Page 49 of Come Find Me
She goes back to the papers, but I don’t want her to hang up. “Can Lydia find out what’s in the signal?” I ask.
“Eh. She’s, like, a computer expert. Heard she got suspended in middle school for hacking into the school email and sending out a snow day closure alert. So yeah, she’s crazy talented, but I don’t think she has the right equipment.”
“And Elliot won’t talk to you. Do you think he would talk to someone else?”
“No, I don’t. His trial is coming up, and the lawyers are focused on helping him remember….” She sighs, her thoughts drifting. But then she sits straighter, leaning closer to the screen so her brown eyes look twice their normal size. “There are people at the college who can do this, though. My mom worked there. They know me.” She looks quickly over her shoulder and lowers her voice. “But I have to talk to Joe first.”
Her head twists to the side, and she leans even closer so all I see is the side of her cheek, half her mouth, as she whispers, “I have to go.”
And then the screen goes black.
—
Long after everyone should typically be asleep, I hear my parents across the hall. My mom’s voice, high and fast. My father, trying to calm her. The tension fills the house, until it reaches my shoulders and I need to act.
They don’t hear me walking by their room, past the closed door. They don’t hear me on the stairs, or heading out the back door. If they notice the engine starting, they don’t come out to stop me.
—
There’s no one at Kennedy’s old house right now. All the lights are off, and the front door is locked. I go around back, let myself in the way Kennedy taught me yesterday, keeping a flashlight low and away from the windows.
Tell me what to do,I think, closing my eyes. “Liam,” I whisper into the emptiness. Nothing comes. I thought my brother wanted me here. I thought he was sending me a message, to come.
Nothing answers. Not even a flicker of a sign. The air conditioner kicking on, or a gust of wind rattling something in the vents. It’s just an empty house, in an empty field, under an empty sky.
I pull out my phone instead of my equipment and make a call. Kennedy’s face appears, barely decipherable in the grainy dark surrounding her. She sits upright. “Nolan?”
“I’m here,” I say. “Tell me what to do.”
She rubs her eyes, runs a hand down her face, then tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. I’ve woken her. She’s still in bed. “At my house?”
I nod.
“Okay,” she says, keeping her voice low. “Reboot the house. Let’s see if we can restart things to pick up the signal again. It’s the only thing I can think to do. There has to be something more. Something more than just pi, if that’s even what it is.”
She leads me with the sound of her voice to the garage, even though I’ve been here before. Still, I give myself over, letting her lead the way. When she instructs me to shut down the fuse box and flip it back on again, I listen. She sends me to the shed next, to make sure the computer is back online. “It should—running—and then…”
“Kennedy?” I shake the phone in the dark, as if I can jar her back into focus. “Hold on, you’re breaking up.”
The feed continues to cut in and out as I walk in the dark. But even as she disappears, I think I hear her voice.
I need to find a way back to my house this afternoon. Nolan rebooted the electricity and sent me a text to let me know it was done.
I haven’t slept since. I’m already sitting at the kitchen table when Joe emerges from his room.
He does a double take when he sees me. “Morning,” he says, sticking his head into the fridge. “I’ll get milk on the way home.”
“Okay.” I’m eating my cereal dry, crunching the Cheerios between my back molars.
“After school, the Albertsons invited you over. Until I’m back.”
I drop my spoon. “What?”
Something in my voice must resonate, because he shuts the fridge door, turning slowly. “To and from school, that’s it.” As if he could sense that I was already planning for Nolan to pick me up from school, drive me by our house, where I could pull the data and be back at Joe’s before he realized it—hopefully even before the school bus.
“Is this a joke?”
“No, Kennedy, this isn’t a joke.”
