid up the tiniest bit, and he cocked his head. “Yeah, sort of. It’s just that . . .” His eyes slid over every part of my face. “You don’t look any different.” His brow fell as he tried to explain. “What I mean is, Austin looks older. He looks twenty-two. But you . . . you still look . . . sixteen.”

My dad had always been dorky. And by dorky I guess I mean cheesy but sweet.

He was the hands-on kind of dad. When I was little, he was the dad who volunteered to go on class field trips, and coach my softball and basketball teams when all the other dads were too busy working. He worked, too, but his job as a computer programmer gave him the flexibility to telecommute, which meant he’d collected coach’s trophies until I went into middle school and his role was usurped by coaches who collected real paychecks for what they did.

But he’d never missed a single game or recital or parent-teacher conference.

He was that dad.

So seeing him now, five years—and one missing daughter—later was like a punch to the gut.

It wasn’t just me he’d been missing all these years later . . . it was him.

He was no longer the same man I remembered from our fight over which college scholarship I should pursue. This man, this dad, was a bedraggled version of that one.

His eyes were what I noticed first. Where my mom’s had been tense and drawn, his were red rimmed and vacant. Hopeless.

Unlike with my mom, however, there was no awkward hesitation. He was running toward the house the moment he stumbled from the beat-up van he’d parked haphazardly at the curb, the door still dangling wide open. I met him on the lawn, barely registering the fact that I was pushing my way past my mother and her new son and husband, past Tyler and his mom and his father, who was planning to meet us at the hospital—something my mother was insisting on, that I be checked out.

Gary Wahl—Austin and Tyler’s dad—would take my official statement there. I was pretty sure that because I was twenty-one, and no longer a minor, I could make some of these decisions on my own, but I still had to answer questions about where I’d been, or at least about what I could recall . . . which was pretty much less than nothing.

But none of those things mattered now. I didn’t care that we had an audience or that my dad smelled of whiskey or gin or some noxious combination of the two and that he probably shouldn’t have been driving in the first place. He was here, and that was all that mattered.

“I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . ,” I mumbled at the same time he did.

His shirt smelled stale and warm—like him, but not. He was fatter and softer than I remembered, and my arms had to reach farther to find their way around him. The scruff of his chin against my forehead had gone past grizzled and grown softer, like a beard, even though it was patchy and, from what I’d seen of it before he’d grabbed me and clutched me to him, grayer than I thought he should be.

I felt a hand on the small of my back, a light touch. “We should get going,” my mother said softly. “We can take my car.”

I glanced up at my dad, feeling like this might be too weird for him, but not sure which of us I was more worried about, him or me. He just shrugged, as if he didn’t care about her or who drove, but his grip on me remained the same. Firm. Secure. Like an anchor.

We followed her, and I didn’t look back to see if her new family followed us.

The inside of her car was cramped. Or maybe it was just me, sitting in the passenger seat feeling all awkward with my parents, who were now eyeing each other warily, like they were complete strangers.

My mom sat beside me, fumbling with the ignition and her seat belt, and then some more with the seat belt, pretty much anything to avoid looking in the backseat, where my dad was straining to lean forward, trying to be as close as he could to me.

Finally, when we were away from Austin’s house and from the new husband and the house I’d grown up in, away from everything and everyone that should have been comforting and ordinary but made me feel as out of place as I did sitting here trapped between my parents, my mom broke the silence. “Can you remember anything, Kyra? Even the tiniest detail so we can try to figure this out?”

But it was my dad who answered as he slumped forward, his elbows on the center console and his fingers slipping through his greasy hair. “It was the light. How many times do I have to tell you? It was the goddamn light that took her.”

They argued the entire drive, and I just sat there, listening mostly, because I didn’t have anything to offer.

“Do you remember the light?” my dad kept asking.

I’d already answered his question. Of course I remembered it. How could I not? It was bright, blinding, brilliant.

There was the light . . . then . . . nothing. Not a single memory.

“How many times do we have to go over this? How many times?!” My mom’s voice bordered on hysteria as she clutched the wheel, and I knew why. He was repeating himself—maybe he had been for years. Maybe this was the same argument she’d been hearing from him since the night I’d vanished.

I knew what she was thinking: how could he possibly blame a light for my disappearance? It was . . . well, it was insane to say the least.

But my dad didn’t see it that way. He was convinced. And not just convinced, but the way he talked about that light—all reverential and crazy eyed—reminded me of those guys who made tinfoil hats or pulled out all their fillings so the government couldn’t read their thoughts through radio frequencies.

That kind of convinced.

He didn’t actually say the word aliens, or even abduction. Instead he talked about internet message boards and government cover-ups, and he’d even mentioned crop circles at one point, so it wasn’t exactly like he was being subtle either.

Aliens. My dad thought I’d been abducted by aliens. Awesome.

I guess it sort of explained the nonshowery look he had about him and the stench of booze he wore like cologne. And I was starting to also-maybe-sort of see why my mom had kicked him out.

But from where I sat, he was still my dad, and the sense of guilt that this was all somehow my fault was overwhelming. If only I hadn’t argued with him. If only I hadn’t forced him to stop the car. If only I hadn’t gotten out in the middle of Chuckanut Drive.

If only . . .

It was a terrible game to play. One he’d probably played a million times over.

I twisted around in my seat, and put my hand on his. It was like a role reversal of all the times he’d squeezed my hand, silently reassuring me with his touch that everything would be okay. I wanted to convey that too. To let him know I was here now. That I wasn’t leaving again.

His bloodshot eyes found mine and stabbed my heart. “They work like that, you know? They just take people.”

I tried to shake my head, to deny his words. I might not have my memory to rely on, but I was certain it hadn’t been little green men who’d come down in their flying saucer and whisked me away to probe me for five years, only to bring me back and deposit me behind a Dumpster at the Gas ’n’ Sip.

“Ben,” my mom said when I didn’t seem to be able to come up with anything useful to add. “Maybe you should go home and get some sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

My dad shook his head violently, vehemently. “Nuhuh. No way. I’m staying with Kyra.” His hand flipped over and squeezed mine. “No way I’m letting you outta my sight again,” he vowed.

The emergency room is never the kind of place you want to hang out. The last time I was here the whole team had shown up to check on our shortstop, Carrie Dreyer. She’d come barreling into second and hit the base weird. When she went down screaming and everyone gathered around her, we realized that her bone was sticking clean through her skin. It had been a compound fracture, and she’d needed two surgeries and a titanium rod, and couldn’t come back that season.

And now, because I’d disappeared, I had no idea if Carrie had ever played again.

The ER was slow when my mom and dad walked me inside, so we didn’t have to wait long. It was strange to fill out my own admission forms, or any forms for that matter, since I’d never done that before. But now that I was an adult—which was even stranger—my parents were no longer allowed to sign for me. They also weren’t allowed to make decisions on my behalf. The staff made a point of speaking to me instead of to them, and I had to give permission for them even to be in the room while I was examined.

It was as if I’d suddenly been emancipated, something I’d heard other kids at school talk about before, about how cool it would be to make their own decisions and not have to answer to their parents anymore.

Yet now that I was here, faced with that exact thing, I was terrified. I felt more and more like a stranger trapped inside my own body. Like a little girl playing dress-up in my mom’s high heels, waiting for someone to come along and send me back to the playground with the other kids.

I was glad when they stuck me in a private room since it was hard enough to talk about all this with the people who were there to support me. I couldn’t imagine having to explain it in front of complete strangers. The big sliding glass door that led to the hallway outside made a whooshing sound whenever someone came in or out, and I jumped every time it opened.

Austin’s dad had been right behind us, so after a nurse had taken my vitals—my blood pressure, temperature, pulse—and noted them on my paper-thin chart, he tapped on the door. The glass whooshed as it slid open. “Mind if I come in?”

I waved him inside, while the nurse told me the doctor would be coming to check on me shortly.

Gary Wahl didn’t seem any different than he had the last time I’d seen him—a little grayer maybe, if I was looking for it, but other than that the same as he always had.

He eased onto the stool next to the bed; his eyes, so similar to Austin’s, found me. “I know you already said most of this, but we gotta make it official.” He tapped his pen on a notebook he was holding. “I’ll make it quick,” he adding, smiling in a way that made me think of Austin, and my stomach lurched. But I swear, everything made me think of Austin right about then, and I couldn’t wait for all this to be over with so I could be alone to call him. I just wanted to hear his voice again.

“You said you don’t remember where you’ve been all this time, the entire five years. Is that right, Kyra?” His voice was so serious, so not-Austin’s-dad’s voice, that I almost—even though it wasn’t even kinda funny—giggled. In all the years I’d known him, I’d never heard him use his cop voice before.

I took a breath and bit the inside of my lip, nodding solemnly instead. “Yeah. Uh, yes, that’s right.”

He scribbled my response. “So why don’t we start at the beginning. Tell me where you were and what the last thing you remember was?”

The game, I thought. I remembered the championship game. I opened my mouth to tell him that. About how Austin had been there, and how he was going to meet us at the Pizza Palace. But my dad answered first. “The light. Tell him about the light.”

“Oh, Jesus H. Christ,” my mom snapped, pinching her eyes between her finger and thumb. And then she dropped her hand with a sigh and glared at my father. “Are you kidding me with this? You’re not really starting this now, are you?”

“The light?” Gary looked at each of them and then at me.

Just then I heard the whooshing sound of the door and I jerked; my attention landed on a woman in the doorway wearing blue scrubs under her white lab coat—the doctor.

But behind her, in the hallway beyond the door, I saw Tyler, and realized that Gary hadn’t come alone. Tyler had come with him, and he was watching me through the glass, looking at me the way Austin should have been if he had been here the way he was supposed to be.

Like he was worried about me.

Things quieted down once I kicked my parents out of my room, something I could do now that I was a legitimate grown-up.

Before, I would’ve gotten crazy satisfaction from the ability to do things like that.

My parents went grudgingly, giving the doctor a chance to do her examination, which was pretty limited. She was nice, but there wasn’t much for her to do since I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me.

“Does this hurt?” Her small hands probed my belly as her eyes, which were sympathetic, met mine.

“Uh-uh.”

“What about this?” She poked harder, around my hips and into my lower abdomen.

“No.” I shook my head to emphasize my point. So far there was nothing unusual.

She looked back to where Gary was making some notes and pretending he couldn’t see or hear us, even though there was no way he couldn’t. I’d asked him to stay, not really wanting to be alone but not wanting my parents arguing over the top of me either.

“What about sexual assault?” She asked the questions as casually as if she were asking whether I preferred vanilla or strawberry ice cream. “Would you like me to examine you for signs you were assaulted?”

I wanted to crawl beneath the exam table and never come out. I didn’t bother to see if Gary was looking. I just shook my head again. “I’m fine.”

She nodded and made a quick note on my chart, and then gave me her hand to help me sit up. “Well, I don’t see anything that jumps out at me. I’ll order up some blood work and send that off to the lab, but I don’t see any reason you can’t go home. Do you have any questions?”

A million. But again I shook my head. She offered to send in my parents, but I told her to wait. I wanted just a few more minutes of peace.

I hated this new version of my parents. I hated that they seemed to hate each other and that they couldn’t be in the same room for five minutes without freaking out on each other. I hated the blame I could feel oozing from my mom, and the weird stuff my dad was fixated on, and the way the air between them was overflowing with bitterness. But I hated even more the guilt inside me, simmering just below the surface like it was ready to boil over at any moment. Like this was all somehow my fault.

I clenched my fingers into fists and hid them beneath my legs, where no one could see them, all the while screaming silently inside my own head, where no one could hear my inner tantrum. I bet I could implode, disintegrate into ash on this very spot where I was perched in my hospital gown on the edge of the bed, and no one would even notice.

I was still answering, or rather not answering, Gary’s questions when a man came in carrying what looked like a blue tackle box filled with test tubes and gauze and white tape and needles.

“Kyra Agnew?” he asked, as if he had a habit of wandering into the wrong room. He gave Gary a strange look, and I wondered if everyone knew why I was here.

“Uh-huh.”

“Just need to get a little blood for the lab before you go.” He grinned and set his box down while he pulled on a pair of latex gloves. He checked the ID bracelet on my wrist against the name on my chart and started getting the tubes and a needle ready.

Gary pointed to the hallway. “We’re all done here. I’m just gonna have a word with your parents and then we’ll see you back at the ranch.” He leaned down then, not a cop thing but an Austin’s-dad thing, and kissed me on the cheek. “It’s good to have you back, Kyr. Let us know if you need anything. Anything at all.”

My eyes stung. I didn’t want to cry, but I kinda was anyway. Even though I hadn’t had the chance to miss anyone, it was nice to know they’d missed me. “Thanks,” I croaked.

When we were alone, the lab guy examined the crook of my arm. “This’ll only take a second. Anyone ever told you you have great veins?”

I shrugged because I’d heard that before.

He seemed pretty young, but I had no idea how to judge that. By the tattoos that covered the parts of his arms I could see? The piercing in his eyebrow that he tried to cover up with one of those little round Band-Aids but was obvious anyway?

“How old are you?”

He grinned down at me. “Why? You worried I don’t know what I’m doing? I’m twenty-four, but I been doin’ this for two years at least. I’m the best around; you won’t feel a thing,” he bragged.

Twenty-four. Just three years older than I was now, and two years older than Austin and Cat.

My eyes roved over him as he wrapped a strip of rubber around my upper arm and tapped one of the blue vessels that bulged. “Don’t make a fist,” he told me when I started to curl my fingers. “It’s not necessary.”

He said some things that were probably meant to be distracting, but all I could think was that we could be friends if we wanted to, we were that close in age. He caught me staring, and I dropped my eyes to the needle as it plunged into my arm.

I’d never been squeamish—not even when it came to watching my own blood being drawn—so it was strange when I felt the prickling, the tingling around the needle.

“Is it supposed to feel like that?”

“Like what? Are you feeling a little light-headed or anything?”

I shook my head. “Just . . . it’s kinda . . . tingly.”

He popped the second vacuum-sealed vial into the syringe, and it rapidly began filling with blood. He glanced at me and then back to his task, releasing the rubber strip from my upper arm with a snap. “I’m sure it’s fine. And we’re . . . just . . . about . . . done. . . .” With those last words he set the vial back in his box of tricks and reached for a cotton swab, setting it on top of the needle in my arm as he tugged to pull it free.

But it didn’t budge.

He pulled again, harder this time, and still the needle stayed where it was, buried in my arm—deep in the vein.

The tingling sensation persisted, and now I felt a pressure too.

The guy frowned at it and then at me.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“No . . . it’s, uh . . . fine. . . .”

We both knew that wasn’t true. The needle should have slid out easily. I’d had this done before, and I’d never seen a needle get stuck before, not ever.

Beneath the surface of my skin, my vein swelled, bulging outward. The lab guy’s eyes widened. He pulled one more time, this time yanking the thing like he was pulling on a nail stuck in a wall instead of a needle in the soft tissue of my arm.

I yelped, but more because he scared the crap out of me than because it hurt, although it did kind of hurt too. He staggered backward, a full step away from me, but he had the needle in his hand when he stood upright. He held it in his fist like he was declaring victory or something.

“Oh, shit!” he cursed when he looked down and noticed the blood that spurted from the wound on my arm. It was only a little bit, but his moment of triumph was over, and he attacked the red smear with the cotton ball. “Sorry about that. Not sure what happened.” He secured the cotton ball with a strip of tape. “It should stop bleeding in about fifteen minutes, and you might have a little bruise for a few days. Nothing to be alarmed about, pretty routine stuff.”

He had me confirm that my name was correct on my vials of blood and then cleaned and packed up his gear, and the doors whooshed closed behind him.

By the time I gave my parents the signal that they were out of “time-out” and could come back inside my room, the nurse had returned with my discharge orders. And just like my sketchy memory, there was nothing conclusive about my visit to the hospital. Even the discharge orders were vague. They included scheduling a follow-up appointment with my family doctor to discuss any unusual lab results that might come back, making an appointment with the dentist to have my chipped tooth looked at, a list of phone numbers for local counselors and support groups—in case I wanted to discuss things, which right now sounded like the worst idea ever since I didn’t even know what “things” I would discuss—and getting plenty of rest. That last recommendation was the only idea I could really get behind.

I had a moment of panic, though, when we were getting ready to go and I was changing back into my filthy uniform—the same one I’d vanished in—and I suddenly realized I had no place to go. That I belonged nowhere.

I didn’t have a home anymore, not really, because the place I remembered wasn’t really mine anymore; it was just the house I’d grown up in. My home—the house I’d lived in just yesterday, in my mind—was gone now. My parents were no longer together—they’d moved on—and there was a new family living in that house: my mom and her husband and their son.

I was a stranger to that life.

The sensation of being unwelcome overwhelmed me even as my dad’s hand closed over mine, and the decision was made for me. “I’ll stay at your mom’s tonight, with you.” And before she could argue or say anything to the contrary, he faced her with his bloodshot eyes. “I’ll sleep in the guest room.”

“Ben,” my mom interjected, sounding a million times softer than she had when he’d mentioned the light. “Kyra’ll be in the guest room.”

I guess my bedroom had been part of that whole “getting on with their lives” thing, like getting rid of my dad.

“Fine,” my dad insisted, his grip tightening. “I’ll sleep on the couch. I already told you; I’m not letting her out of my sight again.” He looked down at me, and for a moment my hurt feelings evaporated. “I’m so so so glad you’re back, Supernova,” he told me on his boozy breath.

CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS OFFICIAL. I WAS A GUEST IN MY OWN BEDroom.

It was still my bed and my chest of drawers and probably even my same pillows, but those were the only things that hadn’t changed in the five years I’d been gone. The bedding was new, and still had that stiff, fresh-from-the-bag feel as if it’d never really been used and hadn’t yet gone through a single wash cycle.

It had been just as weird as I thought it would be, crossing the threshold of the house for the second time that day, only this time understanding that everything really had changed. That this was no longer the home I’d remembered.

The differences I thought I’d noticed before had finally made sense to my confused brain: the new furniture, no longer the floral-patterned, overstuffed sofas that had once crowded our living room. Now there was a sleek, cool, gray microfiber sectional with a leather ottoman parked in front of it. The big entertainment center that had once housed our giant TV and had been cluttered with books and family photos and handmade ceramic bowls and ashtrays and framed drawings I’d done as a little girl was now gone altogether. There were new photos on the walls, a different family than the one who had lived here before with only one common denominator: my mom.

I’d wiped my feet on an unfamiliar rug inside the door, and saw that my mom removed her shoes and placed them in a basket by the door—something we’d never done before. I’d followed suit, while my dad came in behind us, ignoring the new rule entirely.

The kitchen table was the only thing in the house I recognized.

I didn’t bother asking what they’d done with all my personal belongings. My clothes and my comforter—the one that I’d had since I was eight and was probably too girlie and even a little threadbare, but was so pliable it was like soft, warm dough blanketing me whenever I’d climbed into bed. And there were all the pictures of Cat and me that had been plastered on my corkboard, which was also missing, and my posters and ribbons and trophies and stuffed animals.

A lifetime of memories, all vanished. Erased. As if I’d never existed at all.

There was a soft rap at the door, and my mom eased inside.

“I got your dad all set up on the couch for the night, and I brought you these. The pants are probably too short, but you should feel better after you get a shower and put on some clean clothes.” She handed me a pile of clothing, letting me borrow hers since all I had to my name was the uniform I was still wearing.

I smiled wanly, wishing a hot shower really could fix everything. “Thanks.” I tugged at my grubby shirt. “This thing is pretty foul. I think I preferred the superflattering hospital gown with my butt hanging out for the whole world to see.”

Her brow puckered. “Are you sure you’re okay? I can call someone from the list the hospital gave us. We can probably get you in with someone tomorrow if you want to talk about . . . anything.” I wondered what the “anything” might be.

“I’m fine, Mom. All I want right now is that shower.”

She tilted her head to the side and smiled, and I thought she might be vacillating, trying to decide whether to leave it at that—just light, polite, meaningless conversation. Nothing heavy or real. And then she hesitated. “You can tell me, you know,” she blurted at last, almost as if she hadn’t meant to say it at all. “About what happened that night. About where you’ve been all this time.” She frowned, her face a study in gravity as she came back to the bed where I was sitting cross-legged, my fingers tracing the geometric pattern on the coarse comforter. “I know what your dad thinks, what he claims, but you can tell me what really happened to you.”

I hadn’t taken the time to consider the endless possibilities that existed, or all the speculations that might have been made over the years about my whereabouts. I knew what Tyler said, about the suspicions about my dad, but I wondered how many nights my mother had lain awake trying to guess where I was, torturing herself with her own version of what-ifs.

I could see them now, etched all over her worn face.

Suddenly the truth seemed inadequate, even though it was all I had. “I honestly don’t remember. If I did I would tell you.”

I watched her sag and wondered if she believed me or not. If she thought that, for whatever reason, I was covering up my absence.

So I asked her instead, “What do you think happened?”

Her eyes shot up to mine, her narrow, tweezed brows finding their way to the bridge of her nose. She contemplated me for several long seconds before answering. “You ran away. You and your dad had a fight over colleges—he told me you did—and you ran away.”

I thought about not denying her version, because for all I knew she was right. I couldn’t remember what happened, and her version sounded righter than the theory that I’d been abducted by aliens.

But there was no way I’d have done that. I would never have left my parents, and I surely wouldn’t have left Austin.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, pulling up my pant leg to reveal the bruise I couldn’t stop thinking about. “Besides, how do you explain the fact that I still have this, five years later?”

She looked at it, but there was a skeptical edge to her expression, as if she didn’t see it the way I had. “A bruise? Kyra.” She said my name the way she’d said my dad’s earlier. Like I was grasping at straws.

“It’s exactly the same as it was. In exactly the same place. You don’t think that’s weird? And what about my phone?” I pulled it out, the one with the no service message flashing on the screen. “Why isn’t it dead? If it’s really been five years, shouldn’t it be dead by now? But look . . .” I held it out to her so she could see what I did. “It still has half its charge.”

She closed her eyes for a long moment as she shook her head wearily. “I’m not saying I have all the answers. Obviously this is all very . . . confusing.” She reached over and patted my knee. It was self-conscious, the gesture, and felt more like something a casual acquaintance might do. Not really the kind of thing a mom does when she hasn’t seen her one-and-only daughter in five long, tormented years.

Steel fingers clutched my chest, making it hard to breathe and making me aware of how unwelcome I felt here, in a place that should have been steeped in memories and warmth and understanding.

“And what about Dad? How come you . . .” I shrugged, slipping my knee from beneath her hand. “Why is everything so different now?”

She sighed, and I knew this was all hard for her too. Hard to explain. Maybe even hard to have me back. “You saw him, Kyra. He’s been like that ever since . . .” She frowned over her own explanation. “Ever since you’ve been gone. He couldn’t get over it—you disappearing. He stopped going to work. At first we all did; we were all so focused on finding you. But eventually, when everything led us to dead ends and there were no real clues to follow and no signs you were ever coming home . . . eventually we had to get back to living again. It was hard, almost impossible, but we had to. Your dad, he couldn’t do it. He started hanging out online all day, trying to find evidence, explanations, anything to figure out where you’d gone, even if they weren’t logical.” She sighed. “When he lost his job, I told myself to give him time, that he just needed time.” Tears welled in her eyes, and she shook her head. “But time just made it—him—worse. He started drinking. Eventually . . .” Her voice wavered. “Eventually, I asked him to leave. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I’m sorry,” she told me, reaching over and trying again, this time squeezing my knee. “Things’ll be okay. We’ll be okay,” she offered pensively. The attempt wasn’t great, but it was better. She got up then, the bed shifting the way it used to when she was finished reading to me after she’d tucked me in at night.

My tongue glided over the chiseled plane of my tooth as I watched her go, back to her other family. When the door was closed, I reached beneath the pillow to where I’d stashed the phone Tyler had given me.

I longed so badly to hear Austin’s voice. Maybe then I’d stop feeling so adrift. So . . . alone.

I opened Tyler’s contacts list and found Austin’s name right below someone named Ashley. I figured now was as good a time as any—it was barely after ten o’clock, early still.

Yet five years too late.

My stomach knotted as I pressed the button and waited.

