“I’m fine. Really.” He looks unconvinced. “It’s not what I was expecting.”
“What were you expecting?”
A fair question. Smaller. Dirtier. Brokener. Less whole.
Less ready.
“It’s so…” I trail off because I cannot tell him any of that, can I? But he seems to get it anyway.
“They hauled so much out of here. You can’t believe the cursing my father does into his phone every day. All new this, all new that, tear out those, get rid of that other thing. They had to fly in some kind of special cleaning crew.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess the stuff that was already here was too old?”
“For what?”
“For whatever they’re going to make next.”
And when I don’t say anything to that, he says, very gently, “What did you think reopening the plant meant?”
I shake my head. I do not know.
He smiles. “Don’t worry. We’ll find what you’re looking for.” He holds out his fists, and I choose one. He opens it, empty, waves it over the other, also empty, and shows me the first again with its prize gleaming in the center of his palm. “After all, we have the key.”
So I lean over and kiss him.
I don’t know why.
It’s terrible. Atrocious. My sisters would scream if they saw. My mother would be dismayed beyond the power of speech. But I can’t think what else to do. Being in here is so overwhelming and strange that what’s steady and safe is actually River. Though he’s new and the plant’s older than I am, comparatively speaking he’s what feels familiar and comforting. Possible.
And even though my mother would label me treasonous right now, I’m here on her quest. She started it. She’s the one who told us to find out what we could from River. Plus, he’s betraying his parents more than I’m betraying mine, and he’s done it for us, for me. Stealing those emails, stealing that key, these are the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me. When I started kissing him, it was just spontaneous, a thing to do, an opportunity—and maybe the only one I’ll ever get—but now it might be something more than that because after I start I don’t stop. It was kind of him to bring me here. It was kind of him to worry about me. It was kind of him to promise me his key. I doubt he did it so I’d kiss him. But I don’t know why he did do it. Or, really, why I am either.
It’s terrible, it is, but also it’s amazing.
First he tastes surprised.
Then he tastes euphoric.
Or maybe it’s not taste but some new sense that’s feeding that information straight into my brain. When he puts his arms around me, I can feel him pressing that key against my lower back. When I put mine around his shoulders, I can feel those muscles that flexed when he changed gears. I can feel his mouth, outside and in, and his breath, bated as mine.
We kiss for a little while which is surprising because when you think about your first kiss, you think of it like a finite thing, measurable, contained, begun in a blink and over just as fast, but this is not contained. This sprawls and wanes, except the waning is actually waiting, the begging of more to come, and then more does come, and that’s all part of it, a small thing that proves to be part of a much larger, growing one. Expanding. Like the universe. But eventually, we part.
When we do, he takes my hand again. “It’s not really a museum, I guess.”
“No,” I agree. Museums preserve the old. This is all new, gravely new. “More like a monument.”
He smiles like I’m making a joke. I’m not. “To what?”
“To what’s to come.”
Two
The days we have left before November 22 are precious now and shrinking in number, but for nine of them, I did not tell anyone about my Santa picture because it was not a clue to the mystery of how to not reopen the plant. We are looking for paperwork, and the Santas are not paperwork. We are looking for activities you used to be able to do in winter, but the Santas were only pretending to fish which you could do anytime. We were looking in the plant for something leaking, cracked, and broken, but that was Mab’s job not mine, and those issues do not apply to Santas.
But it turned out it was more accurate to say the Santa picture was a clue, it was just not a clue to the answer. It was a clue to the question. The Santa picture was a clue to what the mystery actually was.
On the day I showed my sisters the Santa picture, which was yesterday, Mab got home from school even later than when tutoring got out, and I knew she did not go to tutoring. When Mab finally got home the reason she was late was because she got River to take her in the plant, and since she went in the plant she wanted to talk and talk and talk about all the things she saw and one she kissed. Mirabel was listening hard for clues, but it sounded to me like a boring description of the difference between what Mab was expecting (a plant that had been sitting vacant for seventeen years) and what Mab actually saw (a plant that is about to reopen). Since we already knew the plant is about to reopen, the only clue I could find was that Mab is not as smart as she appears.
Mirabel was also interested in hearing about the kissing. I was not.
I sighed, but they ignored me, so I sighed louder and then I sighed louder and then I sighed louder, and then Mab talked again about the kissing which she had already talked about a lot, so I started running around them in circles so they would know that I wanted them to talk about something else. We were in our room where there are three beds. Mirabel was lying on hers. Mab was lying on hers with her legs up the wall in a funny position because her part of the wall is covered in postcards I sent her. So the circles I ran in were small, but I have had a lot of practice running in small circles.
“Jesus, Monday, this is kind of important.” Mab said this as if kissing River Templeton were the key to not reopening the plant.
“This will not work,” I told her.
“What won’t?” Her face made a face that meant whatever I was going to say next was going to be stupid, but she did not know that because I had not said it yet.
“I do not think River will go to his father and say, ‘Father, I have kissed Mab Mitchell, and it was nice, so I do not think you should reopen the plant,’ so his father will say, ‘Okay, River, you have convinced me.’”
“No one’s saying that,” Mab sneered but she did not say what anyone was saying. “At least I’m trying to help. What are you doing?”
“I am looking at scrapbooks to see if there used to be an indoor pool,” I said.
“What does an indoor pool have to do with anything?”
“I do not know,” I said because I did not.
“Did there?” Mab asked.
“Not that I could see,” I said.
“Not much of a clue,” she said.
I was going to say I could not find clues if I did not know what clues I was looking for. I was going to say scrapbooks were more likely places to hold hints about the past than the inside of River’s mouth. I was going to say she should just shut up because I could not think of a better comeback. But instead I said I did find one clue.
They both stopped looking at each other and looked at me instead.