“Hal, will you stop doing that?! It’s driving me crazy.” Nia spoke in a growl.
“Stop doing what?” I’d just been sitting there thinking about how we were never going to see Amanda’s box again, but unless Nia had suddenly developed ESP, the odds were she wasn’t railing against my negative thoughts.
“That.” She mimed flicking something with her finger, and I realized I must have been opening and shutting the watch without realizing it. “You do it all the time.”
“I do? Sorry,” I said, and I started to shove the watch back into my pocket.
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask—what is that?” asked Callie, reaching for the watch.
“It’s a pocket watch,” said Nia.
As Nia came over to where Callie and I were sitting, I suddenly remembered Frieda’s warning. This was bad. This was very bad.
Taking it from me, Callie held the watch up to her face and squinted at the inscription in the dim light. “I know you,” she read.
“Guys,” I announced, “we need to separate.”
Callie was too focused on what she was reading to pay attention to what I’d just said, but Nia heard me.
“What are you talking about? We just got back together, you idiot.”
“No,” I insisted. “I mean, yes. But we shouldn’t have. It’s dangerous for us to be together.”
I was about to explain everything that Frieda had told me when Callie said, “‘I know you. You know me.’ I don’t get it.”
My head snapped around to look at her. “What did you just say?”
“I don’t get it,” Callie repeated.
“Before that.”
“Um, ‘I know you. You know me.’”
“That’s not what it says,” I told her. “It says, ‘I know you,’ then ‘x2’ in parentheses, then ‘know me.’”
Callie shook her head and showed me the all-too-familiar inscription. “The ‘x2’ in parentheses means multiply the item immediately proceeding it by two, in this case, the ‘you.’ It’s algebraic notation.”
“Oh my god,” I said.
Because suddenly I knew where the inscription came from.
Callie laughed, misunderstanding my amazement. “It’s not that big a deal. You just—”
“No, you don’t understand! I know what it means now. ‘I know you. You know me.’”
The girls stared at me blankly.
“This watch.” I pointed at it. “It’s from Amanda. And the inscription—it’s a song.” I threw my head back, unsure about whether I wanted to laugh or cry. “It’s a Beatles song. ‘I know you. You know me.’ Those are the lyrics.”
“Amanda,” Callie whispered.
“Um, okay,” said Nia. “Not exactly the most exciting but, you know, who am I to criticize the Beatles? I mean, ‘Michelle’ might be fairly mundane, but ‘Day in the Life—’”
“The message.” I held out my hand in the universal signal for stop. I needed time, literally, for all the gears in my own head to spin. “The message is come together. She’s telling us to work together to find her.” The song played in my head and I almost shouted the chorus at Nia and Callie. “‘Come together, right now, over me!’ It’s not dangerous for us to work together. It’s crucial!”
“What are you talking about?” Nia asked.
“Why would it be dangerous?” Callie added.
“Frieda said—” But they didn’t know about my trip to see Frieda. They didn’t know because I hadn’t told them. And I hadn’t told them because I’d been so eager to be the one to find Amanda that I’d missed the most important tool for finding her.
Us. The three of us. Together.
A small buzz began, growing louder over the next few seconds.
“We have less than a minute to get backstage,” Nia observed, pushing a button on her phone and standing up.
Callie jumped up. “Wait! We didn’t figure out how to get the box back.”
“Oh, but we did,” Nia said, moving toward the door.
“We did?” I asked.
“Together,” Nia prompted, and Callie and I looked at each other and then back at her, neither of us getting it.
Nia shook her head, clearly amazed by how dense we were. “Where are we all going to be together in less than an hour?”
“Um, nowhere?” Callie offered.
“Um, cast party?” Nia corrected her. “But I like the sarcasm. I must be rubbing off on you.” She gestured with her hand for Callie to join her at the door, and Callie did.
Suddenly I remembered. “The cast party’s at Heidi’s.”
