The Edge of Everything (Untitled #1)(2)
She checked her phone. It was five o’clock, and there were two texts waiting for her.
The first was from her friend Dallas, who she’d been seeing off and on before her dad died.
It said: Blizzards be awesome, dawg! You doing OK??
Dallas was a good guy. He was muscly and dimply in a baseball-player kind of way—cute, but not exactly Zoe’s type. Also, he had a tattoo that used to kill the mood whenever he took his shirt off. He’d apparently gone back and forth between Never Stop! and Don’t Ever Stop!, and the tattoo artist had gotten confused and the tat wound up reading, Never Don’t Stop! Dallas, being Dallas, loved it and high-fived the guy on the spot.
Zoe texted him back in Dallas-speak: I’m solid, dawg! Thx for checking. You rock on the reg. (Did I say that right?)
The second text was from her best friend, Val: This blizzard sucks ass. ASS! I’m gonna take a nap with Gloria and ignore it. I’m VERY serious about this nap. Do you need ANYTHING AT ALL before nap begins?? Once nap is in progress, I will be UNAVAILABLE to you.
Val’s girlfriend was extremely shy. Val was … not. She’d been crazy in love with Gloria for a year, and was always doing beautiful, slightly psycho things, like making a Tumblr devoted entirely to Gloria’s feet.
Zoe texted back: Why is everyone worried about me? I’m FINE! Go take your nap, Nap Goddess! I will be soooo quiet!!!!
Smiling to herself, she added emojis of an alarm clock, a hammer, and a bomb.
Val wrote back one more time: Love you too, freak!
Zoe found duct tape in a kitchen drawer and taped up the downstairs windows so they wouldn’t shatter in the storm. Her mother had told her that doing this in a blizzard was dumb and possibly dangerous. Still, it made Zoe feel safer somehow, and gave her something to do. She peered outside, and saw Jonah and the black Labs jumping back and forth across the frozen river at the bottom of their yard. Their mom had prohibited this activity on another sign she had made: Uncool Behavior That I Cannot, in Good Conscience, Tolerate. Zoe pretended she hadn’t noticed what her brother was doing. Then she stopped watching so she wouldn’t see him do anything worse. She went upstairs and taped X’s on the second-story windows. She threw in a few O’s, too, so that when her mother finally drove up it’d look like giants were playing tic-tac-toe.
She finished taping the windows at 5:30, just as the storm finally found the mountain. She made herself a cup of coffee—black, because her mother only bought soy milk, which tasted like the tears of aliens—and drifted into the living room, so she could sip it at the window. Zoe stared out at the forest, which started up at the bottom of their yard and ran all the way down to the lake. Her family’s land was a mostly bald patch of the mountain, but there was a stand of larch up against the house to give them shade in the summer. The wind had agitated them. Branches were stabbing and scratching the glass. It was like the trees were trying to get in.
Her mom had been gone two hours. By now, the police would have barricaded the roads and, though her mother was not usually someone who took no for an answer, the cops would never let her back up the mountain tonight. Zoe pushed the thought down into a box at the back of her brain labeled Do Not Open. She shouted out the front door for Jonah. She’d been an idiot to leave him out there so long. She pushed that thought down, too.
Jonah didn’t answer. She hadn’t really expected him to. She loved the little bug, but most days it seemed like his sole purpose in life was to make everything harder for her. She knew he could hear her. He just wasn’t ready to stop romping around with the dogs. They weren’t allowed in the house, even during storms, which Jonah thought was mean. He once protested with an actual picket sign.
Zoe shouted for her brother three more times: loud, louder, loudest.
No answer.
She checked WeatherBug again. It was 15 below.
All she could see out the window was a riot of white. Everything was shapeless and heavy with snow: her spectacularly crappy red car, the compost bin, even the big wooden bear that her mom’s hippie-dippy artist friend, Rufus, had carved for the driveway. The thought of having to bundle up and trudge around in the storm just to drag Jonah’s butt inside made Zoe so angry that her face started to get hot. And she wouldn’t be able to complain to her mom because she shouldn’t have let him outside in the first place. Jonah always found a way to win. He was nuts, but he was clever.
She yelled for Spock and Uhura. No answer. Spock was two years younger and a big-time coward. Zoe figured he was hiding under the tractor in the pole barn, quivering. But Uhura was a daredevil and scared of nothing. She should have come running.
Zoe sighed. She had to go find Jonah. She had no choice.
She threw on a scarf, gloves, boots, a puffy blue coat, and a tasseled hat that Jonah had knitted for her when their dad died (actually, Uhura had eaten the tassel and in its place there was just a hole that kept getting bigger and bigger). Zoe didn’t bother with snowshoes because she was only going to be out as long as it took to march Jonah back inside. Five minutes. Maybe ten. Tops.
Zoe knew it was pointless to wish that her dad were around to help her track down Jonah. She wished it anyway. Memories of her father swept over her so suddenly it made her whole body clench.
Zoe’s dad had been goofy, excitable—and completely, infuriatingly unreliable. He was obsessed with everything about caves, down to bats and flatworms. He was even bizarrely into cave mud, which he insisted held the secret to a great complexion. He used to bring Ziploc bags of it home and try to dab it on Zoe’s mother’s face. Her mom would shriek with laughter and run away in mock horror. Then her dad would smear it all over his own cheeks, and chase Jonah and Zoe around the house, making monster noises.