With a stomach-wrenching drop, the scene was ripped away. Park had yanked his arm from my grasp, and I tumbled to the ground. He stood above me, his eyes burning with a cold fire. He opened his mouth to speak, but the police megaphone blared again. “Stay where you are,” the amplified voice repeated.
Park gave me one last glare and disappeared into the crowd. The entire room was a tumble of frantic movement. Instead of saying “Stay where you are,” the officer should just have said, “Completely freak out for a second, then run like hell while we try to apprehend you.”
People knocked into us from all sides. Nathan pulled me to my feet, and I grabbed a handful of Eric’s shirt to keep him close. Cedric had left the DJ station, but the music kept playing, and the lights kept flashing, so the panic of the crowd seemed almost like another dance. Bodies thronged the staircase leading up to the main level. It looked like a death by trampling waiting to happen, and yet I started toward it.
Nathan stopped me. “Through here! The back room!” He pulled me along behind him, so I pulled Eric. Nathan led us away from the crowd and along one wall until we came to a swinging door marked Authorized Personnel Only. We ducked inside, out of the semidarkness of the party into the full-on darkness of an unknown room. Eric dug out his cell phone and turned on the flashlight, revealing a wall of Occupational Safety and Health posters, a water fountain, and a tattered couch. He reached for the light switch.
“Don’t turn on the overheads,” Nathan said. “Do you want to advertise that we’re in here?”
My ears were ringing from the music, and in the quiet room, Nathan’s voice sounded tinny and recorded. “How did you know to come back here?” I asked.
“There’s always a storeroom.” Nathan shielded his eyes when Eric swung the light toward him. “And a fire exit.” He pointed.
Past the towering rows of storeroom shelves, now bare, a red exit sign hovered in the distance. The door was blocked by a rolling metal book cart and a pile of empty cardboard boxes. Nathan and I cleared a path, and Eric opened the door, his light revealing a grim concrete stairwell leading up. Horror-movie warning bells sounded in my mind, but a loud crash from the other side of the storeroom sent me pushing past Nathan and Eric and climbing the stairs two at a time. When we reached the top, Nathan opened the metal door a crack and peered out. He gestured for us to stay quiet, and we emerged into a long, narrow alley between the bookstore and the sporting-goods warehouse next door.
At one end of the alley, the flashing lights of police cars painted the walls blue and red, a Law & Order echo of the party lights inside. A uniformed cop ushered two crying girls into the back of his patrol car. He shut the door and was approached by another officer, a smaller figure in a leather jacket. The lights hit her face. Detective Johnson.
I spun back toward the door. There was no handle on the outside, just a smooth surface that offered no escape. Johnson turned to look down the alley. “You there! Stop! Police!”
Once again, unless she’d said, “You there! Flee the scene of the crime!” she was asking for disappointment.
We ran for the opposite end of the alley, cop footsteps echoing behind us. We hadn’t gone far when I heard a cry. Eric collapsed to the ground behind me. I froze, not sure what to do, and Nathan skidded to a stop as well.
Sprawled on the pavement, Eric glanced at Detective Johnson and the two other officers, who were gaining rapidly. “Go!” he cried. “I’m fine! Go!”
Nathan and I locked eyes. I couldn’t read his expression, but there was no time to take a vote. I sprinted back toward Eric, but Nathan got there first. He had Eric half on his feet by the time I reached them, and the police were almost on top of us.
Then the door from the stairwell flew open again, and a group of five or six guys tumbled out into the alley, right in front of the cops. Johnson stopped herself in time, but the other two took the boys down like bowling pins. Before they could recover, Nathan had hauled Eric the rest of the way up, and we escaped into the night.
“Are you okay?” I asked Eric as we circled back through the neighborhood toward Nathan’s car.
“Fine.” Eric ducked his head. “That was a stunning display of my natural athletic ability. You like?”
Nathan slapped Eric on the back. “I cannot believe you on that guitar. Seriously, man. That was ridiculous.”
“Yes, well,” Eric said. “I dabble.”
