Come Find Me(29)

She puts a hand on one hip and leans into it. “Yeah, I do. In the field, on the other side of the park. Where I live. KJ. Kennedy. Jones.” She spells it out for me, like I’m a moron. And maybe I am. Kennedy Jones, of the Jones House. The stories Sutton told us. The girl who must’ve been there when I showed up yesterday morning, taking readings. The girl who must’ve decorated my back car window with her handprints, trying to spook me.

I hop down from the table, stepping closer. “Were you following me? Tracking me or something?” I ask.

She makes a face that in any other setting would have me running, regardless of the fact that she’s practically half my size. “No, I wasn’t following you. I was following them.” She tips her head in the direction of Sutton’s crew.

“That’s not any less creepy.”

She shakes her head. “They cut right through my yard. I was just…” I feel her grasping for something, not just the word, but some way to explain. Her face shifts, and she shakes it off. “What’s it to you? I live nearby. I should be asking if you were following me.”

I give her a look right back, and she raises an eyebrow. “Well, what are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”

I gesture around me, in a circle. “This is it.”

“This is what?”

“Where my brother disappeared. You never heard of it? Liam Chandler? Two years ago? You live right there….”

Her mouth forms the word oh, but no noise comes out. “We moved here last year. I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

    “It was on the news.”

“Not by me, I guess. I lived near DC most of my life. People disappeared a lot. Or worse.”

As if missing brothers happen all the time. As if this isn’t the defining moment of my life, and everything that’s happened since.

“So…,” I begin, looking her over but trying not to seem like I am. She’s smaller than I realized at first. Her legs not as long, when she’s standing in front of me. And her hair, it’s hard to tell in the dark, but it’s not quite as wild. Her eyes are wide, and dark, and unflinching.

I’ve obviously failed in keeping my observation of her a secret, because she does the same to me, only she doesn’t try to hide it. I try not to shrink into myself as her eyes skim over me slowly. She presses her lips together. “So, Visitor—”

“Nolan,” I say. “Nolan Chandler.”

“Nolan, Nolan Chandler,” she repeats, “what were you hoping to find out here?” She gestures to my bag. “Is that what I think it is?”

I open the top and show her the contents, but she doesn’t move to touch it. Just nods slightly. I remember, then, this girl is looking for aliens. I think she mentioned that someone was looking into it for her. “Wait,” I say, remembering the conversation that just happened between Sutton and his friends. “Was that girl—Lydia, right?—was she your, quote, contact?”

Kennedy crosses her arms over her chest. “She’s smart. She knows computers. She knows that stuff almost as well as anyone else. Besides, doesn’t sound like you have anything to add. So far, you’ve sent me a No and three question marks. At least I’m trying something.”

    “Fair enough. I’m trying something, too, though.”

“I think—” she starts, just as I say, “Want to know what I’m thinking?”

We both grin. “You first,” I say.

She shakes her head, looking up at the sky, then back at me. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it means. Any of it. The signal stopped happening, and I never would’ve thought it was anything real if it weren’t for the fact that you were seeing the exact same thing.”

I smile then, without even thinking about it. Because I suddenly don’t feel so out of my element. I feel exactly in my element. I have been living in uncertainty for two years. “Me too,” I say. “But it’s not happening at my house anymore, either. And if I hadn’t taken that video, I would’ve thought I was just remembering it wrong.”

She wrinkles her nose either at me or at the equipment, I’m not sure. But it turns her suddenly vulnerable. “There’s someone else. I know someone else who can help, who might be able to tell us what it means. I’m going to talk to him tomorrow.”

“Who?”

She looks at me as if to say she doesn’t trust me yet. Well, she ran into me in the middle of the night, in the middle of the woods—who can blame her? The silence eventually reaches peak awkward levels, and I clear my throat. “Okay, well, on that note, I think I’ll be heading back to my car now.”

    She steps back at the same time, like it’s a race to see who gets away the fastest. “Okay, well, guess I’ll be making my way back to the house now.”

“I thought—”

She turns around. “You thought what?”

“I thought no one lived there anymore.”

She smiles, and it catches me off guard. “They don’t.” And with that, she’s gone.





The next morning, I end up getting on the bus at the same stop Marco and I both used to use, before he got his license, and a car. I sneak on between two students, head down, headphones on, but the stealth mode is unnecessary—the driver doesn’t even look my way.