“Maybe you should talk to Diesel,” I said.
Cress’s mouth popped open. “Why me?”
“You’re the one who likes him.”
As soon as I said it, I knew I shouldn’t have. “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m being such a jerk.”
“It’s okay,” Cress said, even though I knew it wasn’t.
I’d watched the video of Billy Holcomb’s dad pleading for information enough times to know it by heart, but I watched it again when I got to the library. Mr. Holcomb stepped up to the microphones, his jaw tight, and read his speech from a paper in halting words.
“Whoever knows where Billy is, whoever may be with him—this is a plea for you to bring him home. The Fayetteville PD, the State Highway Patrol, and the FBI are all looking for you. You may have good intentions, but I’m sure you realize this situation is bigger than you anticipated. Turn Billy over and we will not pursue you. I’ll take him back with no questions asked. Please let this nightmare be over and bring my boy home.”
The whole time, his hands are shaking. He looks so sad. His face is tan and handsome, his beard a mix of black and gray. It must have been early in the morning because the sun is in his eyes. At the end of the video, he puts his sunglasses on and turns away. I watched the video again and thought about how scary it would be to be kidnapped. Was that what had happened? Had Billy been kidnapped? My brain sorted the pieces over and over, but I still didn’t have the answers. I still didn’t know how to help.
“Hello, Maddy,” Miss Rivera said from behind me, and I jumped half out of my chair. “Researching your Living Museum project, I hope?” She wore a green-and-white shirt that said Librarian, because Book Wizard isn’t an official title.
I laughed. “I like your shirt.”
“Thank you.” Her eyes went to my screen. “What’s this you’re watching?”
I started to say it was nothing, but Miss Rivera was too sharp to buy that. And besides, maybe she could help me—as long as she didn’t think I was freaking out over nothing. She was always so helpful, she might actually give me a chance.
“I’m trying to find more information about Billy Holcomb. He’s the boy who went missing last fall.”
“Oh, I remember that.”
“That’s his dad on the video.”
“The poor man,” she said. “What exactly are you looking for and why?”
I took a breath. “I’m trying to find out what happened.”
“Why?”
“To keep other kids safe?”
Miss Rivera’s eyes softened in sympathy. “That’s thoughtful of you. I can help you find some resources—as long as you promise to get me a name for the Living Museum this week?”
I nodded quickly.
“Okay. Well, I’d say your best bet is local newspapers. They are the ones most likely to have unique information, though they might be hard to find because their distribution will be limited. Most things are on the internet, but it takes skill to find accurate information.”
She slid the keyboard her way. “What matters most are your search terms. Then you need to make sure each source is legitimate.” She showed me the different catalogs and websites that would be good places to start. “Promise me you’ll get to work on your project? It’s so special when the students are all in costume and the families come to walk through the halls.”
I remembered the Living Museum packet mentioning something about giving a speech to guests. That wasn’t the part that bothered me, though.
“I’ll try,” I said.
18
TIME TRAVELERS
The problem with change is that you’re never ready for it. Even when you know a change is on the way, it still sneaks up on you somehow. I guess that’s why most changes usually feel bad. No matter how much you prepare for them, they still catch you by surprise.
A week had passed and I was still stewing over the ransom for my bike when Stan found me lying in a patch of sun in our backyard, tossing a pinecone into the air. Every once in a while, I’d throw it, and Frankie would take off at a sprint to fetch it back.
“Mind if I join you?” Stan asked.
I could have said something mean like “it’s a free world,” but he wasn’t the one I was mad at. I was surprised to find that in addition to Diesel, I was also mad at Cress. Diesel had stolen my bike, but she kept smiling at him. Plus, despite using Miss Rivera’s research tips, I still hadn’t found any evidence to prove Eric was Billy Holcomb. And then Eric had shown up at school with blue hair. Blue. Like he was only changing the color for fun, which made me think he wasn’t in trouble at all. Maybe I was wrong about him. Maybe I was wrong about everything.
Stan settled onto the grass next to me, or at least he tried to. First he crossed his legs. Then he stretched them out. Finally, he flopped back like a normal human, pulled off his glasses, and wiped them with the bottom of his red checked shirt one lens at a time.
“It’s nice back here,” he said, admiring Dad’s field. The flowers were coming to life. Yellow forsythia glowed in the sun, mixed with masses of white anemones. Dark clumps of daisies and coneflowers were on their way. Soon the whole field would be blooming.
“My dad planted it.” Of course Stan probably already knew that, but I felt this need to say Dad’s name, to keep him present. The barrier loomed in my mind.
“He did an amazing job,” Stan said, really taking the time to admire the field before turning to me. “Any ideas about what we should do next weekend?”
“Well, it is Easter.” I was hoping we could skip the whole awkward hangout for once, but Stan took my words the wrong way.
“Ah! An egg hunt?”
“I think I’m too old for that.”
“Oh. Right. Of course.” He shook his head. “I keep forgetting you’re almost a teenager.”
Was I? I didn’t feel that grown up, especially when my mind filled with evil thoughts as I watched Cress and Diesel smiling at each other at school.
