Come Find Me(47)

Tell me what to do, I think, closing my eyes. “Liam,” I whisper into the emptiness. Nothing comes. I thought my brother wanted me here. I thought he was sending me a message, to come.

Nothing answers. Not even a flicker of a sign. The air conditioner kicking on, or a gust of wind rattling something in the vents. It’s just an empty house, in an empty field, under an empty sky.

I pull out my phone instead of my equipment and make a call. Kennedy’s face appears, barely decipherable in the grainy dark surrounding her. She sits upright. “Nolan?”

“I’m here,” I say. “Tell me what to do.”

She rubs her eyes, runs a hand down her face, then tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. I’ve woken her. She’s still in bed. “At my house?”

I nod.

“Okay,” she says, keeping her voice low. “Reboot the house. Let’s see if we can restart things to pick up the signal again. It’s the only thing I can think to do. There has to be something more. Something more than just pi, if that’s even what it is.”

She leads me with the sound of her voice to the garage, even though I’ve been here before. Still, I give myself over, letting her lead the way. When she instructs me to shut down the fuse box and flip it back on again, I listen. She sends me to the shed next, to make sure the computer is back online. “It should—running—and then…”

    “Kennedy?” I shake the phone in the dark, as if I can jar her back into focus. “Hold on, you’re breaking up.”

The feed continues to cut in and out as I walk in the dark. But even as she disappears, I think I hear her voice.





I need to find a way back to my house this afternoon. Nolan rebooted the electricity and sent me a text to let me know it was done.

I haven’t slept since. I’m already sitting at the kitchen table when Joe emerges from his room.

He does a double take when he sees me. “Morning,” he says, sticking his head into the fridge. “I’ll get milk on the way home.”

“Okay.” I’m eating my cereal dry, crunching the Cheerios between my back molars.

“After school, the Albertsons invited you over. Until I’m back.”

I drop my spoon. “What?”

Something in my voice must resonate, because he shuts the fridge door, turning slowly. “To and from school, that’s it.” As if he could sense that I was already planning for Nolan to pick me up from school, drive me by our house, where I could pull the data and be back at Joe’s before he realized it—hopefully even before the school bus.

    “Is this a joke?”

“No, Kennedy, this isn’t a joke.”

“Joe, okay, tomorrow I’ll do that. I’ll go to the Albertsons’ and stare blankly at these kids I don’t know. Totally fine. Just not today.”

He narrows his eyes. “What’s so important about today, Kennedy?”

I grasp for anything frantically. “You know I have finals. How am I supposed to study with a bunch of people I don’t know around?”

“How are you supposed to study when you spend all hours of the night running around with some guy?”

“Nolan,” I repeat, for the tenth time.

“Right. Nolan who is not your boyfriend, but who drove you to the house in the middle of the night so you could get these boxes. Nolan, who I literally never heard of a week ago, but who has been to our house to see you at least two times that I know of. Was it this Nolan who took you to see Elliot, too?”

I don’t answer right away. “Joe, haven’t you ever done something nice for a friend because they needed your help?”

He shakes his head. “Not like this, Kennedy. This is not a list of normal things you do for a friend. Especially not one you just met. Trust me on this.”

I glance at my phone, trying to sidestep him, but he puts a hand out. “And the second you leave this house, you’re going to be on the phone with him, am I right?”

    I stop midstride and look up at him.

“Like I said, Kennedy. Not a friend.”

“I feel sorry for you, Joe. That every relationship you’ve ever had is only surface-deep.”

As soon as I leave the house, I’m on the phone to Nolan, just like Joe accused. Only this time, when he picks up, I can’t get Joe’s words out of my head. It’s true, Nolan is the first person I thought of this morning, the part of the day I was looking forward to the most. He asks me for my email so he can send me something, and it’s immediately something else to look forward to.

Is it normal to talk to someone first thing each morning and last thing each evening? To hold their hand in the dark in the house where your worst nightmare happened? To hide out in the room of their missing brother?

Is it normal to drive a girl you just met to a jail? To skip school because she asked?

Maybe not. But I wasn’t about to tell Joe the reason: It’s not that he’s into me, Joe. It’s that we’ve both simultaneously stumbled upon proof that the world is more than it seems.



* * *



—

A text arrives at lunch: Check your email.

Nolan came through. My email is full of scanned images. It’s the information on Hunter Long. His address in North Carolina, his pictures, the brief overview of the case, and his parents’ contact information.