“What?”
She took a deep breath. “I was upset because you didn’t tell me about it. I’m your best friend, you’re supposed to tell me these things. But,” she hurried on before I could interrupt her, “I think you should go. And maybe I’ll find it in my heart to forgive you.” A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, the way it always did whenever she was joking about something. Caro has a terrible poker face. Drew has already said that when we go to Vegas for our twenty-first birthdays, Caro is not invited.
“Oh, Caro,” I sighed, then wrapped my arms around her and hugged her tight. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t mean to make you feel left out of anything.”
Caro hugged me back. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry I freaked out. I was just mad.”
“I’ll tell you everything from now on, okay? Promise.”
“You better,” she said back, then squeezed me tight and let go. “Can we eat? I’m starving.”
“And here we are, the final suits in our house of cards!” Drew cried, and I glanced over Caro’s shoulder to see Oliver and him walking toward us.
“Oh yeah?” Oliver said, dropping his bag next to me and then sitting down with a sigh. “Which one am I?”
“Spade,” Drew said.
“No, he’s the heart,” I said, giving him a kiss on the cheek before any of the lunchtime attendants could spot us. “Oliver’s the heart.”
“Barf,” Drew said.
Caro didn’t say anything, only because she was too busy making gagging noises.
“You’re cheesy,” Oliver laughed at me, but he put his arm around my shoulders, anyway.
“Here, I brought lunch,” Caro said, passing all of us burritos. They were as heavy as paperweights and the packets of red sauce were sticky and I was suddenly starving. “Only the finest two-dollar burritos for my friends.”
“Did you tell them?” Oliver asked me, unwrapping his burrito.
“Caro’s caught up,” I said, then turned to Drew. “I’m grounded because I got into college, they’ll probably never let me surf again, my parents might kill me, et cetera.”
Drew tried to respond, but he had already bitten into his burrito. “The ‘et cetera’ part is worrying,” he said when he was finally able to speak again. “And no surfing? Are you serious?”
I patted his arm. “I’ll have to live vicariously through you.”
Oliver reached for Caro’s drink and took a sip. I could see why she had gotten the jumbo-sized one. “What about you, Drew? What happened after last night?”
“Oh, shit!” I said. “Drew, I’m so sorry! I didn’t even ask about you and Kevin.”
Drew shrugged. “Oh, you know. It’s okay. He understands. Kane’s really pissed at my parents, though. Like, he’s mad.” Drew widened his eyes a little and I could understand why. Kane was over six feet tall and built of solid muscle. I had never seen Kane get upset, which made the prospect all the more intimidating. “He says that I should bring Kevin, anyway, and if anyone has a problem with it, he’ll take care of it. And I don’t want my brother to hulk out at my grandma’s birthday party, soooo yeah.” Drew squirted some red sauce onto his burrito. “Parents, man.”
Oliver cleared his throat a little. “Well, my mom wants me to do an interview for Crime Watch so they can find my dad,” he said. “So I get to be on TV and help get my dad arrested.”
Caro’s eyes flicked back down to her lunch and I knew what she was thinking. Oliver’s dad deserves to be arrested. But she just said, “That sucks, dude. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” Oliver said. “Should be fun. Can’t wait.”
“To summarize!” Drew said, sitting up straight. “Emmy’s parents have grounded her and are possibly plotting her death as we speak because she got into a four-year university and became an excellent surfer behind their backs.”
“Accurate,” I said.
“And Oliver’s dad kidnapped him for ten years, scaring everyone to pieces, before he finally came home and now his mom is using him to arrest his dad, which will now add tens of thousands of dollars to the therapy bills he’s already going to accrue.”
Oliver laughed, low and sharp and genuine. “Pretty much, yeah.”
“And my parents don’t want me to tell my grandmother—who, let’s be honest, is already in the bottom of the ninth inning, age-wise—that I’m gay and dating the most beautiful man in the free world—no offense, Oliver—”
“None taken,” he said. “Kevin’s a handsome guy.”
