by Lee Nichols
I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. Strapped to a chair underwater, I was shivering and my lungs burned. A moment before I blacked out, the chair rose through the icy darkness and broke the water’s surface.
I gasped and coughed, but the instant I caught my breath, he plunged me under again, brought to the verge of drowning over and over.
“Once more, Emma?” he asked. “Or will you answer me now?”
I longed to tell him everything, to end the fear and stop the pain. Then the chair plunged again into the freezing water.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Acknowledgments
Teaser
1
Six weeks ago, my parents disappeared.
I’d left them at the San Francisco airport at seven in the evening, nervous and excited. These were their last words:
Dad: “There’s money in the bank; use your ATM card. If you get in trouble …” He looked at me. “Don’t get in trouble. We have our cell phone. You can call us anytime.”
Mom: “You know a scarf isn’t a jacket, Emma.”
It was a chilly forty-eight degrees—sometimes I wondered if San Francisco was really in California. I’d worn a black sweater, black jeans, black boots, and a red embroidered pashmina my parents brought back from one of their many business trips. The scarf was wound tightly around my neck and shoulders.
Me: “That’s really the last thing you’re going to say to me?”
Mom: “A hat helps, too.”
She fingered my short, choppy blond bob—a haircut she hadn’t approved—looking like she was about to say more, but she hugged me instead.
I suppose if I’d known they were going to vanish, I would’ve said “I love you” and “I’ll miss you.” Instead, I left them at the curb and sputtered home in our ancient Volvo wagon, already planning my fall from grace: clubbing until 4:00 a.m., unsupervised shopping sprees, and maybe even a tattoo if I could come up with something good.
Hoping for inspiration, I paced our mausoleum of a house. Seriously, our coffee table was a stone sarcophagus; it was like we snacked off Nefertiti’s head. My parents were overly fond of the dead, or at least the possessions of the dead. They sold antiquities from a store below our apartment on Fillmore Street, and the apartment was filled with relics and icons. Even the sofa was 150 years old—horsehair, dust mites, and all.
My family had owned the building for generations. I guess we were rich, despite the old car, my pathetic allowance, and public education. Why else would we have the high-tech security system for both the store and apartment, which required a thumbprint to get in? When we were younger, my brother, Max, and I pretended we were 007 agents. Now it was just an aggravation every time I left the house for a red-eye chai from the café next door.
You’re probably wondering what kind of parents leave their seventeen-year-old home alone for God knows how long. They’d said three weeks, but my parents didn’t always stick to the plan—this trip, in fact, was last minute. Still, I wasn’t completely alone. They had exactly one employee, Susan, who’d run the shop for the past ten years, and she was supposed to check on me every night.
Susan’s daughter, Abby, was my best friend—emphasis on was. Two years older than me and two years younger than my brother, we’d grown up together, hanging out after school, obsessing over guys and our mutual lack of nice fingernails. Abby and Max were always close; he even tutored her in French. And with our parents away so often, Susan became a surrogate mother to us.
Then, this summer, when Max was home from Harvard, I discovered him and Abby having The Affair.
I’d just gotten back from the café next door when I heard noises coming from Max’s room. I’d barged in without knocking and discovered them—which put a whole new spin on the French lessons.
It was more of Max’s skin than I’d seen since I was a toddler, but I’d blocked out a lot from my past; it was just one more image to add to the file. And they were both happier than I’d ever seen either of them. For two months, things were great.
Then Max dumped her.
Abby was devastated, and there was nothing I could do except keep the Kleenex and chocolate flowing. I have no idea how Max took the breakup, or why he ended it, because the next day he left for his junior year abroad.
Now he was in Tibet or Timbuktu, someplace he could only be reached by yak. Which was so Max—kind of cool, and kind of cold. Breaking hearts in California so he could bring safe drinking water to remote villages in Asia.
So I wasn’t completely alone, because I still had Susan. Except Abby blamed me for the breakup, or at least I thought she did. I didn’t really know because she hadn’t talked to me since she’d left for UC, Santa Barbara. And her mom was following suit.
While my parents thought me safe in Susan’s hands, she was acting like I was her daughter’s worst enemy. She definitely wouldn’t be checking up on me as much as she usually did. A girl could get into a lot of trouble with so much freedom. I couldn’t wait to get started.
But I wasn’t exactly sure how. Clubbing wasn’t the kind of thing you did alone, the shops were closed, and I was still debating the body art. So I lay alone in bed that night, with only my laptop for company. Instead of talking to actual humans, I messed around on Facebook. I caught up on how everyone was doing at college and stalked my current fixation, the painfully unobtainable Jared from school.
Then I e-mailed Max:
I imagine the yaks run on treadmills to create enough electricity for you to check your messages. Like a Buddhist episode of The Flintstones. Why did you dump Abby? You know you miss me.
