Tornado Brain

by Cat Patrick

  “But I told you, I’m back!” I shouted at her.

  And then her face was in focus—but it wasn’t Tess’s face. And it wasn’t Colette’s.

  “You took Lemonade,” I said to myself. “And you’re not back. You’re gone.”

  PART 3

  The Rest

  chapter 18

  Fact: There have been instances of tornadoes destroying lighthouses.

  SUNDAY MORNING, THE real storm came.

  Tess and I sat opposite each other at the kitchen table in the cottage, each with a fleece blanket wrapped around our shoulders because our PJs had gotten wet running over from the inn. We were both holding mugs of tea that our mom had made while we’d waited for the others. I had my feet up on my chair and my mug rested on my knees, which was keeping them from jittering. Pirate lay at the foot of my chair.

  The cottage was crowded.

  Mom and Officer Rollins sat at the table with us; Officer Saunders and a policewoman I didn’t know sat on the couch in the living room, which was really the same room as the kitchen since there wasn’t a wall separating them; and Charles leaned against the kitchen counter with his arms folded across his chest, the orca tattoo on his arm facing out.

  The recorder in the middle of the table had a green light illuminated on it. The clock on the microwave said 7:16 a.m. and we’d just finished telling the whole room about dare-or-scare.

  It’d been two and a half days since anyone had seen Colette.

  Officer Rollins tried to keep it all straight. “So you believe that Colette was making videos Thursday night, and something happened to her when she was filming—and that’s why we can’t find her?”

  “Yes,” Tess answered confidently.

  “And you also believe that she changed the upload dates on the videos, so it would look like they were older than they are?”

  “Yes.” Tess nodded.

  “Why?”

  Tess looked at me, unsure. I shook my head. “We don’t know,” Tess answered for us.

  “But you feel confident that she was re-creating your dare-or-scare game. Is that what you think, too, Frankie?” he asked me.

  “I think so?” I said, feeling groggy and frazzled with most of the police officers in Long Beach stuffed into the tiny cottage.

  “And you initially suspected that Colette might be at Mrs. Sievich’s residence?”

  “Yes,” I said, looking down at my hands, feeling stupid. Officer Rollins had already explained that the reason the Sea Witch had gone to the police station was that her property had been vandalized again—I guess it happened sometimes—and officers had gone there to check it out. So they were pretty sure Colette wasn’t there. Maybe I felt a little sorry for the Sea Witch. I don’t know.

  It didn’t matter anyway: the dream had made me remember where Colette was for sure—and she wasn’t with the stuffed dead animals.

  Rollins, as the other officers called him, rubbed his eyes and his forehead, just like he had on Friday. “Frankie, we’ve been looking for Colette for forty-eight hours straight. We’re all exhausted. I don’t want to hear that you think she might be out there. I need you to tell me specifically where you think she is.”

  Honestly, I thought I’d already said that, but maybe it was just the voice screaming in my head, telling them where to look. Or maybe I felt like I’d told the police because I’d told Tess about my dream, the dream when I remembered the best dare I’d ever come up with.

  I took a deep breath, wondering: What if I’m wrong? But then I asked myself, What if I’m right?

  “I think she was trying to do a dare I made up,” I began. Everyone in the room was looking at me. Charles nodded, and my mom gave me a reassuring smile, but the way Tess held her chin high like she was holding mine up for me made me feel like it was all going to be all right. “It was around Halloween when I made it up. Tess and Colette had been to three haunted houses already and I knew if I chose to do a scare, they would come up with something terrible. So I had to make the dare really great.”

  “And?” Officer Rollins asked.

  “I dared us to ride to the lighthouse.”

  My mom gasped.

  Tess started biting her thumbnail and the officers in the living room took notes even though the recorder was on in the middle of the table, documenting everything I said.

  “It’s not that far,” I said, turning my mug in my hands. “When I did it, it didn’t even take me an hour.”

  I glanced at my mom, who did not look happy that I’d ridden by myself to the lighthouse. “Did you do it, too?” she whispered to Tess.

  Tess looked at me guiltily, then back at Mom. “I told Frankie and Colette that I had, but I lied. I went halfway—but I got scared and turned around.”

  “I knew it,” I muttered.

  “Keep going, Frankie,” Rollins said.

  “Colette doesn’t have a bike,” I said. He looked at me like he didn’t get what I was saying, so I added in explanation, “The yellow bike has been missing from our inn.”

  “Oh no,” Mom murmured, understanding.

  “She means that she thinks Colette took a bike from our inn to try the dare,” Tess said.

  “Yes,” I said, nodding, keeping my eyes low.

  “Frankie, when you called yesterday, you said there was a whole page of dares in your notebook,” Rollins said. “Why would Colette choose this one?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Tess thought maybe she picked dares that we all did—but Colette never did this one before. I wonder if she picked the hardest ones, or just the ones that were the least . . .”

  “Least what?” Mom asked.

  “Stupid?” I answered, thinking of the dare where you had to see how many marshmallows you could eat before you threw up.