“—because if I do, she’ll cut us off and my parents would rather I live a lie than have to move themselves into a two-bedroom condo and drive a Ford Focus. And Caro’s parents . . .”
“Caro’s parents should have stopped at five kids,” Caro said, reaching for the soda again. “Because they have no idea what she does all day and don’t really care, either.”
“Can we please have a moment of silence for Caro’s decrepit family life, especially her sister Heather?” Drew said, solemnly placing his hand over his heart.
“Especially Heather,” Caro said darkly, but let Drew give her a one-armed hug, anyway.
“Well, that’s that,” Drew said brightly. “The four of us are fucked.”
Oliver raised his burrito into the air. “To us!” he said dramatically, sounding like one of the newscasters that had reported on him time and time again. “And to the future!”
We all cracked up at that, clinking our half-eaten burritos in the air as we laughed. “To us and our terrible futures!” Caro echoed. “Now who’s hogging all the red sauce? Seriously, you guys, stop doing that.”
I grinned up at Oliver, who kissed my forehead and then tossed Caro one of his own packets. This is perfect, I thought to myself.
And that afternoon, for one glorious hour, it was.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I drove Oliver home as slowly as possible, trying to spend as much time with him as I could before I had to go back to the makeshift cell that was my bedroom. At the red light, we kissed until the car behind us started honking, and even then it took a few extra seconds before we were able to untangle ourselves from each other. “How much longer is this going to go on?” Oliver asked as we sailed through the intersection, still holding hands over the front console. “Did your parents say how long you’d be grounded?”
“Nope,” I said. “That’s part of the fun, the wondering without asking.”
“And you’re not going to ask.” Oliver sounded dubious.
“No way!” I said. “What if that makes them ground me for even longer?” I pulled into our driveway and put the van into PARK very, very slowly. “Want to get the mail together?”
Oliver started to laugh as he gathered up his backpack. “I do, actually,” he said. “We are so pathetic.”
“The worst,” I agreed. I wanted to keep holding his hand as we walked, but I knew my mom was home and I wasn’t willing to risk her seeing us. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours and I was already missing the ocean like crazy. Any more time added to my sentence and I’d probably start to go into shock from lack of salt water.
The mail was boring, like it always was: bills for my parents, flyers from grocery stores, a couple of envelopes addressed to CURRENT RESIDENT. “I wish people still wrote letters,” I said to Oliver as we both emptied the boxes. “Wouldn’t that be cool? Like, you’d go to the mailbox and there’d be a letter just waiting for you?”
“I’ll write you a letter,” he said.
“That might be the only way you’ll be allowed to talk to me,” I said, and he smiled as he pulled a large envelope out of the box. “What the—oh, wow.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s from Columbia,” he said. “University. In New York.”
“Let the college wooing begin!” I cried. “Did you write for info?”
“No, but it’s actually my favorite school. My dad and I used to go up to the campus when we lived in New York.” He was looking at it almost rev
erently, and I tried to imagine what he was picturing: wrought-iron gates, brick buildings, cool fall air and the crunch of his dad’s shoes walking through leaves as Oliver did the same.
“Columbia’d be cool,” I said, trying not to drop anything as I balanced my backpack, the mail, and my keys. “You could go back to New York.”
“Are you kidding? If your parents won’t let you go to San Diego, there’s no way mine’s letting me go back to New York. She’d probably try to move into my dorm with me.”
“She’d be your roomie!” I said. “You could take classes together, be study buddies . . .”
“Oh my God, stop,” Oliver said, but he was laughing, too. “Just stop talking. I don’t even want to think about rooming with my mom.”
“I’d watch that reality show for sure,” I told him. “Like, number one priority on the DVR, no question.”
“Emmy!” My mom’s voice rang out from the front door. “Time to come in.” She sounded unamused, to say the least.