Then Nathan stopped short, and he threw out an arm to block us. “Wait.” He ushered us off the sidewalk and into the shadows. A police car blocked the street where we had parked. The interior light was on, and it illuminated a lone cop, his head bent low over a clipboard. We backtracked until the car was out of sight.
“Can’t we go around him?” I asked. “I really should get home.”
“It’s a cul-de-sac,” Nathan said. “No other way in, unless we climb someone’s fence.” He looked over at Eric and me, clearly deciding that, given the company, that was a bad idea. “Even then, we’d have to drive right past him. We’d better hang out for a while.”
We found a tiny neighborhood park. It had no streetlamps, but the playground sand glowed in the moonlight. Eric and Nathan claimed the only two swings, their faces hidden in shadow. I sat on the end of a plastic slide and rubbed my face with my hands. All this effort, all this risk, and we had nothing new.
Eric pulled out his phone and began typing a message.
“Updating your many Twitter followers?” I asked.
“No, I’m texting my mom to let her know I’m going to be later than I thought.”
Nathan and I stared at him in pointed silence.
“What?” Eric said. “I told you. She likes me to have life experiences.”
I snort-laughed so loudly that they both shushed me, which of course made me laugh harder. Eric smiled at me, his face lit by his phone, the only bright spot in the dark.
“You are so strange,” I told him, “that you make everything else seem normal.”
“I take that as a compliment.”
I leaned back against the slide and listened to the creak of the swings as the guys rocked back and forth. The images of Tyler that I’d seen when I’d touched the watch loomed heavy in my mind, but they had to compete with the still-fresh surge of exhilaration I’d felt on that stage, standing beside Nathan and Eric, badda-bumming my sad little heart out. I dug into my pocket for my phone so I could text Elena.
Your fondest wish for me has come true, I wrote.
Today was an Adventures in Babysitting kind of day.
The next thing I knew, Nathan was shaking me gently. “Megan, let’s move. Cops are gone, and it’s after four a.m. I need to be home for breakfast.”
I stood up, stretching the kinks out of my back. “The two of you have very weird families. Do you know that?”
Nathan shot a quick glance over at Eric, who was walking toward the street. He stepped closer to me. “Hey, are you hungry?” he asked. “I mean, do you want to come over?”
I knew I should go straight home. I knew my parents would freak if they woke up and found me gone, even with the note I’d left. I knew Detective Johnson might have recognized me, might even have told my parents where I was.
But my body was still lit up from adrenaline, and I wasn’t ready for the night to be over yet.
“I could eat.”
We dropped Eric at his house, but instead of taking us across the river into DC, Nathan drove down a quiet, tree-lined street in McLean. He parked in front of a two-story colonial with massive pillars in the front. He turned off the car, and I looked around, confused.
“Wait. Where are we?”
“My house,” Nathan said.
“You live here? But you said you lived in DC.”
“No, I said I went to school in DC,” he corrected.
I looked up at the white-framed windows, at the ivy crawling up the brick, and understanding dawned. “You go to a private school in DC. Probably some expensive prep school in—”
; “Georgetown. Yes.”
I pointed a finger at him. “But when we were at that McDonald’s in Northeast, you said you were already in the neighborhood.”
“I was getting my hair cut. You don’t think I’m trusting all this gorgeousness”—he used both hands to indicate his hair—“to some white salon in Georgetown?”
I crossed my arms and gave him a look. “All along, you knew exactly what I thought, and you didn’t correct me. You knew I assumed you lived in that neighborhood because . . .”
“. . . because I’m black,” he finished for me.
I felt a surge of defensiveness, like he was accusing me of something. But there it was. He was right. “Wow, um. Yeah,” I managed. “I did think that.”
He shook his head, his mouth a thin line. “Happens to every black kid in this neighborhood.” His eyes were tired. That look—I’d helped put that look on his face.
“It’s not okay,” I said quietly, “for me to, you know, add to that. I’m sorry.”
He smiled a little and bumped me with his shoulder. “Come inside?”