I didn’t wait long. “Hey, Ty-Ty,” The girl that picked up on the other end was most definitely not Austin, but I knew her voice almost as well as I knew my own.

“Ty?” she tried again.

I was suddenly less certain than ever, and I thought about hanging up and pretending I’d never placed this call in the first place. Maybe even set the phone on fire.

“Tyler . . . ? Are you there?”

I swallowed, trying not to vomit on my own incredulity as I opened my mouth to speak. “Cat? Is that you?”

My words were followed by the longest pause in history. Longer even than the time I dared Cat to call Nathan Higgins, her eighth-grade crush, and she’d accidentally professed her love to his dad in way-too-explicit terms.

As I waited, I thought maybe we’d gotten disconnected, or that she’d had the same thought I had and decided to toss her phone in the trash and direct a flamethrower at it.

And then I heard her. “Oh my god, Kyra, is it really you?” It wasn’t really a question, even though it technically was, and I knew right away that she’d already heard from someone that I was back. “I—I—” she started, but she choked on her own words.

On my end, I couldn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what I felt. I didn’t know whether I was relieved she’d recognized my voice or curious about why she was answering Austin’s phone . . .

. . . or angry because I wasn’t really confused at all.

It all made perfect sense.

They were together . . . .at CWU. Living the life Austin and I had always dreamed of.

She cleared her throat, and then I heard her again, her voice all watery and wobbly. The way I felt inside. “Kyra, oh my god, I never thought I’d see you again, and then we—I—heard you were back, and I couldn’t . . . I can’t . . . I . . .” She fell apart again, and I could hear her hiccupping as she tried to gather herself so she could start rambling once more.

But I didn’t want to listen to her ramble. Heat crept up my neck, and my jaw tensed. “What’re you doing there, Cat?” I asked, not wanting to sound like the jilted girlfriend but feeling it all the same.

She sniffled. “Kyr . . . come on. . . .” It wasn’t an explanation, or even an apology. But I understood all the same.

“So that’s it then? You and Austin?” My voice cracked. “Really? My best friend and my boyfriend?” It was the oldest and lamest story in history. Betrayed by the two people you trusted most in this world.

There was another record-breaking pause. I had no idea if she was alone or if Austin was there with her, and they were communicating silently while I sat on my end like a fool.

“Kyr,” Cat tried again. “I swear to you, we never did anything before . . . well before . . . you went missing. . . .” She fumbled over her words, and my humiliation deepened. “We searched so hard for you, with everyone else. And we waited forever for you to come back. We just . . . we thought you were . . . dead.”

I wanted to slink beneath the too-stiff covers in my fake bedroom and hide away forever. Instead, I hung up the phone.

Some habits died hard. And sneaking out to Austin’s house in the middle of the night came to me as naturally as riding a bike or tying my shoes or adding extra butter to my popcorn at the movies. I get how that sounds, but mostly when I’d snuck into Austin’s room at night, we really just slept. We’d been doing that since our parents had put a ban on our boy-girl sleepovers, deciding they were inappropriate the older we got. We thought the late-in-the-game rule change was unfair of them, especially after we’d grown accustomed to our overnight playdates.

Still, they weren’t really wrong to ban the sleepovers, because somewhere along the way, sometime during middle school, Austin and I had crossed that line between best friends to something more. Something experimental and unknown to us. Something far more interesting and exciting.

We’d started by holding hands in a different way, not like little kids anymore. Our fingers would intertwine, moving in and around and over, exploring and testing. My stomach would flutter and lurch as I learned the feel of each of his fingertips. I remember taking his hand in mine as an excuse to touch him, and I would trace the lines of his palms, pretending to read his future in an ominous voice.

Eventually, holding hands wasn’t enough, and, on a late-summer day while we were at the river, we’d kissed. We’d crossed a line and never went back. After that we’d begun whispering whenever grown-ups were around, our conversations no longer as innocent as they’d once been as we navigated into uncharted waters.

And then one night I’d snuck into his bedroom and fallen asleep there.

That was it. A ritual had been born, and no one—not my parents or his, maybe because they all worked or maybe because they were too trusting to check on us—had ever realized what we’d been up to.

Or maybe they’d known all along and never said a word.

Only it wasn’t Austin I was looking for tonight.

But since Tyler wasn’t accustomed to me coming over at all hours, his window wasn’t unlocked when I got there. Not that I would’ve just climbed in the way I would have with Austin. That was different; Austin and I had been different.

It was disquieting all over again to see Tyler appear at his window, a slightly darker-haired version of his older brother. And one who, apparently, didn’t wear a shirt when he slept.

I tried not to look at how defined his bare chest was. Tried to keep my gaze from moving lower and noticing his muscled stomach and his navel, which was surrounded by a tuft of dark hair.

Hell, I chastised myself, reminding myself that I was still four years older than him. He was still Austin’s brother!

Forcing my gaze upward, I caught him smiling at me, but not in the I-caught-you-being-all-lascivious way, and I knew I’d made the right decision, coming here. His window slid open on old aluminum tracks that scraped a little too loudly for my liking, since they hadn’t been oiled the way Austin’s had in order to keep them from broadcasting my arrival.

“Hey,” he whispered down at me, sounding more alert than he should, considering it was approaching midnight. Unlike me, he had school tomorrow. At least according to the calendar I’d consulted no less than a dozen times when I’d finally given up trying to sleep. I just couldn’t wrap my brain around the time leap I’d taken.

Crazy, considering I’d missed so many milestones that should make me feel like an adult: getting my driver’s license, graduating high school, starting college, voting. Going to a bar.

“What are you doing here?” Tyler rubbed his hand over his face, something Austin used to do to wake himself up.

I bit the side of my lip. “Couldn’t sleep. It’s just so . . . weird over there.”

He balanced his arms on the window ledge. “I bet. You’re all my parents talked about all night.” Leaning to the side, he offered, “Wanna come in?”

I grimaced. Suddenly it was weird over here too. Looking at him, with his too-much-like-Austin looks. “Nah. I just wanted to give you this.” I held out the cell phone. I didn’t need it anymore, so there was no point keeping it. The only two people I thought I’d wanted to talk to were now the enemy, camped out together and colluding against me. Despite Cat’s tearful pleas, I couldn’t help picturing them together, having a good laugh over the way I’d called up and thought we’d pick up right where things left off.

Tyler winced as he looked at the phone, and I assumed he understood why I was returning it. He must’ve known. I mean, of course he knew about his brother and Cat, and now he knew that I knew too. He at least had the good grace to look sheepish, and I hoped he meant it. “Sorry” was all he said.

“Yeah,” I answered, looking down at my borrowed yoga pants and wishing my mom were a few inches taller so they didn’t skate over the tops of my ankles. “Me too.”

I left Tyler’s house—it was still strange to think of it like that, Tyler’s house and not Austin’s—and felt lost for a minute. I figured I might as well go home, but suddenly I wasn’t sure where home was exactly.

The word felt foreign, even in the space of my own thoughts. Home should be the place you were most at ease. Most comfortable. Most secure.

I felt none of those things in my mother’s house, at least not anymore. I was a stranger, sleeping in a strange room, in a home she’d made with a new family.

Instead of crossing the street, a straight shot to the home-that-wasn’t-home, I wandered down the sidewalk, heading nowhere in particular. There was a breeze, and I was again aware of how exposed my ankles were as the wind whorled around them, tickling my skin. Despite the supersweet high waters I was sporting, it had been really nice to wear something that didn’t reek of softball diamond or day-old sweat.

I’d expected to have to shave through five years’ worth of leg hair with my mom’s Lady Bic, maybe go through one or two of her disposable shavers in the process, but when I’d run my hands over my legs, I’d realized they were still smooth. As if I’d just shaved them the day before, right before the championship game.

The idea that someone might have shaved them for me while I was out cold gave me the heebie-jeebies. If that were the case, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted my memory back.

After showering, I’d tentatively reached out to touch the steamed mirror, whisking away the condensation so I could see better, looking at that other me through the damp halo. The me staring back was the same me I’d seen every day for as long as I could remember. There’d never been anything remarkable about me, unless you counted my eyes, which I’d always thought were crazy big for my face, and the freckles that splashed across my nose, making me look younger than I was. Something no teen ever wanted.

I’d never been like Cat, with her shockingly blond hair that grew that way straight from her head rather than coming from a bottle, and her exotic-shaped eyes that she accented with jet-black eyeliner, and a pointed chin that she always held high, giving her a badass vibe. The kind of vibe I’d always wanted but could never pull off because grandmothers wanted to pinch my cheeks and give me a quarter for being so adorable.

I’d spent forever staring in the mirror, studying myself for evidence of changes or nonchanges. It was harder than I’d expected, to dissect myself like that, and that same woozy sense of déjà vu hovered over me, like I was having some sort of freaky out-of-body experience.

I stopped walking when I found myself in front of our neighborhood park. Like me, it looked the same as it always had. Standard-issue park stuff, really: slides, swings, sandbox, grass.

The lights all around me were off for the night since it was way past curfew, yet I could see everything I needed to see. I knew this place like the back of my hand. It was the perfect place to be alone, and I hopped the short fence, wondering who it was possibly meant to keep out since I was practically tall enough to step over it, and then realized it probably wasn’t meant to keep anyone out at all. It was designed to keep small children inside. It was like a kid corral.

The swings were near the tree line, and beneath them there was sand so that if you fell, you’d land in the soft powder instead of scrape a knee, or crush a skull.

Mostly, I think neighborhood cats liked to pee in it, though.

Austin and I used to swing as high, and as fast, as we could and then jump, measuring to see which of us had landed the farthest. That was, of course, before all the kissing had started.

From that point on the park had become an after-dark hideaway where we’d curled up among the turrets of the jungle gym or in the tunnels as we’d practiced and practiced and practiced on each other. Making sure we got that whole kissing thing just right.

I sat in one of the swings, suffocated by memories as I wrapped my fingers around the chain and kicked my legs. Maybe the park hadn’t been such a great idea after all.

Moving back and forth, I tried to let my mind go blank. I pushed higher and higher in the air, leaning my head back and watching as the stars blurred together.

“You’re a supernova, Kyra. Someday you’ll burn so bright none of us will even be able to look at you.” My dad always used to say things like that with a chuckle, right before he said something like “No pain, no gain” while reminding me to keep practicing or telling me that I needed to straighten out my pitch. Or sometimes he’d just reach over and brush away a stray hair and tell me how beautiful I was.

Dads say things like that sometimes.

Said, I thought, squeezing my eyes shut and sitting upright once more. Sometimes they said things like that. I wasn’t sure what kinds of things my dad said anymore.

Behind me, I heard a sound, a shifting or rustling in the trees that bordered the park. The place where Cat and I always imagined creepy pervs hung out in their raincoats, watching the little kiddies play on the teeter-totters.

I turned sharply in the swing, the chains twisting together as I strained to see into the craggy shadows that filled the space between the trunks and shrubs and thick layer of ferns that choked the ground.

I waited, holding my breath as I listened. The back of my neck prickled as I scanned, unable to stop searching, unable to let go of that strange feeling of being watched.

I should leave, I finally decided when my heart refused to slow, even when I couldn’t pinpoint anything to be afraid of, other than my overactive imagination. Five years hadn’t changed the fact that I could still freak myself out in the dark.

As I got up, the swing jerked against the backs of my legs, rotating first one way and then the other as the chains worked to right themselves once more. Suddenly I didn’t feel safe out here, in the park in the middle of the night, all by myself, and I wondered what I’d been thinking coming here.

I was just about to go, pivoting in the soft sand beneath my feet, when I saw him standing there, near the entrance to the park.

“What are you doing here?”

“Sorry,” Tyler offered, taking an uncertain step back. “I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just that I saw you take off this way and thought that maybe you shouldn’t be out here alone. I don’t want to intrude or anything, but . . .” He cocked his head to the side as a slow smile slid over his face. “I can’t in good conscience leave you out here by yourself.”

I glanced around at the deserted playground. “You afraid some bully might push me down or something?” I grinned, and it felt like the first time I’d really smiled since I’d been back. I sat down again on the swing, keeping my eyes on Tyler, disappointed that he’d decided to wear a shirt this time.

He came closer, his feet sinking in the soft sand. “Or something.” He took the swing next to mine.

We stayed like that, moving back and forth on the swings, not in a hurry, not racing or trying to swing higher or matching each other’s rhythm, just swaying as I tried not to look at him too much or too often. It was hard, though. My gaze kept shifting in his direction, and I didn’t want to stare, but I did want to at the same time.

He was of course older now than I remembered, but different too. More so than anyone else.

“What do you remember? About me, I mean?”

I grinned again when he asked the question, because it was so close to what I’d just been thinking. “I remember you liked chalk. That you always did these cool chalk drawings all over the sidewalks,” I said, twisting in my swing to face him.

He made a face. “Ouch. Really? That’s what you think of when you think of me? Chalk?”

“That’s not bad, is it?” I laughed at his reaction, pushing off again and letting the swing drift. “Why? What do you remember about me?”

He stopped moving, stopped swinging as he inhaled, his eyes—those green eyes—following mine. “I remember thinking Austin was the luckiest guy I knew.”

My breath caught in the back of my throat, and my feet hit the ground, stopping me.

“What?” Tyler insisted, swinging sideways until his shoulder nudged me. “Don’t pretend you didn’t know I had the hugest crush on you, Kyra. It wasn’t my fault I was only in the seventh grade and you barely noticed me.”

He was right; I’d barely noticed him back then. Most of my memories of Tyler were fragments, held together by Austin.

“See how you went and made things all awkward?” I accused, getting up from my swing and dusting off the back of my borrowed yoga pants.

Undeterred, Tyler fell into step beside me as we made our way toward the park entrance. “Awkward or not, you should know I’m glad you’re back.” He flashed me a sheepish smile as he added, “And now that I’m older, I’ll try to be a little more memorable.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Day Two

I BARELY SLEPT, IF AT ALL; MY BRAIN JUST KEPT tripping over facts and nonfacts, memories and illusions, trying to sort through what was and wasn’t and might have been. Considering I didn’t remember sleeping, I felt fine by the time the sun started coming up and the smell of coffee brewing found its way down the hall to my fake-bedroom.

I’d almost forgotten about The Husband—which is what I’d silently dubbed Grant, since it made me physically ill to even think his name—but he was the one I stumbled into in the kitchen. He was already dressed in a suit and on his way out the door, thank God, because, like I’d mentioned, that whole stomach-wrenching, physically ill thing.

I checked the clock over the microwave—it was 7:42.

The Husband poked his head back inside a minute later—I knew because my eyes automatically flicked to check. “You might want to see this.”

I was still in my mom’s clothes from the night before, and I grudgingly trailed after him, keeping enough distance so he didn’t get the wrong impression or anything. No matter what he had to show me, there was no way this was a truce.

I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw what it was he’d come back in to share with me. And then I smiled, because how could I not?

The illustrations were detailed and elaborate. And even though they were created with chalk, they were vibrant and lifelike.

Tyler had drawn a cobblestone pathway that stretched all the way from one side of our street to the other, bridging our two houses, practically from my front door to his. And running across the top of the pathway was a saying, written in beautiful, scrawling script. It said:

I’ll remember you always.

It took my breath away. I couldn’t believe he’d gone to all this trouble for me. He must’ve stayed up half the night to finish it.

I glanced over to his house, but he was probably already at school.

The Husband made a whistling sound. “Pretty impressive.”

I’d almost forgotten he was there, and I wiped the smile from my face, not wanting him to get the tiniest glimpse into what I might be thinking, and then I stalked back inside. Once I’d locked the door and leaned against it and was sure The Husband could no longer see me, the grin slipped back to my lips.

My mom was at the coffeemaker, pouring herself a cup just as my dad shuffled into the kitchen.

“Yes, please,” he told her, nodding at the pot in her hand as he sat down at the table, taking the same spot he’d always sat in when we’d all lived there together.

She rolled her eyes at him but reached for another mug anyway. She didn’t ask if he wanted cream or sugar, even though he always did; she just handed his coffee to him black.

He grumbled, but he got up and went to the fridge. After a minute he peered around the door at my mom. “Don’t you have anything that isn’t soy? Something that comes from, oh, I don’t know, a cow? I’ll even take goat.”

“Sorry.” She shrugged, not at all apologetically, plucking the carton of soy milk from his hands and settling down at the table.

I sat down, too, taking my old seat. The familiarity of it should have been comfortable, but it so wasn’t. My dad sitting across from me, my mom between us, like we were still a family.

But we weren’t.

“Pretty cool, what that Tyler kid did,” my dad said, breaking the tense silence.

I cringed. “You . . . saw that?”

“Saw him do it. Right after you snuck back in.” He raised his bushy eyebrows at me, folding his arms across the belly he’d never had before.

“You snuck out?” my mom demanded, glowering at me and then turning her glare on my dad, probably for not cluing her in sooner. “How could you . . . do you have any idea . . .” She stammered, unable to come up with the right argument. And then seemed to deflate all at once. “Kyra, you can’t do that. We . . . just got you back.”

And that was it. That was the right one, and even though I was technically an adult, her words were like a knife through my heart.

“Sorry,” my sixteen-year-old self mumbled, feeling properly scolded.

“She was fine.” My dad assured, reaching over and patting my hand, maybe because he couldn’t pat hers anymore. “They went to the park and came right back. They were gone less than half an hour.”

My eyes widened. “You knew? The whole time?”

He lifted his still-black coffee to his lips, and his mouth turned downward evasively. “I might’a followed you, might’a didn’t.” He winked then, and I shook my head, thinking of the way I’d heard something in the trees. Had he seriously been spying on us?

“That’s weird. You’re weird.” But it felt better, joking with him like that, like nothing had changed. Well, not as much at least.

My mom cut in. “I think we should get you some clothes today.” She eyed my outfit skeptically, and I was tempted to remind her it was hers. “And maybe a new cell phone.”

A loud wail erupted from down the hall, and I felt myself blanch as she jumped up from the table. I’d practically erased the kid from my memory, almost as effectively as I’d forgotten the past five years. If only.

With my mom gone, my dad leaned in, and I could smell his breath. I wondered if he wasn’t still a little drunk from the day before. “I’m not much of a shopper. I think I’ll leave you all to it. I should probably get home and see how Nancy’s holding up.”

Nancy. I let this new name sink in, even as my world tilted sideways once more. Suddenly there was a Nancy too. What was that all about? Now I had two new parents to deal with?

I no longer had a bedroom, or parents who could stand each other, or even a real home of my own.

My vision blurred, and when I couldn’t stand to look at him for another second, I let my eyes slip to the digital clock on the microwave. It was 8:31.

After a moment he got up from the table, his chair scraping along the tile floor. He kissed me on the top my head, his beard catching strands of my hair as he did. “I’ll come back later, kiddo. We can talk more then.” My mom came back into the kitchen carrying her new kid, and my dad smiled, but it never really reached his eyes. “Maybe I’ll even bring Nancy so you can meet her.”

Shopping with my mom and the new kid was less like shopping and more like wrangling an errant steer. The kid had to be herded and restrained at every turn. But I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to hear my mom call him “my brother” again.

She kept saying that. “Your brother holds a spoon just fine, Kyra. He’s only two.” “Can you hold your brother’s hand while we cross the street?” “Your brother has a name; it’s Logan.”

It was as though, if she said it enough, she’d somehow force some nonexistent bond between us. Make me feel something for him.

Fine, whatever. He might be my brother by blood, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a virtual stranger.

Worse, he was the brat who’d stolen my mom.

By the time we reached Target, which was only our second stop after the cell phone store, my mom managed to secure the mangy little beast into a shopping cart with a strap that was surely meant to contain monkeys. She got him to shut up for five whole minutes with a bag of popcorn that he threw around like it was confetti and the New Year’s Eve ball was dropping in Times Square. He was the most embarrassing thing ever, and I couldn’t believe she thought I’d ever lay claim to him.

He didn’t start screaming until he realized he couldn’t wiggle out of the shoulder harness he was strapped into.

After about fifteen minutes of that I covered my ears. “Forget it.” I glanced at what was in the cart: a couple of T-shirts and one pair of jeans I’d already picked out. “I don’t wanna do this anymore.” I glanced meaningfully at the kid writhing in the seat and held out my hand for the keys. “I’m going to the car. Pay for this stuff, or don’t. I could care less.”

I stayed in my fake bedroom the rest of the afternoon; at least there it was quiet. And away from the kid.

My mom tried to come talk to me, but everything was so different now—even with her. It was like chatting with a stranger.

When The Husband came home, which was earlier than I expected, she asked if I wanted to try again with the whole shopping thing. I refused, deciding I’d rather have my fingernails ripped off one by one than suffer through more of her painful attempts at small talk. I worried that letting her go by herself to “bring me back some things” would mean my closet would soon be overflowing with mom jeans and cardigans in every color of the rainbow. I’d be the youngest forty-year-old on the block. But it was worth it since all I wanted to do was scream at her for not being my old mom, the one who could talk to me about anything, and everything, and nothing at all.

I remembered one time, when I was thirteen and I’d first gotten my period, that my mom and I had stayed up well after midnight watching chick flicks and eating ice cream straight out of the carton while she’d explained to me all the important girl-stuff, like tampons and condoms, and boys and kissing.

She told me about her first date with my dad, when he’d forgotten his wallet and she’d had to pay for everything. And their second date, when he forgot it again and how he’d had to beg her to give him a third chance, promising that he’d show her his cash when he picked her up, because he didn’t want her to think he was a total loser and was just trying to get free meals out of her.

She’d wrapped her arms around me then and told me all about the night I was born, and the way my dad cried harder than anyone in the room, including me.

And here we were, strangers in a strange house with nothing to say to each other.

The knocking at my window startled me, and I practically leaped off my bed. I looked at my open curtains and saw Tyler glancing at me from over the edge of my windowsill.

Smiling and shaking my head, I loped toward the window, my socks whispering across the floor as I came to a skidding stop. I slid my window open and leaned out a little, looking toward the front, and then the back, of the house to see if anyone else was around. “Why didn’t you come to the door like a normal person?”

Tyler grinned back at me. “I thought this was our thing.” When I stared at him blankly, he raised his eyebrows. “You know, you came to my window; I come to yours.” He shrugged and pushed his hands into the pockets of his zip-up hoodie.

Letting out a small laugh, I balanced against my elbows. “I’m not sure we have a thing, but okay.” I didn’t tell him that using the windows had been mine and Austin’s thing, because it didn’t matter anymore. Austin and Cat had new things now. Things that had nothing at all to do with me.

“So, how was it? Your first day back and all?”

The fact that he was here, standing outside my window and asking me how my day was, almost made me cry. No one else had bothered to ask how I was. He was the first person who wasn’t pulling me at both ends, like I was a rope in a tug-of-war. “You really don’t want to know,” I answered. “This whole returning thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Yeah? What was it supposed to be like?”

I considered that for a moment, leaning forward against the windowsill as I chewed the side of my lip. “Good question. I feel like people should be showering me with gifts and cakes and shooting confetti cannons in my honor. And maybe someone should carry me on their shoulders. A little less with the crazy dads and the bickering parents and . . .” I stopped short of saying how boyfriends should still be boyfriends and not be hooking up with my best friend the first chance they get.

Ex-best friend, I corrected silently.

“Or making chalk masterpieces for you?” Tyler asked, grinning mischievously as he bit his bottom lip.

“Yeah.” My voice dropped, and I shrugged, trying to act like it was no big deal even though it was a huge deal. I leaned farther out the window so I could get a glimpse of his handiwork. “Like that.”

Tyler was studying me, his green eyes, just a shade darker than Austin’s, never leaving mine. I could’ve sworn his cheeks flushed just a little, but he managed to change the subject effortlessly. “People are talking about you. At school.”

“Talking good or talking bad?” Not that I cared, really, but I couldn’t help being curious about the kind of gossip my reappearance had stirred up. I guess towns like Burlington were that way; news always spread fast.

“Wrong, mostly. A lot of stupid speculation about where you’ve been all this time. Abducted, runaway, sold into white slavery, that kind of shit.” He smiled, and his teeth flashed white and straight, and I wondered if he’d had braces when I was gone or if they were always that perfect. I tore my eyes away from them.

