All We Can Do Is Wait(35)

Scott shrugged. “I guess. O.K. as we all can be right now.”

Skyler sighed. “Yeah.” She and Scott stood there for a moment, not sure what to say to one another. Skyler, feeling nervous and wanting to sit down, said, “Maybe I’ll go check on her.”

She made her way to Alexa and sat next to her, Alexa acknowledging her by pulling her head up from her knees, letting her feet drop to the floor, and leaning back in her chair in a slump. After a short silence, Alexa, eyes on the ceiling, asked, “Did you find anything out? About your sister?”

Skyler shook her head. “No. Just . . . more waiting.”

Her phone buzzed, again. Why hadn’t she just turned it off? She ignored it, but Alexa had heard the vibrating. “Shouldn’t you answer that? I mean, what if it’s your parents?”

Skyler folded her hands over her bag, as if to muffle the sound of the phone. “It’s not my parents.” Alexa didn’t press it any further.

“Where are you from again?” Alexa asked, her tone light and conversational, maybe trying to distract Skyler from whatever tenseness had seized her when the phone buzzed.

“JP,” Skyler answered, a vision of the empty house, of Kate’s pristine room, just across the hall from Skyler’s messy one, darting into her head.

“Oh, cool. JP seems cool. Like, lots of old hippies, right?”

It was true. Parts of Jamaica Plain had long ago been taken over by crunchy vegetarian types who ran co-ops and held an annual Wake Up the Earth Festival every spring, and whose kids were white boys with dreadlocks and hyphenated last names. That generation of kids was mostly grown now, and so the neighborhood felt a little different, a newer, younger, less crunchy crowd of people moving in. But Skyler’s grandparents’ house had sort of weathered it all untouched, tucked away on a quiet street off South Street, close to the Forest Hills T station.

“Yeah, lots of old hippies. And new yuppies. It smells less like pot all the time and more like . . . yoga mats.”

Alexa laughed. “I thought hippies did yoga.”

Skyler shook her head. “They’re the ones who, like, introduced yoga to white people. But the yuppies have taken it to a whole ’nother level.”

“I’ve only been there once,” Alexa said. “Jamaica Plain. A girl from school lives there, and she had this party. It was pretty lame, but it was kind of funny because all these girls from my school were so, like, fascinated with the public school kids? They thought all the boys were so hot, with their accents.”

Skyler wasn’t sure if she should find that story funny, a bunch of rich girls doing public school kid tourism in JP, which was by no means poor, at least not the part of JP Alexa had probably visited. But there was something amusing about it, a bunch of girls ogling all the dumb, basic, same-y boys Skyler was surrounded by at school every day. Everyone was interesting to someone, she guessed. And, of course, those boys had been interesting to her once too.

Skyler fiddled with the ring on her finger, two hands clasping a heart.

“I love those,” Alexa said. “They’re so . . . Boston.”

Skyler wasn’t sure why she still wore it. It had once represented something good, something that made Skyler feel safe. Now, two years later, maybe it still kept her safe. Only now it was a talisman, used to ward off something bad.

? ? ?

In the weeks after prom, things had been good between Skyler and Danny. The euphoria of the about-to-graduate seniors was infectious. But then summer came, and shortly after the Fourth of July, Danny was fired from the golf course for vague reasons that, no matter how many times Skyler asked, Danny would not explain to her. He didn’t even tell her that he got fired. She had to hear that, embarrassingly, from Meghan Ehlers, the two of them standing off to the side during an Arboretum party, Skyler wondering aloud why he was in such a mood.

“Oh, you didn’t hear?” Meghan asked, seeming a little too excited to have information that Skyler didn’t.

“No . . .” Skyler answered cautiously.

Meghan made a little gasping sound and said, “He got fired. I don’t know. There was some fight or something.”

No wonder he was thrashing around like crazy that night. But when Skyler asked him the next morning, knowing that asking him the night before would not have been a good idea, he shrugged it off. “I quit,” he said, kicking out of bed and stomping to the bathroom, Skyler realizing that was the end of the discussion.

Skyler was in summer school, having failed physics that year. When she wasn’t in class or trying, halfheartedly, to study, she was with Danny, helping him pack and get ready to move to the apartment in Roxbury he and two of his friends would be living in when they started at Suffolk in the fall. Without a job, Danny might not have enough money to cover rent, and his parents, stretched thin with so many kids, three in college, would not be able to help him. They suggested he live at home, he could choose his mom’s or his dad’s house, but Danny wouldn’t hear it. He and Tommy and Timmy had too many plans for their newfound freedom—parties, mostly.

So Danny was brooding and mean most of the summer, testy with Skyler and getting drunk pretty much every night. Sometimes he’d text her and demand that she come pick him up, seeming to forget that, though Skyler had her license, her grandparents wouldn’t let her drive the car after dark, let alone to pick up Danny in the middle of the night.