“I think,” Koenig said, with an emphasis on think that indicated he really meant know, “that it would be better if I took you out there. Wouldn’t want you getting the wrong peninsula. I can do Saturday.”
I didn’t realize that he had made a joke until we’d hung up, and then I felt bad for not laughing.
On Thursday, the newspaper called. What did I have to say about the Grace Brisbane missing persons case?
Nothing, that was what I had to say. Actually, what I had said to my guitar the night before was
you can’t lose a girl you misplaced years before
stop looking
stop looking
But the song wasn’t ready for public consumption, so I just hung up the phone without saying anything else.
On Friday, Grace told me that she was coming with Koenig and me to the peninsula. “I want Koenig to see me,” she said. She was sitting on my bed matching socks while I tried out different ways of folding towels. “If he knows I’m alive, there can’t be a missing persons case.”
Uncertainty made an indigestible lump in my stomach. The possibilities sown by that action seemed to grow rapid and fierce. “He’ll say you have to go back to your parents.”
“Then we’ll go see them,” Grace said. She threw a sock with a hole in it to the end of the bed. “Peninsula first, then them.”
“Grace?” I said, but I wasn’t sure what I was asking her.
“They’re never home,” she said recklessly. “If they’re home, me talking to them was meant to be. Sam, don’t give me that look. I’m tired of this … not knowing. I can’t relax, waiting for the ax to fall. I’m not going to have people suspecting you of — of — whatever it is they think you did. Kidnapped me. Killed me. Whatever. I can’t fix very much these days, but I can fix that. I can’t take the idea of them thinking of you that way.”
“But your parents …”
Grace made a massive ball of socks without mates between her hands. I wondered if I’d unknowingly been wandering about all this time in socks that didn’t quite match. “They only have a couple of months until I’m eighteen, Sam, and then they can’t say anything about what I do. They can choose the hard way and lose me forever as soon as my birthday rolls around, or they can be reasonable and we can one day be on speaking terms with them again. Maybe. Is it true that Dad punched you? Cole says he punched you.”
She read the response in my face.
“Yeah,” she said, and she sighed, the first evidence that this topic held any pain for her. “And that is why I’m not going to have a problem having this conversation with them.”
“I hate confrontation,” I muttered. It was possibly the most unnecessary thing I had ever said.
“I don’t understand,” Grace said, stretching out her legs, “how a guy who never seems to wear any socks has so many ones that don’t match.”
We both looked at my bare feet. She reached out her hand as if she could possibly reach my toes from where she sat. I grabbed her hand and kissed her palm instead. Her hand smelled like butter and flour and home.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it your way. Koenig, then your parents.”
“It’s better to have a plan,” she said.
I didn’t know if that was true. But it felt true.
• ISABEL •
I hadn’t forgotten about Grace’s request for me to find out about summer school, but it took me quite awhile to figure out how to go about tracking down the answer. It wasn’t as if I could pretend it was for me, and the more precise my questions got, the more I’d draw suspicion. In the end, I figured out a solution by accident. Emptying out my backpack, I found an old note from Ms. McKay, my favorite teacher from last year. Which wasn’t saying much, but still. This particular note dated from my “problematic period” — my mother’s words — and in it, Ms. McKay let me know that she would be happy to help me if I would let her. It reminded me that Ms. McKay was good at answering questions without asking any of her own.
Unfortunately, everyone else also knew this about Ms. McKay, so there was always a line to see her after last period. She didn’t have an office, just the English classroom, so to an outsider, it looked like five students were waiting desperately to get in there and learn some Chaucer.
The door opened and closed as Hayley Olsen left the classroom and the girl in front of me went in. I moved forward one step and leaned against the wall. I hoped Grace knew how much I did for her. I could have been at home doing nothing by now. Daydreaming. The quality of my daydreams had improved exponentially as of late.
Footsteps slapped up behind me, followed by a sound that was unmistakably a backpack hitting the ground. I glanced back.
Rachel.
Rachel was like a caricature of a teen. There was something incredibly self-aware with the way she presented herself: the stripes, the quirky smocks, the braids and the twisted knobs she put her hair into. Everything about her said quirky, fun, silly, naive. But, this: There was innocence and there was projected innocence. I had nothing against either, but I liked to know what I was dealing with. Rachel knew darn well how she wanted people to see her, and that was what she gave them. She wasn’t an idiot.
Rachel saw me looking but pretended not to. My suspicion had already settled, however.
“Fancy seeing you here,” I said.
Rachel flashed me a grimace that lasted about as long as a movie frame; too fast for the human eye to properly perceive. “Fancy.”
I leaned toward her, my voice lowered. “You wouldn’t be here to talk about Grace, would you?”
Her eyes widened. “I’m already seeing a counselor, but that’s none of your business.”
She was good.
“Right. I’m sure you are. So you aren’t going in to confess anything to Ms. McKay about her or the wolves,” I said. “Because that would be so incredibly dumb, I can’t begin to tell you.”
Rachel’s face cleared suddenly. “You know.”
I just gave her a look.
“So it really is true.” Rachel rubbed her upper arm and studied the floor.
“I’ve seen it.”
Rachel sighed. “Who else knows?”
“Nobody. It’s staying that way, right?”
The door opened and closed. The student in front of me went in; I was next. Rachel made an annoyed noise. “Look, I didn’t do my English reading! That’s why I’m here. Not for anything about Grace. Wait. That means that you are here for her.”
I wasn’t sure how she’d managed to come to that conclusion, but it didn’t change the fact that she was right. For half a second, I considered telling Rachel that Grace had asked me to find out about summer school for her, mostly because I wanted to rub in that Grace had trusted me first and I was shallow that way, but it wouldn’t really be useful.
“Just finding out about some graduating credits,” I said.
We stood in the awkward silence of people who had a friend in common and not much else. Students passed down the other side of the hall, laughing and making weird noises because they were guys and that was mostly what high school boys did. The school continued to smell like burritos. I continued to devise my method of questioning Ms. McKay.