“Hey, check it out.” I left the window and came back with a shiny new phone. Before showing him, I pressed the button to check the time on it. “Look what my mom got me today.”

He leaned back on his heels, that flawless grin lighting up his entire face. A groove etched its way into his cheek, producing a dimple, something I had no business noticing. “Told you she’d get you a new one. Here.” He held out his hand, and I let him take it from me. His fingers moved expertly over the phone’s slick, flat screen, waking it up and pulling up the Contacts list. I knew exactly what he was doing. He didn’t mention the fact that his would be the only name in the list, and I didn’t mention the tiny flutter that erupted in the base of my stomach that I was now in possession of his number.

I watched as he dialed himself then, and the phone in his pocket vibrated. “Now I have your number too.” He handed it back to me and we stood there for a moment, our eyes locked. It was too long, and we both knew it, but neither of us looked away, and then it was way, way too long. I’m not sure if it meant something, or nothing, and I hated how badly I wished I could see inside his head, to read his thoughts. But eventually my cheeks got hot, and I blinked first.

“So, I have this thing . . .” he started, pointing in a general way toward his house or his car but making it clear he had to go.

“Oh yeah. Sure. Go ahead.” I was stammering, and I hated that he was making me stammer at all. “I’ll see you lat—”

“You wanna come?” Our words overlapped, and I stopped talking so I could process what he’d said, to make sure I’d heard him correctly. He stood there rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly and waiting for me to answer.

I lifted my shoulders. “I mean, sure. I guess. It’s not like I have a whole lot goin’ on around here.” I glanced behind me at a room that was sterile and practically begging me to make a break for it. When I turned back, I wrinkled my nose. “Do I have to change?”

He stood on his toes so he could check me out. I was wearing the jeans and one of the T-shirts my mom had gone ahead and paid for during our shopping trip from hell. “Nah. You look good in clothes that fit,” he told me, his eyes sparkling.

“What?” I gasped, feigning surprise. “Are you sure? Because I’m pretty sure I nailed it with my mom’s high-water yoga pants. Are you saying they’re not in style, because they totally were five years ago?”

His expression became a little too serious, making me catch my breath. “I’m pretty sure you could pull off just about any look you wanted to.”

“Good.” I laughed, hoping he couldn’t hear the shakiness in my voice. “’Cause I seriously don’t have anything else, and I really don’t want to put my softball uniform back on again, like ever.”

I checked the time again, and it was still just before six o’clock, same as it had been a couple of minutes ago. I lifted my foot to the window ledge and held out my hand to him. I thought about leaving a note or something for my mom to let her know where I’d be, but then I figured she had my number—because she was the only one, aside from Tyler, who did—and she could call if she was worried.

Tyler’s fingers closed around mine, and it was the first really obvious difference I noticed between him and his brother. Austin’s hands had always been dry, sometimes cracked even. He’d spent years applying special creams and moisturizers to protect against all the chlorine and sun damage, but they always had this rough quality about them, like fine-grit sandpaper. He’d spent half his life in the pool, the other half in every available lake, river, and stream. He was one of those people who probably wouldn’t have minded if he’d been born with webbed toes.

Tyler’s hands were soft. Not like a girl’s or anything, but not calloused like mine—which still made absolutely no sense since, according to everyone, I hadn’t picked up a bat in five years.

But now that I stopped to think about it, there were so many things about Tyler that were different from his brother, it was hard to imagine I’d ever mistaken the two of them in the first place. His hands, and his eyes, which were green but were mossier colored than Austin’s. And the dimple that appeared once more when I bumped against him as I hopped down, making him look somewhere between gorgeous and stunning.

I blinked hard, trying to snap some sense into myself. Where the holy hell did that come from? I balked at the idea of Tyler as anything but Austin’s younger brother, because no matter what, that’s what he was—Austin’s brother—and I struck a silent deal with myself to never, ever think about him as anything other than a friend, because that is all he could ever be.

CHAPTER FIVE

“OKAAAY, I GIVE UP. WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?” I asked, surveying the less-than-savory alley where Tyler had parked. “Shouldn’t we be someplace a little less . . .” I raised my eyebrows. “Stabby?”

Tyler shoved open his car door in a way that made it clear his car door was the kind that needed a good shove in order to open. “Relax,” he assured me. “It’s perfectly safe.”

He smiled, and that made me feel a little happier, if not at all safer, as he got out and came around to my side, opening my door and waiting for me. No one had ever opened my car door like that, not even Austin.

I blushed and ducked my head as I eased past him, trying not to notice how tall he was or the way he smelled, which wasn’t at all like back-alley garbage. He locked the car and went to a door that was dented and painted black. He didn’t knock or anything but let himself inside. He held the door long enough for me to realize I was supposed to follow, so I trailed after him and found myself in a storage room of some sort crowded with metal shelves and stacks of cardboard boxes and plastic crates that filled every possible space. There seemed to be no order to the chaos. Mostly, it looked like books and catalogs, but there were also stacks of rolled posters and piles of photographs, and magazines and comic books.

Tyler didn’t stop, though. He slipped right past the hoarder’s haven not giving it a second glance, leading me without a single word into an even more cluttered bookstore beyond.

This wasn’t one of those chain bookstores, though, the ones where everything is perfectly aligned and tidy, and where there were tables strategically positioned to highlight this week’s hottest sellers. There was no soft jazz playing in the background or a café with easy chairs so patrons could kick back with a pastry and hang out to browse their selections. This was more like a thrift store for books, which made sense, I supposed, when I spied the bold neon sign on the other side of the plate glass window that read USED BOOKS.

It had that smell too. That musty, old-book smell. The smell you notice when you got your assigned reading in English class. The smell that wafted up from the pages of a book that’s been passed down year after year, the one with the dog-eared pages and highlighted passages, and rips and a tattered cover. And if you were really, really lucky, some kid with nothing better to do, because he for sure wasn’t going to read the book, drew pictures of ladies’ boobs at the front of each chapter.

That was how I’d forever remember Of Mice and Men—as amateur pencil porn.

The guy behind the counter was wearing a checkered shirt and black, horn-rimmed glasses, and was hunched forward on his elbow as he worked on a crossword puzzle from the newspaper. He lifted his eyes disinterestedly as we approached—a halfhearted attempt at customer service—but when he caught sight of Tyler, he dropped his pencil and hopped up from his stool.

“Hey! I was waitin’ for ya.” His grin spread wide and made his scruffy, unshaved face look more welcoming than his what-the-hell-do-you-want glance had. It was clear that when he chose to, like now, he had an infectious quality about him, as his eyes crinkled with enthusiasm.

“Okay . . .” The guy went behind the desk excitedly and reached beneath the counter. “This came in, and I immediately thought of you.”

Tyler took a step closer, and I tried to see around him. Whatever it was—and from where I stood it looked like a magazine, a really old magazine—it had Tyler’s full attention now.

Tyler leaned forward, pursing his lips. “Can you take it out?” Tyler asked, his voice low and filled with what was unmistakably awe.

“Dude, of course I can take it out. But trust me, I’ve already checked it from cover to cover. It’s practically mint. It’s exactly what you’ve been looking for.” The clerk slipped it from the plastic sleeve that protected it, and Tyler’s eyes went wide as his fingers cautiously, gingerly, reached down.

When he brushed the cover, I saw him suck in his breath and hold it.

This thing was seriously important to him.

All I could see was faded print and creased pages, and a chunk missing from the bottom-right edge of the cover.

There was clearly a discrepancy in our interpretations of “practically mint.”

But after inspecting it, neither of them even haggled over the price; Tyler just laid down several bills, way more than I thought anyone should ever pay for a relic like that.

Tyler put his prize back in its plastic covering, and the guy behind the counter double-bagged it for him, making it more than obvious that you should never be too careful when it comes to protecting your secondhand junk.

I cleared my throat, and Tyler glanced my way self-consciously, as if he’d only just remembered I’d been standing there the whole time. “Oh yeah. Hey. This is Kyra,” he told the clerk, who had also suddenly noticed me now that their transaction was coming to a close. At first he gave me a quick once-over, like he wasn’t all that interested. And then he did a double take, and his gray eyes scoured me with laser intensity. I squirmed beneath his examination.

The guy frowned then. “I know you,” he told me as if it were irrefutable. “From somewhere . . .” I could see the cogs in his head turning as he tried to nail it down. “Did you go to Emerson?”

Did? he’d asked, and I shook my head, studying him right back and wondering if I’d ever seen him at the rival high school. “No. I went to Burlington.”

He nodded as if that made sense, but he was still scowling, still trying to decipher where he knew me from. I was sure he didn’t look familiar to me, so I couldn’t help him out. I was almost positive we’d never crossed paths before.

And then he snapped his fingers. “I got it! I got it! You’re that girl! The one who went missing. I knew I recognized you. Man, your face was everywhere. Everyone knew who you were.” He grinned his infectious grin, only this time I couldn’t return his smile. “Heard you were back. What the hell happened to you anyway? Where you been all this time?”

Suddenly my legs felt wobbly, and my stomach rolled uneasily. I hadn’t considered that people might actually recognize me after all the efforts that had been made to find me five years ago. And that when they did they might ask questions I wasn’t prepared to answer—couldn’t possibly answer. I turned to Tyler. “I—I think I’ll wait outside.” I staggered away from the counter, suddenly anxious to get out from between the disordered stacks of decaying books and magazines that felt like they were closing in on me. I didn’t wait to see if Tyler was coming or not because I didn’t care.

In my rush, I crashed into someone before I could make it to the back room. I murmured an apologetic “I’m sorry.” I glanced up only briefly as I went to brush past him.

“No worries,” the dark-skinned boy mumbled as I shoved past him. I hesitated briefly as I caught his eyes, which were unusually copper colored, but then I kept going, through the storeroom and out into the alley behind the shop. That was when I realized I didn’t have the keys, and I was locked out of the car. It didn’t matter, though. I didn’t mind the garbagey stench of the alley, because it was better than the suffocating scrutiny of too many one-sided questions.

The back door of the bookstore opened, and I glanced up to find Tyler standing in the doorway, watching me with a concerned expression contorting his features.

“I’m okay,” I said before he had the chance to ask.

“I’m sorry,” he told me, his voice low and rumbly near my ear as he leaned over my shoulder to unlock the passenger side door. My heart rate tripled at having him there, at my back, so close I could smell the crisp scent of his soap.

But I didn’t want him to apologize, because none of this was his fault.

“Please. Don’t worry about it,” I begged. “It is what it is, right?” When the door opened, I collapsed into the seat. Melted into it, more like. My bones felt like liquid butter, and even shrugging was a major undertaking. “I better get used to people asking me things like that, or I’m gonna be spending a lot of time holed up in my bedroom. It just took me off guard is all. No big.” I flashed a quick smile up at him, the kind meant to reassure him, because I really wanted him to believe what I’d said. I wanted to believe it too. And then I changed the subject. “I don’t get it.” I nodded toward the Fort Knox of all bags he clutched in his hands. “All that fuss over, what, a comic book?” I bit back a teasing smile.

He rolled his eyes. “Okay, one, this is so not a comic book,” he began tolerantly, as if this wasn’t the first time he’d had to explain his hobby.

“Looks like a comic book to me.”

“This,” he said, plucking his plastic-encased treasure from the safety of its double bags. He held it up delicately so I could get a better look. On the cover was an old-fashioned red airplane with several other, smaller planes in the background. I couldn’t tell if they were chasing the red one or if it was one big, happy airplane family. The title on the cover read: Bill Barnes Air Adventurer. 10 cents. “This is a pulp magazine. A July 1934 Air Adventurer with a Frank Tinsley cover, to be exact.” He was grinning so proudly that he nearly convinced me that was something to be proud of.

“So, it’s a . . . magazine?” I prodded, intentionally needling him because I could see he was serious about this.

“Yeah. I mean, no. Not really.” Scowling over his inability to make his point, he sighed and closed the door before stomping around to the driver’s side. Inwardly I was grinning, because I’d gotten exactly the reaction I was hoping for. When he got in the car, he tried again. “It’s a pulp novel. They’re books. Some of them used to be published in serialized form, like this. A lot of the best writers wrote pulp novels in their time: Isaac Asimov, H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Jack London. Even Mark Twain. I’ve been looking for this one for a long time. That’s why Jackson called me when it came in.” He frowned, and then shrugged as if it wasn’t worth explaining.

He was right; I’d probably never understand his level of intensity. I wasn’t a huge reader, and I don’t remember ever seeing Austin read any of the required books for school. But it was downright adorable that Tyler was so passionate about this crappy, moldering old magazine that he treated like a rare and delicate treasure.

It made me wonder how he’d treat a girl. You know, if he cherished her the way he cherished that book.

I twisted in my seat so I could get a better look at him. “So, what you’re telling me is that you’re a total nerd. Is that it?”

The dimple reappeared again, digging so deep into his cheek I thought it might make a permanent groove. My heart nearly stopped.

Austin had outgrown his dimples when he hit puberty. I thought I’d been glad because he looked older without them. But now . . .

Tyler started the car and pretended he was ignoring me, concentrating instead on backing out of the alley, but I caught his sideways glances, and the dimple never really disappeared entirely. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Before long I turned to stare at the town I’d lived in my entire life as we drove. I was surprised how many changes there were, but since I hadn’t been here, the new shops, and the closed ones, were glaring and out of place. If I’d been here the whole time, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed them. The evolution of industry.

Just then we passed the high school, and a boulder settled over my chest.

But it wasn’t the school that caught my eye; it was the fields, with their big box lights shining down on them. Even from the car I could make out the chalked outlines of the infield.

The boulder threatened to crush me.

“Hey.” My hand shot out to Tyler, and I gripped his arm. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the grass and the dirt, the stands and dugouts. “Pull over, will ya?”

Without asking why or making a big deal about it, Tyler pulled to the side of the road and cut the engine. I stumbled out of the car, and I didn’t look back to see if he was behind me.

I was captivated. Enthralled. Terrified.

My vision tunneled as I approached, so that all I could see were the fields where I’d spent so much of my life.

When I reached the chain-link fencing, I curled my fingers through it, feeling light-headed and unsteady.

I would’ve been a senior if I hadn’t vanished. I should’ve had one more year—one more season—on these very fields with the rest of my team.

I hadn’t heard Tyler get out of his car, but I knew he was right behind me when I heard his voice. “It has a name now.” His breath tickled my neck. And then, before I could say anything, or breathe even, his hand was covering mine where my fingers curled through the fence. My stomach plunged.

Oh my god, what is wrong with me? Didn’t I have enough to worry about without letting myself get all gooey over a boy who was far too young for me?

And Austin’s brother no less? All at once I realized Tyler was saying something to me, and I hadn’t heard a single word of it. I felt like an idiot. I wondered what it was about him that turned me into such a girl—the kind of girl who daydreamed about things like dimples. I spun around to face him. But he was too close—we were too close. I realized that fact too late as I found myself lodged between him and the fence. I swallowed. “Wait, what did you say?”

He shook his head, and his lips were so beautiful, so full and tempting, that I swore my eyes were glued to them, and I found myself tracking them like a cat following a play toy. I blinked, hard, when I realized what I was doing, and I prayed to God he had no idea why I was so distracted.

“I was saying that the field has a name now.” He reached out and brushed a piece of hair from my forehead. “Agnew Field. They named it after you.”

I jerked back, away from his touch, and away from his words.

Suddenly I knew—knew—it was wrong.

This.

All of it. Me and Tyler. Being here at the school. The fact that they’d named the field I’d once played on after me. In memorium . . . like I was dead.

And I had been dead in a way. For five long years everyone had mourned me. They’d let me go and “moved on,” and everything had changed.

And now I was back. A corpse with a second chance.

I slipped out from beneath his arm, from where I suddenly felt trapped, cornered by his presence. “I have to go,” I insisted, pulling out my phone and checking the time. “I need you to take me home. Now.”

There were four messages waiting for me on my bed when I got back, all written on multicolored sticky notes that were stuck together so precisely they formed a perfect neon-rainbow fan. I assumed they were also in chronological order.

Flipping through them, I noted my mom’s handwriting and was grateful she’d decided to take phone messages rather than to give out my new cell number. It wasn’t even nine o’clock when Tyler dropped me off, but my mom and her new family were already tucked away in their bedrooms for the night, so I had the house to myself.

In the kitchen there was a plate covered with plastic wrap. Through the film I could see she’d made me my favorite: spaghetti with Grandma Thelma’s homemade meatballs. I felt a stab of guilt for not being there for dinner, but the very idea of sitting through a meal with them and pretending we were an actual family made me nauseous.

Maybe if I tried harder, though, maybe if I made more of an effort to talk to my mom, she would finally say something real to me.

Taking the calendar off the wall, I carried it, along with the plate of spaghetti, to the table. I looked at the time on my phone and double-checked it against the time on the microwave. It bothered me that the two weren’t exactly in sync—they were a minute apart—and I watched until the microwave’s clock caught up to the time on my phone before turning to the calendar.

I flipped to May and put my finger on today’s date, and the moment I did, the panic in my chest subsided. I knew why. It had become like an obsession with me, keeping tabs on the time. The constant reassurance that I hadn’t lost another day. Or another hour or minute or second. That I was still here, and time was moving at the exact right speed it should.

I didn’t reheat the spaghetti because I’d always liked it cold better anyway. I peeled back the plastic wrap and thrust my fork into the center, thinking I should be starving. I hadn’t eaten anything since I’d stolen a handful of popcorn from “my brother.” I twirled the fork, mesmerized by the way the pasta swirled and whorled around it, gathering it into a bulging wad, and then I lifted the entire mass and plunged it into my mouth.

My mom had always complained that watching me eat spaghetti was like watching the animals feeding at the zoo and that I might as well lift the plate up to my mouth and shovel it directly in. She wasn’t entirely wrong; I did love my spaghetti.

Clamping my teeth down on the first bite of the soft pasta, I closed my eyes, preparing to savor it, letting it roll over my tongue. But I knew immediately that something wasn’t quite right with it. Maybe it was the recipe. Maybe my mom had tweaked it over the years. Or maybe there was something wrong with the ingredients she’d used. Regardless of the reason, it definitely wasn’t the same spaghetti I’d remembered.

I chewed anyway, forcing it down. I tried the meatball. My grandmother’s recipe had been handed down from her mother and then passed to my mom, and would eventually be passed down to me. My dad used to say I’d cut my teeth on these meatballs.

But it was just like the spaghetti. The meatballs were the same, but not. Like everything else since I’d returned. They were . . . off.

I continued eating, but less enthusiastically, and halfway through my meal I finally gave up and washed the rest of it down the garbage disposal. It was the first time in my life I got no real joy out of my mom’s spaghetti, and I couldn’t help wondering if it was me, or if she’d done something to sabotage it, although I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why.

Tucking the calendar beneath my arm, I went back to my room and threw myself on my bed to read through the messages my mom had taken. Three of them made my pulse rise all over again—the three from Cat.

Cat, and not Austin.

Cat, who’d called at 4:15, 4:53, and again at 6:36. Her cell number, which was the same as it had been five years ago, was also written down on each note, as if it wasn’t permanently etched in my brain.

I crumpled up all of the messages and tossed them into one of the shopping bags my mom had left piled in my room, filled with the clothes she’d brought back with her from Old Navy, Macy’s, and American Eagle—none of which I’d bothered looking through yet.

The fourth message was from my dad, letting me know he hadn’t been able to make it back tonight but that he would definitely be here first thing in the morning to take me to breakfast.

Probably better that we’d be going out. Maybe without my mom around I could talk to him—really talk to him. And maybe he’d stop bringing up the whole light thing or his whacked-out theories about UFOs.

Maybe he’d go back to being my dad again.

When my phone buzzed, it scared the crap out of me.

I bolted upright and checked the time on the digital clock that I’d set so it was synchronized precisely with my phone, which I assumed was set to some sort of world standard. I hadn’t been sleeping, but I’d been trying to, or least pretending I was trying to, as I’d stretched out and stared at the ceiling, waiting for that drowsy-floaty feeling of sleep to claim me. If only I could shut off my mind for a few seconds.

I slipped my hand beneath my pillow and pulled out my phone, checking to see who was calling at this hour.

It wasn’t a call, though; it was a text. From Tyler.

Your lights are on, it read.

I was suddenly glad I’d handed him my phone earlier, and completely embarrassed that I’d freaked out on him back at the school. We’d driven home in the kind of charged silence that had made it feel like we’d had a fight even though he hadn’t done anything wrong. It was all me, really, being weird and jumpy about the fact that I was some kind of aberration who had no memory of what had happened to me for five whole years.

Very observant, I texted back, unable to stop myself from smiling now.

His response was immediate. I left you something. Look out your window.

I hoped that “something” was him.

But as quickly as the thought sprang to my head, I stamped it out. Stop it. He’s just a friend. Just a friend . . . Unfortunately, that mantra wasn’t working very well.

Still, I was a little disappointed when he wasn’t standing there on the other side of my window. I frowned, opening the window and leaning out.

On the ground was a bag—the same smooth brown paper his comic book had been bagged in from the bookstore.

Like a seasoned veteran, I was out the window and back in my room in a blink. I peeled back the paper and peeked inside.

Immediately, I texted him back. A book?

After only a slight pause he answered: One of the best in my collection.

I looked again, to see what it was: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I’d heard of it but never read it. It was old, like the other one, and he had it in plastic even though this one was a regular paperback.

I don’t want to ruin it, I responded.

I trust you. And that simple, three-word statement made me grin so wide my cheeks ached. A second text said, I thought it might help you sleep.

My mischievous side kicked in. So you’re saying it’s boring?

This time the wait was a little longer, and just when I thought maybe my teasing hadn’t translated over text message and he wasn’t going to answer, my phone buzzed again. I’m saying I want to share one of my very favorite things in the world with you, Kyra.

CHAPTER SIX

Day Three

I FINISHED THE BOOK AT 4:25 IN THE MORNING, exactly four hours and thirteen minutes after I’d started it. Since it was 238 pages, that was just under a page a minute, so I knew I wouldn’t be winning any speed-reading contests or anything.

I knew now why it was one of Tyler’s favorite things. I loved it. Not in the sense that I felt all warm and fuzzy after reading it or anything, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About Montag, the main character who’d spent his life burning books, and his technology-addicted wife, and the free-thinking girl next door who was “different” from everyone else, never fitting into her strange, emotionless society.

I was different, I couldn’t help thinking. Like Clarisse had been.

I continued to be haunted by the book long after I’d slipped it back into its synthetic sleeve and placed it on my nightstand. I was downright giddy at the prospect of seeing Tyler again, and maybe I’d talk about the book with him if it meant drawing out our time together, because I was so not above going there.

I glanced up when my bedroom door started to open, but then it stopped and there was a brisk knock.

“Yeah,” I called, keeping my voice down since it was only . . . I checked: 7:47.

It opened the rest of the way, and The Husband was there, filling the doorway and studying me. We hadn’t spent much, or any, really, time together. I’d avoided him as much as possible, staying in parts of the house where he wasn’t—my room namely—and venturing out only when necessary. Just seeing him now made my stomach do nervous flips.

I couldn’t help it; I still had that bitter taste in my mouth over our first encounter. Deep down, I knew none of this was his fault, but it didn’t change the fact that I blamed him, at least in some part, for the way things were. For my parents’ divorce, for that new kid in the nursery down the hall, for the guest room I was living in.

He made an attempt to smile. “Hey, kiddo,” he offered, and inside I grimaced. My dad called me “kiddo,” not him. “Your dad’s here. He’s waiting for you in the kitchen.”

I didn’t say anything, just stared woodenly at him until he finally got the point and retreated with a shrug.

Since I hadn’t really slept, I’d never bothered putting on pajamas, so I quickly stripped out of what I’d worn yesterday and snagged the first pair of jeans and a vintage-style T-shirt I could find in the bags my mom had delivered—glad she’d gotten my sizes right. She’d even bought me a pair of simple black-and-white Chuck Taylors, which, as far as I was concerned, went with everything. They were a little stiff for my liking, but I figured they’d be broken in soon enough.

My dad was alone and sitting at his same spot at the kitchen table when I came in. He looked up at me earnestly.

Without meaning to, I caught myself giving him the once-over. Evaluating his clothes, his state of cleanliness, his posture, right down to trying to decide how red his eyes were.

