Page 25 of Fragments of the Lost
The shelves are a mess. The floor is a mess. The room is nothing like it should be, and I give up on trying to maintain an ordered chaos.
I jump down onto the carpet and start stacking all the books on the floor into a box.
But the footsteps stop at the bottom, at Mia’s room. “They’re not working,” Mia yells.
“Jessa?” his mother calls from down below. “Are you up there?”
“Yes,” I call. “The power’s off.”
“Just a short,” she says. “Hold on.”
I get back to work, and eventually the house reboots. A door closes below, and I know Eve has been out to the garage, to reset the power. The power source under his desk glows red. The light in the corner clicks on, the gust of heat from the vent lifting the hair off my neck, like a breath.
I keep stacking, trying to put the room back in some sort of order, in case Eve comes upstairs. One of the books, a paperback purchasedUsed(so says the yellow sticker on the back that he never peeled off), has tears in the edges of theback cover. When I flip to the front cover, it catches me around the throat in a heartbeat, remembering the last time I saw this. I found it for him near the end of the school year. Under the seat of his car.
We were driving to one of Julian and Max’s ball games in late May, some big playoff game, and I had my phone out, directing Caleb. The windows were rolled down, and the air smelled of spring and exhaust.
“Oh, crap,” Caleb said, craning his head at the sign overhead. “Toll.”
“How much?” I asked, scrambling.
I opened the glove compartment, but only found the car manual, a mini-flashlight, his insurance and registration cards. I ran my fingers through the cup holders, the side compartments in the doors.
“Check under the seat,” he said.
I pulled out a candy wrapper, three quarters—“I knew it,” he declared when I raised them in victory—and a book, facedown, spine broken down the middle.
“Some light reading?” I asked, holding it up to him. “What, can’t possibly get enough ofThe Grapes of Wrath?”
He grabbed it from me with one hand, his eyes drifting from the road momentarily. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve been looking for that forever. I had to go sit at the school library for thirty minutes until I finished, because Mrs. Laverne wouldn’t let me check it out, since there was a wait list. Not that anyone actually came to check it out that week, I might add.”
“And how exactly did it end up under your seat?”
He shrugged, slipping it into the gap beside his seat. He paid the toll, took the exit. “Guess it fell out of my bag. You must’ve kicked it under the seat.” But he was smiling when he said it.
I gasped. “Me?”
“Yeah. You can never sit still.” He put a hand on my leg for emphasis. The leg that I’d just tucked under the other, unbuckling for a moment to get more comfortable.
Then we passed a small sign with a town’s name on it and his fingers tightened slightly, kind of in play, kind of not. “Hey, I want to check something out first. Okay?”
“What?”
But he didn’t answer, and he ignored the directions I gave him. “Just, hold on.”
We drove for miles, past cornfields, into a more densely wooded area, down curvier roads. Eventually, he swung the car onto an unmarked drive down an unpaved road.
“There,” he said, nodding out the front window.
He eased the car to a slow stop, but left the engine running.
“Whoa.” We had pulled up alongside what looked like an old barn, blackened in sections and caved in, with boarded-up windows. “What is this place?”
He turned off the engine and grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment. “Come on, want to check it out?”
I didn’t, really. But I didn’t want to sit in the car alone while Caleb did, either.
“Caleb, my parents will be worried if I don’t show up.” They would already be there by now, arriving with the team. And the game was set to start in ten minutes. Julian was pitching, and I should be there.
