I looked for people, for animals, for any sign of life. But if they were out there watching, they were hiding well.
Mom and Dad weren’t home yet—they’d gone back to letting us walk home from school.
But Aidan was home. Just downstairs. In the den.
I made a move to get him….
And stopped.
Because just as I started toward the stairs, the wind changed.
It was no longer blowing out.
It was drawing me in.
And I asked myself: What do you want?
The answer wasn’t: I want to leave.
It wasn’t: I want everyone to know.
It was: I don’t want anything to change.
Aidan was happy now. He had friends, a boyfriend, a life. Our family had been disrupted by Aveinieu, and then we’d made it through the disruption.
There’s no going back.
The wind felt stronger. My pencil skidded across the floor, the notebook following more slowly, and the textbook slower still. The rocking chair nodded, then pulled away.
I knew what I had to do. Or at least I felt I knew what I had to do, which was enough.
I reached down for the pencil and ripped a page out of the notebook.
He’s not coming back, I wrote. He’s happy here.
Then I folded the page into a paper airplane and launched it into the green sky.
I stood there in my attic and watched it soar far beyond the back of the dresser, far into somewhere I’d never go, drifting and drifting until I couldn’t see it any longer.
Then I shut the doors.
The wind slowed down. The green edged back to black.
Five minutes later, I opened the doors and found the empty dresser again.
Ten minutes after that, Aidan called up to me.
Not because he’d felt something or heard something.
No. He just wanted to see if I wanted to play a game.
44
A week later, the dresser was gone, along with a few other attic things we never used.
“Your father was having nightmares about it,” Mom said over dinner that night.
Dad put his fork down and said, “Your mother also announced she was getting tired of the clutter.”
“Who’d you give it to?” I asked.
“We didn’t give it to anyone,” Dad said. “We threw it out.”
Aidan didn’t say a word. But really, it wasn’t Aidan I was studying. It was our father.
Why now? What did you see? I wanted to ask him.
But I couldn’t do it without giving us both away.
45
The night we’d given Officer Pinkus our false story, only to have it dismissed, Aidan and I returned to our bedroom, back to the real story. Once again, we talked in nighttime darkness, right before our minds would take us into the realm of sleep.
“We were really bad at that,” Aidan said from his bed. “But thanks anyway.”
“Anytime,” I said.
He laughed. “But hopefully never again.”
“But hopefully never again,” I agreed.
I thought that was the end of the conversation. But a minute later, Aidan said, “I’m worried.”
“That Officer Pinkus will tell?”
“No. I’m worried that I’ll forget.”
I didn’t have to ask Forget what? I knew.
Aidan went on. “I worry that the more time goes by, the more it will feel like a dream, like something that didn’t happen. I worry I’ll forget what it was like. Especially if I never get the chance to go back there, I would like to remember what it was like to see a green sky and to feed a maddox and to drink plenty tea and to stand next to Cordelia and see the sun set. I want to remember what it was like to be so far away from here. But how can I?”
“Tell me everything you remember,” I said. “And I’ll try to remember it too.”
So we talked, quietly and for hours.
At the end, I promised again that we would share this, because I believed every word. That I would remember.
And I have. I have held on to this story. It’s not something I think about all the time. I can go long stretches without thinking about it. But every now and then I’ll remember, and every now and then Aidan and I will remember together. Sometimes we’ll talk about it when no one else is around. But more often than not, it’s just a look we share. Or I’ll feel something, that shiver of memory, and I’ll turn to see that Aidan is feeling it too.
We don’t tell it to each other much anymore, but the story is still there. Like all honest stories, it lives within us.
True or not, every story has something it wants you to remember.
True or not, every story has something it wants you to believe.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many, many people helped this Disappearance appear. Thanks to my friends, some of whom make appearances in this book as authority figures, which can’t possibly be right. Thanks as well to Billy, Nick, and Anica, who were the first friends to hear its beginning aloud.
Thanks to my parents, who were gracious in letting me make up worlds (as long as I didn’t disappear into them), and to my brother (for never going missing for six hours, not to mention six days).
Thank you to everyone at Random House Children’s Books, in particular Melanie, Mary, and Barbara for their enthusiasm about me stepping into a new place, and April and Carol for envisioning the cover. And thanks to Bill, Simon, David, Marion, and everyone else at the Clegg Agency for their expert shepherding.
And thanks, of course, to my editor, Nancy, who never says to me, “Fido, your leash is too long!”
Some of David Levithan's many acclaimed novels and story collections include 19 Love Songs, Every Day, Two Boys Kissing, and Boy Meets Boy. His bestselling collaborations include Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, Dash and Lily's Book of Dares, and The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily (written with Rachel Cohn) and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (written with John Green). David was named the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for his contribution to YA literature. You can learn more about him at davidlevithan.com and follow him on Twitter at @loversdiction.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!