“Oh, no! No way!” Callie wagged her index finger at Nia. “I don’t mean to be a drama queen or anything, but I promised myself I’d never set foot in that house again.”
Close enough that she could reach out and grab Callie’s hand, Nia did just that, pulling Callie through the door. “Yes, objection duly noted, okay?”
As she and Callie disappeared into the corridor, Nia called to me over her shoulder. “Get your mom to drop you at Heidi’s after the play.”
The door closed behind them, leaving me alone in the art room, so amazed at everything that had just happened I fell against the back of the sofa. Here I was, right where I’d been when Callie surprised me, yet I felt so completely different I might as well have traveled halfway around the world. I touched my forearm where the tattoo of a cougar was fading a little every day.
One man in his time plays many parts.
You’re on the bus or you’re off the bus.
The time for me to be the loner had come to an end.
Now it was time for me to be a friend.
Chapter 17
“You do realize it could be anywhere, don’t you?”
We were standing on the Braggs’ front lawn. As it turned out, Mom had given me and Callie a ride, and Nia had hopped out of her parents’ car less than a minute after my family’s Subaru pulled away. In spite of my happiness at being reunited with Callie and Nia, standing there, the brightly lit windows of the house’s enormous interior casting shadows on the perfectly cropped grass, I couldn’t help being more than a little overwhelmed by our task.
“The only question is how we’re going to get past Heidi in the first place. Once that’s accomplished, we’re golden.” Nia’s voice was so confident I couldn’t believe we had the same agenda. It was like I was planning on breaking into Fort Knox and she was hoping to get herself a Limonata, which I happened to remember was her favorite drink. No common soda for Nia. “Oh, don’t worry about that; Heidi’s going to be late,” Callie said casually.
I was totally confused by that. “How can she be late? The party’s at her house.”
“She’ll stay in her room getting ready,” Callie explained, brushing her hands together. “She’ll want to make an entrance.”
“But it’s her house,” I repeated stupidly.
Suddenly Callie and Nia burst out laughing, like I’d just uttered the funniest thing since Abbott and Costello’s Who’s on First.
“Sorry, Hal,” Callie said, covering her mouth with her hand but unable to prevent another burst of laughter from escaping.
“Yeah, sorry,” Nia echoed, laughing, too.
“Let me guess—I’m being such a guy, right?”
“Something like that,” Callie assured me, patting my arm as she and Nia, emboldened rather than daunted by what a dolt they were working with, started up the lawn toward the Braggs’ house.
There were a few cars parked in the driveway, meaning either the Braggs had a fleet of automobiles or that some of the older cast members had already arrived. As Callie pushed the front door open without knocking, voices from inside made it clear we were not the first guests to show, which was a relief. The bigger the crowd, the easier it would be to disappear.
Everything as far as the eye could see was white or off-white—the sofas, the rugs, even the walls, which didn’t seem to be painted so much as . . . upholstered in a pale beige silky fabric. To my right, a
bunch of people were gathered around an enormous glass table in the gigantic dining room. To my left was a sunken living room that was itself roughly the square footage of my entire downstairs. For once I was glad to be no good at math—just thinking about calculating the odds of finding a twelve-inch-by-twelve-inch box in all that space was enough to make me want to turn around and go home. Forget the fact that the box could be anywhere in the house. It could be anywhere not in the house.
“Should we split up?” I suggested, trying to silence the voices of doom in my head. “Text if we find something?”
At this suggestion, Nia spun to face us. “Give me your phone numbers.”
Callie’s face was bewildered. “Nia, what are you talking about—you’ve called me a million times by now. You have my number.”
Nia pulled an iPhone from the tiny handbag that swung from her wrist.
“You got an iPhone!” Callie nearly gasped.
In response, Nia wacked Callie on the butt with her bag. “No, you shallow I-Girl, it’s my brother’s. He loaned it to me.”
“That’s former I-Girl,” Callie corrected her. “And where’s your phone?”
