The In-Between

by Rebecca K. S. Ansari

  After more small adjustments to the scope, Cooper finally found himself focused within the room, which was lit but thankfully unoccupied. Slowly he scanned side to side, amazed at the level of detail he could see. What from afar he’d thought were polka dots on her puffy comforter and matching pillow mountain were actually small stitched rosebuds. He could read the spines of the packed bookshelf—A Wrinkle in Time, When You Reach Me, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—and he was able to count the six Ticonderoga pencils resting in a mason jar on her desk.

  And there, hanging on the back of the desk chair, was the girl’s navy-blue jacket.

  He adjusted the scope ever so slightly and focused in on the gold stitching. While the folds in the jacket obscured one of the crest’s edges, Cooper could make out the embroidery of a large bird, flying upward, wings outstretched, with two swords crossing behind it.

  Jess was right. It was exactly like the sketch in the newspaper.

  The newspaper sketch had been black and white, but now he could see there was ruby-red stitching in the hilt of each sword that matched a red gleam in the bird’s eyes. A banner of some sort was stitched beneath, clutched in the bird’s talons. Vigilantes U—. The curves in the cloth obscured the letters after.

  “Vigilantes?” he whispered to himself. He wasn’t sure what that word meant exactly, but he was pretty sure it involved people who took the law into their own hands.

  Cooper scanned the room again. He knew he was now pushing the limits of “research.” He had already confirmed the crest was a match. He should put the telescope away. But he couldn’t stop himself from poking around a little bit more to see if there were any other interesting items in her room. As he did, he passed his view over her desk again.

  “Wait. Wha—?”

  He zoomed in on the mason jar.

  No pencils.

  Had someone, somehow, walked into the room while he was checking out the jacket and taken them? He quickly zoomed out again. The room was empty.

  Surely he would have seen someone cross the room. How had the pencils simply vanished? There had been six of them just seconds ago. He had counted them! He’d even read the brand. Cooper panned up to the shelf to check the spines of the books again.

  “What are you doing?”

  Cooper jolted up and away from the scope so fast he almost toppled over backward. He spun around to find Jess, mouth agape in the doorway of his room, the threads of an unfinished friendship bracelet hanging limply in her fingers.

  “Nothing!” he shouted, too loudly. He couldn’t have appeared any guiltier if he’d tried.

  “I can’t believe you! You’re totally looking at that girl’s jacket, aren’t you?”

  “No.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked around his room. The telescope just sat there, pointed at the girl’s bedroom window, impossible to explain away.

  “Yes, you are! You made fun of me and then decided to try to solve the mystery without me?”

  “I’m not trying to solve anything. There’s nothing to solve. I just wanted to see if they were actually the same, that’s all.”

  “You want to take all the glory for yourself!” She threw the friendship bracelet at him; it fell to the floor limply, halfway between them.

  “Jess. There is no glory.”

  “Fine,” Jess said. “You weren’t working on this behind my back. I believe you. You were just peeping into that girl’s window for fun, then?” She crossed her arms and smirked.

  “You know that’s not what I was doing,” Cooper said in a hushed voice, even though there wasn’t anyone else in the house to hear them.

  Jess pantomimed a crass, openmouthed kiss, her hands caressing an invisible body before her.

  “Stop that.”

  “I bet Mom will love hearing about this. I can’t wait to tell her.” She turned to leave, practically skipping with joy.

  “Fine!” he called after her. “I was looking for more information.”

  Jess stopped and slowly turned back toward him. “And?”

  Cooper stifled a frustrated growl. The fact that his little sister held the upper hand stung like an army of fire ants, and it practically killed him to admit that her little mystery had interested him. But it was still better than having his mother think he was some window-leering creep.

  “If we work on this together, will you keep your mouth shut to Mom?”

  She lifted one eyebrow and tilted her head. “Okay.”

