The only question was, did Gaia want to set the clock back that far? Even if she did want to, was she ready to? Sam couldn’t tell. He could certainly tell that she was maintaining a certain degree of distance from him, but she could have been doing it for so many different reasons. After all, if you’d already seen someone disappear, it must be awfully hard to believe they might not disappear again. You couldn’t have love without trust. And how could you trust a man who’d al ready up and died on you once?
All Sam knew was that he wasn’t going to rush anything. He was prepared to carry on in this isolated, untouched, infantilized, incubator-prison world of awkwardness. Just as long as he saw her every single day.
“Well, what’s wrong?” Sam asked. “What’s going on?”
“It’s my father. . . ,” Gaia began, and then she trailed off. From out of absolute nowhere a tear had appeared on her cheek. She dumped her bag on the floor and crouched down against the wall, burying her head in her hands for a half second before visibly forcing herself to regain her composure.
Sam had no choice but to glue his fingers to the arms of his chair. The desire to crouch down next to her and hold her was like some kind of preprogrammed hypnotic command. His fingernails were turning white from clenching the cushy arms of the chair, but he knew a physical gesture would only turn into an awkward disaster.
“I’m sorry,” she uttered.
“No,” Sam said gently, feeling like he was calling to her from a hundred miles away, even though the room was the size of the average rich man’s closet. “Just tell me what it is. Tell me what I can do.”
“I don’t know,” she replied. Her frustration was clearly near the boiling point. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I know Dad is in trouble. They took him, Sam. They took him from the hospital. And I have no idea where. I don’t know where he is and I have no idea who ‘they’ are.”
Sam felt a flash of pure empathy for Gaia’s father. He pictured her father being carried away with nothing to think about but how far he was being taken from his family—how far he was being taken from Gaia. Sam knew every one of those sensations far too well.
“Well. . . we have to find him,” Sam declared. “That’s all. We need to start looking for him right now. We don’t want to waste any time.”
Gaia froze for a moment and looked up at Sam. This rather obvious reply seemed to strike her in some surprisingly deep way, as if Sam had somehow said the thing she’d been longing to hear, even though he couldn’t really imagine what else there could possibly be to say. If someone was missing, what else did you do but start looking immediately? Didn’t they always say that the first forty-eight hours were some kind of critical period for finding missing persons? But still, Gaia’s face had seemed to light up when he said it. Like he’d just solved some riddle she’d been mulling over all morning.
“Yes,” she said, showing the first faint signs of a smile since she’d walked through the door. “Yes, that’s right. Right now. I need to start looking right—”
“We,” Sam corrected her. “We need to start looking.”
Gaia’s smile faded from her face. “Sam. . . you don’t need to be involved in any more of—”
“Gaia.” Sam searched her eyes for some common sense, trying to ignore their mesmerizing shade of ocean blue so as to complete his sentences. “Whoever the hell I’m hiding from right now is out there somewhere. And I’d be willing to bet my second life on the fact that those same people have something to do with whatever is going on with your dad. So we need to start looking for him, Gaia. We.”
Gaia stared into Sam’s eyes. And she kept staring. She stared long enough to confuse him terribly and make his heart beat twice as fast. The longer she looked, the quicker his heart beat.
“What?” he asked finally, praying for her to blurt out a ten-minute monologue about how much she loved him—how much she’d always loved him and had dreamed about him every night he was gone the exact same way he had dreamed about her. . . .
“I don’t know,” she said, lifting her bag off the floor. That wasn’t what he’d had in mind. “I’m just. . . I need to talk to Tatiana. I need to—”
“Look, Gaia . . .” Sam stood up from his chair and took a step closer to her, trying not to make her feel cornered. “I want to help you. And I need you to help me. If this is still your uncle doing this, then we both need to know that. If he’s just a vegetable in a coma, then we need to figure out who is doing it. Either way. . . we . . .” Sam felt his throat beginning to close. “We need each other,” he stated finally. He suddenly felt like he was wobbling wildly on a tightrope, waiting for her response.
