I checked my phone. Nothing.
Time to head home.
I was halfway there, waiting for the light to change at the intersection, when Maureen’s SUV suddenly pulled up next to me. Rick was at the wheel and Maureen was talking to someone in the backseat, motioning with her hand about something. The windows were tinted, but I could make out the outline of the twins’ car seats in the middle seats, and farther back, the tousle of Oliver’s hair.
My breath caught before I could stop it.
“Oh, hi!” Maureen said, her voice muffled by the window. Open it, open it, I could see her mouthing to Rick, who dutifully did just that. “Hi, Emmy! What are you doing out here?”
Protest noises started to come from the backseat, and then Rick rolled down those windows, as well. “Hi!” the twins yelled. “We went mini golfing!”
“I hit the windmill!”
“I drank lemonade and threw up!”
“Cool,” I said, desperately trying to get a glimpse of Oliver without being desperate about it. (Way easier said than done.)
He leaned forward when he heard my voice, just so I could see half his face in the window, the other half still stuck in the backseat. “Hey,” he said.
“Hi,” I said, and before I could figure out what else to say, Maureen interrupted us.
“We’re heading home now! C’mon, we’ll give you a ride! Open the doors, Rick, let her in.”
“Careful in the backseat,” Rick said as I started to climb in. “There’s some random golf balls rolling around back there.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying to climb over the twins without actually touching them, since I wasn’t sure which one had been sick, and also without tripping over myself in front of Oliver.
“There’s room next to Oliver,” Maureen said, directing me from the front seat.
“I think she’s got it, hon,” Rick said.
“Well, I’m just making sure.” Maureen threw me a grin in the rearview mirror. “Enough room back there?”
I fell into the seat next to Oliver, squeezed in by bags of supplies: extra clothes, snacks, books, and tiny pink shoes. He looked like a giant next to all of it, but when I sat down, he smiled at me and grabbed my hand, squeezing so tight that all I could do was squeeze back just as hard.
“Hi,” was all he said.
“Hey,” I replied. Our voices were cool, like we said hello to each other all the time, like we weren’t holding hands in the backseat of his mom’s car, hanging on for our dear lives. “Did you get a hole in one?”
“I got a hole in one!” Nora screamed, trying to turn around in her car seat despite the harness, and I casually threw my bag over Oliver’s and my hands before she could see. Oliver laughed, then hid it with a cough.
“You okay, sweetie?” Maureen asked from the front. “There’s water in the cooler if—”
“I’m fine, Mom,” Oliver said.
“I got a hole in one, Emmy!” Nora finally settled for just craning her neck around at a terrible-looking angle. “It went in!”
“Awesome!” I told her. “Did you get a sticker?”
“Yeah, but it’s on my shoe.”
“Of course it is.”
Oliver’s grip on my hand hadn’t let go and I knocked my knee against his, raising my eyebrow in that subtle, universal gesture that means, “You okay?” He just nodded, so I let it go.
“Did you get my text?” I asked him. “Because I, um, I texted you. Today.”
“Hey, Mom?” he called.
“Yes, sweetie?”
“Did I get Emmy’s text today?” There was an edge to his voice, like this wasn’t a question he should be asking.
Maureen sighed heavily from the front seat. “Honey, you’ll get your phone back on Monday before school. We talked about this. He missed his curfew last night, Emmy.”
“Let him explain it, Mo,” Rick murmured from the front seat.
“No phone until Monday,” Oliver told me, his voice cheerful but his eyes anything but happy. “So no, I did not get your text. And I couldn’t text you, either.”
That last sentence went over everyone’s heads but mine, and I smiled despite myself. “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
“Right?” Oliver asked. We were speaking our own language at this point, grinning like idiots at each other. “What did your text say?”
“Oh, I just wanted to know if you had a good time last night, that’s all.”
“I had a great time,” he replied. We sounded like we were performing a skit about the two most blandly cheerful high school students in America. “Really great.”