“Out of juice,” Nia explained, and she prepared to enter our numbers into Cisco Rivera’s phone. Her eyes gleamed in a way that made me wonder if Cisco knew he’d loaned his sister his iPhone. “Now, scoot.”
* * *
Of course Nia and Callie were right that it made total sense for me to go upstairs and risk running into Heidi and the other I-Girls. Our little scene in the auditorium notwithstanding, I hardly had the history with Heidi and her flunkies that Nia and Callie did. Still, that fact did nothing to make my heart pound less furiously as I pushed open the bedroom door of the Orion police chief.
Oh, sorry, sir, I was just looking for the bathroom. Now, really, I don’t think we need those handcuffs, it was an honest mistake. Sir! Sir! Chief Bragg, don’t I get even one phone call–
I tried to shake this image from my head, but by the time I was literally on my hands and knees under the desk in what must have been a guest bedroom, it was getting increasingly hard to come up with a plausible story to explain my behavior. I think I might have left my coat last time I was over. When was that, you say? Oh, uh, I’m pretty sure it was never.
I’d been looking for at least forty-five minutes, and all I’d learned was that Mrs. Bragg had so many shoes they literally could not be contained within the more than dozen closets upstairs—when I opened the closet door in the guest room, a box dropped onto my head and red shoes exploded, the heels so spiky the impact of one with my head brought tears to my eyes. I was rubbing the spot on my scalp where a small lump was swiftly growing when my phone buzzed.
MEET ME DOWNSTAIRS IN HALLWAY BTWN
KITCHEN & LIVING ROOM.
I’d never been so happy to do anything as I was to flee the upstairs of the Braggs’ house. Walking by a closed door I’d passed before, I concluded from the Miley Cyrus now blasting from within that it was Heidi’s, and I was relieved to know she was still sequestered in her room, at least for the moment.
Moment, unfortunately, being the key word, I realized, as I took the winding stairs two at a time.
“What are you doing, Hal?”
I spun around so fast I’m pretty sure I heard something in my ankle pop. Just looking for the bathroom. Just looking for the bathroom. Just . . .
But the person addressing me from the archway between the foyer and the Braggs’ dining room wasn’t a member of the Bragg family. It was a sophomore girl who’d played one of the courtiers in exile, Theresa Ax, also known as Terri.
Was she a good friend of Heidi’s, good enough that she’d know there was no reason for me to be wandering around upstairs in Heidi’s house?
“Um . . .” She was holding a sandwich and looking at me in this really intense way. Maybe it was just the guilt talking, but to me her look definitely said, I’m onto you. . . . I decided to punt. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“I said, what are you doing here?”
Here like upstairs at Heidi’s house? Here like in the foyer?
“I . . .” It was one thing to tell Chief Bragg I was looking for the bathroom, another to casually inform Terri the sophomore girl that I’d been standing somewhere with my pants down.
She flipped her long black hair over her shoulder in a way that made me wonder if she was auditioning for a position in the soon-to-be-formed I-Girl sophomore division. If that were the case, I hoped for her sake that she spelled Terri with an i and not a y. “I don’t think I’ve, like, ever seen you at a party before.”
“Oh, well . . .” My ankle was throbbing and I felt the buzz of my phone vibrating in my jacket pocket.
She took a bite of her sandwich and looked at me. “We should seriously hang out.”
Was this another Heidi Bragg trick? Would I ever again be able to talk to anyone without wondering what her ulterior motive might be? “Yeah, sure,” I said. Kitchens were usually near dining rooms, weren’t they? That was how it worked in my house, anyway. I looked over Terri’s shoulder—sure enough, there was a swinging door behind her.
Kitchen.
“I’ll catch you later,” I said, then turned and practically flew through the swinging door.
The kitchen was crowded with people from the play. For a second I didn’t see any of the I-Girls, but then I looked again and, out of the corner of my eye, spotted the one with the dark hair—I was pretty sure her name was Traci or Kelli. She was pouring some diet soda into a couple of glasses, and as I headed toward the door on the opposite side of the room, the one I was sincerely hoping would lead me to the hallway Callie was talking about, I thought she might have looked up and seen me. Right as we made eye contact, Nia, coming from the side, bumped into her. Traci/Kelli stumbled and several glasses of soda spilled down the front of her shirt.
