“No.”
“Not even Lucas?”
Aidan shook his head. “Not even Lucas. I ran away. I was alone. And then I came back. Alone.”
Now it was Officer Pinkus who nodded. Then she sat back for a second, decided something, and rocked again toward us.
“When I was fourteen,” she said, “my older sister ran away. She did it to be with a boy who wasn’t good for her. We’d all warned her about him; she wouldn’t listen. So she left, and it ended very badly. I never saw her again. Which is why I do what I do…and why you need to listen to me now. Got it?”
“Got it,” Aidan and I both said.
“Good. As long as no one hurt you, the only thing that matters now is that you’re back. And the only thing that matters going forward is that you don’t run away again. This doesn’t just matter to me; it matters to your parents, your town, your friends. Stay here. And if you ever get the feeling you want to run away again, talk to someone about it. Because running away without a word is never going to be the answer to your problems; it will only cause more problems. There are certainly kids out there who need to be in a better place than the home they’ve been given—but you’re not one of those kids. You are a kid who is surrounded by love. You might not see it all the time—none of us ever do. But it’s there. Whenever you need to reach for it, reach for it, because it’s there. Do you feel that?”
“Yes,” Aidan said.
“And do you promise not to disappear again?” Officer Pinkus gestured toward the dresser. “For whatever reason.”
Aidan didn’t look to the dresser. He looked straight at Officer Pinkus.
“I promise.”
She stood up then and told us, “As far as I’m concerned, this case is now closed. I will tell your parents that. I will say that to anyone who asks. I loathe the fact that it was our lapse that put your story out there in the first place. But now it’s yours again, and you don’t have to do anything else with it if you don’t want to. If you end up having more to tell me, my door will always be open to you. Never make up things because you think they’re what people want to hear. Most of the time when you do that, you end up being wrong.”
Aidan and I stood up too. Officer Pinkus offered her hand, and one after the other, we shook it.
Before she left the attic, she took a look around, then said to us, “There’s no place like home, right?”
And we agreed.
There’s no place like home.
42
True to her word, Officer Pinkus told Mom and Dad that the case was closed and they needed to start treating it that way too.
“What’s important is that he’s back,” she said. And they repeated it.
The fact that it didn’t matter where he’d been was unspoken, but understood.
* * *
—
Aidan and I had an intense conversation before bed that night, and over the next few weeks talking before bed became something like a tradition. Not about Aveinieu, but about other things. Once I’d proven my belief in him, it carried over to other things. Which made life easier for both of us, to be able to talk about it.
He stayed friends with Glenn, but not really best friends. His friend group grew pretty big, and even included Kelli and Keegan. Every now and then, someone made a unicorn joke, but mostly people stayed away from it. It was too weird, too unusual to deal with. So it stopped being what they thought about when they thought about Aidan. He tried to do lots of other things—he joined track, started singing in the school chorus—to define himself more.
About a month after the case was closed, Mom and Dad drove us into the city for a day with Aunt Brandi. She’d found a gamer con that she thought Aidan and I would like, one that was aimed at teens and kids. It was actually thrown by the same organization as the one Aidan had pretended to go to, in the same hotel. Of course, Brandi had no way of knowing that. She also didn’t understand why we were on the hunt for pay phones.
We didn’t find any.
But Aidan did find something else. Because two of Brandi’s friends came along with their own kids. And one of those kids was a boy Aidan’s age named Luther. From the moment they started talking, it was clear they weren’t going to stop talking anytime soon. Luther even joined us on the pay phone hunt, without needing to know why we were so desperate to find one.
After we got back home, Aidan and Luther started texting and gaming together. After three weeks, they were dating, and suddenly Aidan was known as the seventh grader with a gamer boyfriend who lived in the city. People talked about it for a week, and then it seemed like it had always been the case.
I hung out with Busby, Tate, and Truman as usual, and unicorns never came up again. The next time they were over at my house, they definitely were curious to see the attic. But I think that curiosity died out when they found an ordinary dresser in an ordinary attic. It must have been much more interesting in their imaginations.
I started to do my homework up there. Aidan had pretty much claimed the den as his after-school domain, and I wanted a domain of my own. It was nice and quiet up above everything else.
It was about two months after Officer Pinkus had sat in the rocking chair that I stretched out on the floor to do some math problems and noticed that the pages on my notebook were moving. Just the wind—but not just the wind. Because it wasn’t coming from the open door to downstairs.
It was coming from the dresser.
43
I stood up.
Walked forward.
The wind was unmistakable, emanating from the crack between the doors. I expected them to swing open at any moment.
I looked into the crack and saw green.
This can’t be happening, I thought.
And if it wasn’t happening, it wouldn’t matter if I opened the doors.
So I did.
And there it was.
The sky wasn’t just green—it was like seeing an emerald from the inside, with the light glimmering through. There were hills in the distance, but they seemed to be leaning toward me, defying any sense they might have had of gravity. They were more like horns than hills, really, one shade darker than a plum and one shade lighter than a shadow. The ground itself seemed to have veins running through it, thin stripes that might have been roads or might have been rows of red and blue trees.
This was Aveinieu, right in front of me. I had no doubt.
I was looking out onto it as if I were in a tower rising above the landscape. When I leaned in and looked down, I saw a wall that looked like the inside of an oyster, smooth to the touch. And against it was what could only be called a cross between a ladder and a staircase, a temporary structure allowing me to step into the new world.