—Emma
My daily pleading senryu went to Abby. She never responded, but I was nothing if not tenacious:
My brother is a dickwad
While you rock Organic Chem
Talk to me?
Abby was doing premed at UCSB and worried about Organic Chemistry, so along with knocking Max, I figured I’d send her positive energy. I wasn’t sure question marks were technically allowed in senryu, but I found myself using them a lot. Probably because my life felt like one big question mark lately. Like how was I going to start enjoying my newfound freedom?
By midnight, I was zonked. I was going to have to work on my stamina if I wanted to stay out until four. I clicked send, closed my laptop, and crashed.
Seven hours later, the alarm went off. Though I’d been left alone loads of times, I never got used to the feeling of waking to an empty house. Do you know how loud your spoon sounds against your bowl when it’s only you and your cornflakes in the morning?
I showered and dressed and noticed a sick feeling in my stomach. I tried to identify the anxiety. Not grades, not homework; I didn’t even miss my parents yet. What made me woozy was my lack of friends. It’s not like I was an outcast—I didn’t wear panty hose, I wasn’t the girl who drew spiderwebs all over her face—but my best friend graduated last year and I’d been the unofficial mascot of her class. So it wasn’t only Abby I missed, it was everyone.
Still, I managed to drag myself out the door and my foot nudged something on the mat. A plain white envelope.
A secret admirer? A love letter from Jared?
No, a letter of resignation from Susan. Effective immediately. There were two pages of eloquent regrets, but basically all she said was “I quit.”
Hmm … what was I supposed to do about this? No reason to panic. Maybe my parents had already hired a backup employee. Or maybe they’d be coming home early, before I even had a chance to enjoy their absence.
I walked the block to the bus stop, then ran the last few feet to catch it. I found a seat, took a deep breath, and pulled out my cell to dial Susan.
She answered on the first ring. “You got my letter?”
“You can’t quit now!” I said. “My parents just left for Paris. I’m all alone. Who’s going to run the store?”
“You.”
“Me?” But then I’d have no time for shopping sprees, nightlife, or even a tattoo. Maybe I’d just get a belly ring.
“I’m sorry, Emma. I got another job. In Santa Barbara,” she said, her voice warm and motherly and completely unyielding. “I want to be closer to Abby.”
I swallowed. “Is this about Max?”
“No,” she said. “This is about Abby.”
“I don’t understand why she isn’t talking to me.”
After a moment she said, “I think it’s better if you stop e-mailing her.”
“I just—I miss her …” If she were still here, this whole freedom thing would’ve been a lot more fun.
Susan said, “I left a voice mail with your parents and I’m sure they’ll come right back. I’m sorry, Emma. I really am.”
Then she hung up.
The bus heaved to a stop in front of my school. I watched other students trickle off, meeting their friends on the steps. I stepped out, greeted no one, and walked into the main hall alone, yearning to be anywhere but here.
2
The next two weeks blew.
Every morning I woke in the empty house, pressed Sleep on the alarm, and phoned my parents’ cell. No mysterious backup employee showed up, so either they never got Susan’s voice mail or they decided I was fine on my own. They’d left me one message saying, “Not to worry, we’ve decided to visit Max. We’ll be in touch soon.” I hadn’t heard from them since.
I’d lie there listening to “The customer you are dialing is out of service area,” imagining all the horrors that could befall them. Snicker, because befall was a funny word. Then run through the litany of disasters: torture, sleep deprivation, and constant Celine Dion music piped into their cells. Though I guess it was pretty unlikely they’d ended up at Guantánamo.
They could’ve been kidnapped, except there’d been no ransom demand. Ritual sacrifice would serve them right for ignoring me—tossed into a volcano by some preindustrial Andean tribe, crying out my name as they fell to fiery deaths. Except they’d probably call out, “Maaaaax!”
Then I’d force myself out of bed and slip downstairs through the kitchen, taking the long way to the front door because some of the antiquities were freaking me out. I hadn’t been near my dad’s office since the day they left. In the hallway outside his door was a jumbled collection of funeral urns, and I knew it sounded crazy but it felt as though they were missing him. The area reeked of longing. Those urns had always given me the shivers, so I avoided that part of the house entirely.
I stopped at the Gothic Café next door for my morning red-eye. You know you’ve got a problem when baristas greet you by name. You know you’ve got another problem when it’s the warmest social interaction of your day. My parents would’ve been appalled at how much cash I was dropping on chais, but they weren’t here to stop me, were they?
I dragged myself to school and tried for As so I could get into Berkeley, though given my PSATs, that was looking like a long shot. And ever since the Incident—a little something I no longer discussed—my parents never let me leave home. Hence I never accompanied them on their travels, and I wasn’t even sure they’d let me cross the Bay to attend Berkeley if I got in—which was a big if.
Latin was the only class I enjoyed. I’d taken it since seventh grade. “Eheu fugaces labuntur anni.”* It was one of the few things I had in common with my parents: love for a dead language.