“I hope that glare isn’t for me,” Stan said. “I promise I come in peace. Actually, I hoped we could talk about the idea your mom mentioned. About adding to our family.”
A baby. I swallowed hard.
Stan looked as uncomfortable as I felt, but he forged on. “So, the thing is… well, you and your mom—and your dad—you were a family a long time before you and I met.”
I kept my body perfectly still. It felt like if I moved, the world might explode.
“And, well, the thing is—” Stan’s eyes moved from me to his little red notebook, which had appeared from out of nowhere. Did he really need to have that thing with him all the time?
“I’d like to ask for your blessing,” he said. “I know that sounds strange, but it’s important to me that you’re on board with adding to our family, the same as you were with your mom and me getting married. I would never want to do anything to hurt you, Maddy.”
He stopped talking, his eyes fixed on the field. My body floated above us, my arms and legs lost in time. There are moments when it feels like the world is changing too fast for me to keep up, and everything tilts. It’s like catching a glimpse behind the curtains of the universe. Suddenly the past, the present, and the future are all mixed up.
Stan had been around for a whole year before he and Mom got married, but there was still so much I didn’t know about him. Maybe it was being in Dad’s field or maybe it was how everything seemed to be changing, but suddenly I was full of questions.
“Have you ever been in love before?” I asked. “Before Mom, I mean?”
Stan’s pale cheeks pinked up. “Well. Yes, I suppose I was in love once or twice, but I never felt at home until I met your mom—and you.”
The barrier threatened, but I pushed back.
“What happened with those other people?”
“Well, I guess it didn’t work out.” He gave a clipped laugh. “Or maybe it did?”
He looked at me with so much hope in his eyes that I felt a little guilty for
prying. It wasn’t Stan’s fault things were all mixed up. He could have ended up with some other family, but he didn’t. For all we knew, there was some other universe out there where Dad was still alive and Stan was not. I just wished I felt like I’d ended up in the right one.
The first time I met Stan was at the Greek Festival in Greensboro. Fifth grade had started the week before, and I was excited to roam the festival lawn. It was always crowded, but in a good way. People gathered under gigantic white tents to buy arts and crafts, eat mountains of food, and dance in huge circles. The music alone was enough to make me smile.
Mom and I were in line for food when a tall, clean-shaven white man in a dress shirt walked up. He said hello to Mom like he knew her already, then introduced himself to me, which was the way it always went when we were out. Mom knew everyone because of her job as a labor-and-delivery nurse—we liked to joke about how many babies she “had” each night—but people usually moved on after they chatted for a few minutes.
Stan didn’t leave.
By the time we got to the front of the line, he’d told me all about how computers talk to each other and how one day they would be able to think for themselves.
When it was finally our turn to order, I’d never been more grateful to see the food ladies with their spatulas and serving spoons. We bought a plate of pastitsio, which is like lasagna but better, and skewers of pork souvlaki with pitas and stuffed grape leaves on the side. We also grabbed baklava and hen’s nests for dessert, which are so delicious they make me wish I knew how to make them so I could have them all the time. Stan helped carry our trays to a table where he’d held some chairs for us. Seats go fast at the festival. You have to stake out your place early if you want to hear the music. As we settled in, Stan and Mom exchanged a smiley, googly-eyed glance, and I got this funny feeling in my stomach, like they had a secret I wasn’t in on.
While we ate, Stan kept spilling stuff—the saltshaker, his drink, his plastic fork. Looking back now, I guess he was nervous. At the time I thought he was a weirdo who talked too much about computers. I did my best not to encourage him, but the trouble with not talking is that it’s hard not to think about all the horrible things that could happen. Like how the old lady across from us could choke on her lamb shank. Or how the little kids under the table could get flattened. Or how the tent could collapse and crush us all. I don’t want to think these thoughts, but sometimes they fill my mind like a million tiny aphids sucking a tomato plant dry.
After a while, the music changed and the dance troupe performed. At the end, they invited the audience members to come up and join a giant dance circle with arms linked.
“Maybe we should try it?” Mom said.
She took my hand, and Stan’s, too.
In the dance circle at the Greek Festival, the music goes faster and faster and the circle moves quicker and quicker until you’re all leaning on each other as you kick and jump. We went so fast it felt like I was falling… until I really was falling. Stan tripped and pulled me and Mom down with him, along with a bunch of other people, but the strange thing was, no one got upset. No one got hurt. Everybody just laughed and lifted each other up and started dancing again.
Sitting in the field with Stan, I realized I’d forgotten how strange it was to meet him that first time, and how quickly I’d gotten used to having him around. Sure, it was weird to think about him and Mom having a baby, but everything new is weird at first.
I picked a rock out of the grass and held it up. “Is this a friend of yours?”
He laughed. “I’m never going to live that down, am I?”
“Nope.”
We both laughed, and for a moment I felt this lightness, like gravity had given way.
Stan plucked a buttercup and twirled it between his fingers. “Did you know that ninety percent of the material that makes plants grow comes from the air, not the ground?”
My brows rose. “I thought you didn’t like nature.”