  “Maybe her goal is to do all of them,” Tess said quietly. “Maybe she’s not finished yet. Maybe she just . . .”

  Tess stopped talking and everyone in the room went silent. I don’t know why I felt guilty, but I did. Maybe because the dare had been my idea—and now we were sitting around talking with the police and Colette was missing, out there somewhere in the pouring rain.

  Thunder rumbled the floor just to make me feel worse.

  Officer Rollins looked worriedly out the window, then back at me. “To be clear, do you mean the North Head or Cape Disappointment Lighthouse?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Which one,” he asked.

  “North Head,” Tess said.

  “Okay, that’s good, thank you, Tess,” Officer Rollins said. To the other officers in the other room, he said, “That’s, what, four miles?”

  “More like five, maybe six,” said Officer Saunders. He was sitting in my favorite seat on the couch; my thoughts were spinning too fast to care. I felt completely off the rails.

  Officer Rollins turned back to me. “And what route did you use, Frankie, when you rode it?”

  “Discovery Trail for part of it.” I took a breath, knowing my mom wouldn’t like the next part. “And North Head Road.”

  “The bike path?” Officer Rollins asked.

  I shook my head no.

  “Frankie!” my mom blurted out. “You could have been killed!”

  Everyone got silent, probably thinking what I was: I could have been killed but hadn’t been—but maybe Colette had. The policewoman was typing on her phone faster than a texting teenager.

  “You mean Willows to North Head Road?” she asked, her eyes on her phone.

  “I guess?” I asked back, because I don’t pay attention to streets that much unless I have a reason to.

  “Colette could have taken any of the north-south routes,” Officer Rollins said to the other officers. “Call Martin from Ilwaco and see if they can spare anyone.”

  “We need to get the sheriff’s office involved
, too,” the woman officer said.

  “They already are,” Officer Rollins said. He picked up the recorder and turned it off, then stood up. Seeming to fill the entire kitchen, he said, “We’ll need to check around the roadways in both directions in case she reached the lighthouse and turned around—and Discovery Trail, too.”

  They moved toward the door, pulling their rain gear over their heads, their belts full of stuff, clanking and jangling. “Thank you, girls,” Officer Rollins said before shutting the door to the cottage.

  Tess hugged me.

  I let her.

  chapter 19

  Fact: Tornadoes that happened before 1950 weren’t reliably reported.

  “HOW ARE YOU two?” Mom asked later, leaning up against the door frame, looking at us with concern. Tess and I were on the beds we’d slept in forever until we moved into the inn.

  Mom went over and sat on Tess’s bed. I felt jealous that she wasn’t sitting on mine—but I didn’t want her to sit on it either. I was confused by that feeling.

  “We’re fine,” I said automatically.

  “We’re not fine,” Tess said. “Did Officer Rollins call?”

  Mom shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “I did speak with Colette’s mother about an hour ago. The police are still searching. They’re trying to move quickly but also be thorough.”

  “So they’re going fast and slow at the same time?” I asked. “That makes no sense.”

  I looked up at the trio of paper hot-air balloons I’d made with a babysitter once hanging over my bed from hooks on the ceiling. The babysitter had told me to write something inspirational on them. In black marker, one said: Something inspirational. In purple marker, another said: You can do it! And in green marker, the one closest to me said: We fly higher than lost balloons.

  “I don’t know, Frankie,” Mom said. “They’re trying their best.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Do you want pancakes?” she asked us. “I have some blueberries to put in them.”

  “I want to go back to sleep,” Tess said, rolling onto her side, facing the wall. “My eyes sting.”

  Mom started scratching her back. I was jealous of that, too, even though I can’t stand it when she does it to me. It’s like I craved and hated the idea of contact at the same time, which made me feel like an alien. Maybe I just wanted to feel like my mom loves me the same as she loves my sister.

  “I’m going to the beach,” I said, getting up from the too-small bed. I stepped into the rain boots I’d thrown near the bed, but something wasn’t right.

  “Ugh, I hate these socks!” I crashed down to the floor and struggled to get the rain boots off so I could readjust my socks. Rain boots are the worst to get off. “Help me!” I shouted at my mom.

  “How about some manners?” she asked, walking over to me. I stuck my foot in the air. She trapped my leg between her knees and yanked the left boot off. Then we went through the same process with the right. “Do you want to borrow a pair of my socks?” she asked softly as I grunted and growled at the pair I was wearing.

  I was annoyed at her offer. I was annoyed about everything, and I didn’t know how to not be.

  Finally I got the sock seams lined up on both feet so that they didn’t squish my pinkie toes when I put my feet back in the boots.

  “There!” I said, standing up and putting my hands on my hips.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Mom asked.

  “No,” I said. Her face looked hurt, so I added, “I just want to be alone.”

  “Okay, Frankie, but don’t go far—and take your phone. Just in case we hear anything.”

  I nodded and left the room. The cottage looked empty without all the people in it from earlier: it felt strange. I put on my raincoat over my pajamas, then took an apple from the fruit basket and my phone from the charger. It wasn’t pouring anymore—just raining—but still I made sure my phone was deep in my pocket, protected from the water.

