he’s really, really cute. You’d like him. He’s the type of guy you always say are a-dor-ah-bleh.” I imitated her accent.
“He is dark-haired? Is he tall?”
I smiled. “Yes, he is. Light blue eyes. His hair comes down about to his eyebrows, and he’s got a really straight nose.” I was caught in a stare and came to, only to find my mother looking smugly at me.
“You like him a lot. I can tell.”
“I mean … it’s complicated.”
“Why isn’t he your boyfriend? He likes you, surely.” She looked as though she was ready to turn on him.
“He has a girlfriend.”
It was the easiest answer that had any truth to it. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t want to tell her about Becca. Maybe the reason was that I would never get sympathy from an outsider for being jealous of a girl who had gone missing. But my mom nodded in understanding and turned around to pull out yet another baking sheet. I slipped another bite to Jasper. A second later, I heard the front door open, and looked up to see my best friend.
“Leah!” I screeched as she walked into the kitchen. I practically leaped on her as if we’d been separated by a century instead of only a few hundred miles.
She squeezed me back. “I’m so happy to see you! Michael came, too, he’s outside talking to his mom.”
Small drop in my stomach.
“Michael?”
“Yeah … we’re back together.”
My jaw dropped. “Are you serious?” My smile ebbed a little. “But you texted me like a week ago and said—”
“We’re working through it. Plus he’s the best kisser ever.”
My little sister screamed with delight.
“Oh, sorry,” Leah said to my mother, and slapped her hand over her mouth.
“That’s fine, that’s fine,” my mom said, and smiled down at the onion she was chopping.
I loved that we were getting ready for dinner and the sun still hadn’t set. It was really, really good to be home. But something was different. It was still my house, but suddenly I felt like a guest. A welcome guest, for sure, but definitely a guest.
The house was the same, something that thrilled me and simultaneously seemed inexplicably strange. I’d only been gone a few months, but it felt weird that everything had just carried on without me. My house was my memory, something I’d always be able to conjure up, even when I was ancient and couldn’t recognize the back of my hand. But when I wasn’t there, it still existed. The doors still slapped and thudded open and shut, flies were still smacked on the outside porch, the fridge still emptied and filled, and my bed was never surprised that I didn’t come back.
All without my mind and me holding it together.
Michael, who had a mop of curly brown hair and teeth that looked almost too straight, walked into my kitchen and greeted my parents, and then smiled at me.
“‘Ey, girl!” He wrapped his arms around me and shook me. “I’ve missed you!”
“Michael!” I feigned excitement. Michael and I had never really gotten along. That’s what happens when you make my best friend cry hundreds of times. It really irritated me that she’d brought him to my house on Christmas Eve. But if she hadn’t, I felt kind of certain she would have just not come. I always tried to rationalize this trait of hers.
Whatever it was that had changed in me lately had no patience for it.
He put his arm around her, and she held his hand. Leah cooed as he kissed her on the tip of the nose.
Yuck.
“Hey, so you’re at Manderley Academy, right?” Michael said, adjusting his attention to me.
“Yeah, it’s in—”
“I know where it is,” he interrupted in that … way of his. “Didn’t some girl go missing from there?”
I felt shaken as my two worlds collided. My mom turned. “Missing? What happened? Did you know her?” She looked at me.
“N-no.”
“Yeah, she was hot in those missing photos, too. If she had a boyfriend, I bet he’s pissed he didn’t hang on to her.”
Leah thudded him in the chest. “Mikey, shut up. She’s missing, it seems wrong to talk about her like that.”
“Hang on to her?” I repeated his words. “She’s missing, she’s not flitting around the world with some other guy.”
I couldn’t believe I was defending her. But somehow, she felt like mine to think bad things about. Certainly not Michael’s.
“Whatever, I’m just saying she’s hot. She’s been missing since the end of last year. I read it online somewhere. She’s probably dead.”
“Oh, my God,” Leah said, ignoring Michael’s more ominous prediction, “that’s just so incredibly General Hospital.”
“She’s got some friend, Diana or something—”
“Dana,” I corrected, automatically.
“Yeah, Dana—she was hot, too—said that she didn’t know where the girl was but she was sure she was still out there. She’s all over interviews online.”
I felt light-headed. It was too strange to hear my best friend’s annoying douche of a boyfriend talking about Becca and Dana.
“That’s so weird. Is everyone freaking out at your school, then?” Leah’s eyes were wide.
I nodded. “Yeah, everyone’s really worried.”
“That’s just awful. That poor girl.” My mom clucked her tongue and started moving the cookies from the tray to a cooling rack. “I hope they find her. Her poor friends, they must be so worried! Oh, and if she did have a boyfriend … that must be just the worst kind of worry—Oh! The corn bread! I’d nearly forgotten it.”
I wanted to press the reset button, and make it so Michael had never come. It would have made things infinitely better for a thousand reasons, but right now his little bit of online stalker info was making me feel nauseous.
“Look!” Lily ran over to me and presented me with the drawing she’d had her nose to for at least ten minutes.
I crouched down to her level, thankful for a change in subject. “What have we got here?”
It was the most tactful way of asking an easily offended child like Lily what on earth she’d been trying to depict with the four free crayons she’d smuggled out of Harry’s Restaurant and Pub.
“Jasper,” she said, pointing to the thickly drawn figure that took up a third of