“Emmy, can you please tell Drew that next time Oliver needs to be home by eleven?” Maureen looked at us again through the rearview mirror, her “mom face” firmly in place. “I don’t know what his parents think is appropriate for a Friday night, but Oliver’s curfew is eleven o’clock.”
Oliver knocked his knee into mine this time. I didn’t need a body-language expert to explain what he meant. “Yeah, of course,” I said. “Drew’s not great with time.”
“You just don’t know what could happen,” Maureen said, and the double meaning in her words made everyone, even Molly and Nora, go quiet for the rest of the ride.
Oliver never let go of my hand.
Once we pulled up into their driveway, I had a plan. “Hey,” I said as the twins started to frantically unbuckle themselves like their car seats were on fire. “Do you have that book that I loaned you for English?”
Oliver didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, yeah, totally,” he said. “Come on up, I’ll get it for you.”
“You’re so sweet to loan him your things from last year,” Maureen said. “Molly, no, do not eat that Cheerio from the floor. I said no.”
“Of course,” I said. “It’s not a problem.”
As soon as we were out of the car, and while Rick and Maureen fumbled with the girls and empty juice boxes and bags, Oliver and I disappeared inside and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. “I am so sorry!” he whispered, even though we were the only ones in the house. “She went ballistic when I came home last night.”
“What’d you say?”
“Just that Drew and I met up at the movies.” We hit the landing and booked it into his room. “And it let out later than I thought it would. Don’t worry, I didn’t mention you at all.”
“God, thank you. My mom would—”
“I know, I know. Basement, Dickens, gruel.”
“Exactly.” I closed the door behind us, then turned around and smiled at Oliver. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he said, then gathered me up and kissed me hard.
It took all the coordination in my body to hang on to his sweatshirt sleeve, but I managed to stay upright. He tasted even better than he had the night before, this time without the fog of alcohol between us, and I wrapped my hand around the back of his neck and pulled him closer, dizzy with the sort of longing that was now hitting me like a freight train.
“I was kind of freaking out,” I admitted when he pulled away for a second. “I thought . . .”
“You thought I was a douche canoe,” he finished.
“Yeah, kind of,” I giggled. “But not anymore. Quick, hurry, before they find us.”
Oliver pulled me closer, tighter than ever this time, and kissed me again. The only way I could describe what kissing him felt like was, like the last day of school, knowing that months of freedom and sunshine lay before you, the feeling that you could do anything you wanted and time stretched out in endless possibilities. That’s how I felt in his arms, like the future was limitless just because he was there. He was finally there.
We heard the door from the garage slam open, followed by, “Girls, do not slam the door!” We pulled apart once again. “Quick, which book do you want?”
“I don’t care, anything,” I said, and he shoved a copy of Mrs. Dalloway at me. “Wait, wait!” I whispered. “Come here, your mouth.” I pressed my thumb against his lips, wiping away my lip gloss. “Bonn
e Belle Lip Smacker in Dr Pepper just doesn’t match your skin tone,” I teased, and he kissed my thumb.
“Tastes good, though,” he said.
“Oh my God, you need to shut up right now.” I kissed him again, then pulled away and straightened my shirt. “You good?”
“Um, yeah.” He laughed. “This is way better than miniature golf.”
“Glad to know where I rank,” I told him, then clutched the copy of Mrs. Dalloway to my chest. “See you at school on Monday?”
“Absolutely,” he whispered back, then I left his room and went back downstairs, dodging Maureen and going out the front door, only letting the empty cul-de-sac see my face-splitting smile, my ridiculous happiness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Over the next week, Oliver and I kept to a pretty steady routine of going to school, going to the beach for more surfing lessons, kissing, making out in the backyard, and basically lying to our parents about all of that. (Except for school. That, unfortunately, wasn’t a lie.) Caro came to the beach a few times with us, since Drew was busy hanging out with Kevin at Starbucks or at soccer practice, but after the second time, she got bored. “I’m the third wheel,” she said on the way home. “I’m turning your bicycle into a tricycle.”