He’d showered and changed clothes since yesterday, and if I wasn’t mistaken, I thought he might have gotten a haircut. He hadn’t shaved, but his beard looked . . . trimmed . . . less scruffy. Even his eyes were clearer as they caught mine.

“Sorry I didn’t make it back here last night; I got tied up.” He shook his head and glanced away from me.

I sat down at the table across from him like always, so we were facing each other. I was nervous—he was making me nervous. He looked like he had something to say, and I was worried it wasn’t something I wanted to hear. He probably would have tried to reach for my hands if I hadn’t had them buried in my lap and balled tightly. “Anyway, I just wanted to tell you I shouldn’t have said all that stuff yesterday. . . .”

He didn’t finish, but I knew he was done talking when he winced and waited for me. I guess I was supposed to say something then.

I wanted to; I just wasn’t sure what that something was. It was so weird to be tongue-tied around my own parents, so I shrugged because I couldn’t think of anything else. I checked the microwave, thinking that only three minutes had passed even though it felt like forever.

More than anything, though, I wished he’d fill this awkward silence with one of his stupid expressions. I wished he’d say something like “An apology is a good way to have the last word.” Or “It’s easier to apologize than to ask for permission”—not that that one would have made sense in this situation, but I would have welcomed anything to break the tension right now.

And then he snorted. “Man, that kid across the street sure likes you, doesn’t he?”

My eyes flew open, and I stared at him. “Who? Tyler? What’s that supposed to mean?”

He wiggled his eyebrows at me, something that was so my old dad that I almost laughed at him. “The new art out front. He’s got it pretty bad, is all I’m saying.”

“Dad!” I jumped up, not wanting to admit that what he told me meant a million times more than it should. That it was killing me not to bolt to the front door so I could see if Tyler really had drawn something new for me. “You have no idea what you’re even talking about.” I tried to sound like it was nothing when really, at that very moment, it was everything. “He’s Austin’s brother,” I tried again, and this time I could hear it, the fact that I was so not convincing. There was no way my dad hadn’t heard it too. But I was already making my way out of the kitchen toward the front of the house.

I heard my dad laughing at me from the table. “See for yourself, and then tell me it’s nothing,” he called after me.

When I stepped outside and saw what he meant, I knew. . . .

He wasn’t wrong.

The old drawing—the path—and the writing—“I’ll remember you always”—were gone. Erased. And in their place was a new “masterpiece,” and it was infinitely more beautiful and more meaningful.

It was the birdcage in the center of the road that caught my attention first: chalk drawn and intricate, with its delicate bowed, golden bars. Its door was hanging open wide, and a small blue bird was just taking flight, with small chalk wisps depicting it gathering momentum as it broke free from its confines.

And below the bird, tracing the path of its trajectory, were the words Tyler had chosen . . . just for me.

The script was so different from the morning before, yet just as elegant and lovingly crafted, each letter carefully placed and delicately drawn. But it was the meaning of them, those words, all together that made me pause as I stepped closer, taking them all in at once:

The best things in life are worth the risk.

I inhaled sharply, telling myself I shouldn’t be grinning but unable to stop myself. I thought of the way he’d taken my hand when I’d jumped from my window yesterday, or the way his dimple carved into his cheek whenever he smiled at me. I doubted those were the “best things” he meant, but my mind went there anyway, because clearly I was beyond redemption.

“Come on, Juliet,” my dad said, slapping his hand on my shoulder. “Let me buy you some coffee with real cream. Maybe we’ll even get eggs from a chicken instead’a that Egg Beaters crap your mom buys.”

It wasn’t half bad, hanging out with my dad. He wasn’t the same or anything, but he was trying way harder than my mom was. Or maybe he was trying differently. It was like he wanted to be his old self, but he’d forgotten who that was exactly.

Five years is a long time.

He didn’t push me, though. I think he wanted to, especially when I hadn’t touched more than a bite of my Rooty Tooty Fresh ’N Fruity, the pancakes smothered in strawberries and whipped cream that had always been my favorite. From the worried looks he shot my way, you’d’ve thought I’d kicked a puppy or something.

“It’s no big deal,” I told him, shoving the plate away from me. “I guess I just don’t like it anymore is all.”

He lifted his hand to wave our server over, but I stopped him. “It’s okay. I wasn’t really hungry anyway.” He dropped his hand, looking more satisfied by that answer than he had by the idea that my tastes might have grown up over the past five years. “Sure. Okay.” He reached for his coffee and dumped in a disgusting amount of cream, until it was more tan than brown.

He didn’t mention this Nancy person, and I didn’t ask, even though I probably should have because it seemed like the polite thing to do. But I didn’t feel like being polite. Nancy could wait.

I’d have to deal with her and The Husband and “my brother” and probably a whole lot of other people soon enough. For now I was still figuring out where I fit into this strange new world I’d been dropped into.

After we left the IHOP, my dad took me straight back to my mom’s place. The edges of the chalk drawing had been somewhat blurred from being driven over, but the birdcage—and the words beneath the bird—were just as captivating the second time around. I was glad my dad didn’t call me on the fact that I’d stood on the sidewalk way too long, taking it all in once more.

Since The Husband had taken “my brother” to day care, or wherever they kept him when they went to work during the day, it was just the three of us at the house: my mom, my dad, and me. It was exactly as awkward as it sounded, so my dad pretty much excused himself right away.

“How was breakfast?” my mom asked, watching from the front window as the van pulled away.

My shoulders tensed. I didn’t want to start this whole small-talk thing with her again. “Good. Fine.”

She nodded and went to the microfiber sofa that I hadn’t even bothered sitting on yet. I knew she wanted me to do what she did, make myself at home, but I stayed where I was, standing stiffly in the doorway.

“Have you thought about what you’ll do now . . . ,” she started. “Now that you’re back?” I wasn’t sure what she was getting at, and I frowned. She kept going. “You know, school? We should probably figure out a way for you to finish high school, and maybe get you started in college.” She ran her hand along the arm of the sofa.

School. I hadn’t thought about that. The idea of sitting in a classroom with a bunch of high school kids, even if they looked remotely like Tyler, was absolutely out of the question. I’d be a total outcast, even if I wasn’t twenty-one. I’d seen the way that Jackson guy from the bookstore had gawked at me like I was an oddity—the girl who’d up and vanished.

“No thanks,” I rebuffed her idea. “Maybe we can find an online school or something. Or I can get my GED and go to Skagit Valley.” The community college was a far cry from the kinds of scholarship schools my dad had once tried to shove down my throat. But it was close to here, and it would give me a chance to sort out what I wanted to do next.

“I suppose that’d be okay. As long as you’re not sitting around here all day, watching Judge Judy and hanging out with your dad.”

My heart stuttered, and I blinked at my mom in disbelief. “Seriously? You didn’t just say that, did you?”

“What?” she asked, getting up from her place and giving me a look that said she had no idea why I was so bent. “What did I say?”

I threw my arms wide and let out a noisy breath. “Did you not even hear yourself? Can’t you say anything nice about him? He’s still my dad.”

Pinching her lips, she turned to gaze out the window. I heard her sigh exasperatedly. I started to tell her I didn’t want to hear her talk about my dad anymore—not another word—but then she whirled around once more, only this time she looked ashen. Her face was masked in the kind of worry only a mom could manage. She finally looked exactly like she should. “Shit, Kyra,” she said. “Austin’s here.”

I wasn’t even sure I registered her words right away. I mean, I knew what she’d said—I understood her and all—but it didn’t sink in right away.

Austin, she’d said. He was here. Now.

I was suddenly more nervous than I’d been since I’d been back, maybe than I’d ever been in my entire life. This was all I’d wanted: to see him, and for him to want to see me. And now that he’d come . . . I don’t know . . . I wasn’t as sure.

Four days ago Austin and I had been destined to spend the rest of our lives together. I’d been willing to turn my back on scholarships and softball and everything in order to make that happen.

Then I woke up behind a Dumpster and found out that he and my best friend, the girl I’d grown up with and told all my secrets to, were living the life I’d always dreamed of living.

Was it really so strange I might be having second thoughts about facing him now?

When the doorbell rang, it reverberated through my entire body. My mom leaned over and whispered to me ninja-quiet, “Do you want me to tell him you’re not here?”

I let out a nervous laugh, but even that sounded too shrill, and I had to remind myself to breathe. “No. I can do this,” I assured her, totally sounding calmer than I felt inside.

Bracing myself, I went to the door. My lungs ached, and I was definitely light-headed, but there was no going back now. No matter what happened, I needed this. I tried to think of one of my dad’s inspirational quotes, but all I could come up with was something about “opportunity knocking,” which was totally inappropriate because it wasn’t opportunity at all—it was Austin, and he was standing on my porch ringing the doorbell.

When I opened it, my mouth went completely dry. Tyler had been right about Austin; he did look older.

His eyes were the same green as always, just shades lighter than his brother’s; but beyond that he was completely different from what he had been that night after my championship game, when I’d kissed him by the softball diamond, promising to meet up later at the Pizza Palace.

His hair, which had always been sun bleached and chlorine damaged from spending so much time in the water, was darker now, and his face was leaner than I remembered. Not sharp, but more defined, as if age had chiseled in the angles.

A part of me had hoped his new life with Cat would have turned him fat and soft and, yes, maybe too hideous even to look upon, like some fairy-tale troll. But he was none of those things. He was older and more matured, but he was also still Austin.

“Oh my god. It’s really you,” he breathed, drinking me in. “I thought . . . we all thought you were gone for good.”

He touched my face, and I flinched. “Can we . . . ?” He shifted nervously, and I was relieved he was at least sort of uncomfortable facing me in person. He looked past me to where my mom was standing at my back like some sort of Mafia enforcer, and his voice rose. “Can we talk someplace private?”

Silently I was grateful to my mom for giving me that—the whole solidarity thing—but I still needed to do this on my own, so I closed the door on her, giving Austin and me some space.

I stepped away from the door and led him down the steps so she couldn’t eavesdrop either, because I wouldn’t put it past her, not if she was anything like my old mom. That mom would have no qualms about putting her ear to the door so she could listen to what we were saying.

We had to cross the street to reach his car, which meant walking over the top of the chalk birdcage, and I tried not to stare, but my eyes kept straying downward, taking in the bird and its feathers, and marveling over every tiny detail Tyler had put into it. Self-consciously, I wondered if Austin knew that his brother had drawn the birdcage or that it was meant for me. I seriously hoped not.

We stood there, each studying the other for what was probably only a few seconds but for what felt like hours. Austin rubbed the thick shadow of whiskers along his jaw that used to be the finest of stubble, and I crossed my arms, mostly to hide the fact that my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I kept looking away to avoid his eyes and his face, pretty much all of him, because looking at him gave me that itchy déjà vu sensation all over again.

“Cat misses you,” Austin said at last, clearing his throat loudly.

And with that, any nerves or worry that I might not say or do the right thing evaporated. Maybe it was hearing his voice again, because at least that hadn’t changed all that much, or maybe it was the fact that he’d said something so incredibly insensitive to start off our very first conversation, but suddenly I couldn’t see him as anything but plain old Austin anymore. Older, yes, but still just a stupid boy who said stupid things when he opened his mouth. “Cat? Really? You drove all this way to talk about Cat?”

Had I forgotten that about him, the way he sometimes bulldozed right over my feelings, not because he didn’t care, but because he was so totally oblivious?

“I mean, no. Of course I didn’t.” He shifted some more, almost like he was doing some sort of dance, and I winced because it was so . . . strangely pathetic. God, he couldn’t even talk to me; he could barely look me in the eye at all. “It’s just that she wanted to come, too . . . to see you, but we . . . I mean, I . . . I thought it was a bad idea. I thought I should see you first.”

Inside, in a place where Austin couldn’t see, where he’d never know what this meeting was doing to me, my heart felt like it was shattering into a million little fragments. It wasn’t like I didn’t know this already, that we were really-truly-completely over, Austin and me, but to see him here and hear him stammering for something to say to me . . . I guess it finally hit home.

But that didn’t change the fact that I was pissed at him for giving up on me in the first place, or for choosing to go on with his life with Cat, of all people! I didn’t realize I was crying until I heard myself yelling at him. “Why couldn’t you wait, goddammit? Why did you”—I choked on a sob—“have to give up on me?” And then, before I knew what I was doing, I hit him, but it wasn’t a real hit, and we both knew it. My fist struck him square in the chest while I yelled again, tears streaking down both sides of my face. “Why’d you have to do all the things we were supposed to do with her?”

I felt his arms go around me, and even that wasn’t the same anymore. I should’ve loved that he was finally touching me, hugging me. Except he wasn’t hugging me, not really. He was comforting me, and that isn’t the same thing at all. I felt like a little kid who’d skinned her knee, and Austin was just trying to make it all better.

Thing was, I didn’t want to be comforted. Not by him. I writhed inside the circle of his arms, but instead of realizing I meant it, that I wanted him to let me go for real, his grip tightened. Understandable, I guess, since in the old days I would’ve wanted him to keep hold of me. To wait out my stubbornness.

But not now.

I shoved harder. “Get. Off.” I demanded, making sure he understood I meant it this time.

When he released me, my faced felt flushed, but not in an attractive, you-just-made-me-blush kind of way. I knew it was blotchy and gross, but I didn’t care. I wiped my nose on the back of my hand.

Just then Tyler’s car pulled to a stop behind Austin’s. Austin barely seemed to notice his younger brother, but Tyler was all I noticed now. I hadn’t realized how close I’d been standing to Austin until Tyler got out of his car and his dark eyes moved from me to Austin and back to me again.

I swallowed hard as I took a step back, wishing more than anything I’d never come out here in the first place.

But Tyler didn’t skip a beat. He nodded at me like we were old buddies rather than the kind of people you stay up half the night drawing chalk masterpieces for as he jerked his backpack from his backseat.

When he approached Austin on the sidewalk, he didn’t step around him like a normal person would have. Instead, he bumped into him with his shoulder, shoving his older brother out of his way.

“What’s your problem?” was all Austin said as Tyler passed him, which wasn’t much of a greeting from one brother to another, but I guess neither was the shoulder-bump thing.

After Tyler had slammed the front door behind him, leaving us all alone again, Austin turned his attention back to me and beneath his breath muttered, “Jesus, Kyra, this is really hard for me.”

“Hard for you?” I managed when I finally stopped glancing up to their house to see if Tyler was in there, watching us.

Austin exhaled, running his hand through his hair. I knew the gesture. He thought I was overreacting. “Yeah. I thought my girlfriend was dead, and now here you are. I’m confused, but I want us to be . . . friends.”

I didn’t know what to say. Nothing, I guess. We weren’t friends, not anymore. We hadn’t been for a really, really long time.

Shrugging and shaking my head, because what else could I do, I turned on my heel and left him standing there.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Day Four

I SAT IN DR. DUNN’S EMPTY WAITING ROOM, MY tongue running over the chipped tooth I was here to have fixed while I continued to rehash my confrontation with Austin yesterday. I’d been replaying it in my head over and over all night, but worse was the fact that I also couldn’t stop thinking about Tyler, and the look on his face when he’d come home from school to find the two of us standing there together.

None of it should matter to me, mostly because it really didn’t matter. I was nothing to Austin, and now that I’d seen him again, it was clear Austin wasn’t anything to me either. We were so over.

Besides, on top of everything else, Tyler was still just Austin’s little brother. Too young to be anything more than a friend.

So why had my already-fractured heart shattered a little more when I’d stepped outside this morning to leave for the dentist only to discover there was no new chalk drawing for me, only the birdcage from the day before—a little more smudged and worn?

Because if I stopped lying to myself for even a second, then maybe there was a part of me where Tyler mattered more than he should.

I watched as my mom’s son ate a corner from a page of the Highlights magazine he’d been maniacally flipping through, pretending he knew how to read. I thought about asking my mom if there was something lacking in his diet that made him crave paper pulp as he chewed off a second piece, but I’d already offended her and The Husband that morning when I’d implied that, perhaps, he needed more practice with a spoon as more of the oatmeal had fallen off it than made it to his mouth.

To be fair, my exact words were something along the lines of a suggestion that they put him into physical therapy.

Considering that The Husband had given my mom a terse look, I decided it probably wasn’t worth the effort to bring up her son’s nutritional deficiencies too.

As if reading my mind, the kid looked up and grinned at me, his teeth all pulped out with mushy bits of newsprint. Disgusting.

“Kyra.” A woman in faded pink scrubs read my name from the file in her hands, as if the waiting room was teeming with patients all clamoring to get in to see the dentist on this busy Wednesday morning. I made a point of glancing at all the empty seats. Nope, still just me.

I got up and followed her. Behind me, I heard the door from the parking lot open and a voice I recognized said, “Sorry I’m late. I—uh—I overslept.”

I turned to see my dad standing in the doorway. He had the same unshowered look he’d had the first day I saw him, like he’d just rolled out of bed.

“I told you, you didn’t have to come. It’s just a dentist appointment. I can handle this.” My mom’s voice was pinched and high-pitched, the same way it had been when she’d reminded me that “my brother” had a name. I just kept walking and ignored all of them.

I couldn’t remember Dr. Dunn not being my dentist, but now, like everyone else—well, everyone but me, it seemed—he looked older. Fatter, too, like my dad, but cleaner, something I only just now realized that I appreciated in a dentist.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he washed his hands. He was whistling off-key to the music that played overhead. I remembered that about him, the way he whistled and sang beneath his breath like no one could hear him.

“So your mom says you chipped your tooth.” He straddled the small swivel stool next to the examination chair I was reclined on, and he ducked in close. He nodded once, my signal to open wide. I did, and he asked, “What happened?”

His fingers were already in my mouth, probing over my molars, so I tried to talk around them. “A hee o’ hang-ee” were the sounds that came out of me, nothing like “A piece of candy” should have sounded. I might as well have been a two-year-old with a mouthful of mashed-up magazine.

“Candy, huh? That’ll do it,” he answered cheerfully, his latex glove finding the broken spot on my tooth. His glasses had special magnified lenses on them that made him look like he was wearing miniature binoculars. He sat back and told the lady in the pink scrubs, “Let’s get a quick set of X-rays to make sure everything’s A-OK.” He turned to me and winked with one of his giant eyes. “Then we’ll get you all fixed up. Sound good?”

I shrugged. Okay.

She took her X-rays, and he came back in to check them, holding them up to the wall-mounted white box. I watched him disinterestedly as he scrutinized them and then asked his assistant to get my old X-rays, the ones I’d had done just last week. Or, rather, the last week I remembered.

He looked at those, too, and now I was more interested in what he was doing because he was more interested. I could tell because it wasn’t a casual glance; it was a long, drawn-out perusal, the kind that you give to something curious or strange, something requiring a second or third look. He kept his back to me, so I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined him squinting behind those giant-eyed lenses. Squinting and biting his lip and concentrating.

Then he left the room, both sets of X-rays in hand.

I waited a long time in the reclining chair before he finally came back.

“What was it?” I asked.

He dismissed my concern away with a wave. A flourish, really. “Nothing,” he answered, glazing over my question and moving on with the adept skill of someone used to dodging the prying questions of children. “Good news. Tooth is chipped but not cracked, so we don’t need to do a filling or a crown. I can smooth the edge down so it doesn’t bother your tongue.”

He was lying, of course. All that concentrating over a chip that needed polishing? But I could tell he wasn’t planning to give me any more than that, so I opened my mouth wide when he told me to and let him buff the chip into submission.

And on my way out, like I was still seven, he let me choose a prize from the treasure box the receptionist kept hidden behind the counter. It was overflowing with plastic rings and beads and spinning tops and toy soldiers with flimsy parachutes stuck to their backs.

I reached for a paddle with a rubble ball attached to a string, and when I did, I saw the way “my brother’s” eyes lit up with desperate longing. He wanted my third-rate paddleball; I knew he wanted it.

I pretended not to notice, but inside I was grinning a pretty self-satisfied grin at my not-too-dignified jab at the toddler as I tucked it into my pocket, thinking I’d rather throw the stupid piece of junk in the trash than give it to him. And then I turned to my mom, who was looking at me like she knew exactly what had just transpired, and I told her, “I’m riding with Dad.”

“So what was all that about? With Dr. Dunn? I know he saw something on my X-rays.” I had to say it fast so I could get the words out in one breath, doing my best not to breathe inside my dad’s pigpen of a van. The smell of stale fast food alone was enough to make me gag, but, like yesterday, it was the other smell, the faint odor of something . . . mildewy . . . or musty—I didn’t know exactly what it was, but it was disgusting.

“Nothing, really.” But he didn’t gloss over things as well as Dr. Dunn had, and his “nothing” sounded more like an admission of guilt.

I kicked a crumpled paper bag at my feet and wondered just how often he got his meals at greasy drive-throughs. From the state of his van, I’d guess every one. “You can tell me. Actually,” I said, sitting up taller, “I think you have to tell me. I’m an adult now. I have a right to know.” It was so strange to say that out loud, especially since I didn’t feel any older.

My dad reached up and rubbed his jaw, his fingers distorting the skin of his face. “Really, I can’t tell you. Your mom—”

“She doesn’t have to know you told me. What’s the point in keeping secrets? It’s just the friggin’ dentist. How bad could it be? I have gum disease? I need a root canal? Come on.”

My dad veered suddenly to the right, the van lurching along as he maneuvered us toward the side of the road. My stomach dropped. It reminded me too much of the night he pulled his car over, when I’d insisted I was getting out to walk.

“What are you doing?” My voice sounded hollow, weak.

He pulled out his phone. A flip phone that had been outdated even five years ago, and he dialed while I waited. “I’m taking her to my place,” he said into the low-tech receiver. He flashed a knowing grin at me. “Yeah, she wants to meet Nancy.”

The first thing Nancy did was lick me. It was the grossest greeting I’d ever gotten, but I forgave her right away because, after licking me, her tail was wagging so hard she could hardly stand still. It was as if someone had wound up her butt, and she no longer had control over her own actions.

Nancy was a mutt. And not just any mutt, but the muttiest-looking mutt I’d ever laid eyes on. She had to be at least part sheepdog, and maybe part wolf, but there was definitely part something else in there too. Something mangy. She was bushy to the point that she was in danger of being considered some kind of mongrel prehistoric ram or a mutant woolly mammoth rather than just a regular old dog.

But when she stared at me with her enormous, liquid-brown eyes, I could see why my dad had fallen in love with her in the first place. And also why he put up with her unholy stink. It was exactly that smell that I’d noticed in his van: the Nancy smell.

“So, what’d’ya think of my fancy Nancy?”

She had her chin perched on my knee and was staring at me all longingly and doe-eyed, as if she had no intention of letting me out of her sight. Ever. “Not that fancy, I gotta say.” I reached out and ruffled the top of her head, her ears flopping in two different directions when I did. “But she’s not so bad.”

I glanced around uneasily, less comfortable with my next question. “Dad, what are you doing here? What is this place?”

My dad followed my gaze. “I know it’s probably not what you expected, but it’s my home. This is where I live now. Ever since . . . well, since . . .” He lowered his head, rubbing his whiskery chin again. He went to the small kitchen, not really a separate space in the cramped trailer, and he turned on one of the gas burners. He kept his back to me as he filled a kettle. “It’s not so bad,” he finally finished, using the same words I’d used about his dog before facing me once more.

I winced. Not so bad. I didn’t really agree. It was worse.

There were stacks of newspapers and magazines and bills and notebooks on every surface that wasn’t covered with dirty dishes or laundry or bags filled with who knew what. There wasn’t a TV that I could see, but there was a giant telescope standing in the center of what I assumed was supposed to be the living room but was really more of a glorified walkway, complete with a two-seater couch that was also littered with clothes and newspapers. I didn’t see the booze bottles or empty beer cans, but that didn’t mean they weren’t here somewhere.

My dad, who had once been the epitome of neatfreakness, brushed aside a place for my mug at his wobbly kitchen table, where I was sitting with Nancy’s head in my lap. “Really? ’Cause it looks that bad to me. I’m not staying here, just so you know.”

He shrugged again. “You can if you want, but I won’t make you. Besides, I’m not sure your mom would let you anyway.”