  “Okay. Here’s what I saw.” Cooper took some paper from his desk and drew a quick sketch of the emblem as best he could, adding in some of the lower-half details missing from the newspaper image. “The top is identical, but there’s a banner at the bottom,” he told Jess, “with the word ‘Vigilantes’ on it, then the letter U, but I couldn’t see the rest of the words.”

  “Vigilantes? What does that mean?”

  “A vigilante is someone who . . . hold on.” He went to the computer and opened the Merriam-Webster website. “‘A member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress or punish crime; a self-appointed doer of justice.’ Synonyms include ‘punisher’ and ‘avenger.’”

  “Jeez!” Jess said. “What kind of school does she go to?”

  “I’m sure the other words we’re missing change its meaning.” If the girl’s insignia was actually the same as the one from the train crash, he and Jess might already have more information to go on than the cops had back in 1928, given that they had almost the entire crest. Cooper handed the computer to his sister. “Let’s see if we can find another online match to the crest itself, now that we have more than just the top half. I’m going to go get the iPad so we can both search.”

  As he went downstairs to fetch the tragically abused and cracked iPad from the living room, a question rose in his mind. Jess was nose down in the computer as he walked in again.

  “Hey. How did you just happen to find that article about the train crash in the first place?” he asked. “It’s quite a coincidence that you read some random unsolved mystery only to find it might involve our neighbor.”

  Jess didn’t answer.

  “Jess?” Cooper said when she stayed quiet. “If we are going to work together, you have to tell me.”

  “Well . . .” Her voice was small as she said, “I was actually trying to find out more about her.”

  “The girl across the alley? Why?”

  “I just . . . she’s . . .” Jess stalled.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I was curious. She never talks to us, but she sits there, in that beautiful house, like some glamorous movie star, going off to some fancy private school each day.”

  Cooper let out a slow sigh. Though it had been a while, this wasn’t the first time Jess had expressed a fascination with private school. It began when she was first diagnosed with diabetes, as she begged her parents to let her transfer after a few embarrassing low-blood-sugar incidents. She thought her life would be so much better if she could only get a fresh start, go someplace where no one felt sorry for her or treated her like this poor, fragile thing that might shatter. She failed to see the flaw in her reasoning—diabetes would follow her wherever she went.

  “She’s just so interesting, and so pretty,” Jess continued, “so I tried to figure out what academy she went to using her uniform crest. I found the train article instead.”

  Cooper knew this was when their mom would tell Jess that she was interesting and pretty, and she didn’t need a fancy uniform or expensive school to be her amazing self. He tried to form the words, but it didn’t work. Brothers didn’t say that stuff. So instead he sat beside her and said, kindly, “Let’s see what else we can find. What search terms did you use?”

  “I searched ‘bird and swords symbol,’ but I had to scroll to, like, page twenty-eight before I found that newspaper picture.”

  “Well, maybe we can try it from the other direction: the schools. Type in ‘private schools in Chicago.’ Then we can look for a logo that matches hers.”
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  Jess leaned ever so slightly closer to Cooper and said, “That was actually what I tried first, but I gave up when I saw there were four hundred and ten of them.”

  “Oh.”

  “And that doesn’t even count the schools in the suburbs.”

  “Well, with two of us, it’ll take half the time.” Cooper navigated to the same search results on the iPad. “Some of these are preschools and kindergartens. We don’t have to look at them.” He scrolled further. “And here’s a bunch that are high school only.”

  “How old do you think she is?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe twelve? Thirteen? I don’t think she’s in high school yet. Let’s try searching ‘private middle school Chicago,’” Cooper suggested. They both typed.

  “Oh, that’s better,” Jess said. “Down to a hundred and seventy-six.”

  They agreed that Jess would start from the top of the list, linking to each home page and scanning for a school crest or symbol, and Cooper would start at the bottom. It proved to be a slow and tedious process.

  “Wow, this whole middle school has only thirty-one students! That’d be weird,” she said. “Yeesh. This one’s like a prison.”

