Page 4 of Come Find Me
I steel my nerve and hold the device up against the stone-covered front wall, and then I hear it—
Footsteps. Lightning fast, but barely there.
My heart’s in my throat when a blur emerges from the side of the house, and it takes me a second to realize this is not a ghost but a girl. Long, pale legs and a dark tangle of hair and her back hunched over the handlebars of a bike.
A girl,the articles said, Sutton said.
I watch her go. She doesn’t even notice me standing there.
—
The pizza delivery car is pulling out just as I’m pulling in, and suddenly I’m faced with a weekly dilemma: have pizza and get sucked into the world of missing children, or sneak up the back steps to the comfort of my room and let the hunger eat away at my stomach lining. I’d love option three: go to the drive-through. But I’ve spent most of my savings on this equipment, and my job is a figment of my parents’ imagination, after all.
As I walk to the house, I imagine I’m a gazelle in the savannah. The hunger wins out. The lion pounces.
“They let you out early?” my dad says as my hand reaches into the box of pizza.
“Uh-huh,” I lie. I said I was tutoring. I said it was a job at the library. I said I needed the money for college, since I knew my parents were running on fumes by now. They’d sunk so much into the search for Liam, and then into this foundation.
How can I be thinking about who would pay for college when these children are missing?Priorities, Nolan.
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” he says, handing me a plate. “We could use your help sorting through the tip line….”
I make some excuse about studying for finals and pile a few slices onto the plate. The finals part isn’t a lie. The studying part, on the other hand, will have to wait. I need to get upstairs and transfer the data points. Plot it out on one of the park maps on my computer. See if there’s any overlap, any pattern, anyfailure to predictwithin.
I grab a soda, and there’s a new face taped to the wall, just beside the fridge in my peripheral vision. I don’t look. Those pictures, man. They’ll gut you, or they’ll numb you, and either way, you die a little.
I have to get out of here. I’m surrounded by ghosts.
When I finally make it back, Joe’s up and in the shower. By the time he gets out, I’ve returned the bike to the garage and changed into pajamas.
I can’t believe I slept so long at the house. I woke with a start, with a feeling that someone was there, like a presence. As if the stories the other kids told in the dark, whispered low to scare one another, were real. But then the light filtered in, everything clarified—and I remembered that I was alone.
—
Joe says he has to be on campus for most of Saturday, buthas tois probably an overstatement.
He does work sporadic hours, I’ll give him that. But occasionally I think he builds in some extra time, just to have an excuse to leave. I don’t even blame him.
Truthfully, we get along just fine for roommates thrown into an unforeseen living arrangement. And in practice, everything’s working out as far as the courts are concerned. But in theory, he hasn’t taken too well to suddenly being responsible for his sixteen-year-old niece. Can’t say I’ve taken too well to it, either. It’s hard to take him seriously as a voice of authority—he was always just my mom’s slightly irresponsible, much younger kid brother, who took a few years off before attending college tosee the world,with a spotty attendance record when it came to family affairs—and my presence probably doesn’t help with his bachelor lifestyle.
But on the plus side, he pretty much leaves me to my own devices. He’s adopted a random assortment of ground rules, which he came up with on a whim one night, but I mostly try to stick by them so I can fight the good fight where it counts. No drinking (not a problem), no boys (also not a problem), and no skipping school (mostly not a problem). If he ever catches me sneaking out, I can tell him that technically I haven’t broken any of his rules and hope that holds. I’m fighting him hard, though, on the house thing.
He wants to sell it. I don’t. After a lifetime of moving around campus housing with my mom, this was the first time we’d had a house in our name, and land. According to my mom, it would be a place for us all to grow roots.
It’s the only place I can feel them, still.
Technically, the house is now mine.
Technically, it’s Joe’s decision, since he’s the one who’d have to send the checks.
All these technicalities.
—
We finally cross paths at breakfast. Lunch? I look at the clock: too close to tell. He’s got two different kinds of cereal out on the kitchen table—we shop separately but buy vaguely similar things. The one time we went grocery shopping together, the woman at the checkout gave him some seriously judgmental looks and pulled me aside to ask if I was okay. Joe’s too old to pass as my brother, too young to be my father, too unsure of how to act around me to look casual. Anyway, that store clerk’s comment? I mock-gagged and laughed it off. But Joe was mortified. Now he drops me off with cash for my own stuff while he “runs errands.” I think he just drives around for a while until I text him.
“What are you doing today?” he asks, drinking the remaining milk directly from the bowl.