I bristled at his words, and almost decided to stay just because he’d said that. I wondered if that was why he’d said it, because he knew how much I hated to be told what I could, and couldn’t, do. “She doesn’t have any say in the matter. I’m an adult, remember?”

At the stove, my dad cleared his throat nervously, and the gesture made me hyperaware that he, that all of them—my mom, my dad, and the dentist—were keeping something from me.

“What? Why are you acting so weird? I mean, besides rooming with a dog and looking all”—I waved my hand at him, indicating his disheveled appearance—“hobo chic?”

He pulled the whistling kettle off the burner and filled my mug, handing me a tea bag. I’d never really liked tea, never really had it before, so it seemed strange that my dad was offering it to me. I unpeeled the worn paper wrapper and plopped the tea bag into the steaming water. Before I could ask if he had any sugar, he was handing me a bowl of clumpy-looking sugar crystals.

Everything in this place was sketchy, right down to the sugar.

He cleared his own spot at the table, shoving a stack of papers and news clippings out of his way so he could set his own tea down in front of him. “The reason I’m acting weirder than usual . . .” His emphasis on the er almost made me smile, like even he realized he wasn’t exactly the dad I’d known. He raised an eyebrow at me as he scooped several spoonfuls of the sugar into his mug and concentrated on stirring. “Is something the dentist—Dr. Dunn—noticed on your X-rays.”

I raised my eyebrows back at him. Got that, I relayed with my impatient look.

“So he showed us the ones he took the week before you disappeared, when you’d been in to see him for your checkup, and he compared them to the ones he took today.” He spoke slowly, deliberately. It was painful the way he drew out each syllable and emphasized words like before you disappeared and compared and today, as if there was some significance to them that I should understand. I didn’t, and I just wanted him to get to the point already.

And then he did. “They’re the same. Five years later, they’re exactly the same.”

I didn’t understand. He was looking at me as if this was a big deal, something monumental, but I didn’t know why. “O-kaaaay . . .”

“Five years,” he repeated, still doing that drawing-out thing that was driving me crazy. “Five years is a long time, Kyr. Five years and not a thing, not one single thing, has changed on your X-rays.”

I lifted my shoulders. What was I supposed to say to that?

“It’s not possible,” he finally said, making his big, bombshell statement.

I still didn’t get it. “What do you mean, ‘not possible’? Of course it’s possible. You just said that’s what he saw.”

He shook his head. “No, I mean, it’s not possible.” He said it differently now, the word possible, like he was saying something magical. “He explained it to your mom and me in the waiting room. In five years, things change, especially in a teenager. Teeth erode from wear, nerves shift, cavities change—you had a cavity, did you know that? You had a little bit of decay between two of your teeth that your mom and him had decided to wait and watch, to see if the next time you came in it had changed, grown, and would need to be filled. Well, guess what? Five years later, and it’s exactly the same as it was. Exactly. Not bigger, not smaller. Just . . . the same.”

I stopped scratching Nancy’s scruffy woolen head, and she yawned against my knees but stayed where she was.

“So . . . I’m just different than most people. . . .” I wasn’t sure if I was trying to convince him or me, or if I was asking a question or making a statement.

My dad just shook his head and repeated, “Not possible.”

“But it is. . . .”

He scowled at me like I was the one who wasn’t making sense. And then he glanced toward the telescope, and I swore I finally understood what he was getting at.

I shot up from the table. Tea spilled, and Nancy yelped as her chin banged on the wooden chair I’d been sitting in. “Uh-uh. No way. That’s what’s not possible. Dad, please, stop it. You’re scaring me. You don’t really believe . . .” I couldn’t say it; it was so hard because it meant I was admitting just how crazy he was. “There are no such things as aliens.”

“Kyra . . .” He sounded so reasonable when he said my name that I almost didn’t notice the crazy mountain-man beard or the stains on his flannel shirt—the same shirt he’d been wearing when he’d come to see me that first day. “You don’t know what I do. You haven’t been living with this, gathering information for the past five years, trying to find out what happened to you. If you’d just stop to think about it, it makes perfect sense, really. And it explains what the dentist told us today, if you’ll only listen to me. Please, just . . . just try to have an open mind.” He stood now, too, and my chest constricted as his hand reached toward mine. His fingers, though . . . his touch when his fingers closed over mine was so comfortingly familiar that my legs nearly buckled. “For me,” he whispered as his eyes locked on mine.

It was that—those two words—that were my undoing. He was still in there, my dad. My number one fan. Begging to be heard. For me to take him seriously.

I didn’t know if I could, but I owed it to him—didn’t I?—to at least try.

“So you’re trying to say that I’m . . . I’m still sixteen?” Just saying the words sounded beyond insane, and I hated that I felt like I was indulging his delusions. “That I’ve been . . . what . . . stuck in some alien spacecraft for the past five years . . . and they just . . . put me back here? Why, Dad? Why would they do that? Why would they keep me all that time and then just . . . send me home?”

Something about my questions, or maybe about the fact that I wasn’t running the other way, set my dad in motion then. Like snap! and he was pulling me toward the back of the trailer. Nancy followed us, not nearly as leery as I was about my dad’s sanity. I wished I could be as trusting as her, maybe then my heart wouldn’t be trying to beat its way out of my chest at that very moment. Maybe my eyes wouldn’t be stinging with frustration and fear that my old man had cracked.

When he flipped the switch inside the only bedroom, the one I’d assumed he slept in, I realized I’d assumed entirely wrong. There was no sleeping going on in that room.

It was full-on crazy-town in there. Like the X-Files had thrown up in there.

“Look, I don’t know why they do the things they do,” he was saying, but all I could think was What the holy hell is going on here? Was my dad part of some alien conspiracy cult? Because I was looking at four walls that were plastered in what could only be described as star charts and maps, and photos of blips in the night sky that I assumed were supposed to be alien spacecrafts, and drawings of beings with skinny bodies and oversize heads and eyes, and more photos and drawings; and across them all were pieces of string connecting one thing to another in a way that seemed to make no real sense at all. And in one far corner, just above a desk that was as cluttered as the walls, with books and more maps and a computer that had newspaper clippings taped to it, was a series of missing-person flyers and milk carton cutouts.

There was one, in the very center of them all, that I recognized all too well: my own.

They’d used my sophomore class picture, the one where I was wearing Cat’s silver sweater and was quasi-hung over because Cat had decided that we should try shots of tequila the night before, when her parents had gone to the symphony. After watching her throw back three of them, I’d finally let her convince me to try one, and I’d nearly thrown it up before finally gagging it down.

Yet somehow she’d managed to talk me into four more. Cat had always been like that—persuasive.

None of that showed in the black-and-white image that stared back at me now. “You have got to be kidding me,” I finally managed.

My dad cleared his throat, and I was glad he had the grace at least to be a little uncomfortable about bringing me to his cracked-out shrine to Martians. “Please, try to have an open mind about this.”

I shrugged a “Fine, go ahead” shrug. But inside I was thinking, He’d better make his point soon, because he is losing me.

Fast.

No one could ever accuse my dad of doing anything halfassed, and that included this alien conspiracy thing. He’d definitely done his homework on the matter. He’d taken his ideas—his theories—and run with them. And apparently he wasn’t alone. I’d sat in stunned silence while he’d pulled up website after website, showing me, basically trying to prove to me, that there were others out there in our situation. That was how he kept putting it, like calling it “our situation” somehow recruited me to his way of thinking.

There were blogs and support groups, and a lot of them posted under pseudonyms and code names.

My dad’s was Supernova16.

He told me about people who had flashbacks and some, like me, who were missing chunks of time . . . and still others who’d seen the flashes of light themselves.

He quizzed me then, asking me questions interrogation style. Things like “Have you had any weird dreams or flashbacks since you’ve been back?” and “What do you think of when I say the word spaceship?” or my personal favorite “When the dentist was polishing your teeth, did you have any ‘unusual’ reactions to his drill?”

“No,” I insisted to his last question, but I knew by the determined set of his jaw and the way his eyes narrowed that he wasn’t buying it. Like he thought I might be holding something back. And I felt sick, because the more he dug in, the more I realized just how warped his thinking really was.

He held up a picture of some kind of creature with a freakishly large head and huge, pupil-less eyes and a short, squat body. He held up one after another, like they were flash cards, flipping through them almost too fast for me to process. Some looked kind of like insects, with long grasshopperish arms, and others were gray skinned and sickly, with giant-brained heads. “Do any of these make you uncomfortable?”

I shook my head because uncomfortable definitely wasn’t the word that came to mind. All they really made me was sad about what the heck my dad had been going through all these years that had led him to this.

I let him keep going because I’d promised him I would, and then he asked me the weirdest question of all. “Did you see them, Kyr? Did you see any fireflies that night?”

That one made me falter. “Fireflies?” I asked, wondering where he was going with this line of questioning. Aside from TV or movies, I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually seen a firefly in real life at all. I mean, I knew they were bugs and that they glowed, like little insects with lanterns in their butts. But that was as far as my knowledge went. “No. Why would I? What do fireflies have to do with anything? Why are you even asking me that? All I saw was . . . that light . . . and then you were screaming, and then . . .”

Shit . . . nothing else. There was nothing after that.

A tear trickled down my cheek, only this time it wasn’t like when I’d been crying with Austin, and my dad didn’t try to force his arms around me. Maybe he should have, but he didn’t. He just stared at me.

We were at the exact same standstill we had been when we’d started. He believed and I didn’t, and I was sad because of who he’d become, and sad because I almost wished I could confirm one of his whacked-out ideas—something—to make it seem a little less . . .

Sad.

I stood there, holding my breath, when his eyes found mine. After a long, long moment, he blinked hard, and a pained expression crossed his face, and I was sure I saw him there—my old dad, buried behind the beard and sad, puppy dog eyes. “You’re right,” he finally admitted with a shaky breath, and I felt my shoulders and breath loosening, because he was still there. There was still hope for him. For us.

And then he spoke again, and he ruined everything. “I knew it was too much,” he said. “I knew I should’ve waited.”

I felt my own heartbeat pulse in my ears. I felt it stop beating.

“Dad, no . . .” My voice was barely a whisper, but he heard me all the same. He hadn’t given up on it at all. And it was then I knew the truth; he wasn’t in there anymore, in that husk of a body, not my dad. This was some other dad. Some replacement dad.

I thought I’d stopped crying, but I tasted the tears when I opened my mouth to say, “Just take me home.”

The minute I walked through the front door, my mom started questioning me, but she was the absolute last person I wanted to confide in. She was half the problem. If she hadn’t pushed my dad away in the first place, there was no way he would’ve ended up in that crap-ass trailer overflowing with star charts and hidden booze bottles. But instead of facing her like a grown-up, I opted for the more mature choice of running to my fake bedroom and locking myself inside. And by locking I mean pushing my nightstand in front of the door.

She at least had the decency not to shove her way inside, which she totally could have since my nightstand weighed like ten pounds.

Instead, she stood out in the hallway and spoke to me through the door, which is how it felt like she’d been talking to me ever since I’d been back—through a barrier.

Listening to her attempts to coax me out was almost worse than listening to my dad tell me about his online forums and how everyone on there agreed with him, that I was certainly-surely-most definitely a victim of alien abduction. I pinched my eyes in an effort to suppress the headache my dad had given me with all his crazy talk and did my best to stop thinking about my father and what he’d become. I wondered if he’d ever, ever come back to me the way I’d come back to him.

I stayed quiet until, eventually, my mom gave up and went away.

When my new phone buzzed in my pocket, I regretted checking it almost the moment I did.

Can we please talk? the text from my dad read.

I’d never, in my entire life, ever avoided my dad before. I mean, yeah, maybe once or twice, when I didn’t want to go to practice or that one time when I got detention for texting in class. Or the times when I didn’t want to talk about which college I should go to.

But never like this. Never when I was afraid of hurting his feelings because I was sure he’d lost his freaking mind.

Suddenly I had a glimpse into what my mom must’ve gone through, and I hated it. I hated her for giving up on him, and hated myself for being on the brink of doing the same thing.

There was a first time for everything, I thought, ignoring his message. I knew I couldn’t put him off forever, but I wasn’t yet ready for another round of Kyra Meets ET.

The worst part was, there were parts of his story that made sense. Maybe that would explain why I still had a bruise on my shin, or the reason I’d been wearing the same clothes when I woke up behind the Gas ’n’ Sip, or how my phone was still charged. Or maybe I was starting to sound as whacked out as he did.

Why on earth would aliens have a charger for a Motorola Razr?

Every explanation left me more confused. More lost.

And more alone.

When the text from Tyler came in, I almost didn’t notice it because I’d been ignoring messages from my dad for hours. But when I finally saw who it was, I let myself forget all about unchanged dental records and crazy dads and prying moms, and everything else that had turned my day to total crap.

After what had happened in front of his house yesterday, I’d worried he might not want to be my friend anymore. And Tyler was pretty much the only friend I had. I couldn’t bear the idea of losing him before we even got a chance to really know each other.

I left you something. To make up for this morning.

This morning? I wondered. What about this morning?

But I was already leaping from my bed to find out what he meant.

When I opened my window, I leaned all the way out, thinking that maybe he’d meant another chalk drawing on the road. But even as dusk fell I could see the road was the same as before.

And then I saw the small gift bag beneath my window.

Without going outside, I lowered myself far enough that my fingers brushed the top of it and snagged it before pulling myself back inside. When I closed the window, I sank to the floor and peeked into the bag.

It wasn’t anything elaborate, the bag. There was no tissue paper or sparkly shreds or anything, just a single piece of paper, rolled up and secured by an ordinary rubber band.

Slipping the rubber band free, I uncurled the sheet of paper and gasped.

I leaned in closer, to get a better look as a wide smile slowly drew my lips apart. It was incredible.

I’d been wrong when I’d assumed it wasn’t another chalk drawing, because it was. Only this one wasn’t drawn on the road. This one was so much more personal, and meant solely for me.

It was me.

Me, the way I’d looked the day I’d come home, when I’d first stumbled across the street and fallen into Tyler’s arms, still wearing my uniform, with the ribbons tangled through my hair.

He’d captured my image perfectly, with precision and depth and life. Somehow he’d made my eyes, which I’d always thought were too big, seem beautiful in a haunted kind of way; and I no longer questioned whether they fit my face. He managed to re-create the arch of my brows and the shape of my jaw and each and every freckle splattered across my nose.

Immediately, I texted him back: I love it. Thank you. Because what more could I possibly say?

CHAPTER EIGHT

Day Five

THIS WAS MY MOM’S FIRST DAY BACK AT WORK since I’d been home—probably the longest she’d been off work at one time since she’d squeezed out her new kid, so it hadn’t been hard to convince her I’d be fine and that I could fend for myself for a whole eight hours.

It was Thursday, according to my obsession with the calendar, which meant Tyler, the only other person who might’ve kept me company, was at school too. I was completely on my own for the day.

By 8:01 I was pacing the house.

By 8:16 I’d taken a complete inventory of the refrigerator, the kitchen cabinets, and the pantry, and noted the sad lack of nonnutritional, preservative-laden snack foods.

By 8:43 I was bored out of my frickin’ skull.

I finally settled down on the couch and started flipping through the channels, most of which were morning talk shows aimed at the stay-at-home-mom crowd. I paused when one of those talk shows was interrupted by a local news segment. My throat felt tight and scratchy as I stared at the familiar face on the screen.

I knew him. It was the lab guy who’d taken my blood at the hospital the night I’d come home. And according to the news report I was watching, he was dead.

I tried to read the ticker that ran continuously across the bottom of the screen, but I could only catch bits and pieces of it:

. . . A phlebotomist from Skagit General Hospital . . . found dead in his apartment last night by his girlfriend . . . hemorrhaging from his mouth and eyes . . . autopsy will be performed to determine exact cause of death . . .

I switched to several other channels to see if there were any other details, but when I couldn’t find anything, I gave up and decided to see if I could find anything online. Trouble was, the computer was password protected, and I would rather have been forced to wear my mom’s high waters every day until the end of time than to break down and ask her, even via text, what her password was.

I tried a few semi-obvious combinations: Password, Kyra, Logan (because it seemed logical), Supernova (which was far less likely), and my birthday. I would’ve tried “my brother’s” birthday, but I had no idea what that was.

After a while I got bored with that, too, and gave up.

Eventually I took a shower and started sorting through the clothes my mom had picked out for me.

I had to admit, and this was coming from someone with zero idea of what was in style anymore, I didn’t hate what she’d selected. I’m guessing she’d steered away from anything supertrendy, which was probably good since I doubted she had any better notion than I did what would rock the community college scene these days. But at least she’d remembered my size and that I liked vintage-style tees and jeans that felt broken in already.

I spent forty-three minutes unpacking and cutting off tags from T-shirts, underwear, pajamas, socks, tank tops, and jeans—everything a girl newly returned from a five-year hiatus could possibly need. I slipped into a pair of jeans and a worn-looking T-shirt with the Count from Sesame Street on the front and couldn’t help smiling just a little that my mom remembered, too, how much I’d loved the number-obsessed vampire when I was a kid.

When the doorbell rang, I stopped what I was doing and checked the digital alarm clock against my phone to make sure the two were still in sync. 9:33.

I slipped my phone into my pocket and went to see who it was.

The man standing on the front step looked like any other man who wore stiffly starched suits and stiff, plain black ties: Stiff. I couldn’t tell if he was a salesman or one of those church guys who goes around trying to convert people, but he definitely wasn’t a deliveryman, not in that getup.

I would’ve discouraged him right off with an immediate “My parents aren’t here,” but the first rule drilled into every latchkey kid is: never tell a stranger you’re home alone. So I waited to see what he wanted.

Shockingly, it wasn’t my parents he was looking for.

“Kyra Agnew?” His voice came out just as stiff as his suit. It was sort of daunting, the way he said my name—and the fact that he knew my name—with authority, like a principal or a coach, and I found myself standing straighter because of it.

“Uh . . . I . . . yeah . . . ,” I stammered, because sometimes when I was intimidated, I was smooth like that. My pulse sped up the tiniest bit.

He reached into his jacket and pulled out some sort of leather wallet thingie. It was black, too, like his suit, and when he flipped it open, there was a slick-looking badge inside. I focused on the golden beetle in the center of it while he said his name in that same no-nonsense manner that made me want to salute him. “Agent Truman. National Security Agency. May I come in?”

He tucked his wallet back inside his jacket and took a step forward. My mind reeled, but before his foot even hit the ground I was yanking the door closed. I didn’t slam it on him, but I closed it enough so that I was wedged between the opening. It was the same move The Husband had pulled on me when I’d tried to barge in on him that first day. There was no way I was letting this guy into my house.

First of all, neither of my parents was here, something I obviously couldn’t tell him without violating latchkey kid rule number one. Second, I had no way of knowing if that shiny badge was even real. I had a badge once too. I got it from my Cracker Jack box. So, yeah, no thanks on letting the potential serial killer inside.

“We can talk out here.”

He raised his brows and considered me, a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “Whatever you prefer,” he said in his authoritative voice.

I lifted my chin a notch. “What’s this about? You said National Security Agency? What’s that?”

“Miss Agnew, I have some questions for you,” he answered, not really answering my question about his “agency.” He pulled out a notepad and flipped open the cover, perusing whatever was written in there and then addressing me again. “We heard about your disappearance. What was that, five years ago?”

My pulse picked up, and the sound of blood rushing filled my head. I swallowed. “That’s right.”

“According to the police report, you were on your way home from a baseball game.” He glanced up with just his steely eyes, the leathery skin around them crinkling as he trained his gaze on me.

“Softball,” I corrected, reaching up to scratch my elbow.

“Softball,” he amended, scribbling the note in his book. “And you were in the car with your”—he consulted his notes—“father, on Chuckanut Drive, when you got out of the car.”

This wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway, scratching harder.

“What happened next?” This time he wasn’t looking at the notepad; his gaze was directed solely at me, and I had the feeling my answer was important.

I stopped scratching, my mouth suddenly too dry to answer. I lifted my shoulders, my eyes widening slightly and my mouth turning down in a frown.

He waited for something more, and then when it was obvious that was all the answer he was getting from me, he pried. “What does that mean, precisely? Are you saying you don’t know what happened?”

I shrug-nodded and then tried my voice, because I thought I should be a little more decisive than a bobble head doll. “I mean, I guess so.”

“Nothing”—his eyes narrowed as he prompted me—“unusual or out of place?”

I thought of the light. The flash. And the importance my dad placed on in. I thought of my dad and the way he’d become obsessed with where I’d been, and my stomach clenched.

I didn’t want to answer these questions.

“No, nothing. I’m sure you already know I had a fight with my dad, and I got out to walk. After that . . . I don’t remember anything.”

The man—this Agent Truman, he’d said his name was—sighed. His expression relaxed. The lines in his face that a moment ago made him look hard and a little threatening now reminded me of the way my grandpa had looked right before he’d died. Weary. I could almost imagine this man smiling. Almost. “Look. I get it. This is a tough subject. You’ve been through something difficult. You’re confused. We’re just trying to help. We want the same answers you do. We want to help sort this whole mess out.” He did smile then. It wasn’t exactly endearing or anything, but it was nice enough. “Are you sure I can’t come inside?”

I bit the inside of my cheek. I was confused enough about who he was and why he was here without him playing both bad cop and good cop. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. . . .”

His hand was now on the door, gripping the wood as if I’d already given him permission. “We can talk about your father’s version of events. See what he thinks happened to you.”

My dad? Why was he talking about what my dad thought happened that night?

Or was he talking about that other thing, the one Tyler had mentioned where some of the people in town thought my dad might have had something to do with my disappearance in the first place?

He might as well have smacked me in the face with that enormous hand of his, the one that was still on my door, and I suddenly felt cornered, trapped. He was bigger than I was. And if his badge was real, then he actually had some authority and maybe could insist on coming inside. Maybe I had no right at all to keep him out.

Right now, though, none of that mattered. I lodged my foot against the bottom of the door to keep it from budging. “My father? He doesn’t have anything to do with this.” I didn’t wait for his rebuttal, because I didn’t care what he had to say. I leaned my shoulder and all of my weight against the door, surprised that Agent Truman was pushing from the other side in an effort to stop me. “I have to go,” I insisted. “I don’t have time to talk to you.” I shoved harder to emphasize my point.

Through the opening, we faced each other, and Agent Truman didn’t try to convince me again. After a moment, the longest split second of my life, he let the door close, and I locked it behind me.

Then I bolted it and sagged to the floor, my heart pounding in my chest.

I never saw Agent Truman leave, probably because I’d never seen his car in the first place, but after an hour or so of patrolling the windows—and after the third time I’d read Goodnight Moon—I was sure he was gone. I was also sick to death of being cooped up in the house and watching the clock. Check that, clocks.

Scrounging through the change jar my mom still kept in the kitchen, I took a pocket full of quarters, deciding to walk the mile to the Gas ’n’ Sip. I almost changed my mind when I came outside and found Agent Truman’s business card on my front porch, but instead, I glanced in every possible direction, and then, in case he was watching, I tore it into tiny bits and tossed it in the trash bin on my way out. I wanted to make it clear that there was no way I was talking to anyone from the National Security Agency about my dad.

No one could ever convince me he had anything do with my disappearance, no matter how unhinged he might be.

The Gas ’n’ Sip had always been my favorite junk food dealer. When we were finally allowed to walk there on our own, Austin and I used to pool our allowance money and trek there during the summer for ice cream bars and Mountain Dews and packages of powdered doughnuts. When Austin got his license and started driving us to school, we’d stop there in the mornings for some of the strongest-brewed coffee in town. And sometimes for powdered doughnuts too.

I’d spent almost as much time at the Gas ’n’ Sip as I had on the softball fields.

Being here now, though, I felt like a total loser. A loser with a pocketful of change.

I strolled the aisles in record time, picking up some Red Vines, a Dr Pepper, and obviously doughnuts, before dropping my mountain of change on the counter. The cashier glared at me for not paying with bills or a debit card, but I ignored her, making it her problem to count it out while I perused the trashy magazines displayed in front.

Not much had changed in the gossip magazine since I’d been gone; a lot of the same celebrities hooking up and breaking up or checking into rehab. One of the less-reputable newspapers had a headline that made me think fleetingly of my dad because of how far-fetched it was: “Bat Boy Spotted Living in Cave in Arkansas.”