“The warden calls,” I whispered to Oliver, who kept his face serious even though his mouth twitched. “Okay!” I yelled back at her, then “accidentally” dropped one of the envelopes. “See you tomorrow?” I said to Oliver as I stooped to pick it up.
“Nice move,” he said, smirking at me. “And yeah. Hope you get out on good behavior.”
“Emmy! Now!”
“Yeah, don’t hold your breath,” I said, then blew a kiss in his direction before turning around and trudging up the driveway and into the house.
“You know you’re not allowed to spend time with Oliver right now,” my mom said the second the front door shut behind me.
“My day was fine, thanks,” I replied. “And yours?”
“Emily.”
I sighed. “Mom, I drove him home and we got the mail, and now I’m here. Inside. You always overreact.”
She just held out her hand for the mail and I gave it to her before going upstairs. “Your dad’s working late tonight,” she called after me, and I paused on the stairs’ landing. “And I have to cater a benefit over in Irvine, so you’ll be on your own. I put dinner in the refrigerator for you.”
Wait for it, I thought. Wait for it . . .
“And you know no one is allowed over tonight while we’re gone.”
There it is.
“I know, Mom,” I said. “The details are pretty clear.”
“Well, seeing as how you’ve been lying to us about so many other things.”
She was flipping through the mail, not really paying attention to me, so I gave her one good eye roll before going up to my room. Again, the urge to slam the door was overwhelming. Maybe that’s what I’ll do while I’m home alone, I thought. Slam my bedroom door a few times. Another wild and crazy night at Chez Emmy.
Instead, I changed clothes and did my homework sans music or the internet. It turns out that being grounded makes you really productive, and I cranked through two chapters of my civics textbook and diagrammed the Krebs Cycle for bio by the time I realized it was dark outside and my mom was knocking on my bedroom door. “Okay, I’m going,” she said. “Food is downstairs for you. Bed by ten.”
“’Kay,” I said. I must have looked like the model child, sitting at my desk with no distractions, surrounded by textbooks and notepads and highlighters.
“I’ll be home by eleven, Dad should be here by ten thirty.”
“’Kay.”
“Emmy, don’t sulk.”
“I’m not sulking!” I said. “I just said okay, that’s it! What else do you want me to say?”
She ignored my question. “Are you doing your homework?”
“No, I’m plotting a government takeover.” I held up a highlighter. “Can’t do it without the pink one, though. That’s just foolish.”
My mom narrowed her eyes at me, but ignored that comment, too. “Bed by ten,” she said again. “You stay up too late.”
I bit back a comment about how ten p.m. is practially late afternoon, and instead just said okay again.
“Call me if you need anything.”
“Mom.” I closed my eyes, then opened them. “Okay.”
She looked at me one last time, like she didn’t know who I was, like I was some stranger who had moved into her daughter’s room and was organizing her school supplies. “Bye,” she finally said, then went downstairs. I waited until I heard the garage door close behind her, then the sound of her car disappearing down the street, before I closed my textbooks and went downstairs to eat dinner.
It was turkey meat loaf with a mustard glaze and red smashed potatoes, one of my top three favorite meals, and I wondered if it was a concession while I ate and watched an episode of the Kardashians. None of the Kardashians were ever grounded. One of them even made a sex tape! My mom would probably sacrifice me to the gods if I had a leaked sex tape. (Which, just to clear up any confusion, is not something that I will ever, ever have. Leaked or not.)
I left the TV on as I loaded my plate into the dishwasher, then turned it off and put on music while I showered and changed into sweats and an old T-shirt that said SAVE THE HEDGEHOG on it (for the record, I don’t know why the hedgehog needs saving; it’s just a comfortable shirt). I was reading a book that Caro had loaned me that she had gotten from her oldest sister, Jessica, and I was about to start reading it when I saw Oliver’s light flick off, then back on.
“Can I come over?” he said as soon as I poked my head out the open window. His voice was different, low and serious and shaky. “I need to come over.”
“No one’s here,” I called back. “I can’t—”
“I need to come over.”