Gaia dropped her head down toward her scuffed-up sneakers. The silence was unbearable. “I know, Sam,” she uttered at last. “I know we do.”
Sam felt his entire spine light up. Taking risks was beginning to grow on him.
“Why don’t we meet up?” he went on, a bit too excitedly. “After you’ve talked to Tatiana or after you’re done with whatever you need to do. Tonight. In my palatial headquarters here. And we can go over it all. We can go over what we know and what we don’t know. We can try to plot out a strategy to find your dad.”
Gaia took another moment and then looked up at Sam with a simple half smile that made him nearly lose his balance again. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, you’re right. We need a strategy.”
Sam breathed out comfortably. “Seven-thirty?” he asked.
“Seven-thirty,” she agreed. There was a brief, indefinable pause before she spoke again. “I have to go, okay?” “Okay.” Sam smiled slightly and then backed away toward his chair. He felt like grinning from ear to ear, which made him a little sick. They weren’t going to the movies, for God’s sake, they were meeting to discuss a litany of horrible tragedies. He was just ecstatic that he had managed to earn a little bit of her trust back.
An Army of Thirsty Penguins
GAIA COULDN’T IMAGINE WHY TATIANA would be so utterly stupid as to hang out at the Astor Place Starbucks before school. She’d told Tatiana at least ten times that the Village School’s “master clique,” aka the Friends of Heather, aka the “FOHs,” gathered there in hordes at seven forty-five. They piled into Starbucks like an army of thirsty penguins—swaddled in black and white from head to toe, waddling around with their ice-cold attitudes, preening themselves endlessly, chirping frantically at ear-shattering frequencies, and guzzling down grande lattes like they were about to become extinct.
Gaia would have to try and dart in unnoticed, fish Tatiana out of the nightmarish squall, and get her safely over to Taylor’s Bakery, where they could have coffee priced within their economic bracket and actually hear each other talk.
As she approached the corner of Astor and Lafayette, she could already see through the floor-to-ceiling windows that the penguin show had begun. Starbucks was packed. She took a deep breath, ducked her head, swung open the door, and entered the storm.
The chirping stung her ears as she slid past the painful snippets of profoundly idiotic conversation.
“Does my nose look fat today. . . ?”
“Well, you really have to go to the Isle of Capri to get the best capri pants. . . .”
Hang on, Tatiana, Gaia thought as she tuned out the tragic sounds of elitist teen culture, scanning every cushy chair and wooden table for a sign of her quasi sister. She pictured Tatiana huddling somewhere on the outskirts of the room, cursing Starbucks and the state of American youth as the icy winds of popularity beat her fragile frame deep into the frozen tundra. Just hang on. I’ll save you. . . .
But when Gaia finally did find Tatiana. . . she wasn’t huddling in the least. And she certainly wasn’t on the outskirts of the room, shivering in the winds of idiocy. No. When Gaia found Tatiana, she was, in fact, seated comfortably in the warm and sunny center of a ring of queen idiots. . . .
Gaia froze in her tracks and blinked twice, hoping her vision would clear. But the disturbing image remained the same.
Tatiana was dressed with her usual display of annoyingly perfect casual elegance. A formfitting black knit shirt and a lavender print skirt. Her hair was in its usual perfectly coiffed dancer’s bun. But there was simply nothing usual about the seating. What was she doing on “the Platform”? The platform that was practically reserved for the FOHs? She wasn’t grimacing with fear and loathing. . . she was smiling politely. She wasn’t buried in the hard frozen tundra; she was sitting in one of the biggest cushy chairs, right next to Ed, surrounded by a giant circle of attentive rich girls from hell. Okay, Tatiana and Ed was a normal sight. Ed and the FOHs was not an entirely abnormal sight. He had, after all, gone out with Heather for quite some time back in another life. But Tatiana and the FOHs?
Shake it off, Gaia. You’re seeing things. Either she was hallucinating, or else she was just experiencing an explosive attack of misperception. She stepped closer to try and correct her skewed vision. But stepping closer only made it worse. Seeing this bizarre congregation of individuals was one thing. But actually hearing what they were all discussing was a whole other level of disturbing.