I glanced away guiltily when I realized just how far my opinion of my own father had fallen.

I noticed him then, the boy standing in the same aisle I’d been in just a moment earlier, rapt in concentration over the selection of Snickers and Milky Ways.

I might not have given him a second thought, or even a second glance, if it hadn’t been for his eyes. Eyes that I’d seen before.

Eyes that were strikingly copper colored.

He was the same boy from the bookstore. Not the hipster cashier who’d sold Tyler his magazine thing, but the one I’d run into on my way out. The darker-skinned boy who’d made me pause because of his unusual eyes.

He wasn’t looking at me now though, and I tried to study his features without him noticing me. There wasn’t much else distinguishable about him. His hair was cut short, almost to his scalp, and his skin was smooth. His mouth and nose were normal sized, and he was average height.

He was just . . . normal.

“Need a bag?”

I turned back around to face the lady at the cash register. “I . . . yeah, sure.” I took my change and the receipt, and after she bagged my loot I took that too.

And when I turned back around, the boy was gone.

As if my day couldn’t get any worse, it totally did.

When I got back, my former best friend was sitting on the front porch of my mom’s house, looking as if she belonged there and had been sitting there every day for the past five years without skipping a beat. If it hadn’t been for her oversize shoulder bag, an accessory she used to insist was for women who’d given up on trying to be sexy, I might have overlooked how . . . grown-up she looked.

Except that I probably wouldn’t have. Because she did. Look grown-up, I mean.

So, so much more than I did, standing there in my Sesame Street T-shirt and Chucks.

Her expression, though, that Cat expression of unbound exuberance that no one else in the whole wide world could emulate, hadn’t changed a bit. And when she saw me wandering up the sidewalk, that liveliness that I’d always loved about her lit up her entire face.

“Kyra!” she gasped, jumping to her feet as she clutched her grown-up purse in front of her.

“Cat? What the hell?” I gripped my plastic bag in front of me as if it could somehow shield me. I wasn’t sure what I was more indignant about, being blindsided by her visit or suddenly realizing just how different she was from the last time I’d seen her, and how exactly the same I was. “Shouldn’t you be at school? Shouldn’t you have called or something?”

She frowned. “I did. I called like a million times, Kyr. I left messages with your mom and your dad. Didn’t they tell you?”

I thought of the sticky-note rainbow my mom had left on my bed.

I glanced at my feet, shoving down the deluge of feelings I couldn’t sort through. I was more than just confused or hurt. Yes, she and Austin had betrayed me, but it was different seeing her in person now than it had been seeing Austin. It was harder, somehow, to ignore the years—the lifetime—that she’d just been Cat, my BFF. “You shouldn’t be here.” It was difficult to say, but I so wasn’t ready for this.

In the fringe of my vision, I saw her take a step closer. “What did you think, that I was gonna stay away? You’re my best friend, Kyra, and you’ve been gone for five whole years. I had to come.”

“Were,” I told her, looking up to find her watching me with those perfectly lined eyes. Even her shockingly blond hair looked less high school and more college. No longer ponytailed or braided with wild strands flying loose the way it had been when we’d been on the field. Now it fell in perfect waves that made it clear she’d made a skilled effort with it. “You were my best friend.”

She stopped, and for a long—I mean a really long—time we were both quiet. I thought that was it, that I’d pushed her away, too, like my dad. But then she laughed. “Okay, well, just because you say we’re not best friends anymore doesn’t make it true.”

I looked up, and I saw the person she was now. The person Austin went away to school with . . . and was probably living with. That he was definitely-positively-for sure in love with, because how could he not love Cat. She was everything I wasn’t, and just because I had no idea what was cool anymore, I knew that this Cat was the epitome of all things cool, right down to her knee-high, lace-up boots and her knotted batik scarf.

I loved her even while I hated her. “You might not want to be my friend,” she declared vehemently. “But you will always, forever, be mine. So don’t be stupid, of course I was planning to come here and see you.”

Tears stung my eyes. I wanted to ask her about how she could have ever hooked up with Austin in the first place and why she hadn’t come the other day when he had, but pride made those questions impossible. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was that things had changed, and how pissed I was at her, and that I wished, more than anything, we could just go back. . . .

Back.

To five years ago.

And then, as if she’d read my thoughts, because, like any good best friend, Cat had always been able to do that, she reached into her bag. “I brought you something.”

At first I didn’t get it, the significance of what she held, and then she told me. “It’s from that night. It’s the game-winning ball.” She stepped the rest of the way down from the steps and presented it to me. “We all signed it,” she said, her words getting all watery. “Hoping we’d give it to you as a team when you came back.” She ended on a strangled sob, until she was full-on crying.

I took the ball from her, concentrating on it so I didn’t have to face the fact that mascara was streaking down her pink cheeks. The feel of the ball was so achingly familiar, yet so foreign, that I almost dropped it as soon as it was in my hand.

I had always believed that, like any good pitcher, the ball was an extension of me. That I understood it in ways other people didn’t. I’d spent hours memorizing each tiny stipple in the surface of the leather, and the pattern of the stitches and seams. I knew when a ball had gone bad or the difference between a men’s and women’s ball even before I’d wrapped my fingers around it.

This though . . . this felt strange. Right, but not right.

Like Cat and me.

I swallowed, and then swallowed again because I didn’t want to cry. I’d always been stubborn like that. I didn’t wear my heart on my sleeve the way she did.

“I’m not saying we’re not friends, Cat. I’m just saying I can’t do this right now,” I told her. And I took my ball and went up the steps.

As I opened the door to leave her behind, I faltered. Stuck between the door and the jamb was a brand-new, not-torn-up business card from Agent Truman.

Goose bumps peppered my skin as I drew it out. I would’ve looked for him, up and down the street, but I didn’t want to risk facing Cat again, so I pocketed it instead.

But even as I went inside, the question followed me: how had he known I’d thrown away the other one?

CHAPTER NINE

I REMEMBER ONE TIME, DURING THE SUMMER between my fifth- and sixth-grade years, right before it was time for me to start middle school, when I cried a whole lot. I didn’t know why I was crying so much at the time, because I cried over pretty much everything: TV commercials, melted ice cream, a grass stain on my favorite jeans. But now that I think back on it, it was probably because I was so afraid.

I was no longer going to be sitting in the same classroom day after day with the same teacher and the same kids for the entire school year. This year, and each year going forward, was going to be all about lockers and choosing electives and showering after gym class and school dances. It was about endless possibility.

I would be embarking on a year of change, where everything was new and unexpected and . . . terrifying.

That was how I felt now.

This house and this family . . . it was all new but not new. Predictable yet unexpected. And utterly, totally, wholly terrifying.

After Cat had gone I couldn’t shake that feeling. Seeing her again left me feeling squirrelly in my own skin. The stuff with my dad and the stalkery NSA agent made me question where I’d been for the past five years, but it was Cat . . . Cat, who’d driven all the way from Ellensburg to inform me that, whether I liked it or not, she intended to stay my friend, who had me wondering who I was going to be from this point on.

It was strange to think that she and I no longer had a single thing in common. She had spent the last five years living life, hitting those milestones I’d missed, and maturing in ways I had yet to even comprehend.

I wasn’t even sure what it was I was supposed to do now. The idea of finishing high school, even if it was only online, was nauseating, yet I knew it would have to be done if I ever planned to grow up—in either the literal or the figurative senses.

The worst part of the whole thing, though, was that Cat had said the one thing Austin hadn’t. Sure, he said he’d hoped we could stay friends, but I knew the truth: he hadn’t meant it. Not the way Cat had.

When I finally realized that there weren’t enough Dr Peppers and doughnuts in the world to drown my sorrows, I gave up on them.

Frustrated, I stripped out of my juvenile T-shirt and pulled on a plain black one instead. And then, because I didn’t have any necklaces or batik scarves to make me feel less . . . sixteen, I took out the only real jacket my mom had gotten me. It had a canvas-like feel and pockets that gave it an almost military look. Not dressy exactly, but not a hoodie either.

Nothing, though, could convince me to change my Chucks.

That was how I filled the time between when Cat left and when school got out, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t watching the clock and silently counting down the minutes till Tyler should be home. Or that I wasn’t hoping like mad he’d come see me before I had to fabricate some lame excuse to call him first, because I totally would have. So when his car pulled up in front of his house—not that I was watching from the window or anything—I felt a surge of giddiness. Maybe this day was salvageable after all.

I’d expected him to go inside first—check in with his mom, drop off his backpack, grab something to eat—all the things Austin used to do after school. So when he started toward my house instead, I got fidgety all over again. I wiped my palms over the front of my jeans, feeling stupid for being nervous all of a sudden. It was just Tyler, after all. What did I expect was going to happen?

After consulting the mirror one more time and deciding I was as ready as I was ever going to be, I gripped the knob and warned myself to “be cool” as I stood in front of the door and forced myself to take a couple of deep breaths. I didn’t want to scare him away with my eagerness.

But Tyler didn’t come to the door. We had a thing now, and instead of knocking, I heard him tapping on my bedroom window.

I raced across the house to my bedroom and saw him waving at me from the other side of my window. Trying to tell myself it was no big deal that he was here, I opened it and shot him my best I-wasn’t-expecting-you face.

“Let’s get outta here,” he announced without any preamble.

His invitation caught me by surprise, and my inner voice abandoned me altogether. I forgot all about playing it cool, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I even understood what that phrase meant. “Totally,” I breathed, before climbing over the windowsill and dropping onto the soft ground below.

As if he was worried I might fall, Tyler reached out to steady me. He caught me by the waist because he didn’t know I’d done this a thousand times before. But I let him believe I needed his help. I let his fingers close around my hips and pretended I needed him to keep me balanced because I liked the way they felt. His hands. On me.

“Thanks.” I took longer than necessary to stand upright, but eventually I had no other choice. I couldn’t let him think the leap—or his touch—had somehow crippled me.

I’d been so focused on Tyler, and when he’d be home, that I’d nearly forgotten all about Agent Truman and his reappearing business card. But now that I was standing outside, in the open, I found myself searching for the dogged agent, for some sign that he was out here. Following me.

Except then I saw Tyler, holding his car door open for me again, and I realized it really was just the two of us, that there was no one else. I sighed and let myself forget all about superspies and crazy dads, and everything else that had turned my day to total crap.

“You look nice,” Tyler told me, flashing his incredible smile at me when he got in.

“Thanks. Just letting my mom dress me up, like a Barbie doll.” I grinned slyly. “It was this or the holiday-sparkle gown. It’s pretty fancy. I think you’da liked it.”

Laughing, he pulled his car away from the curb. “I think you made the right call. Not sure you’d fit in wearing a ball gown.” Tyler grinned. “But I like the new you.”

I wanted to laugh, too, but instead I smiled weakly. The new me. That was the thing. I was the same; it was everyone else who’d changed.

“Yeah? Where we going?” I asked. Surreptitiously, so he wouldn’t notice, I pulled my phone out and noted the time. It was 3:11.

“I figured I’d get you out of the house before the neighbors start to think you’re some kind of shut-in or something.” He tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel while he drove, and I wasn’t sure if it was a habit or if I made him nervous. I hoped it was that last thing, because I’d hate to think it only went one way.

“Shut-in? I’ve only been home for five days, and I’ve barely been there. Pretty sure I don’t qualify as a shut-in.”

He shrugged. “Then I guess I thought you might want to grab some coffee with me.” Cocking his head, he shot me a look. “Did they even have coffee in your day? ’Cause we could go someplace else. Maybe split a root beer float or something.”

I shoved him. “Okay, smart-ass. Coffee’s good.” I laughed, and wondered if he’d watched the clock half as much as I had today.

The coffee shop he took me to was cute, not a Starbucks or Seattle’s Best Coffee—the kinds of corporate places Cat and I had sworn off because Cat had convinced me they were “bastardizing” the coffee culture. Austin had gone along with our boycott because he liked making out with me, but I’m not sure why any of us thought getting our coffee from the Gas ’n’ Sip was any more humanitarian. It was a gas station, after all.

After ordering, Tyler dragged me to a spot in the back where we found a table away from all the noise. It was quieter and less crowded than near the counter, where people were coming and going, and the espresso machine hissed, and there was the constant banging as the baristas replaced old grounds with fresh ones. Tyler leaned forward, over the top of his double-shot mocha, and studied me pensively. “I’m sorry about the other day,” he blurted out. “About how I acted when Austin came by.”

My eyebrows squeezed together. My chest squeezed even tighter. I’d thought about it more times than I could count, but I guess I hadn’t really expected him to apologize. “It’s okay . . .” I started, and then realized the thing about Tyler was that I could talk to him. I’d nearly forgotten how good it felt just to be near him. How he didn’t act like my feelings didn’t count, and that I shouldn’t rock the boat. “It sucked, really. All this time I’ve been back, all I thought I wanted was to see him, and then when I did . . .” I shook my head. “It wasn’t at all what I thought it’d be. He was . . . he was a jerk. He didn’t really care about me or what I was going through; he just came over to . . . make himself feel better, I guess. He didn’t even ask how I’ve been . . . or where I was the whole time I was gone.” I looked across the table to Tyler, who was just sitting there, listening. To me. “And then you got home, and all I could think was how you would’ve asked me those things. But you looked so upset, and I felt like a jerk for not stopping you when you went inside.” He didn’t try to console me or interrupt me or tell me that I was wrong to have the feelings I had, the way Austin would have. He just let me unload on him, and it was so . . . freeing. I kept going. “And then today, I had such a shitty day, and instead of going home after school, you came right over.” I stopped talking when I realized I’d just confessed to spying on him. My cheeks felt like they might burst into flames, and I bit my lip before I said anything more incriminating.

His expression shifted from wistful concern to amusement in a blink. He grinned at me, obviously not about to let my slip pass that easily. “You were watching me?”

I made a face at him. “Whatever. I noticed you were home, that’s all. Not that strange, considering I live across the street, you know?”

“And you just happened to be looking out your window at the exact moment I got home. . . . That seems a little strange. C’mon, admit it. You were waiting for me.”

“Uh, no,” I insisted, perfectly fine with the fact that I was lying through my teeth. “I was looking out the window, and I happened to see you. The end. But it’s awesome you think I have nothing better to do all day than to sit around thinking about you.”

He leaned back in his chair, his smile so wide, and his dimple so deep, he looked positively full of himself. When had little Tyler grown into this guy who oozed such confidence? And how could I have ever thought of him as little? “Okay,” he allowed, but there was nothing in his tone to suggest that he believed a single word I’d said. “If you say so.”

I didn’t think it was possible, but my cheeks got even hotter. Lifting my plain-old ordinary drip coffee to my lips, I took a sip, hiding behind the cup for as long as possible.

“It was hard . . . seeing Austin again. Seeing how much he’s changed and knowing the things I know . . . about him and Cat.” And then I set down my cup again and confessed, “But it was worse today. I saw Cat.”

I didn’t know if this was too weird to share all this with him. Even though I felt something—whatever it was—for Tyler, I couldn’t ignore the history I’d had with Austin. Austin had walked away from our past years ago, but it didn’t stop the weight that had settled deep in the pit of my stomach, that felt heavier each and every time I thought of what we’d once had together.

Tyler was great and all, but he was just a distraction. A really adorable distraction.

At least that’s what I told myself.

“I know.” He set his phone on the table between us as if he was confessing something with it. “She called after she saw you, to see if I was out of school yet. She was crying, and I think she just wanted someone to talk to. She said almost the same things about seeing you.” He shrugged and leaned forward again. His voice was shades more thoughtful than it had been when he’d been teasing me about watching him.

It was what made me feel comfortable confiding in him—that serious way of his, that quiet maturity. “She said you hadn’t changed a bit. I guess that made it worse for some reason, because she said she wanted everything to be the same as before. She . . .” He paused and frowned, and I wondered if he was recalling his conversation, filtering parts of it and deciding what he should and shouldn’t tell me. Holding back. “She wishes her and Austin could undo what they did.”

My heart lurched. I wished for that too. So badly it was probably written all over my face.

I looked at Tyler, sitting across from me with his messy hair and concerned expression. He watched me without judging me, or asking anything from me I wasn’t capable of giving, or making me feel guilty for not acting a certain way or believing things I couldn’t believe. He was just here to help me figure out who I was and how I fit into this new world I’d been dropped into.

I hated that I found it harder and harder to hold on to my feelings for Austin, not to let them be eclipsed by these new and uninvited feelings Tyler had stirred in me.

“But they can’t, can they?” I admitted. Emptiness filled my chest.

He shook his head. “They’re not bad people, Kyra. It wasn’t an accident, them getting together, but it wasn’t malicious either. I was there. I was young, but I was around when it happened. Austin was a wreck after you vanished.”

Tears pricked my eyes, and I blinked to keep them at bay. Tyler’s hand reached for mine, to where I clutched the warm coffee cup as if it were the only thing in the world keeping me tethered to the ground at the moment. He stopped himself, right before he touched me, his fingers hovering so close I had only to twitch to close the gap between us.

And I wanted to. To feel his touch again. To let our fingers intertwine. To let him comfort me the way I longed to be comforted.

It wouldn’t take much, and when I saw the way he was watching our hands, too, I could see him offering me all that and more. He wanted it as badly as I did.

I cleared my throat, inching my coffee just the slightest bit closer to me and creating a chasm between us that felt unbreachable. “So what happened then? How could they have just forgotten about me? How did they end up . . . where they are . . . together?”

His hands stayed where they were. “I can’t say for sure, but if I had to guess I’d say it was all the time they spent together—searching for you, talking about you, waiting for you. You were the glue that held them together at first. You were what kept them from drifting apart. And later, when they realized—when everyone insisted—you weren’t coming back, I think they stayed together because it was . . . easy.” Regret washed over his face. “It might not have been love back then, but it is now.”

His words sliced me, not because I hadn’t known the truth. Of course I had. I’d known from the moment Cat had answered Austin’s phone that night, when I’d realized they’d gone away to college together. But hearing him say it out loud, and maybe because I knew it wasn’t any easier for him to say than it was for me to hear it, was more than I could stand right now.

I shook my head, blinking furiously, trying to tell him to stop without words because my voice was lodged deep in my throat. And he did. He fell silent as I struggled to gain some of the composure I’d lost.

That was when my gaze landed on the boy in the corner, the one sitting at the table with his back to the wall, facing us. I stopped shaking my head. Stopped moving and blinking and breathing.

It was him again. The boy from the gas station, and from the bookstore too.

Just like this morning at the Gas ’n’ Sip, when I’d been standing at the counter to pay, he wasn’t looking at me or anything, and he didn’t appear out of place in the quaint, brick-walled coffee shop. But he was there nonetheless, and I had the strangest sensation that it wasn’t a coincidence that he’d been at all of those places, the only three public places I’d been without my parents since I’d been back.

This time it was me reaching for Tyler. I gripped his sleeve, tugging him closer so he was forced to meet me over the top of the small table. Under any other circumstances I would have noticed the coffee smell of his breath and the way my heart fluttered from having his mouth so close to mine.

But this wasn’t that time.

“Do you know that guy?” I murmured, trying my best to keep my voice down. For the moment I’d forgotten all about Cat and Austin, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the dark-skinned boy who seemed to be everywhere I was.

Tyler sneaked a glance out of the corner of his eye to see who I was talking about, and then when he’d gotten a good look, he shook his head. “Nah. Never seen him before. Why? Do you know him?”

Frowning, I told him, “I keep seeing him everywhere I go. I think he might be following me.” It sounded way crazier outside of my head; I knew it the moment Tyler cringed. “Okay, maybe not following exactly,” I amended, trying to do some damage control before this whole thing got out of hand and Tyler ranked me right up there alongside my dad. For all I knew, insanity was hereditary. “But it’s definitely weird. He was at your friend’s bookstore the night we were there. And then I saw him again this morning at the Gas ’n’ Sip.”

“So basically you’ve seen him twice, and now you’re accusing him of stalking you?”

“This makes three.” Again, my evidence wasn’t exactly rock solid or anything. Especially since the guy hadn’t looked my way once. Considering that I was the one talking about him, he could probably argue that I was the one being creepy.

“You do realize that nothing’s really changed in the past five years, don’t you? Burlington’s still a small town. Getting some new shops didn’t exactly transform us into a metropolis. People run into each other all the time.”

He waited a minute for me to process what he’d said. He was right, of course. The whole point of coincidence was that it was purely accidental. Chance. Like two people being in the same place at the same time.

Or one person being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I released his sleeve and sagged forward on my elbows. “Ugh. I’m sorry. You’re right. I totally ruined our . . .” I stopped short. I’d come this close to saying “date,” which would’ve been a million times more embarrassing than admitting I’d been watching him from my window. Besides, it wasn’t a date. “ . . . coffee,” I said instead.

His smile, when it lit his face, was mesmerizing. “You didn’t ruin anything,” he assured me, cocking an eyebrow. “I thought it was the perfect coffee.”

I blushed again and tried to think of something to deflect attention away from my verbal slipup. “Metropolis, huh? Nice word.”

“You like that? I like to pull out the big guns when I’m trying to make an impression.”

My eyes lifted. “Is that what you were trying to do, impress me?”

There was a beat, a moment in which our eyes met and my heart leaped, and then his voice dropped, feathering my skin and making me shiver. “Of course I am, Kyra. I was sort of hoping you understood that.”

Flustered, I shot to my feet, probably too fast. Definitely too fast. If I hadn’t drawn attention to myself before, there was no doubt I had now with my graceless dismount from my chair. “I—I . . . uh . . .” I stammered superarticulately.

Tyler got up too. He didn’t look embarrassed or confused by my reaction. Instead he grinned as he reached for my coffee before I spilled it everywhere. “Take your time, Kyra. I’m not going anywhere,” he told me as he came around the table and pushed my chair in for me. “I’ll wait till you figure things out.”

My mouth was suddenly too dry to speak even if I had been able to form a coherent thought. I let him lead me out then, between the maze of tables and chairs. We passed the boy in the corner who hadn’t even looked up when I’d jumped out of my seat. My chest was tight and tingly, and I couldn’t decide if it was elation over Tyler’s not-so-veiled revelation about liking me or if I was experiencing the first symptoms of a heart attack.

When we reached the door, I stopped and turned back, curiosity about the other boy finally getting the best of me.

Only this time he was looking right at me.

6:44.

I wasn’t a neat freak, not the way my dad had been before . . . well, before everything had changed. But since I was pretty much limiting most of my time at home to my fake bedroom, I decided not to let it be a total pigpen. I was just throwing out the plastic bag filled with my garbage from the Gas ’n’ Sip when I noticed something written on the receipt.

I fished it out of the bag and smoothed it flat so I could read what it said.

Kyra, call me. And was signed by someone named Simon.

I threw the receipt on the floor, seriously creeped out by the idea that someone had somehow managed to slip a note into my bag—on my receipt, no less—without me noticing. Someone who knew my name.

I thought of Agent Truman, who clearly had boundary issues, and wondered if this was his way of forcing me to talk to him.

And then I thought of the other guy, from the bookstore, the coffee shop, and—what do you know?—the Gas ’n’ Sip. Why would he be following me and leaving me cryptic messages? Why not just come up to me and say, “Hey, we should talk”?

I’d be a lot more likely to have a conversation with him if that had been the case. Now, after reading his “call me” message, I was pretty sure I never would.

I collapsed on my bed and glared up at my ceiling as I tried to imagine what was so important that he’d slipped a secret message in with my junk food.

My mind poured over a hundred different scenarios, ranging from completely innocent—like he was into me—to downright menacing—like he wanted to wear me like a skin suit. But no matter how hard I tried, there was no clear explanation.

And then there was that other thing I couldn’t stop thinking about no matter how hard I tried. The thing where Tyler had all but confessed he was interested in me. Even though it was way less mysterious, it was no less overwhelming. And even when I tried to push him out of my head, he found his way back. His green eyes, his new deeper voice, the way he teased me, his disarming smile. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

He hadn’t said much the entire ride home, but what went unsaid was palpable. Like a heartbeat pulsing between us so loudly it continued to reverberate inside my head long after we’d parted ways at the curb.