A hint of indigo touched the sky, the barest tinge of daylight, as we walked up the long driveway to the back door. Nathan walked close enough that his hand brushed mine, and I fought the urge to grab it and hold on for dear life.
He let us into the kitchen, where he put a teakettle on to boil. He set his eyeglasses on the marble countertop and started rummaging through the cupboards, his long arms easily reaching the tallest cabinets, pulling out mixing bowls and ingredients.
“What are you doing?”
“Um . . . making pancakes?”
“You cook?”
He smiled. “Every single day. My grandmother counts on me for breakfast in the mornings. She wakes up super early, so I have to get up even earlier to beat her in here.”
As he worked, I snooped. A doorway off the kitchen led to a little family room, filled with casual furniture and mismatched shelves that overflowed with books and knickknacks. I examined a small wooden Buddha and ran my fingers through a bowl of foreign coins, as varied in color and size as the different languages that marked them. A framed family photo hung above the slouchy sofa.
“Um, Nathan,” I called out to him, “could I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure.”
“Are your parents, like, Asian?”
He appeared in the doorway. “Chinese, yeah.”
“But . . . you aren’t.”
“True enough,” Nathan said. “They fostered me when my mom took off, and I got to stay. They legally adopted me when I was three.” The teakettle whistled from the kitchen, and Nathan ducked back inside.
“And your grandmother lives with you?”
“Yeah. My dad’s mom. She moved down here from Rockville.” Nathan stepped out into the living room. “Just so you know, before you meet her, she has Alzheimer’s.”
“Oh.”
“She usually thinks I’m my grandfather. He died a few years ago, which is when she came to live with us. And if you needed one more reason to believe that Alzheimer’s is a totally messed-up disease, it’s that it would make anyone believe I’m a seventy-year-old Chinese man.”
“Well,” I said, “you do usually dress like a seventy-year-old man.”
Nathan smiled. “I wear a lot of his clothes.”
“Aha.” Things started clicking into place in my head. “You drive his car?”
“Yes.”
“And Frank Sinatra?”
“My grandparents immigrated here in the sixties,” Nathan said. “Apparently my grandfather thought that to be a good American, you had to act like a member of the Rat Pack. When my grandmother moved in with us, his stuff came with her: the albums, the clothes, the car. I fell in love with all of it. Kinda became my thing.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Tea should be ready.”
I flopped down onto the sofa and let out a long breath. My muscles relaxed, as though my whole body was melting into the cushions, pulling me toward sleep. I could see Nathan in the kitchen, one narrow hip leaning against the countertop, pouring tea from a clay pot into small matching cups. His hair looked taller than usual, and my gaze lingered on the contours of his face. I felt a tug in my chest, a physical sensation, pulling me toward him.
He came back into the family room with the teacups and offered me one. I took it, cupping its warmth in both hands and bringing it to my nose. I breathed in the scent of bitter grass and raisins and flowers—a smell I associated with Nathan himself—and stared into the bottom of the cup, where tiny leaves swirled.
He lowered himself onto the sofa beside me with a yawn and propped his feet on the coffee table. “The batter’s done,” he said. “Now we wait for my grandmother to wake up.” He sipped his tea, then let his head fall back against the cushions.
I mirrored him, resting my head and closing my eyes.
I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, my eyes fluttered open, and I was staring at the ceiling. The teacup in my hand hadn’t spilled, and it was still warm, so I couldn’t have been out for more than a few minutes.
I turned to look at Nathan and found his sleeping face only inches from my own. As though he sensed me there, his eyes opened, and he smiled.
I felt my breathing go shallow.
Nathan closed the tiny gap between us and brushed my nose with his. Then he inched away from me, and his eyes locked on mine.
Footsteps sounded in another part of the house. Nathan and I sat up with a guilty start as an older Asian woman emerged down the stairs into the living room. Her steps were hesitant, her hair streaked with gray. But her small smile bloomed into a larger one when she spotted her grandson.