Lunchtime was misery.
Then I got home and opened the store from 3:00 to 9:00 p.m. On Saturday and Sunday I was there from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Sales were actually pretty good, but I couldn’t keep up the pace. I kept nodding off during class—I mean, even more than usual.
My nights were spent sending plaintive, unanswered e-mails to Max, wanting some word of our parents, and writing senryu for Abby that I did not send.
Two weeks. Two weeks since I’d heard from my parents. Freedom so didn’t rock like I thought it would. I hadn’t even had time to get that belly ring. Besides, it wasn’t the sort of thing you did alone.
Then everything changed.
I had chemistry right before lunch, which was a weight-loss triumph because ions and isotopes really curbed my appetite. As class ended one day, I gathered my stuff, thinking about grabbing a yogurt on my way to the library, when Natalie asked if I wanted to hit lunch.
Natalie was new but already had a social life I envied. I think she sat next to me her first day because she thought she could cheat off me—I looked smarter than I was. During the first test, she kept eyeing my paper and scribbling furiously, but when we got back the graded exams she got a B+ and I got a C.
That rattled her, but apparently not enough to turn her against me.
“Want to go to smoke?” she asked.
“Instead of lunch?” Maybe that’s why she was so skinny. She was also dark haired with nice fingernails and a natural tan, and I doubted she’d turn pasty this winter as I inevitably would. “I was thinking more like yogurt.”
“Oh, you poor sheltered lamb.” She ushered me out the door. “You have no idea what you’ve been missing.”
We left campus and walked two blocks to a gray building between a dry cleaner and a butcher. There was no sign, just a clear plastic box over the door filled with—you got it—smoke. I’d walked by a thousand times and had always thought it was a bar.
Inside, the place was painted a light iridescent gray, with the tables and chairs a darker gray and the concrete floor decorated with gold flames. Not a bar, a restaurant called Smoke—full of hot young professionals and some kids from school. A guy laughing in a corner booth waved at Natalie.
She dragged me by the hand toward him.
Except he wasn’t just a guy. He was Jared, my fixation. The one I stalked on Facebook. Last night he’d posted a picture of himself surfing and I started to type in a comment: “Dude, gnarly Rip Curl,” then realized I had no idea what a Rip Curl was, so said nothing.
Four other people sat around the table. Daniel, a Latino guy I had Latin with (I know that sounds ridiculous); Primus, the completely unoriginal nonconformist; and two girls, Maisy and Caroline, who weren’t actually identical twins, despite the way they looked and acted and dressed.
Natalie scooted into a seat and said, “You know Jared, don’t you?”
I eyed him as though I wasn’t sure. “I think our lockers are close?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “You’re that girl.”
What did that mean? I couldn’t judge from his expression.
“Emma got left behind. Her friends all graduated,” Natalie said.
I’d unburdened myself to her on the way over. Actually, she asked me why I didn’t have any friends and I’d explained.
“So she’s with us now,” Natalie said.
I glanced at Maisy and Caroline, expecting hostility. There were already three guys and three girls. Tossing me into the mix threw off the odds. But they smiled, and Caroline said, “I hope you like shopping.”
“Who doesn’t?” I said.
“Let’s so hit up Urban Outfitters after school,” Danie
l said in a girly voice.
“No!” Primus squealed. “Abercrombie is sooo much better.”
“Shut up, losers,” said Maisy. “You know we only go to Saks.”
Natalie then asked me where I got my boots.
Jared eyed them under the table. “Yeah, they’re hot.”
This was the most conversation I’d had with kids my age since Abby left, and I begged myself not to commit social suicide by climbing across the table into Jared’s lap. I murmured something about my mother bringing them back from Europe, and took a sip of water from the glass in front of me to cool down.
“Help yourself,” said Daniel. Oops—it must’ve been his glass.
“Oh! Ego sum rumex.”*
“Haud forsit,”** he said.
“Can the Latin geeks give it a rest?” Primus said. “Unless you want to talk about togas. We were discussing where we’re having our party.”
I asked what the party was for and Maisy told me her brother had promised to score them a keg. They didn’t really need more reason than that. Natalie suggested Primus’s house.
“Not after last time,” Caroline said.
“What happened last time?” I asked, as Primus turned pink.
“His parents and their friends crashed our party,” Daniel said.
“They drank all the beer,” Maisy said.
“And didn’t even put up bucks for cups,” Jared said.
Natalie and I started to laugh as three baskets of French fries and seven Cokes arrived at the table. And just like that, I had a new set of friends.
* Alas, the fleeting years slip away.
* I’m sorry.
** No problem.
3
The next week didn’t suck.
I still spent my first rising moments calling my parents, hoping their phone would start working. I still e-mailed Max in the evenings and wrote unsent senryu for Abby. But now I actually left messages for Jared on his Facebook page. And he wrote back!