  I would have taken Pirate with me, but she must have been somewhere with Charles. I missed her clanking tags as I trudged through the sand by myself, eyes on the solid light gray sky. I walked to the closest shelter, which only shelters you against wind, not rain, since it’s open at the top.

  I was surprised to find a familiar face already there.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Why do you keep saying that to me?” Kai answered. He had a black hoodie up over his hair, which annoyed me because I liked seeing all the weird ways he styled it. I guess it was raining.

  “I don’t mean it in a mean way,” I said, kicking the sand. “I’m surprised you’re here is all.”

  “I’m meeting Dillon,” he said, and I believed him because his skateboard was next to him, leaning against the bench with the wheels facing out. Also, he had on skate shoes. “We’re going to do some tricks off the boardwalk. You can watch if you want.”

  “You’re skating in the rain?” I asked.

  “Rain or shine.” Kai smiled, but it didn’t seem like a real smile, just a polite one. “You should come.”

  “Thanks, but I’m not in the mood.”

  “Okay,” he said, standing up. He looked at my outfit. “Are you wearing pajamas?”

  “So?”

  “Nothing,” Kai said, stepping away. “Okaybye. Catch you later, Frankincense.”

  “What does that even mean?” I asked, rolling my eyes.

  Kai shrugged. “Something to do with Christmas? You tell me. I’m Buddhist, yo.”

  “Okay, Mr. Buddhist, aren’t you waiting for Dillon to get here?”

  “You said you’re not in the mood to talk.” He pulled his hoodie strings tighter. I really wished he’d let his awesome hair free so I could see what it was doing today.

  “No, I didn’t. I said I’m not in the mood to watch skateboard tricks.”

  “Oh.”

  Kai came back and we both sat on the bench part of the shelter, with about a three-person space between us. Neither of us said anything until it felt so uncomfortable that I had to talk.

  “The police were at our house this morning,” I blurted out.

  “No way,” Kai said, his eyes wide, leaning forward on the bench. “Something to do with Colette? What happened?”

  The whole story tumbled out of me easily—and with it came tears that I didn’t really care about shedding in front of Kai. He didn’t make a big deal of it either: he didn’t say anything about it at all.

  “I remember that dare,” Kai said when I finished the part about the officers leaving to search the different paths to see if Colette had been doing the lighthouse dare and had an accident.

  “You do?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yeah, of course,” Kai said. “Don’t you remember? I shot the edit for you.” I tilted my head sideways; he tried to remind me. “Yeah, your sister was at some camp and Colette was . . . I don’t know where she was. But you wanted to do the dare on a certain day because it was sunny out and you were convinced that there was going to be a storm the next day.” He laughed a little. “You told me that if no one was there to see it, then no one would believe it happened, and it would be like tornadoes that happened a long time ago but weren’t recorded—so I made the edit as proof.”

  “You did?” I asked. “But in my dream, Tess and Colette were there.”

  “Frankfurter, dreams aren’t real.” Kai spun one of the wheels on his skateboard.

  “Will you ever run out of weird names for me?” I asked, kind of liking the names even though they were so cringey.

  Kai shrugged, smiling. He didn’t answer me. Instead, he said, “I can’t believe you spaced that I was there.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said.

  I thought back for a long time and finally there Kai was, at the blurry edge of my memory, not getting mad when I yelled
at him to move out of the way or get closer or hold still. Telling Dillon he was too busy to skate that day. Standing with me in the sun and the rain.

  I didn’t want to tell him I remembered because I felt like he might think I was lying. Instead, I asked, “Why didn’t you ever do the dares with us—or the scares even?”

  He smiled, but it seemed like it had some sad in it. “Duh, you guys never asked me to.”

  Kai looked off in the distance and waved. I turned and saw Dillon standing by the ramp to the boardwalk from the beach. Kai stood and picked up his skateboard. Looking at me, he said, “I always liked helping you, though. It was fun.”

  He gave a little wave and walked over to where Dillon was standing. I saw him say something to Dillon, then Dillon looked my way. I pulled my feet up under my knees on the bench, wondering if I should go watch them do tricks. But they jumped on their skateboards and took off down the boardwalk while I was weighing the pros and cons. That happens to me a lot: I consider something too long and miss the thing I was considering.

  I felt bad.

  I felt bad because I did actually want to watch the tricks.

  I felt bad because Kai was gone.

  I felt bad because I’d never asked him to do a dare.

  I felt bad because I’d never noticed that he’d wanted to.

  * * *

  —

  FROM THE SHELTER, I saw a police car pull into the parking lot of the inn. I watched two people shapes walk toward the cottage and my heart felt like it was going to break through my rib cage. I ran my fastest back home. I was sure that they’d found Colette—but I didn’t know whether they’d found her alive or dead—and my brain was an EF5 tornado.

  As I ran, I thought at her:

  Why did you go alone?

  Did you know you were going to go when you came to my room?

  Would you have asked me for help if I hadn’t yelled at you?

  Why did I ever make up that dare?

  It’s not my fault.

  Why are you so bad at riding a bike?!