Forever. Part 25

"You're p.i.s.sed," he said. "I'm almost there, Isabel. I've almost got something. I think I - I'm really close. I need to talk to Sam. If I can get him to talk to me."

And then he was just a tired, good-looking guy, not a rock star with tens of thousands of fans who wondered where he was or a genius with a brain so big that it rebelled against being used and tried to invent ways to hurt itself instead.

Looking at him looking like that, I felt like I needed something from him, or somebody, and that probably meant that he also needed something from me, or somebody, but the revelation was like looking at spots on a slide. Knowing that it meant something to somebody wasn't the same as it meaning something to you.

And then I heard a familiar sound - the crack of the lock on the door at the end of the hall as the dead bolt unlocked. Someone else was here.

"s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t!" I hissed. I had two seconds to devise a plan. "Get your stuff and get under the counter!" Cole grabbed his slide and juice and Band-Aid wrapper and I checked to make sure he was pushed underneath the counter before I hit the light to the lab room and slid underneath with him.

The door at the end of the hall opened with a slow series of pops, then clunked heavily shut again. I heard my mother's irritated sigh, loud and dramatic enough to be heard all the way in the lab room. I hoped her irritation was because she thought someone had left the hall light on.

There was nothing of Cole but the glint of his eyes in the darkness, the light from the hall reflecting on them. There was not a lot of s.p.a.ce under the counter, so we were knee to knee, foot crushed on top of foot, impossible to tell whose breath was whose. We were both absolutely silent, listening to my mother's progress. I heard her heels click into one of the first rooms - probably the reception area. She was there for a several moments, shuffling around. Cole readjusted one of his feet so that my boot wasn't pressing into his ankle bone. I heard something in his shoulder pop as he moved. He braced one of his arms on the wall behind me. I somehow had a hand between his legs, so I withdrew it.

We waited.

My mother said, very clearly, "Dammit." She crossed the hall into one of the exam rooms. I heard more paper shuffling. It was black as sleep in the cubby beneath the counter, too dark for my eyes to get used to, and it felt like we had more legs between the two of us than we really ought to. My mother dropped papers; I could hear the whoosh and ticking of them spreading over the floor and tapping into the exam table. She didn't swear this time, though.

Cole kissed me. I should have told him to stop, to keep still, but I wanted it. I didn't move from where I was curled up against the wall, just let him kiss me and kiss me again. It was the sort of kiss that would take a long time to recover from. You could take each of our kisses, from the very first moment we'd met, and put them on slides under a microscope, and I was pretty sure what you'd find. Even an expert would see nothing on the first one, and then on the next one, the start of something - mostly outnumbered, easily destroyed - and then more and more until finally this one, something that even the untrained eye could spot. Evidence that we'd probably never be cured of each other, but we might be able to keep it from killing us.

I heard the sound of my mother's footsteps a second before the light to the lab room went on. Then a heavy sigh.

"Isabel, why?"

Cole leaned away and so we were like two possums behind a Dumpster when she stood back to look at us. I saw her doing a quick vitals check: We had all our clothing on, nothing was rumpled, we weren't injecting ourselves with anything. She looked at Cole; Cole smiled lazily back at her.

"You - you're from ..." my mother started. She squinted at him. I waited for her to say NARKOTIKA, though I'd never imagined her a fan. But she said, "The boy from the stairs. From the house. The naked one. Isabel, when I said I didn't want you to do this in the house, I didn't mean to take it to the clinic. Why are you under this counter? Oh, I don't want to know. I just don't."

I didn't really have anything to say.

My mother rubbed one of her eyebrows with a hand that was holding a closely printed form. "G.o.d, where is your car?" "Across the road," I said.

"Of course it is." She shook her head. "I am not telling your father I saw you here, Isabel. Just, please, do not ..." She didn't define what I was supposed to avoid doing. Instead, she threw my half-drunk bottle of juice in the trash can by the door, and turned the light out again. Her shoes receded down the hallway and then there was the popping of the outside door opening and closing. The clunk of the dead bolt.

In the darkness, Cole was invisible, but I could still feel him beside me. Sometimes you didn't have to see something to know it was there.