“Or we could just be three unicycles,” I replied. Oliver was in the front seat next to me, his hand on my leg as I drove with the window down, trying to dry my hair as fast as possible.
“Or we could be a penny-farthing,” Oliver said. “Maybe we could put Caro in a sidecar.”
“A penny what?” Caro and I both said at the same time.
“You know, that old-fashioned bike that had one big wheel up front and then a little wheel behind it?” Oliver mimed riding a bike, which, let’s be honest, didn’t help to clear up the confusion.
“Yeah, no, I’m not that,” I told him. “Can you roll your window down? I need more air.”
“You were saying about the sidecar?” Caro yelled, her voice nearly being drowned out from the sudden gust of wind. “It’d probably be less windy out there than it is in here!”
So after that, it just became Oliver and me. His surfing wasn’t really improving, but we spent most of the time bobbing up and down on the boards, talking instead of practicing.
But on Friday, when our parents thought we were doing another group project for AP Civics at Caro’s house but Oliver and I were actually down at the beach, he was subdued, almost tired. His eyes were heavy, his words soft. “Hey,” I said as we floated next to each other, our legs churning in the water. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine,” he said absently.
“You’re doing the dude sulk,” I told him.
Oliver laughed. “The what?”
“You guys always get pouty and sullen.” I poked my lip out and slouched down, trying to make him laugh for real this time. It worked. “What’s wrong?”
Oliver, though, just looked behind him and watched as a wave started to form. “You think I can get this one?”
I glanced at it. “Probably. You’re getting good.” And he was. He had already ridden to the shore several times that day, hooting and hollering with each successful wave.
“I’m taking it,” he said, then swung his legs out of the ocean and back onto the board as he started to paddle.
“Oliver, wait,” I said as he started to move, and he deliberately reached out and splashed me, leaving me sputtering.
“Oh, you’re going down,” I said, racing to catch up to him. It wasn’t too difficult—his arms were longer and stronger, but I had three years’ worth of experience—and we rode in together, almost like we were moving as the same person.
Afterward, we sat on the beach together, our wet suits drying on a rock next to us as we huddled together underneath a blanket that we found in the back of the minivan. “Your car needs a name,” Oliver said. “Something with personality.”
“Stealth Fighter,” I offered. “Secret Mission.”
“Barely Running,” Oliver said, and I laughed and pretended to choke him.
“Get your own car if you don’t like mine!” I cried.
“Oh, Emmy, I would if I could,” he said, and the sadness I had seen in the water was back now, clouding his eyes like a storm.
“What is it?” I asked. “What happened?”
Oliver shrugged and picked up some sand to run through his fingers. “I guess some national crime show called yesterday. They want to do a feature on my dad and . . . you know, everything.” Oliver brushed the sand away, then waved his hand, the kidnapping just a pesky fly that could be swatted away. “My mom thinks they could find my dad that way. ‘National exposure,’ that’s what she said.”
“And you don’t want to,” I guessed.
“It’s, like, I can move on or I can stay stuck here. I can’t do both. She wants me to adjust to school, to her new family, to be normal—whatever the hell that even means—but then she wants me to go on camera and talk about how my dad kidnapped me ten years ago? I just want to let it go.”
“You don’t want to find your dad, though?”
Oliver looked down at me, his face as sad as I had ever seen it. “I want that more than anything in the world. But not like this.”
He trailed off. “I just can’t hate my dad the way everyone wants me to.”
“Ollie, no,” I said. I reached for his arm but he pulled away. “We don’t want you to hate him.”
“You know what I mean,” he replied. “I had a life with him. He taught me how to do things, how to ride a bike and catch a pop fly. We went to movies, museums. He showed me the constellations.” Oliver laughed a little. “One time, he even used a flashlight and a grapefruit to explain the phases of the moon. It wasn’t awful. Except for the fact that my mom wasn’t there, I mean. That part sucked.”
