Everything Leads to You(12)

“He didn’t even know that she died,” I say.

We head back to the studio to pick up my car, and then we caravan to Toby’s apartment, where our parents told us we could stay again tonight, and where we intend to stay for as long as Toby’s away.

Driving alone, I can’t but help thinking of how today is just so sad. Toby’s gone, Morgan doesn’t love me, Clyde Jones had a daughter named Caroline who tended Frank and Edie’s garden and had problems with men and drugs and never got her father’s letter or all that money that might have helped her.

And I was sure that all of this would mean something for me, too. That something had to come of wandering through Clyde’s house, of our accidental discovery. But now it’s just something else that has come to an end.

And it’s only later, after watching Lowlands, with the warm breeze coming through the kitchen door and our glasses half full of Toby’s Ethiopian tea, that Charlotte says, “What was it Edie said? The drugs and the men and that baby? Could Ava be Clyde’s granddaughter?”





Chapter Three



Charlotte and I are perched on benches in the high school courtyard in our short shorts and tank tops, tapped into the school wireless connection, searching for Ava.

We start by trying to find Caroline’s obituary, because we don’t know Ava’s last name, or even if Ava is really Caroline’s daughter. But we search the Los Angeles Times’s online archive, and the Long Beach Press-Telegram’s, and neither of them go back as far as the nineties.

“Let’s just look up Ava Maddox,” I say.

It doesn’t seem like Caroline was married, and from what Edie said—all those men—it doesn’t seem like she was in a serious relationship either.

Charlotte types in the name, and a moment later we find that there are nine Ava Maddoxes listed in the country, one of whom happens to live in Los Angeles, on Waring Avenue, which is not super close but not too far either. Maybe a twenty-minute drive northeast across the city.

“Should we drive out there?” I ask.

She clicks on an icon that promises to tell us more about Ava, only to find that they want to charge us for it.

“Forty dollars?” I say. “No thanks. Let’s just go.”

“Okay,” Charlotte says. We stand up and she slips her laptop back into its case and then into her bag. We agree to meet back at my car after we’re finished with our respective finals—the last of the semester, the last of our high school lives.

On the way to my math class for the last time, I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn around to see Laura Presley handing me her yearbook.

“Sign it?” she asks, all flirty and cute and kind of nervous.

I force a smile and say sure.

“But how will I get it back from you?”

Her best friend, who is in my math class, says, “Should Emi just give it to me when she’s done?”

“Perfect!” Laura says, as though it’s a new idea and not a plan they made before coming up to me.

I take the yearbook from her and walk into class, even though I’m not going to sign it. I’ve never been that into high school, so I don’t care much about these books made to commemorate it, and if Laura wants some kind of closure we can meet up and laugh about things one day. There was a time I wouldn’t have found anything to laugh about, but it’s been a long time since everything ended between us.

Laura is who made me swear off high school girls. The short version is that I’ve always loved kissing. I kissed more boys in elementary school and junior high than I can count. (Purely innocent, by the way. It never went past that.) And then I kissed Tara Ryland behind the science building our freshman year. When our mouths parted she stood there, blinking at me, like, What the? And I blinked back at her, like, Oh my God. But we were reacting to different things. Tara was shocked because one moment we were collecting dirt samples to measure minerality and the next she was kissing a girl. But for me it was different. I skimmed over the girl part and just thought, Is this what it’s supposed to feel like? Because it wasn’t only that she was a good kisser (which she was), it was that the kiss left me shaky, and by this time I had become almost immune to kissing. And then girls sort of started lining up to kiss me. It drove Charlotte crazy. She rolled her eyes for a year straight. In the midst of all of this, just for a couple months, I threw everyone off by dating Evan Haas. What can I say? There was just something about him.