  Cooper looked at her screen and smiled. He hadn’t hung out with Jess like this in a long time; it wasn’t as terrible as he expected. They found a variety of school emblems, but most were predictably bland: outlines of church steeples; shields with a variety of books, mascots, and sporting equipment. A few had birds on them. But after one hundred and seventy-six links, none of them was exactly right. Jess shut the computer in frustration.

  Searching for an image was more difficult than Cooper realized. Words are easy, but pictures—especially ones that are only in one’s mind, without a specific title or name—are tougher.

  “Maybe try falcon or raven or hawk instead of bird,” Jess said.

  Cooper did as she suggested, only to find a variety of coats of arms, a couple of video games, and ample images of the Hogwarts shield. Searching “two swords” took him deep into the world of tarot cards, and “hawk and two swords” brought up Renaissance festival pictures and a handful of very dated fantasy book covers with nearly naked women wielding knives. Adding “vigilantes” to the search didn’t get them any further. The number of dead ends seemed endless.

  “It’s kind of amazing you found that article in the first place,” Cooper said.

  “Cooper!”

  Both Cooper and Jess jumped at the sound of their mother’s cry from the doorway of the room.

  “I have been texting you for the last hour!” she continued. “Why didn’t you send me your sister’s sugar? And Jess, why are you still awake?”

  Cooper glanced at the iPad screen. 9:56 p.m. His sister’s bedtime was twenty-six minutes ago.

  “Sorry, Mom. We—”

  Mom didn’t even pretend to listen; she took two strides and snatched both the iPad and laptop from their hands. She opened the computer, and the light from the screen uplit her face as it shifted from annoyance to surprise and then something else entirely.

  “You’re researching private schools?” she said in a quiet and deflated voice.

  “Uhh . . .” Cooper watched awkwardly as his mom clicked back through screen after screen of smiling students in uniforms, performing science experiments and playing lacrosse. After a painfully long time, she closed the lid. “You both know we can’t afford any of those schools.”

  What was Cooper supposed to say? That they weren’t searching schools for the reason she suspected, that they were trying to solve a century-old mystery involving a dead British kid? Instead he muttered, “Sorry,” again. It was all he had.

  “Have you even checked your sugar, Jess?”

  “Um . . . no.”

  Their mother tucked both of their screens under one arm and made a sweeping motion with the other. “Jess, go get your pj’s on. I’ll meet you in your room.” She walked away to get Jess’s supplies, shoulders slumped.

  Jess and Cooper waited until Mom was out of earshot. “So what do we do now?” Jess whispered.

  “Go to bed, I guess.”

  “You should try to talk to her.”

  “I don’t think Mom wants anything to do with me right now.”

  “No, not Mom. That girl.”

  “Jess, it’s ten o’clock.”

  Jess tipped her head back and moaned in frustration. “Not now, dum-dum. Tomorrow. You should ask her where she got that jacket.”

  “Why me?”

  “Why not you?”

  Sitting in his room doing internet searches was one thing. Actually talking to the creepy girl across the alley was another thing altogether. “This is your project, Jess, not mine.”

  “Jess!” their mother called from the hallway.

  She jumped up and scooted off to her room.

  Cooper changed into pajamas, and as he walked back toward his bed, he paused. He made sure Jess wasn’t still in the hallway, then took a few side steps back to the window. Little mushroom lamps glimmered along the backyard path of the yellow house, leading from the alley to the back porch. Interior lights still warmed the downstairs windows, but upstairs, the curtains were drawn, and the lights were out. There would be no more surveillance tonight.

  Cooper exhaled. As much as he hated to admit it, Jess was probably right: the easiest way to find out about the crest was to ask the girl herself. Searching for answers online could take forever, with no guarantee of finding anything at all.

  But she was so weird.

  Cooper jumped away from the window, however, when he heard his mother’s voice in the hall right outside his room. “Let’s go. Downstairs.” It was followed by the sounds of footsteps trailing away toward the kitchen. The only reason Jess would go back downstairs after ten was because her blood sugar was too low and she needed more food.