“I don’t have a lot of experience with it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like it. I enjoy learning new things.”
I looked at the field and imagined the air full of invisible plant food.
“Water, air, and energy,” Stan said. “Those are the key ingredients for life.”
I thought about how the air around us seemed empty, but it wasn’t. How life depends on things we cannot see. And how maybe we are all time travelers, trying to find our way.
Even Stan.
“I give you my blessing or whatever,” I said before I chickened out.
I wasn’t sure that I believed what I was saying, but I knew Mom would’ve wanted me to be brave, even if I was scared. Plus, she says that babies are actually pretty adorable when they aren’t pooping, and she’s probably right about that.
19
THE LIST
For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why Eric was friends with Diesel. As we walked into school the day before Easter break, they laughed and bumped into each other like best friends, which would have made sense if they were anything alike, but they weren’t. Diesel was a jerk who stole other people’s bikes. Eric made you fluffernutters and petted your dog.
He was nice.
Eric glanced at me as I turned for the library, and when our eyes met, I got that funny feeling in my stomach again. I knew what that meant, but I was determined not to develop a crush. Look at how Cress was acting. It was like she’d forgotten she ever hated Diesel in the first place. With Eric, it was complicated. Now that we were friends, it didn’t feel right to keep spying on him, but it was going to take more than blue hair to make me give up.
On America’s Most Wanted, they said that a lot of times it’s regular people who discover the fact that breaks a case, like a note in a diary or an address in a pants pocket. People are messy. They leave clues everywhere. It can be hard to see them if you aren’t looking, but the truth is already there, buried under everything else.
I just had to keep looking.
When I got to the library, Miss Rivera helped me put together a fresh list of newspapers in the Fayetteville area, where Billy Holcomb had disappeared. If she thought that was strange, she didn’t say so. Miss Rivera always says that what and how we read is our choice, as long as we’re reading.
“Now, about your Living Museum project—”
“I know. I need to pick someone.”
“Yes, you do. How about Anne Frank? Or maybe Marie Curie? She won a Nobel Prize in Physics. You could make your own radioactive notebook to go along with your outfit.”
It shouldn’t have mattered, but none of those names sparked anything in me. It’s like I was waiting to hear the one name I knew I never would.
“What about Georgia O’Keeffe?” Miss Rivera said. “She was an American artist who painted mountains, skulls, and flowers. Her simplified style was groundbreaking and very cool.”
I still didn’t feel a spark, but I nodded anyway. “Okay. I’ll take her.”
“Excellent,” Miss Rivera said. She walked away, past a new library sign in the shape of a cell phone that said Books, the Original Handheld Device! I only had time to look at a couple of websites on her list before the homeroom bell rang. On the way to class, I saw Diesel in the hall and felt this urge to shout at him for stealing my bike, but he probably would’ve laughed at me. Instead of making a scene, I put my eyes on the millions of tiny pebbles in the floor and promised myself I would get back at him later.
Usually, art class was my favorite. I love making things, drawing things, and figuring them out, but I’d been avoiding making my model for the Living Museum. Everyone else had already started. I couldn’t stall any longer, but this wasn’t a matter of figuring it out. This was about deciding to actually do something, even if it was scary to do it.
Our art teacher had all kinds of materials to choose from. Clay, Popsicle sticks, foil, Styrofoam balls, recyclables that kids had brought in from home, and my favorite, papier-mâché.
Depending on their historic
al figure, kids were making all kinds of props, like masks or hats or swords with blunt edges. I hadn’t looked up Georgia O’Keeffe yet, but I knew she was an artist, and an artist would have paintbrushes or an easel or something like that. Instead of making any of those things, though, my fingers rolled the papier-mâché into a tube like a telescope, only shorter and with a knob on top. A site level. It’s what surveyors use to measure distances and heights. When I finished the model, it would need a stand. I wasn’t sure if we still had one in our attic or if I would need to build that, too, but my hands knew what they wanted to make.
20
SISTER STUFF
I kept waiting for Cress to go back to normal, but something had changed between us. I couldn’t see exactly how, but I could feel it, like a tiny splinter working its way into my heart.
“I don’t want to get stuck babysitting again,” she said as we rattled our way home on the bus. “Mom says we should be grateful to spend Easter with our cousins, but it’s no fun. Mia never helps. We’re at church all day and there are no cell phones allowed.”
“Do they have an egg hunt?”
“Yeah, but I have to help hide the eggs now that I’m twelve.”
“That stinks.” Cress is six months older than me, but sometimes it feels like more than that.
She nudged my shoulder. “You know what they say, eleven is heaven!”
“No one says that,” I said, and we both cracked up.
The bus turned onto Cress’s street, which is in one of the newer subdivisions that have popped up around the middle school, where huge fields used to hold black-and-white cows. Her house is at least twice as big as ours, but not in a stuck-up way like Diesel’s.
“You’ll help me with my model when I get back, right?” Cress said. “I need to make a miniature Friendship 7 to go with my Katherine Johnson costume. I asked my dad for help and he stared at me like I was speaking French.”
Every Missing Piece Page 8