Traci/Kelli’s squeal of fury was like something you’d hear in a documentary about wildlife of the Amazon basin. I took a step toward them, ready to help out if she needed me, but Nia began to laugh.
Traci/Kelli’s eyes widened with amazement. “You’re laughing, you freak?”
Nia crossed her arms over her chest, still laughing. “Yes, I-Girl, I am.”
A couple of people standing around laughed briefly at Nia’s retort as Traci/Kelli rattled the ice in one of the near-empty glasses in her direction. “You’ll regret this!”
Nia shook her head mock-regretfully. “You know something? I really don’t think I will.”
As I pushed through a door and out of the kitchen, I could not help but smile. I found myself standing at one end of a short hallway, empty except for Callie, who was standing about halfway down it staring at the wall.
“Hey,” she said, glancing over and seeing it was me before going back to looking at the wall in front of her.
“Hey,” I said. “Nia’s kicking ass and taking names.” I went to stand beside her and see what she was staring at.
The sight nearly made me gag.
The wall was covered, almost literally, with photos of the Bragg family, particularly Brittney Bragg. There must have been five hundred pictures of them—the Braggs on a ski slope, goggles around their necks, parkas unzipped despite the cold that turned their breath white. Brittney Bragg in the shortest shorts I’d ever seen cracking a bottle over the bow of . . . I leaned forward and squinted. Bragging Rights. Of course. There was a series of faux-casual black-and-white pictures of the family, Brittney in a crisp, white, collared shirt, Chief Bragg in jeans and a dark T-shirt. Heidi wore a sundress, and her little brother was in what looked to be a soccer uniform.
Then there was the overseas portion of the wall: Chief and Mrs. Bragg at the Great Wall of China, the Acropolis, in front of the towering cruise ship that had no doubt delivered them to such exotic locales. In every photo, the two or three or four Braggs were smiling broadly, looking, for all the world, like the all-American family they were pretending to be.
I shook my head in am
azement. “How is it possible for pure evil to look so happy-go-lucky?”
“This shouldn’t be here,” Callie stated firmly.
“I mean, why limit ourselves to the pictures? The whole development is a scourge on the face of the planet.”
She shook her head. “But I mean, specifically, this wall.”
“I hear what you’re saying, but, well, you know, without walls houses kind of . . . fall down.” Quickly, I added, “I’m kidding.”
“Maybe with all that knowledge you should consider a career in architecture.” A small smile played at the corner of Callie’s mouth.
She stepped forward and knocked at the wall, then shook her head. “I don’t even know what I’m knocking for. But they always do it in the movies.”
“Do you think it’s hollow?” I stepped forward and knocked also, but the wall sounded like a wall.
“No, it’s not that. Look.” She pulled me back in the direction I’d come from and opened a door I hadn’t even noticed when I’d walked past. Inside was a laundry room.
Not quite sure what Callie was showing me, I looked around. But the room we were in just seemed like your basic, run-of-the-mill laundry room—washer, dryer, rack for hanging stuff. There were boxes of detergent and fabric softener on a shelf above the machines and an iron on an ironing board that stuck out of the wall next to a small door that looked like it might have led to a closet.
“Got it?” asked Callie.
“Um, okay, yeah.”
“Now, look at this.” She pulled me back into the hallway; a few feet past where we’d been standing, she opened another door. The room reminded me of the family room at Nia’s—except that here the TV was approximately the size of the screen at your local multiplex. There was a stereo and a wall of built-in bookcases that, instead of books, held even more photos, mostly of Brittney Bragg smiling with local celebrities and politicians.
Callie watched me watching the room. “What do you notice?” she asked finally.
“That the Braggs are even more culturally illiterate and less aware of their relative insignificance in the world than I’d ever imagined?”
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