  Cooper knew that low blood sugar at bedtime meant a long and sleepless night for Jess and Mom: food every fifteen minutes until his sister’s level was back where it should be; then Jess could sleep, but only for an hour until Mom woke her to recheck. If she slipped low again, they had to repeat the whole process. Possibly again and again and again, all with the hopes of avoiding a 911 call. They were always quiet outside Cooper’s room, but that didn’t mean he slept. Even though there was nothing he could do to help, sleeping somehow seemed rude.

  Jess’s half-woven friendship bracelet was still on Cooper’s floor. He scooped it up, tiptoed into Jess’s room, and put it on her pillow.

  For a guy trying so hard not to care about others, this awful, hollow feeling in his gut sure felt like caring. Cooper crawled into bed without brushing his teeth and pulled his covers over his head.

  7

  The alarm had been blaring for two minutes before Cooper woke and smacked the off button, his head foggy and his eyes stinging. The night had been as long as he’d feared, his sister and Mom getting up countless times. Cooper woke with each, only to have his mind immediately launch into hyperdrive about his sister’s blood-sugar levels, his dad’s new baby, the train crash, and that crest. Sleep, so elusive for the past eight hours, now didn’t want to let go of him.

  And it now seemed it was the same for everyone else. Even after he’d showered, all was quiet. Cooper dressed and cracked the door to his mother’s room.

  “Mom?” he whispered.

  The only response was a soft snore. He went to her bedside and gently shook her shoulder. “Mom.”

  She rolled slowly onto her back, eyes still closed, and mumbled something that sounded like “in a minute.”

  “Should I wake Jess up? It’s after seven.” He had to nudge her again before he got an answer.

  “We’re staying home today,” she said, finally opening her eyes. “Last night was bad. I’ll call school. Can you let the bus driver know?”

  “Sure.” Cooper felt the urge to apologize bubbling up like a belch, but he swallowed it back down. “Are you getting up?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Give me a minute.”
Her eyelids sagged on the final word, and he left the room quietly.

  Once in the kitchen, Cooper looked around for the iPad or laptop, wanting to research that crest a little more, but they were nowhere to be found. This hardly came as a surprise, as his mom frequently “hid” them in the bottom drawer of her bedside table, and he wasn’t going back up there.

  Instead, Cooper packed lunch and then sat down with a bowl of diabetic-approved Kellogg’s All-Bran cereal. What he wouldn’t give for a Lucky Charm. Just one. Or bacon. He nearly drooled at the thought. His dad loved meat—a good steak, thick pork chops, you name it—and Cooper had inherited his father’s taste buds, much to his mother’s dismay. He wondered if his dad was happier now that he could eat whatever he wanted without having to brush his teeth before kissing his new wife.

  The sounds of his spoon against the bowl got louder with each bite.

  Dad. New wife. New family. He had to get it out of his head.

  Cooper dropped the spoon and pulled his dog-eared journal from his backpack. He opened to the next blank page and began dumping out his tangled mess of thoughts. It was something Cooper had started last year, when his seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Wishingrad, began a section on keeping a journal. At first Cooper thought it was awful. He would turn in two or three short sentences on whatever topic Mrs. Wishingrad assigned. Five assignments into the unit, she asked Cooper to stay after class. He was certain he was in trouble, but instead she had him sit down beside her. In one hand she held his journal, in the other her phone.

  “Cooper, you are a young man of few words,” she began.

  He proved her point by saying nothing.

  “Have you ever heard of the phrase ‘still waters run deep’?”

  He gave a small head shake.

  “I’ve been teaching for over thirty years, and in my experience, the kids who say the least often are the ones who have the most to say. I think you have a deep well of ideas, thoughts, and feelings under the surface.”

  Cooper felt his heart rate pick up. She had no idea what was under his surface. She didn’t know anything about him, he wanted to say. But he just sat there, still.