“So, like. . . how blind is she?” Megan Stein asked, scrunching her face into her best approximation of seriousness. She had probably learned the expression by studying her favorite model-turned-news reporters on TV. “I mean, is she, like, sort of blind, or is she, like, totally blind?”
Heather. They were quizzing Ed and Tatiana about Heather. No, not just quizzing. Grilling.
“She’s completely blind,” Ed explained patiently.
“But I mean, what did it to her?” Tammie Deegan followed up, keeping her head tilted to the left to accentuate the swoop in her hair. “Was she taking drugs?”
“No,” Ed replied.
“Was it some kind of symptom of bulimia or something?”
“No,” Ed puffed with frustration.
“Well, can she put on her own clothes and makeup?” Tammie’s brown eyes filled with concern. “I mean, how does she pick her clothes now?”
“I, uh. . .” Ed shrugged slightly and shook his head, most likely as awed as Gaia by the inane and hopeless priorities of the Friends of Heather. The question was not how Heather was coping. The question was what Heather was wearing.
On one hand, Gaia supposed it made sense for them to be asking all these rapid-fire questions. After all, they really hadn’t gotten any real time with Heather before she’d headed off for her semester of training at a school for the blind. But the truth was, Heather hadn’t really wanted to make that time for her “friends.” She’d known that all her loyal subjects would react to her blindness the exact way they were right now. Like it was another sensational piece of juicy gossip to sink their teeth into and devour.
Watching it all go down was making Gaia queasy. She could tell that Ed was just trying to be kind and informative, but what the hell was Tatiana doing there? Gaia had told Tatiana a fair amount about what had happened with Heather, but did she have to share it so shamelessly with the gossip-hungry hordes? Had she ever even spoken to these people before?
“I really don’t think you need to worry about her,” Tatiana assured them.
How did she know whether or not they needed to worry?
“Yeah,” Ed agreed. “In fact, Heather has been so strong through this whole thing, I wouldn’t be surprised if she bounced right back from—”
“Oh my God!” Megan suddenly leapt out of her chair like she’d just discovered the cure for cancer. “I just had the best idea.”
“What?” the FOHs sang, seemingly in unison.
“I totally know how we can help Heather,” Megan announced, nearly falling forward with enthusiasm. She scanned the faces of the entire group, peering at them like she was about to impart the secrets of life. Her entire posse froze with anticipation.
Megan slid the professionally shaggy strands of her three-hundred-dollar blond hair behind her ears and brought her voice down to a near whisper as a smile spread across her proud face. “A benefit,” she whispered loudly.
Gaia watched as a reverent hush fell over all their Stila-glossed lips.
Carrie Longman was the first to finally speak, though she could only muster one word: “Totally,” she agreed, nodding in slow motion.
“Yes,” Megan squeaked, basking in the glow of self-congratulation. “A benefit. Whenever people are suffering, my mom always throws a benefit. We should throw a huge party at some totally swank establishment. We charge at the door, and we donate all the proceeds to finding a cure for Heather’s blindness.”
Gaia could no longer watch this madness from afar. Her mouth could not possibly stay shut at this point. She plowed through the two kids in front of her and stepped up onto the platform, searching Megan’s sparkling eyes for the remotest indication of intelligence. “Heather is not a Cambodian refugee,” Gaia announced flatly. “She doesn’t need a benefit. She just can’t see. And that’s probably only temporary—”
“Excuse me, Gaia,” Melanie Young interrupted. “But one, who asked you? and two, there’s no need for you to worry: You’re not invited.”
“I think it’s a brilliant idea,” Laura Stafford announced, standing up from her chair.
“Genius, Meegs,” Tammie agreed. “You are a genius.”
Gaia dropped her head into her hands. A benefit for Heather? Could they possibly have come up with a more offensive excuse to throw themselves a big party? Just the thought of it was enough to snap Gaia’s priorities back in order. She had not come to Starbucks to eavesdrop on this confederacy of dunces. She had come here to find Tatiana and tell her about her father’s situation. And that was what she was going to do.