I sat quietly, realizing that I had never asked him about his dad, about their life together. “I’m sorry we never talked about him,” I said quietly. “I just thought it would upset you, that’s all.”
“I’m not mad at you,” Oliver corrected himself, then put his hand over mine, pressing it into the sand. “But everyone acts like I stopped growing up at seven years old. They act like the past ten years didn’t happen to me, too.”
“It was just so terrible here,” I said. “It was scary, not knowing where you were for so long. Your dad just took you, Oliver. We didn’t know what happened.”
“I didn’t know what happened, either!” Oliver said. “Everyone has spent the past ten years thinking that my dad’s the monster, but I’ve spent the last ten years thinking that my mom left me. I spent all that time being mad at her, and I can’t just flip that. I don’t work that way, Emmy. My brain, it doesn’t . . .”
I tangled my fingers through his, feeling the sand rub between our skin.
“My mom and Rick and the twins, they have this perfect family, you know? And I just came in and fucked everything up. They’re fighting all the time and I know it’s because of me. And I can’t go back to where I was, and this town is just so fucking . . .” Oliver shook his head at me. “I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. We should go.”
“No, we should stay,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“Even you and Drew and Caro, you have all these in-jokes and you talk the same and know all the places and people that I don’t know anymore. But I had places and people and in-jokes, too.”
“People?” I asked.
“A few friends,” he clarified. “I even had a girlfriend when I was fifteen.” He glanced down at me. “Sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” I said, then thought, I’ll kill her if she hurt him. The jealousy passed after a second, though.
“I’m not. I just mean that I had a life before I came back. And no one ever wants to hear about it. I feel like if I talk to my mom, she’ll just use it against my dad.”
“Like on a TV news show,” I said.
“Exactly.”
I tightened the blanket around my
shoulder, pulling Oliver and me closer together. It was freezing now, but I didn’t dare move. “Maybe we should talk about it more,” I said. “About both of us during the past ten years.”
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked after a few more minutes of silence, and I nodded against his shoulder. “What happened after I left? I mean, after my dad and I . . . ? Maybe we can start there.”
I sat up a little, trying to organize my thoughts. “Um, there were police. A lot of them, in your house talking to your mom, in my house talking to me and my parents, Caro and Drew. They took your clothes, your shoes, your toothbrush—anything that would help try to find you. But your dad, he already had a three-day start, you know? You can go anywhere in the world in three days.”
“Chicago,” Oliver murmured. “You can go to Chicago.”
I looked at him. “Really?”
He nodded, splaying his hand over mine so that his fingers reached all the way past my fingertips. “We were there for the first six months. He said we were having a vacation, that we needed some father-and-son-bonding time.” Oliver’s voice was as soft as his touch and he traced my fingers as he spoke. “But I wanted to go home after a while. Chicago is loud and we were in this tourist area and it wasn’t like here at all. And he said that we couldn’t go home because my mom had left, that she didn’t want to be with us anymore.”
Hearing him say the words so matter-of-factly made me wince, but he didn’t notice. “And I cried and I cried because I just wanted to see my mom, you know? And I didn’t understand why she would just leave like that because we were supposed to make cookies for Halloween. That’s what I kept telling my dad, that we had to make cookies, and I couldn’t stop crying. And he just held me and he just kept saying how sorry he was, that he was so, so sorry.” Oliver huffed out a laugh that didn’t sound funny. “And now I know what he was really apologizing for. But all I really remember was missing my mom.
“And then he said we needed a ‘fresh start.’ That’s what he said, a fresh start. And that he had always wanted to call me Colin so we should change our names.” Oliver shrugged. “I guess I was afraid of pissing him off, not because he was mean or abusive or anything like that, but just . . . I was already down a mom, you know? I didn’t want to lose my dad, too.”