It hadn’t helped that after he’d cut the engine, he’d leaned across me to unlatch my door, as if I were suddenly incapable of letting myself out. He’d taken his sweet time about it, too, lingering over me; and I knew full well what he was doing. It would have been impossible not to know. The way he smiled teasingly, boldly, as if daring me not to react to his nearness.

With that smug grin he wore, I wouldn’t have given him the satisfaction of a response even if my underwear had caught fire right then and there. Secretly, however, everything inside me strained to be closer to him, to stop pretending there was a chance I might still be Austin’s girl and to undo my seat belt so there was nothing separating us.

A part of me longed to know the feel of his lips and his skin and his heart beating against mine.

I wanted to touch my fingertip to his dimple.

Just once.

I hated how easily he kept wriggling his way back into my thoughts.

My phone buzzed, and again I moved to hit IGNORE. Already I’d disregarded a call from my dad. I knew I wouldn’t really avoid him forever; I wasn’t capable of that kind of cold-hearted detachment. No matter how far off the deep end he’d jumped, he was still my dad. I couldn’t stop myself from loving him.

I needed more time before I’d be ready to jump aboard his crazy train again.

When I checked my phone, though, it was a new number, one I hadn’t programmed and definitely didn’t recognize.

Gooseflesh prickled my arms when I saw the out-of-state area code—area code 310. It wasn’t the number from the back of the receipt, but I was sure I’d seen it before.

Jumping off my bed, I scrambled for the top drawer of my dresser and began digging through the stacks of straight-out-of-the-package underwear and socks.

“Kyra?” My mom’s knocking on the other side of my bedroom door distracted me, and I stopped what I was doing long enough to shout back, “I’m not hungry. Go ahead and eat without me.”

I glanced at the digital numbers on my nightstand while my phone—set to vibrate—buzzed once more. It was 7:26.

Outside my room it was quiet, but I knew she was still there. I could hear “my brother’s” unmistakable footsteps—his short, staccato stride and the way he ran, rather than walked, everywhere he went. He whimpered briefly, and I could picture him straining with his chubby arms raised high above his head, begging to be picked up. Then there was a brief shuffling, and my mother murmured something soft and reassuring, followed by her quieter, and more measured, footsteps leading toward the kitchen.

I shouldn’t feel bad for not wanting to spend time with them, I told myself. This wasn’t my fault. None of it. I hadn’t asked for a new family.

When my fingers closed around Agent Truman’s business card—the second one he’d left me—I inhaled. I’d chucked it in my drawer when I thought I’d never need it again.

I picked up my phone and cross-checked the number on the card with the one that had just called me.

The two were a match.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. How had Agent Truman gotten my cell phone number?

Just as I pressed the button on my phone to check the time, a message popped up on the screen.

A text.

From Agent Truman’s number.

I want to show you something.

For a long time that was it. I waited for more. For another message, something along the lines of Call me back or Let’s schedule an appointment or Meet me at . . .

I wasn’t sure how that last one was supposed to end since I didn’t think there was a local NSA office in a town the size of Burlington, but it didn’t matter. If Agent Truman was trying to freak me out with his ominous message, he was doing a bang-up job. I was freaked, all right.

And if he thought I would message him back, he was out of his ever-loving mind. I had nothing to say to him. I’d already told him everything I knew: that my dad had nothing to do with my disappearance that night. I wasn’t sure what more I could say to convince him.

And then a second text popped up. A picture, followed by a single question:

Do you recognize this man?

I covered my mouth because I did recognize him, but I had no idea why Agent Truman was asking me, or why it even mattered.

Giving in to the urge to defend myself, even if my response was a total lie, I typed in two letters: No, and threw my phone on the bed.

I got up and paced my room, suddenly edgy and itchy and more than a little agitated. My eyes fell on the ball Cat had left me. The one from our championship game. The ball I’d hurled from the pitcher’s mound, striking out batter after batter.

The ball responsible for making the other team cry.

I picked it up and ran my thumb over the stitching as I looked at all the names scrawled on it in various shades of blue, black, purple, and red pen. My teammates who’d signed their names in hopes I’d be home soon and they could give me the ball as a gift. Tears gathered in the corners of my eyes. I wondered where they all were now. I wondered if they knew I was back.

I tossed the ball up in the air and caught it. I did it again, and again, and again.

And then I grabbed my hoodie and my phone, closing out of the picture of the lab tech who’d been found dead the night before in his apartment, and texted my mom, who was just down the hall, in the kitchen with her replacement family.

I’m going out. Back soon.

CHAPTER TEN

I’D ONLY WALKED BETWEEN MY HOUSE AND THE high school a handful of times, and only when it had been a last-resort situation. Like the time I’d overslept when Austin had been at an out-of-town swim meet and I’d missed the bus. Or when Cat and I had gotten into a yelling match in the middle of practice over whether the pitch I’d thrown had hit her on purpose or not. The argument had gotten heated—to the point that the coach had had to intervene—and I’d insisted on walking home, refusing to speak to Cat for two days afterward.

That had been one of the downsides of having an August birthday. I was always younger than everyone else in my class, which meant that, during our sophomore year, while everyone around me had been turning sixteen and getting their driver’s licenses, I’d been relegated to hitching rides and counting down the days till my Sweet Sixteen.

It wasn’t that big a deal since Austin’s birthday was in October and Cat’s was in February, and I could go everywhere they went. What was a big deal was that when August finally rolled around, I chickened out.

Maybe too much time had passed and I’d built up the whole driver’s-license thing too much in my head.

Or maybe, just maybe, I’d failed the driving test twice already—a secret I swore I’d take to my grave.

I’d been too embarrassed to try a third time, so instead I made up some lame excuse about not wanting my license anyway, which was total bull because every kid in the universe wanted one. Your license meant freedom and independence. It meant joining an elite club where people could drive cars and wave at one another on their way to car washes and drive-through espresso stands and parking lots, where they would hang out and compare shitty DMV photos.

And here I was, all these years later, still walking.

And still sixteen . . . or so I’d been told.

By the time I reached the field, I was sweating and I’d stripped out off my jacket and tied the sleeves around my waist. I was still clutching the ball, and it felt good. Right.

Being at the field again was a whole other story. It skeeved me out that they’d named it after me. I didn’t see a sign or anything, which would have felt like a gravestone of sorts, but it was still strange knowing what I knew.

I was relieved that the fields were deserted, since it was still softball and baseball season and there could have been a game or late practice. I stepped out onto the empty field, walking straight to the pitching mound, facing my ghosts head-on.

It was unsettling to stand there again. It was the same place I’d stood dozens, hundreds, thousands of times before. I pressed my fingers alongside the stitching on the ball and closed my eyes, letting memory and reality collide.

When I reopened them, I zeroed in on home plate and envisioned the ball’s trajectory, the point at which I wanted it to leave my hand, the way it should arc—just so—and where it would cross the plate. I rolled my neck and my shoulders, loosening my muscles. And then, taking a breath, I drove off the mound, swinging my arm and rotating my shoulder, all the way around, and released my pitch.

It was so natural, the rhythm so familiar, that it was utterly impossible to believe that five years had passed since the last time I’d thrown a ball. And when I saw it—that very same championship ball—hurtling across its mark, faster maybe than I thought it should have gone, I knew . . . I believed at last what Dr. Dunn had told my parents: I was still sixteen years old. Because there was no way, no possible way on earth I was any older than I had been just six days ago. My body, my muscle memory, hadn’t changed a single iota. My body remembered the same way I did.

“Holy shit.” The voice behind me whispered in awe. “I knew you could play, I mean, I’d heard stories, but damn, that was impressive.”

I whirled around to find Tyler standing right there, and I wondered how he’d managed to sneak up on me. I grinned in response because I knew what I’d just done was impressive, more so even than using words like metropolis or having a killer dimple. “You ever play?” I inquired over my shoulder as I left him standing there while I went to retrieve my ball.

I knew he was trailing after me when he spoke, his voice low and playful. “Softball? Nah. I tried out once, but they said the other girls felt uncomfortable with me in the locker room, so I didn’t make the cut.”

Bending at the waist, I reached for the ball where it had landed near the backstop. Gingerly, I brushed away the dirt as I stood again. “I meant baseball, or just sports in general, smart-ass. Aren’t you ever serious?”

His hand shot out, covering the ball as if he meant to take it from me, but he didn’t, and his hand curled over mine. I inhaled sharply. “I’m serious about plenty of things,” he told me solemnly, his gaze intense. He took a step closer, and without thinking or meaning to, and because I suddenly couldn’t breathe with him standing in my space like that, I took one tiny step back. I let go of the ball, and it dropped back to the ground with a solid thud. It was so much quieter than the pounding of my heart. He took another step. I tried to hold my ground, but my throat grew thick, and my body temperature had risen at least twenty degrees. “There are more important things in life than games, Kyra.” His eyebrow lifted, and his mischievous gaze raked over me.

I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me, or toying with me, or whatever this was that he was doing. I hated even more that it was his fault I couldn’t catch my breath, and I felt suddenly unsteady.

I shoved his chest, trying to give myself some space. “Yeah, well, I’m sure you and your books will be very happy together.” It didn’t escape my notice, the way his muscles felt beneath my fingers, and the solidness of him made me out-and-out feverish.

He caught my hand again, but this time I wasn’t holding the ball, so I couldn’t kid myself that he had some other motivation for his actions. When his thumb moved over my palm, heat burst in the pit of my belly and spread outward, curling the tips of my toes. “I’m serious about other things too.”

I wanted to swallow, but my tongue felt like baked asphalt. “Stop,” I insisted.

“Stop what?”

“Saying things like that.”

His half smile made him look all wolfish, and completely daring. “Like what? That I’m serious? That I like you?” He moved a quarter of an inch closer, and involuntarily my lips parted.

“Yes,” I confirmed, scowling because it was easier, and far less obvious than gaping at him. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

His thumb skated up to my wrist. I was sure he had to know how he affected me, that the thrumming of my pulse would totally give me away. “Then you stop.”

I blinked once and then again. “Me? What did I do?”

He let go of my wrist and lifted his hand to my face. When his thumb feathered over my lower lip, so lightly it could have easily been a figment of my imagination, I shivered.

I saw a show on Animal Planet once about these fainting goats whose muscles froze up when they were startled, and they passed out. Like, they literally fell over if you scared them.

That was me, right now.

I was terrified and exhilarated and frozen all at once.

If I passed out, too, I would surely die of embarrassment.

We stood like that for fifty-five straight heartbeats. Our eyes remained locked in a game of chicken. His palm cupped my chin, and his thumb stayed right on my lip while I tried to find my next breath.

And for fifty-five heartbeats everything inside of me begged him to kiss me.

“Being stubborn,” he said at last, and I had no idea what he was talking about, or when he’d even been talking at all. He shook his head, breaking the spell, or whatever it was I was under—we were both under. “You’re so damned stubborn. If you’d just admit how you feel, then we could stop pretending there’s nothing between us.”

I jerked back, away from his thumb on my lip, and my head collided with the fence behind me, which I hadn’t even realized I’d backed myself up against. “I’m not being stubborn,” I stated firmly, while he smirked as if I’d just made his point for him. I wilted against the chain-link, my fingers weaving through it for support. “I never said there was nothing between us.” It was hard for me to admit the truth, and it came out all shaky and timid sounding. I wasn’t timid, though, at least I never had been before.

“I wouldn’t believe you if you had,” he told me, and this time there was nothing playful or taunting in his voice. Nothing to make me weak-kneed and girlie. But that didn’t stop my lip from tingling where he’d touched it. He picked up the ball, and I led the way back to his car, following the chalk path that led to first base.

“You ever start that book I lent you?” The sudden change in subject was as jarring as it was welcome.

I shrugged, spinning to face him and catching the ball when he tossed it to me. “I finished it, actually.”

“What?” he drawled, flashing me a dubious look. “You’re lying! And here I thought you were all dumb jock and zero substance.”

Even though I knew he was teasing, I glowered at him and chucked the ball back in his direction.

Except that what I’d meant as a playful gesture ended up virtually lethal in execution. The ball didn’t just lob from my hand in a good-natured, we’re-just-messing-around kind of throw. It flew toward him at Mach speed, as if I’d just launched a missile at his head. He was quick enough, or lucky enough, to get out of the way in time.

When it hit the backstop, splinters sprayed outward in an explosion that made even me flinch from where I was standing.

If Tyler hadn’t ducked in time . . .

I covered my mouth. “Oh my god,” I breathed incredulously.

He stared at me and then whipped around to inspect the damage—the crater I’d left in the wooden backstop behind him.

“I—oh my god,” I repeated. “I’m so sorry.” And I so was. I had no idea what had gotten into me or where the hell that throw had even come from. He had every right to be pissed at me; I’d nearly decapitated him with my runaway pitch.

“Jesus Christ, Kyra,” he breathed as his fingertips traced around the fragmented wooden edges. “Have you ever done that before?”

I’d seen plenty of scuffs and dents in the backstop, mostly from foul balls or from the bats themselves, but never anything like what he was looking at.

I shook my head even though he wasn’t looking my way.

“That’s like . . .” He turned to face me, and I could barely meet his eyes. “ . . . Damn.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. And then my throat closed when my eyes shifted, focusing on the street beyond him and the backstop and fencing.

We were no longer alone.

Parked at the far end of the street, almost, but not quite, too far to see from where we were, was Agent Truman, watching us. Watching me.

He leaned against a polished, black sedan, his ankles crossed in front of him. The only thing missing were his government-issued shades.

He didn’t give any indication that he’d noticed us and looked completely out of place loitering on the fringes of a baseball diamond.

But I knew what he was doing there, and I could feel his eyes on me. Everything about him made me intensely, insanely, inscrutably uncomfortable. He’d seen what I’d just done, and for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on, it mattered.

I had no idea what was happening to me. According to my dad, and Dr. Dunn, and the mother I could barely stand to be around, I’d lost five years of my life but I was still sixteen. And now I find out my fastball is lethal?

All I knew for certain was that I didn’t want Agent Truman knowing any of it. This was my life. I’d just gotten it back and I was just figuring it out. I didn’t want him—or anyone else—knowing about it, or me.

“Let’s get outta here,” I told Tyler, waiting for him to catch up to me.

He didn’t argue, and he didn’t notice Agent Truman, who I couldn’t take my eyes off of and who never, for a single second, stopped staring at me.

I was so consumed by the NSA agent’s daunting presence that I almost didn’t notice when the back of Tyler’s hand grazed mine. Except it was all I noticed, because my breath caught, and I glanced sideways to see if Tyler had noticed it too.

He caught me looking at him, and my face flushed when he grinned back at me. And then his fingers captured mine, this time for real, not an accidental brush of skin against skin.

We were holding hands, and my heart was pounding so hard I thought it might splinter the way the backstop had, and suddenly we were all alone then, just the two of us.

Just like when I’d picked up the ball, the feel of his skin was so achingly, beautifully, disarmingly right. Righter than I could remember it ever being with Austin, which felt like a betrayal just to think.

It was almost painful that the moment only lasted a few short seconds, which was how long it took us to skirt the edge of the fencing and reach his car. When we stopped, I untangled my hand from his, not wanting him to be the one to end it first.

“There you go again, being all stubborn.”

I ignored the jab as I slid inside the car while Tyler held my door for me. I ignored the slamming inside my chest, and the fact that I could barely contain my smile no matter how hard I tried to bite it back.

By 10:36 Tyler had texted me no less than eight times, saying nothing in particular but revealing so much with his absurd messages.

Planning to sleep tonight, or should I be worried that you’re some sort of creature of the night, like a vampire or bat?

I meant bat like the animal. Not of the baseball variety.

Did you get my last text? Am I bothering you?

I can bring you another book if you need one.

And my favorite, but mostly because it was so lame: I’ll be dreaming of you.

I’d responded with a lot of yeses, got its, nos, and thanks but no thankses. But I’d learned three very interesting things from his attempt to text the pants off me.

He’d been keeping track of my sleeping habits, which could either be viewed as disturbing or sweet.

His flirting skills sucked.

He’d definitely gotten under my skin.

When half an hour had passed since his last message and I was sure we were done for the night, I set the phone aside and left my room in search of leftovers. As usual, the house was quiet at this hour; and just like every night since I’d been back, my mom had left a plate for me, another of my old faves: meat loaf.

And just like each night it tasted . . . not quite right. I picked at it for a few minutes, choked down a few bites, and ultimately tossed the rest. I threw it down the garbage disposal so my mom wouldn’t notice that I couldn’t seem to stomach her cooking anymore.

As I stood in front of the sink, I peeled the curtains apart and peered outside. I didn’t really expect to see Agent Truman and his cop-mobile out there, but I couldn’t rule it out either. Not after he’d shown up at the baseball field the way he had.

He had definitely gotten under my skin, and not in a good way.

On my way back to my room, I paused in the hallway. The faint glow of a nightlight spilled out from the open door to “my brother’s” room. I took a wary step forward, curious about this kid who was supposed to mean something to me.

His room was the exact opposite of what it had been the last time I’d been in there, when it had been filled with IKEA office furniture, and filing cabinets stuffed with my mom’s work files, and bookshelves jam-packed with my trophies and team pictures. I wasn’t sure where any of those things were now, but it seemed likely they’d been banished to the same place my personal belongings had gone. That, or thrown away. Remnants from another life.

Now it was a nursery, complete with crib and rocking chair and colorful letters on the wall that spelled out LOGAN. Even the smell was different, somewhere between sweet and too-sweet, like a noxious combination of floral air fresheners and baby powder. Since I’d seen the kid wearing diapers—something that made me further question his development, because shouldn’t a two-year-old be using the toilet by now?—I guessed that the air fresheners were meant to cover up the gross stink that went along with pooping in your pants.

I approached the crib as quietly as I could manage, not wanting to wake the kid.

As much as I hated to admit it, he was cuter, or rather less annoying, asleep than he was awake. He sucked his thumb, I noted, unable to stop myself from judging him even when no one was around.

But since no one could hear my inner thoughts, I supposed it was safe to confess there were good things about him too. That his skin was so smooth and unblemished, and his lashes so thick, that any girl in her right mind would envy him. And his expression was so peaceful and relaxed, and he slept so soundly, that I envied him. He had soft curls that peeked around from behind his neck, and my first thought was that I wanted to pet him. To run my fingers through those downy, feather-like curls and to pinch his plump cheeks.

I was such a cliché. I couldn’t afford to watch him for another minute or pretty soon I’d be carrying snapshots of him in my wallet and asking total strangers if I could see pictures of their kids. That’s what grown-ups did. They pretended to be interested in the photos of other people’s kids just so they’d have an excuse to show off their own.

I knew, because my dad had been a master at that game. He once even had giant buttons of my fourth-grade picture made, and he wore his everywhere he went. I found my mom’s in her glove box the day she explained that she didn’t have to wear my face on display to have me in her heart everywhere she went.

I wondered if Logan had taken up my share of that heart.

“We’re all trying, you know?” The hushed voice startled me, and I spun around to find The Husband—Grant—leaning casually against the doorframe, his arms crossed over his chest. He had on a plain white tee and flannel pajama bottoms. “Your mom most of all.”

I shrugged, not wanting to have this conversation. Not here, not with him. Maybe not ever.

I tried to brush past him, but his hand caught my arm. He wasn’t rough, just firm. “Kyra. We all get how hard this must be for you. Everything’s different now, but it wasn’t like we did it on purpose. Things just . . . changed. We want you to be part of our family.”

I closed my eyes. I knew he was trying to help, but his words—the way he said we and our, like I was just supposed to accept him and his son because that was the way things were now—made me want to puke.

“I’m trying too,” I said, and jerked my arm out of his grip.

When I reached my room, I closed my door and leaned against it to bar myself inside.

When was this going to get easier? When would I feel like I belonged somewhere, that I was part of a home or a family, or that someone really understood the person I was now?

I searched my nightstand for my clock, desperate to know how much time had passed, and when I found it, my eyes drifted to the beat-up copy of Fahrenheit 451 sitting beside it. My heart fluttered.

Someone did understand me. Someone who didn’t question where I’d been or how old I was now that I was back.

I eased away from my door so I could text him, knowing full well he was sleeping and wouldn’t get my message till morning. But there was already a message waiting for me.

Not from Tyler but from Agent Truman.

A message had been delivered at 12:01 a.m.: Were there fireflies the day you disappeared?

I dropped onto the edge of my bed, my breath coming in short gasps.

Fireflies. Why on earth would he ask me about fireflies?

My dad had mentioned fireflies to me too. Surely it wasn’t a coincidence.

I squeezed my eyes shut and searched my memory for that night, because suddenly it seemed a zillion times more important than it had before.

We’d been driving on Chuckanut Drive, and I was purposely avoiding my dad, stubbornly staring out the window. There were blurs of light every now and then, flickers in the distance. I suppose they could’ve been fireflies, but I couldn’t say for sure since I’d never really seen one in real life before.

Then I’d yelled at my dad to stop the car, and when he did I fled, and there was a flash. . . .

I pounded my fists against my thighs. Why couldn’t I remember more?

And why was Agent Truman so interested in whether there were stupid glowing bugs out that night?

What if my dad wasn’t as crazy as I thought he was?

A weight settled over my chest as I made a decision. I had to figure out what happened that night, but I couldn’t do it on my own, and I wasn’t about to go to my dad until I knew for sure how this was gonna play out.

There was only one person I could count on right now.

I picked up my phone and punched in a message: Any chance I can talk you into ditching school tomorrow?

I started to hit send and stopped myself. Adding another line to the text: I need an accomplice.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Day Six

I STAYED IN MY ROOM UNTIL MY MOM AND Grant had taken Logan and left for the day. I was proud of myself for giving The Husband and “my brother” their names back. It was a big gesture on my part, even if they had no clue I’d taken them away in the first place.

By the time they were gone, I’d already changed my outfit three times. I chewed the side of my nail as I triple- and quadruple-checked the time. It was only 7:43.

I don’t know why I was so nervous all of a sudden. I’d made Tyler a generous offer, hadn’t I? Giving him the chance to risk truancy, and possibly restriction, just to hang out with me for the day. Clearly, my selflessness knew no bounds.

The drumming at my window made me realize I’d been wrong to doubt whether he’d show, and I rushed to meet him.

“Hey,” I exhaled, sounding way more relieved than seemed warranted.

“Hey yourself. So what do you have planned for us? Bank heist? Jailbreak?” The way he looked at me, with that grin and that glint in his eyes, made me smile. But it was his touch, when I let him help me out the window again that made me beam from the inside out. He deliberately pulled me into him, practically yanking me to make it seem as if I’d lost my balance. My cheek smashed into his chest, not that I was complaining exactly. It wasn’t the worst place to be. “Or maybe you have something more . . . interesting in mind,” he suggested, his voice all gravelly sounding as it rumbled against the side of my face.

Grudgingly, I shoved away from him. “Jeez! Don’t you ever get tired of trying to seduce me with your sorry pickup lines?”

Undiscouraged, he smiled down at me. “Trust me, if I was trying to seduce you, there wouldn’t be anything sorry about it.” He reached for my hand, and his fingers linked through mine the way they had the night before as we started walking.

There was something so endearing about the way he held my hand, the way it felt like something we’d been doing forever while at the same time it felt shiny and new. My stomach quivered, and I liked it.

When we were in his car, he raised an eyebrow at me, and I realized I’d never told him where we were going. I loved that he was willing to go along with whatever I had in mind, no questions asked.

“Oh, uh . . . to Cedar Lake High School.” I paused when an expression I didn’t recognize passed over his face. “Do you know where that is?”

“Uh, yeah. In Bellingham. It’s the school you were playing the night you vanished.” He frowned. “Are you sure you want to go back there?”

I nodded, more sure than I’d ever been. “I need to retrace my steps. I want to see if I can remember anything.”

“Why? What good’ll it do? The past is the past. You’re here now. Shouldn’t you be moving forward now? Forget about what happened all those years ago?”

I hesitated, wondering how much I should tell him about my dad and his crackpot theories, and about Agent Truman, and the way they’d both asked me about fireflies.

“I wish I could,” I started as I smoothed my hand nervously over my jeans. “But there’s more to it than just that. There are things . . . people who are making it hard to let the past stay buried in the past.”

He winced, and I wondered if the pained expression meant he thought I was talking about his brother again. I reached across to where his fingers gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white. But I stopped myself because I felt self-conscious all of a sudden.

