Page 50 of Come Find Me
“Joe, okay, tomorrow I’ll do that. I’ll go to the Albertsons’ and stare blankly at these kids I don’t know. Totally fine. Just not today.”
He narrows his eyes. “What’s so important about today, Kennedy?”
I grasp for anything frantically. “You know I have finals. How am I supposed to study with a bunch of people I don’t know around?”
“How are you supposed to study when you spend all hours of the night running around with some guy?”
“Nolan,” I repeat, for the tenth time.
“Right. Nolan who is not your boyfriend, but who drove you to the house in the middle of the night so you could get these boxes. Nolan, who I literally never heard of a week ago, but who has been to our house to see you at least two times that I know of. Was it this Nolan who took you to see Elliot, too?”
I don’t answer right away. “Joe, haven’t you ever done something nice for a friend because they needed your help?”
He shakes his head. “Not like this, Kennedy. This is not a list of normal things you do for a friend. Especially not one you just met. Trust me on this.”
I glance at my phone, trying to sidestep him, but he puts a hand out. “And the second you leave this house, you’re going to be on the phone with him, am I right?”
I stop midstride and look up at him.
“Like I said, Kennedy. Not a friend.”
“I feel sorry for you, Joe. That every relationship you’ve ever had is only surface-deep.”
As soon as I leave the house, I’m on the phone to Nolan, just like Joe accused. Only this time, when he picks up, I can’t get Joe’s words out of my head. It’s true, Nolan is the first person I thought of this morning, the part of the day I was looking forward to the most. He asks me for my email so he can send me something, and it’s immediately something else to look forward to.
Is it normal to talk to someone first thing each morning and last thing each evening? To hold their hand in the dark in the house where your worst nightmare happened? To hide out in the room of their missing brother?
Is it normal to drive a girl you just met to a jail? To skip school because she asked?
Maybe not. But I wasn’t about to tell Joe the reason:It’s not that he’s into me, Joe. It’s that we’ve both simultaneously stumbled upon proof that the world is more than it seems.
—
A text arrives at lunch:Check your email.
Nolan came through. My email is full of scanned images. It’s the information on Hunter Long. His address in North Carolina, his pictures, the brief overview of the case, and his parents’ contact information.
I write back:Thanks. What are you doing? Are you at school?
I’m scanning through the documents in the school library, eating lunch in the corner, when my phone vibrates under the table with a new text:Sort of. What are you doing?
Eating lunch in the library. Reading through the file.
I’m halfway through my banana when the library door pushes open. I look up, and Nolan’s there, hands in the pockets of his jeans, standing near the entrance like he’s lost—because he is.
I’m already smiling when his gaze finds me at the corner table, and his face mirrors mine. He walks toward me and my stomach flutters, andOh crap,I think,Joe was totally right.He must’ve been able to read it on my face, whenever I mentioned Nolan’s name. I try to hold it back so Nolan doesn’t see. Though from the way the girls at the next table are watching me, smirking, I have a feeling I’m a little too late.
“What are you doing here?” I ask when he sits in the chair beside me. Not across, beside. Pulling the chair even closer so he can look over my shoulder at the documents I’m reading.
“This seemed a little more pressing than gym today,” he says. “And I figured I won’t get to see you later, what with the whole grounded thing.”
“Joe’s making me go to the neighbors’ after school. I think I’m being babysat.”
He cringes. “Sorry about that.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“No, as you pointed out, I’m not that stealthy. It was probably because of me.”