I felt a tickle on my skin; it took me a moment to realize that Cole was driving his die-cast Mustang up my arm. He was laughing to himself, hushed and infectious, as if there was still any reason to be quiet. He turned the car around at my shoulder and headed back down toward my hand, the wheels skidding on my skin a bit when he laughed.

I thought it was the truest thing I'd ever heard from Cole St. Clair.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX.

* SAM *

I didn't realize how accustomed I'd become to a lack of routine until we had one. Somehow, with Grace back in the house and Cole's scientific exploration more focused, our lives took on a sheen of normalcy. I became diurnal again. The kitchen once more became a place for eating; on the counter, prescription drug bottles and scribbled notes were slowly exchanged for cereal boxes and coffee mugs with rings in the bottom. Grace s.h.i.+fted only once in three days, and even then just for a few hours, returning shakily to bed after shutting herself in the bathroom for the duration. The days felt shorter, somehow, when night and sleeping came on a schedule. I went to work and sold books to whispering customers and came home with the feeling of a condemned man given a few days' reprieve. Cole spent his days trying to trap wolves and fell asleep in a different bedroom each night. In the mornings, I caught Grace putting out pans of stale granola for the pair of racc.o.o.ns, and in the evenings, I caught her wistfully looking at college websites and chatting with Rachel. We were all hunting for something elusive and impossible.

The wolf hunt was on the news most nights.

But I was - not quite happy. Pending happy. I knew this was not really my life; it was a borrowed life. One that I was temporarily wearing until I could sort out my own. The date of the wolf hunt felt far away and implausible, but it was impossible to forget. Just because I couldn't think of what to do didn't mean that something didn't need to be done.

On Wednesday, I called Koenig and asked him if he could give me directions to the peninsula so I could properly investigate its potential. That's what I said - "properly investigate." Koenig always seemed to have that effect on me.

"I think," Koenig said, with an emphasis on think that indicated he really meant know, "that it would be better if I took you out there. Wouldn't want you getting the wrong peninsula. I can do Sat.u.r.day."

I didn't realize that he had made a joke until we'd hung up, and then I felt bad for not laughing.

On Thursday, the newspaper called. What did I have to say about the Grace Brisbane missing persons case?

Nothing, that was what I had to say. Actually, what I had said to my guitar the night before was you can't lose a girl you misplaced years before

stop looking

stop looking

But the song wasn't ready for public consumption, so I just hung up the phone without saying anything else.

On Friday, Grace told me that she was coming with Koenig and me to the peninsula. "I want Koenig to see me," she said. She was sitting on my bed matching socks while I tried out different ways of folding towels. "If he knows I'm alive, there can't be a missing persons case."

Uncertainty made an indigestible lump in my stomach. The possibilities sown by that action seemed to grow rapid and fierce. "He'll say you have to go back to your parents."

"Then we'll go see them," Grace said. She threw a sock with a hole in it to the end of the bed. "Peninsula first, then them."

"Grace?" I said, but I wasn't sure what I was asking her.

"They're never home," she said recklessly. "If they're home, me talking to them was meant to be. Sam, don't give me that look. I'm tired of this ... not knowing. I can't relax, waiting for the ax to fall. I'm not going to have people suspecting you of - of - whatever it is they think you did. Kidnapped me. Killed me. Whatever. I can't fix very much these days, but I can fix that. I can't take the idea of them thinking of you that way."

"But your parents ..."

Grace made a ma.s.sive ball of socks without mates between her hands. I wondered if I'd unknowingly been wandering about all this time in socks that didn't quite match. "They only have a couple of months until I'm eighteen, Sam, and then they can't say anything about what I do. They can choose the hard way and lose me forever as soon as my birthday rolls around, or they can be reasonable and we can one day be on speaking terms with them again. Maybe. Is it true that Dad punched you? Cole says he punched you."

She read the response in my face.

"Yeah," she said, and she sighed, the first evidence that this topic held any pain for her. "And that is why I'm not going to have a problem having this conversation with them."

"I hate confrontation," I muttered. It was possibly the most unnecessary thing I had ever said.

"I don't understand," Grace said, stretching out her legs, "how a guy who never seems to wear any socks has so many ones that don't match."

We both looked at my bare feet. She reached out her hand as if she could possibly reach my toes from where she sat. I grabbed her hand and kissed her palm instead. Her hand smelled like b.u.t.ter and flour and home.