“Tyler, I’m not talking about Austin,” I explained, keeping my eyes trained on him. “When I came back, I thought . . . well, you know . . . I thought you were your brother. And I thought we would . . . be together still.” It was so much easier saying it out loud than I thought it would be. “But things are over between him and me, I get that now.” I took a breath and shrugged. “I know I don’t remember where I was all that time, but now that I’m back I feel so different. I’m not sure what it is about you. You were just a kid. . . .” My voice trailed away as I frowned, trying to find a way to explain. “It’s kind of like when Montag from Fahrenheit 451 asks Clarisse why it feels like he’s known her for so many years, and she says, ‘Because I like you, and I don’t want anything from you. And because we know each other.’ It’s the same way with you.”

His fingers relaxed on the steering wheel. His green eyes—ones that had once reminded me of Austin’s but were now so obviously not like Austin’s that I couldn’t imagine having mistaken the two of them—glanced my way. I knew when I looked at him there was no going back. Whatever I’d felt for Austin really was in the past.

Somehow, in less than a week, Tyler had managed to make me believe I belonged here, in this weird, unfamiliar world I’d been dropped into. He was the only person I could count on.

He was my here and now.

His voice was decisive when he spoke. “I’m glad Austin acted like an ass. I’m not saying he’s a dick or anything, because he’s still my brother. But it was a dick move.” He leaned nearer, removing his hand from the wheel and slipping it behind my neck, drawing me so close I could smell the toothpaste on his breath. “You deserve better than that, Kyra.” And just when I thought he was going to do it, finally kiss me, his lips parted and he said, “And you might not want anything from me, but don’t for a single second think I don’t want something from you.”

He was wrong, though; I wanted everything from him. Probably more than I should.

When his mouth fell on my forehead, my eyes closed while I waited for the explosion of butterflies in my stomach to settle down, but it never happened. They kept thrashing, for as long as he stayed there, which was forever, his lips pressed against my skin, burning me, scorching me. When he finally drew back, I was convinced there would be a mark there, a brand in the shape of his mouth.

He grinned, and then winked at me, before starting his engine. “Are we done messing around here? Because I think it’s time for you to start telling me everything. Like who the hell’s been dredging up all this past crap, and why it’s so important that you remember what happened.”

I wanted to tell him no, that I’d way rather stay here and “mess around,” but he was right. It was time to confide in someone. In him.

I waited a few minutes, until my breathing had returned to normal, or as normal as it was going to be while the feel of his lips still blistered my forehead. But I knew he was waiting, even though he didn’t press me.

We took the highway. We’d drive the other way, the way my dad and I had gone—on Chuckanut Drive—on our way back. I wanted to retrace our steps to the T, and my dad had taken the long way home that night because of road construction on the southbound lanes of the interstate.

Tyler’s car slid evenly, smoothly over the pavement, and I leaned back in my seat, studying him surreptitiously. “Remember the day I came back, when you said I didn’t look any older?”

The corners of his mouth ticked up, but he kept his eyes on the road. “Yeah.”

Now that I’d started, I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going with this. I shifted and fidgeted with my seat belt, readjusting it over my chest. After a moment I tried again. “Didn’t you think it was weird that I’m supposed to be twenty-one, but I still look the same?”

This time he turned his head to look at me. “What do you mean ‘supposed to be’? If you’re worried that I think you’re too old for me or something, I’m not.” He directed his gaze back to the road, but he was scowling now. “It’s not a big deal, Kyra. Really.” His lazy smile made a fleeting appearance. “I kinda like the whole cougar thing you’ve got goin’ on.”

Oh my god, even when I was trying to be serious, he was ridiculous. “Uh, no. That’s not it at all. And I’m not.” I was tired of dancing around it, and tired of pretending to be something I wasn’t. This, all of it, would either be better or a thousand times worse if I just spit it out already. “I’m not twenty-one, Tyler. I’m still sixteen.”

There, I thought, and even if I wanted to—which I totally and completely did—I couldn’t take it back now.

Tyler sounded far more reasonable when he responded than I had when I’d blurted out my admission. “What are you talking about, Kyra? You’re the same age as Austin.”

My throat felt scratchy, and I tried to clear it. “I don’t think so,” I admitted. “At first I didn’t believe it either. It was the dentist who saw it first, when I went in to get my tooth fixed. He looked at my X-rays and compared them to the ones I’d had done right before I disappeared—five years ago. He told my parents they were the same. Exactly the same.”

“Kyr—”

But I kept going before he could stop me. I was either going to do this or completely chicken out. Either way I was in too deep, and I’d come out looking like a lunatic. I planned to at least have my say before Tyler walked away and never looked back. “But it wasn’t just that. There were other things too. Things no one else would have noticed but me. Things like the bruise I’d gotten on my leg . . .” I leaned over and pulled the hem of my jeans up, showing him the fading purple splotch on my shin. “I got this when Cat and I were messing around the night before our big game. We broke my dad’s favorite coffee mug and never told him.” Just mentioning my dad and the world’s best dad mug I’d gotten him for Father’s Day when I was eleven made me sick to my stomach.

I wondered what kinds of mugs I’d get him now. WORLD’S BEST ALIEN HUNTER. MY DAD’S CRAZIER THAN YOUR DAD. If only I could have the World’s Best Dad back again.

Tyler looked my way, his eyes alternating between the bruise and the road and me. “You could’ve gotten that anywhere,” he told me, his voice so much softer and less teasing than it had been just a minute ago.

I shook my head, but I’d lost some of my conviction. “But I didn’t. And this.” I tugged up the sleeves of my T-shirt. “It’s the tan I had before I left. From my uniform. How could it still be there, in that exact same place?”

When he didn’t say anything, I fell silent. It filled the air, and I let my sleeve fall back in place. In that moment I wanted to slink down and just disappear again. I stared out the side window instead.

After a few seconds Tyler’s fingers closed over mine and squeezed. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you, Kyra. I’m just saying, give me a minute or two to process it, okay?”

While Burlington Edison’s fields—or rather “Agnew Field”—had looked almost exactly the same as they had the last time I’d stood on them, Cedar Lake’s fields, where we’d played that championship game, were completely rundown. The distinction between the outfield and infield was blurred as dirt and grass bled into each other, and the chalk lines were indistinct and drawn lazily. The dirt was clumpy, and the grass was weedy.

It was like looking at the softball diamond version of my dad.

But none of that mattered, standing there in the last place where everything had been normal. Where I’d been Kyra Agnew, superstar pitcher, only child, teammate, and unquestionably sixteen.

“Anything?” Tyler asked, coming to join me in the dugout where coach had given us her pregame pep talk and her postgame victory speech.

I shook my head. I tried my best to find something, anything that might trigger some small, seemingly insignificant memory, but there was nothing. Nothing new anyway.

Just Cat wrapping her arms around me and screaming victory shouts until my eardrums felt like they’d rupture. And later, near the parking lot, Austin wrapping his arms around me and whispering softer words. Promises that would never be fulfilled.

“Let’s go,” I insisted, taking his hand and dragging him away from there. “Maybe the drive back’ll shake something loose.”

The place where we stopped was way less daunting than I’d made it out to be in my head. I’d built it up to be this desolate stretch of highway straight out of a horror movie, complete with tumbleweeds and its own menacing soundtrack.

In real life it was just an ordinary two-lane road surrounded on both sides by farmland. Not a single sound effect for miles.

I wasn’t sure this was the exact right spot, but it was as close as I could recall. Tyler backed me up when he said he thought he remembered Austin and Cat dragging him here with them to drop off flowers and balloons, back when there’d still been one of those roadside shrines in my honor.

Since five years had gone by, it was hard to confirm, though, since all we could find were bits of dried-up dandelions scattered throughout the gravel shoulder.

“Is it weird?” Tyler asked when I clutched my sides and stared out at the fields that went on for miles.

“No weirder than me telling you I’m still sixteen.”

“Yeah, about that . . .” He reached for my hip and drew me around to face him. Gravel crunched beneath my feet. “If you believe it, I believe it.”

My heart thudded riotously as I faced him that way, with his hand still settled easily, securely, and maybe a little possessively, on my hip. “Simple as that, huh?”

His dimple made a surprise appearance. “Simple as that,” he repeated, and I believed him.

“There’s more, you know?”

He leaned his head back and groaned to the sky, which was turning gloomy and gray, dense clouds amassing. “You are seriously testing the boundaries of my confidence in you, you know? There are limits to what I can accept.” Yet even though his words made a mockery of my revelations, his fingers laced through my belt loops, ensuring that I was snared. When his chin dropped down again, he inhaled deeply, as if he was gathering his wits and preparing himself for whatever bombshell I had to drop next. “Fine.” He let out a breath. “Go ahead. Do your worst.”

I rolled my eyes. “Stop being so dramatic.” But I giggled when I said it, ruining the whole chastising effect I was going for. “This guy came to my house yesterday,” I said earnestly. “He said he was from the National Security Agency, and he was asking me questions about the night I disappeared.”

I had Tyler’s full attention now. He was no longer joking or tugging at my belt loops. He stared down at me with eyes that looked like they’d never been anything but serious. “The NSA? What kinds of questions?”

I shook my head. “That’s the crazy thing. He asked about my dad, which makes sense, I guess. . . .” My words slowed down there, because that was where the whole thing got sticky for me, more so than the part where I told him I hadn’t aged. I grimaced as I broached the subject of my dad. “I guess you know what my dad thinks happened to me.” I had an overwhelming urge to check my phone, to confirm the time, but it was so inappropriate that I stuffed my hands into my pockets instead.

“Yeah. I know. Everyone sorta knows he went off the deep end with the outer space stuff.” He didn’t say it like I would have. Like it was a big, fat joke.

I swallowed, grimacing. “And that guy, Agent Truman, asked me some weird questions that made me nervous. I thought about how you said people thought my dad might have been involved in my disappearance, and at first I wondered if he maybe thought that, too, because he wanted to know what all I remembered—which is almost nothing.” I wrinkled my nose when I said the next part. “But then he asked me about fireflies.”

“Fireflies? Why? What about them?”

“I have no idea, but my dad asked me the same thing. They both wanted to know if I remembered seeing fireflies. . . .” I nodded toward the darkening horizon. “The night I was here.”

“So did you?”

I closed my eyes and inhaled the tang of the rain-swollen air. I felt one tiny drop on my cheek and then another on my nose. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I know what they look like, really.” I opened my eyes and looked at him. “Do you?”

He frowned, concentrating. “I mean, sort of, I guess. Do we even have them around here?”

I shrugged as more raindrops fell on me.

“So what do you remember?”

“We were coming back from my game, and I got out of the car because my dad and I were fighting over college, and about Austin, and I was going to walk to prove a point. I tripped because I couldn’t see where I was going, and my dad was yelling for me. But before I could answer him, something really weird happened.”

“Fireflies?”

I smirked. “No. There was this intense flash of light. It was so bright that I couldn’t see anything else.” I shut my eyes, and for a moment I was transported back there again; and I could hear my dad’s screams, and I was blinded by the light that was everywhere all at once. And I felt tingly. All over.

Tyler’s touch brought me back to the present as he wiped my cheek. I felt tingly again, but in an entirely different way. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I told him, letting him wipe away yet another tear that was mingled with the rain, and then another, as the tiny raindrops became a full-on deluge around us. Neither of us moved, or flinched even, as we were drenched, drowned by the sudden downpour. I blinked the rain away so I could keep looking at his perfect, beautiful face. “If I hadn’t vanished that night, then I wouldn’t have come back, and I wouldn’t have had the chance to know you now. Not like this.”

And like that his lips found me. They didn’t find my forehead this time but captured my lips, and I couldn’t breathe when they did. They were demanding and sweet all at the same time.

Fire flowed through me while rain drizzled down my face. Our tongues teased and touched and danced together, and he crushed me against him in a way that made me believe he’d never, ever let me go.

I’d never been so alive, and I knew this was why I’d come back. To be here, right now, in this moment, with Tyler.

I clung to his shirt. Everything was dripping—me and him, our clothes. Water splashed up off the ground as soon as it struck.

Tyler’s hands were as impatient as mine as he made restless fists with my T-shirt. And then, slowly, painfully, he withdrew his lips from mine while his fingers moved up to clasp the back of my neck tenderly.

I blinked dazedly at him. An unhurried smile found my lips, which pulsed, throbbing to the beat of my pounding heart. “Damn,” I whispered.

Like some sort of idiot, I couldn’t stop grinning. I grinned almost the entire drive home. I grinned when Tyler pulled into my driveway to drop me off at my house—which was right across the street from his. I grinned more than I thought was possible when he kissed me again, and that kiss was even better than the first one, because it was slower and sweeter, and he lingered as he held my eyes with his. And then I grinned some more while I stripped out of my wet clothes and toweled my hair dry.

I was pretty sure my face was going to bust if I didn’t stop all this stupid grinning. But I couldn’t help it. How had I gone from completely displaced and struggling to find my way, to utter and unrestrained bliss in just six days flat?

Oh yeah, Tyler Wahl.

Damn. The boy was that good.

After I’d changed into dry clothes and tossed my wet ones in the washer, I came back to my room and checked my phone. There was a message on it from my mom:

Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be home soon.

Weird.

I wondered if Grant had said something to her about me being in Logan’s room last night, and she’d taken it as a sign I was ready to become one with her perfect little family. I sighed. I seriously hoped that wasn’t the case. Sure, I was fine with taking a baby step toward getting to know them if it meant making things better—and by better I meant actually talking to my mom again. But I certainly wasn’t ready to don matching Christmas sweaters or go on family picnics or anything.

Besides, what was the rush? Even if I was softening toward them, we had all the time in the world. It wasn’t like I was planning to vanish again or anything.

I was just about to tell her as much, maybe something along the lines of I’d rather poke my own eyes out with a fork than listen to you say “my brother” again when a noise from out on the street drew my attention.

It wasn’t even two o’clock yet. My mom had just texted saying she was on her way, so it couldn’t be her, and Grant wasn’t due home for several more hours. Stuffing my phone into my pocket, I went to the front window to take a peek. I was grinning again because I was totally hoping it was Tyler, back in my driveway to pick up where we’d left off.

I never got the chance to find out, though, because before I got to the window, I was grabbed from behind. I felt a hand go around my mouth. And I almost-sorta-absolutely forgot to breathe for several beats too long. I was sure it had to be a guy because his hand was big and his grip was firm. It was horrifying, because I somehow knew it wasn’t a joke even before the guy started dragging me backward, which he did before I’d even remembered how to breathe again.

My eyes went wide as I was jerked away from the window and lugged down the hallway, all the way to the back of the house. I’d never really been a tough girl, not in the fighting sense, but had no intention of giving in without a fight. I kicked and thrashed like hell, flinging my legs as wide and as wildly as I could. I did my best to hook my feet through everything I could along the way, trying to stop him from dragging me. I knocked over a table in the living room, shattering a lamp when it hit the floor, and kicked over a chair once we reached the kitchen.

All I could think was that I didn’t want to vanish again.

Not again . . . not again . . . not again . . .

“Stop it!” a voice hissed against my ear. It was hushed and came from someone far younger than I’d imagined.

But it didn’t stop me from struggling, even though I wavered for just a moment.

Then he spoke again. “If you scream, they’ll know you’re in trouble and come busting in after you. We only have a few minutes.”

Yes, I thought. They’ll come in here and help me. I had no idea who “they” were, but they had to be better than the guy who’d just assaulted me in my own home.

“You need to trust me, Kyra,” he whispered against my ear. “I swear I’m here to help you.”

This time I went still. Fainting-goat still.

We were in the kitchen now, and the moment I went limp in his arms, I questioned my own judgment. After I stopped struggling, he tentatively let go of my mouth, and when I didn’t scream—not that I wasn’t considering it still—he leaned over the top of me and revealed himself at last.

It was the coffee-shop boy with the strange-colored eyes.

Seeing him almost sent me over the edge again. How the hell did he, of all people, end up here in my house? And now, of all times?

His smirk was not at all reassuring. “I can see you have questions, but trust me, now isn’t the time. There are a bunch of people out there coming to get you—” And as if he’d coordinated the timing to confirm his ominous prediction perfectly, there was a thunderous crashing from the front room. It sounded like someone had just set off a bomb at my front door.

And before I could ask him what the hell was happening, and who “they” were and what they wanted from me, he was hauling me to my feet. “If we don’t get you out of here right now, they will take you.”

We heard footsteps and voices, and then we disappeared through the already-open back door.

He kept giving me hand signals, like we were part of some covert ops mission, but I didn’t understand any of them. Mostly we just snuck through the neighbors’ backyards, keeping low and moving fast. When we were finally far enough from my house, hiding between the overgrown shrubs of the O’Flannerys’ house, I stopped panting long enough to glare at him.

I was still shaking all over, barely able to contain myself. “I have no idea who you are or what the hell’s going on back there, but this better be the best explanation ever or I’m calling the cops myself.”

He told me, “I’m Simon.” And then he held his hand out to me like we were introducing ourselves at some sales convention.

I stood there looking at it like it was something strange and foreign. Was he kidding with this? He wanted to shake hands right now?

I shoved his hand away from me. “Is this some kind of joke or something? You’re the guy who left the note on my receipt, and now you come into my house and kidnap me?” I knew I was being too loud, but I could barely restrain myself. This was too much.

But Simon didn’t give me the chance to fall apart. “I get it. This is a shock. But let me show you something.”

He drew me out from the cover of the bushes . . . not far, but far enough so I could see all the way down the street. He kept his hand on my shoulder, ready to reel me back at any moment.

The scene unfolding on my front lawn looked like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. Car doors slammed as more and more people arrived. Many were covered from head to toe in what I could only assume were hazmat or some sort of biohazard suits. Whatever they were wearing, they were intended to protect their occupants from something harmful—something dangerous.

They seemed to be everywhere, with more arriving by the second. The street, for as far as I could see, was lined with polished black vehicles: cars, vans, SUVs, and something that resembled a small bus or an ambulance with doors in the back that were opened wide. Inside I could make out a stretcher and what appeared to be medical equipment.

Someone was unrolling a giant tarp, and someone else was assembling a metal frame that was surrounded on all sides by similar plastic sheeting. There was a table set up at the far end of the yard, near the road. And even from inside my house, I could make out the faint crackling of radio static and saw several people talking into black handhelds.

Seriously, the only thing missing was a squadron of armed soldiers and a helicopter flying overhead.

Whatever they were collecting must be extremely hazardous.

That was when I saw him coming down the front steps of my house. Agent Truman.

He paused long enough to talk to someone in one of the hazmat suits, and then he pointed at my house and shook his head.

“Jesus,” I whispered, pulling back again. I hadn’t even realizing I’d said it out loud. “What’s he doing here?”

Simon caught my expression, or maybe he’d heard the fear in my voice. “So you two’ve met already?”

Dazedly, I shook my head in disbelief and then nodded in answer to his question. “I . . . yeah . . .”

Shouting drew our attention again, and we both inched out of the shrubs in time to see Tyler running toward my house, calling my name. When he reached the sidewalk on my side of the street, he was stopped by two men who weren’t in hazmat suits. I could hear him arguing with a third man who had come to stand in front of him: Agent Truman.

Instinctively, I lurched toward him, but Simon stopped me. “You can’t. We have to get out of here. He’ll be okay. It’s not him they want.” He nodded at me solemnly, and my stomach dropped. And as much as I wanted to deny what he was telling me with that silent nod, all those people in biohazard gear said otherwise.

According to Simon, it was me they were after.

“Stay close, Kyra, and when I give you the signal . . . run.”

He raised his eyebrows as if to ask Got it?

I glared back at him: I have no idea what you mean.

Turns out Simon’s “signal” involved waving three fingers in front of his face and then pointing toward a car—a red one with tinted windows that stood out like a sore thumb on a street that was now teeming with black government vehicles. It was parked directly across the street from us.

Then he took off running without me. What about the whole no-man-left-behind thing?

Fortunately, years on the field had trained me to think fast.

Thankfully the red car’s doors were unlocked, and when we reached it we climbed inside the vehicle before I could question whether we were making a huge mistake or not.

“They’ll hear us,” I insisted in a shaky breath. “They’ll see us leaving and come after us.”

But Simon gave a brisk shake of his head and then nodded toward my house, which was down from where we were now. Several neighbors who were home during the day had made their way out to the sidewalk, wanting to see what all the fuss was about, and Tyler was still arguing with Agent Truman. “They’re way too occupied to notice us. But we have to go. Now.” And somehow, before I had the chance to second-guess him, the engine rumbled to life.

I stayed low, crouched in the passenger seat, and didn’t dare to peek above the dash to see if anyone had spotted us . . . or was running our way. My head was pounding and my chest ached and my breathing was coming in uneven gasps.

I don’t know how we made it out of there without anyone noticing us, but the next thing I knew we were driving. Above me, through the windows, I saw houses and trees, and eventually signs from businesses zipping past us. When I was sure I wasn’t going to pass out, I sat up and started checking behind us to see if anyone was coming after us.

But there was no one. Somehow, someway, Simon had pulled it off. He’d gotten me out of there.

I didn’t know how Agent Truman and his biohazard team expected to explain what they’d done when my mom and Grant got home to find their front door broken to smithereens, but that wasn’t really my problem.

To calm my beating heart, I dug my phone from my front pocket and checked the time. It was barely three in the afternoon, which meant that the schools were just letting out and most grown-ups were counting down the last hours of their workweek before the weekend.

Me, I was on the run from the NSA.

Simon’s eyes widened as he saw what I was doing. “You brought your phone? Jesus, Kyra? Have you used it? Did you call or text anyone since we left?”

Frowning, I shook my head. “No. I was just seeing what time it was.” But even as I said it, I realized what the problem was. Of course the NSA would be able to track my cell phone, the same way Agent Truman had been able to track down my phone number. Obviously, privacy wasn’t an issue for them. “Can they find us if I didn’t use it?”

Simon ran his hand over the top of his close-cropped hair. “They can do a lot of things.” He jerked the steering wheel hard to the right and slammed on the brakes, and then he held his hand out for it. “We can’t take the chance. We need to ditch it,” he demanded, but I was already ahead of him.

I’d taken a marker from his center console and was copying down on my hand the only two numbers—of the three in my contacts list—I didn’t have memorized. My mom’s number, which was new since I’d returned, and Tyler’s. My dad’s was the same as it had always been.

When I was finished, I handed him the phone. He opened his door and set it on the concrete, and then smashed it beneath the heel of his boot.

Simon pulled back onto the road and concentrated on driving, while I kept glancing behind us.

“Here,” Simon said, pulling down a side road that looked a little like the alley Tyler had taken me down the night we’d gone to the used books store. It was wider and seemed more warehousey, though, which turned out to be the point when Simon hopped out and unlocked a tall metal door like the ones you see on storage lockers, the kind that are hinged and rolled up.

When he got back in, he parked the car inside the garage-like space, flipped a switch that illuminated a single bare bulb overhead, and dragged the metal door closed again. It was all very cloak-and-dagger.

Now I was locked inside a storage facility with the stranger who’d just kidnapped me from the authorities and smashed my cell phone. Awesome.

I stayed in the car with my fists pressed tightly on top of my knees. My teeth were clenched, and my shoulders ached. Simon scraped a lone metal chair across the concrete floor to the passenger side of the car and opened my door, propping the chair in front of me.

He straddled it and leaned forward on his knees. “I guess I have some explaining to do.”

I don’t know why, but when his coppery eyes drilled into me, I felt some of my tension easing. It made no sense, considering the circumstances. Still, I was here now, and after a quick perusal of the space, I realized that I probably wasn’t going anywhere unless he wanted me to, so I figured I might as well listen to what he had to say.

“That’s the understatement of the century,” I told him at last. “So, who the hell are you, and why have you been following me?”

He smiled, revealing a set of straight teeth that flashed against his skin. “You noticed, huh?”

My eyebrows lifted. “You weren’t exactly stealthy. You practically knocked me over at the bookstore.” I paused, chewing the inside of my cheek. “And what about that message . . .” I breathed in. “How the hell did you get that on my receipt?”

His smile faded. “Let me start at the beginning. My name is Simon Davis, and I’m like you, Kyra. I was taken too.”