Nathan jumped up and rushed to greet her. “Hai, měi lì.” I followed them into the kitchen as he walked her over to the table and helped her into a seat. Pleased, his grandmother studied his face closely, patting his cheek with one hand. Nathan kissed the top of her head. He went to the stove and turned on the heat, pouring pancake batter into a pan with a secret, faraway smile.
I had a sudden sensation of falling, like I’d dropped through a wormhole and come out in another world. Everything looked the same, but it all felt different. This was not the Nathan I knew. Or, rather, it was the face I knew, but not the Nathan I’d imagined. And I’d spent a lot of time over the last few weeks imagining him. I tried to shake off this new Nathan, to go back to the moment before and shut the door against him. But he stayed, stubbornly glued in place, and I couldn’t seem to remove him without tearing away something essential. I leaned back against the pantry door and sipped my tea.
As the sun came up, tinting the kitchen with rose-colored light, we ate pancakes seasoned with ginger and drank hot tea until I almost liked the taste. After we’d loaded the last dish into the dishwasher, Nathan and I climbed into the front seat of his car so he could take me home. In the dawning light, the car’s exterior paint glowed a bright cadmium orange.
“So this is a Rambler, huh?” I ran my hands over the pale-orange dashboard studded with mysterious silver buttons and knobs. I looked up at him and grinned. “Well, let’s ramble.”
As Nathan fished out his keys, I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. The marbles in my pocket were poking into my hip bone. I pulled one out and held it up to examine it more closely. With the light behind it, it looked like a tiny moon, putting the morning sun into eclipse.
Where did you come from, little marbles? I thought.
Maybe I could find out.
It had been easy to see the memories with Dr. Brightman’s help, but everything I’d seen on my own had come to me without my even trying. I hadn’t really tried to control the ability, to unlock a memory from an object that didn’t give up its secrets with a single touch. I held the marble in the palm of my hand, and like Dr. Brightman had suggested, I unfocused my eyes and imagined myself traveling deep within its metal core, unlocking the light.
A flash. A needlelike pain behind my eyes, so sharp it snapped my head ba
ck. And the world around me disappeared in a blaze of light.
CHAPTER 12
AS THE LIGHT FADED, I COULD SEE TYLER AND BOBBY standing in a luxurious wood-paneled study, where bookshelves lined the walls and a portrait of Abraham Lincoln hung behind a massive desk. Tyler pulled Dr. Brightman’s book about John Wilkes Booth off one of the shelves and started paging through it. Across the room, Bobby opened the door of an elaborately carved wooden cabinet, and his face lit with delight. He reached in and took out a cigar, which he smelled deeply, drawing it across his face under his nose.
“Leave it,” Tyler said.
Bobby’s jaw dropped in a parody of shock. “But you’re trolling the shelves for first editions.”
“No, I’m not. Park told me he wouldn’t buy any more books.” He put Disasters in the Sun down on the desk. “And besides, I wouldn’t take anything from here. The Tyrant would bust Emma’s ass.”
The high-backed leather office chair behind the desk spun around, revealing Emma, drinking from a bottle of vodka she held in one hand. “And it’s such a gorgeous ass, wouldn’t you say?”
Tyler smoothed a hand across the top of Herndon’s desk. “So is this where your dad comes up with all his political decrees?” He pounded a fist on the wood. “Eliminate the capital gains tax! People worked hard for that money!”
Emma rolled her eyes and swatted at him. “God, you’re so obsessed with politics now. Just leave it, okay?”
Bobby leaned on an overstuffed armchair, the cigar still in his hand. “So where’s the good stuff? Brittany’s dad had all those high-end bottles of cognac. I figured Herndon would be stocking something at least as impressive as that.” He wandered over to a sleek black safe that stood in one corner. “What’s in here?”
“Guns, I think.” Emma shrugged. “Daddy loves his guns.”
Tyler picked up an object from the desk, and my heart lurched when I saw it was the Lincoln box. “He doesn’t collect rare Chinese stamps? Hundred-thousand-dollar comic books? Come on, Em, what’s his secret?”
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