"Okay," I said. "We'll do it your way. Koenig, then your parents."

"It's better to have a plan," she said.

I didn't know if that was true. But it felt true.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN.

* ISABEL *

I hadn't forgotten about Grace's request for me to find out about summer school, but it took me quite awhile to figure out how to go about tracking down the answer. It wasn't as if I could pretend it was for me, and the more precise my questions got, the more I'd draw suspicion. In the end, I figured out a solution by accident. Emptying out my backpack, I found an old note from Ms. McKay, my favorite teacher from last year. Which wasn't saying much, but still. This particular note dated from my "problematic period" - my mother's words - and in it, Ms. McKay let me know that she would be happy to help me if I would let her. It reminded me that Ms. McKay was good at answering questions without asking any of her own.

Unfortunately, everyone else also knew this about Ms. McKay, so there was always a line to see her after last period. She didn't have an office, just the English cla.s.sroom, so to an outsider, it looked like five students were waiting desperately to get in there and learn some Chaucer.

The door opened and closed as Hayley Olsen left the cla.s.sroom and the girl in front of me went in. I moved forward one step and leaned against the wall. I hoped Grace knew how much I did for her. I could have been at home doing nothing by now. Daydreaming. The quality of my daydreams had improved exponentially as of late.

Footsteps slapped up behind me, followed by a sound that was unmistakably a backpack hitting the ground. I glanced back.

Rachel.

Rachel was like a caricature of a teen. There was something incredibly self-aware with the way she presented herself: the stripes, the quirky smocks, the braids and the twisted k.n.o.bs she put her hair into. Everything about her said quirky, fun, silly, naive. But, this: There was innocence and there was projected innocence. I had nothing against either, but I liked to know what I was dealing with. Rachel knew darn well how she wanted people to see her, and that was what she gave them. She wasn't an idiot.

Rachel saw me looking but pretended not to. My suspicion had already settled, however.

"Fancy seeing you here," I said.

Rachel flashed me a grimace that lasted about as long as a movie frame; too fast for the human eye to properly perceive. "Fancy."

I leaned toward her, my voice lowered. "You wouldn't be here to talk about Grace, would you?"

Her eyes widened. "I'm already seeing a counselor, but that's none of your business."

She was good.

"Right. I'm sure you are. So you aren't going in to confess anything to Ms. McKay about her or the wolves," I said. "Because that would be so incredibly dumb, I can't begin to tell you."

Rachel's face cleared suddenly. "You know."

I just gave her a look.

"So it really is true." Rachel rubbed her upper arm and studied the floor.

"I've seen it."

Rachel sighed. "Who else knows?"

"n.o.body. It's staying that way, right?"

The door opened and closed. The student in front of me went in; I was next. Rachel made an annoyed noise. "Look, I didn't do my English reading! That's why I'm here. Not for anything about Grace. Wait. That means that you are here for her."

I wasn't sure how she'd managed to come to that conclusion, but it didn't change the fact that she was right. For half a second, I considered telling Rachel that Grace had asked me to find out about summer school for her, mostly because I wanted to rub in that Grace had trusted me first and I was shallow that way, but it wouldn't really be useful.

"Just finding out about some graduating credits," I said.

We stood in the awkward silence of people who had a friend in common and not much else. Students pa.s.sed down the other side of the hall, laughing and making weird noises because they were guys and that was mostly what high school boys did. The school continued to smell like burritos. I continued to devise my method of questioning Ms. McKay.

Rachel, leaning against the wall and looking at the lockers on the other side of the hall, said, "Makes the world seem bigger, doesn't it?"

The naivete of the question irritated me, somehow. "It's just another way to die."

Rachel looked at the side of my head. "You really do default to b.i.t.c.h, don't you? That'll only work as long as you're young and hot. After that, you'll only be able to teach AP History."

I looked at her and narrowed my eyes. I said, "I could say the same for quirky."

Rachel smiled a wide, wide smile, her most innocent one yet. "So what you're saying is you think I'm hot."

Okay, Rachel was all right. I wouldn't give her the satisfaction of a smile back, but I felt my eyes giving me away. The door opened. We regarded each other. As far as allies went, I guessed Grace could do worse.

As I went in to see Ms. McKay, I thought that Rachel actually was right. The world seemed bigger every day.