She turned to Tatiana to pull her off the platform and deliver her from this nightmare, but before she’d even reached for her arm, Tatiana’s words froze Gaia’s entire body in place.
“I think this is an excellent idea,” Tatiana stated with a smile. “A benefit for Heather? I’d love to help plan it.”
Gaia couldn’t even be sure if her jaw had dropped open or not. She was too stunned to check.
goddamn tornados
like some biker trying to start a fight over who had the biggest Harley
Starbucks Nightmare
“ARE YOU KIDDING?” GAIA COUGHED out, staring dumbfounded at Tatiana. “You’re kidding, right?”
Tatiana shrugged mildly at Gaia. “What? It’s a gesture.” She turned to Megan. “This is a very nice gesture for Heather.”
“Well, thank you.” Megan smiled, turning to Gaia and firing a ballistic missile of sarcasm at her face. “I thought so, too. . . .”
“A gesture?” Gaia scoffed. “Heather’s blind, so let’s have a swanky party? That’s your gesture?”
“Gaia, come on.” Ed smiled, too. “It’s not that big a deal—”
Gaia cut Ed off with a harsh glance. If he thought being her boyfriend meant undermining her in public, then they would have to have a long discussion about the terms of this relationship.
“I think I know where we could do it,” Tatiana announced. “Have you heard of this club Pravda? It has sort of a Russian flavor. Many different vodkas, Russian food—”
“No, it’s totally impossible to book Pravda,” Melanie explained. “We’ll have to find—”
“Wait,” Tatiana interrupted. “It is not totally impossible. I have a friend from Russia. She is friends with the owner. I think I could get us the place for sure. If I call her now, maybe even for tomorrow night.”
Us? What the hell did Tatiana mean, she could book us the place? Were she and the FOHs an “us” now? Was this absurd dream ever going to end?
“Tatiana,” Gaia grunted, stepping closer to her. “I need to talk to you—”
“No way!” Tammie squeaked, staring admiringly at Tatiana. Suddenly they all seemed to be staring at Tatiana with the same reverent bug eyes. “Wait. . . you could seriously get them to close down Pravda for our party? Tomorrow night?”
“I think so, yes.” Tatiana smiled.
“Oh my God, yes!” Tammie howled at a ridiculously unnecessary volume. “This party is going to be awesome. Tatiana, this is so cool. This will be the kind of party Heather would have totally loved. I’m going to start inviting the right people ASAP! No, even better, I’m going to make invitations.”
“I’ll start thinking about decorations,” Tatiana offered.
“Perfect!”
Gaia was beginning to feel faint. The entire scene was so sickening, she was actually feeling woozy. There was apparently very little oxygen on the Platform. The girls began to converge on Tatiana, quizzing her on her Pravda connection and her entire Russian history. Gaia quickly realized that her words would no longer suffice to maintain Tatiana’s attention. She clamped her hand around Tatiana’s wrist and simply dragged her off the Platform before she could offer the ladies yet another smile.
“What is wrong with you?” Tatiana complained, ripping her arm from Gaia’s grip once they’d stepped down. “Why are you being so totally bitchy today?”
“Bitchy?”
“Yes, bitchy. What is your problem today?”
“What’s my problem?” Gaia suddenly became very aware of being watched by the FOHs. Not to mention a rather disgruntled-looking boyfriend. She tugged Tatiana farther into the swarm of coffee-swilling penguins and lowered her voice, looking Tatiana deep in the eyes and trying to get down to business.
“What’s my problem?” she whispered intensely. “My problem is that Dad is missing. That’s my problem.”
“What do you mean, missing?”
Gaia gave Tatiana a quick rundown of her visit to the hospital, informing her of Natasha’s unfortunately lackluster reaction. Once she’d managed to maintain Tatiana’s attention long enough to give her all the information, she let out a long, cathartic breath.
Escape Page 2