There was an urgency to him that scared me. I wondered if he and Maureen had had a fight, if that was just the latest trend on our street.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “The back door’s open. Come on up.”
He must have run because he made it up to my bedroom in record time. “Wow, that was—” I started to say, but the words died on my lips once I saw him. His hair was disheveled, his eyes frantic, and he was shaking.
“What is it?” I asked, crossing the room to his side as he shut the bedroom door behind him.
“Pull the blinds,” he said to me.
“What?”
“Just do it, Emmy. Please.” He sounded like he was choking and I realized that he had the envelope from Columbia in his hands, which were trembling as much as the rest of him.
“Okay, okay,” I said, then closed them. When I turned around, Oliver was still standing there, still holding the envelope. His face was something I hadn’t seen, scared and lost and hopeful and sick, all at the same time.
“It’s not from Columbia,” he said.
“What?”
“This. It’s not really from Columbia.”
“Who’s it from, then?”
“Emmy. It’s from my dad.”
He shook out the contents onto my bed. A shiny, colorful letter-sized pamphlet spilled out, and Oliver picked it up, flipped it open, and pulled out a handwritten letter. “It’s from my dad,” he said again. “He sent it to me. He knew Columbia was my favorite and he . . . he sent it. It’s from him.”
Was this shock? It was hard to tell now that I was shaking as bad as Oliver.
“What . . . what does it say?” I said, sinking down onto the bed next to the papers. Oliver sat next to me, hanging on to the letter the way Caro used to hang on to her rag doll, Alice.
“It’s, um, I don’t.” Oliver cleared his throat and I could see his eyes were starting to redden. “I just want to keep it for me, if that’s okay.”
“Okay, yeah, of course.” I put my hand on his back, feeling him shudder under his hoodie. “But what does it say? Does it say where he is?”
Oliver shook his head. “No. But he, um, he wants to see me. Tomorrow. At lunch. I guess he doesn’t realize I’m in school right now.” Oliver named a restaurant that was about ten minutes away. I had been there with my parents once, but my mom hated their French fries
so we never went back.
“What?” If I hadn’t been sitting down, I would have needed to sit down. “He’s here? He’s here in our city right now?”
“I don’t know! I don’t . . .” Oliver took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know,” he said again. “But he wants to meet me at this diner tomorrow afternoon. He said he wants to talk.”
“Oliver,” I said. “Ollie, you have to tell your mom. You have to call the police. This is an actual serious crime!”
“Yeah, I know, Emmy,” he said, and he jerked away from my hand and got up from the bed. “I’m actually really aware of that, but thanks.”
“You can’t go meet him!” I cried. “You know that, right? What if he tries to take you again? What if he, I don’t know, what if he has a gun?”
“My dad? With a gun? Seriously?” Oliver scoffed at me, but he also wouldn’t make eye contact. “Look, you don’t know him like I do, okay? He probably just—”
“No!” I said, standing up alongside him. “You keep trying to defend him, Oliver! And I get it, I understand, he’s your dad, but people—active police officers—are looking for him. They’ve been looking for him for ten years! You have to tell someone!”
“You don’t understand!” he yelled back, and now we were face-to-face. I had never seen him look so shattered before, so completely lost. “I just need to see him, all right! But I can’t drive—”
“Oh no!” I said. “I’m not driving you to meet your dad! Are you serious right now, Oliver?”
“I know when I left that it was hard on everyone but—!”
“Stop saying that!” I screamed and he took a step back, surprised into silence. “Stop saying that you left. You didn’t just leave, Oliver! He took you away from us! He fucking kidnapped you!” I yanked open my closet door with such force that the doorknob slammed into the wall, climbing up onto the step stool and grabbing the dusty shoe box. “Here!” I said. “Look!”
“Emmy—” he started to say, but I just yanked the lid off the box and threw my college application on the floor. There was nothing in that box, I suddenly realized, that was a secret anymore.