“Will that be enough time?” asked Simone. “Eclipses aren’t long. A couple of minutes, tops.”
“Sure. But people will be on Main Street all day. There’s a big viewing party. Trust me, nobody’s going to be at the library. I doubt Harriet will even open it up that day. Especially if I go digging when the eclipse is taking place. It would take me, like, thirty minutes. Tops.”
Simone nodded thoughtfully. “It could work.”
“It has to work,” Dr. Lacamoire reminded her.
“It might be hard for me to sneak away from my dad,” I admitted. “But I can do it. You’ll get your telescope. I’ll get my introduction.”
“It sounds to me like we have a deal, Abigail,” said Dr. Lacamoire smoothly.
“It’s Abby, Dr. Lacamoire.”
“Call me Leo.”
So the plan was in motion. When I said yes, and so did he, we kicked off an adventure that we couldn’t have possibly guessed would end the way it did. I had my reasons, and Dr. Leo Lacamoire had his, and Simone even had hers. But together, we had a shared mission. One that involved lying and deceit and probable disaster, sure, but a mission nonetheless.
“Mom?” I went into the office the next day, where my mother was going over some spreadsheets. “Do you have a sec?”
“Sure thing, sweets. Just trying to get a few last-minute things in order. Can you believe the eclipse is in eight days? We have three new renters this week. One cabin was booked by the New York Times!”
“That’s awesome,” I said. I plopped down in the other office chair and spun around in it.
“So what’s on your mind?” She didn’t take her eyes off the spreadsheets.
I had to play this the right way. I thought about my words carefully.
“Someone was looking at the Waukegan Weekly archives at the library last week for a school project, and I saw a picture of Grandma,” I said.
“In the newspaper? Your grandma?” Now Mom looked up, surprised. “That’s funny. For what?”
“A time capsule,” I said. “It was just random.”
Okay, Leo had told me not to ask anyone. But I didn’t think the thing getting dug up would make national headlines. I mean, the eclipse was all anyone could think about. Main Street was decorated with twinkly lights—which would of course be turned off for the eclipse—and cutouts of shooting stars were in all the store windows. There were already news vans parked outside Hank’s Hardware and More, too. Besides, if I put the dirt right back, it might not even be noticeable. And if Mom did hear about it, chances of her suspecting me were low. I didn’t do things like sneak around and dig up secret time capsules. At least, she didn’t think I did.
And if she asked, I’d lie. I was getting better at it.
I wished I could just call my grandma about the capsule, but she had died when I was in kindergarten. I didn’t remember her much, just flashes of pie crust being spread across a plate and old hymns she’d always hum. There was a framed photo of her on one of our bookshelves, and I knew Mom still went to the cemetery in Milwaukee on her birthday every year. We had an afghan she’d knitted folded over the living room couch, and sometimes, I’d bury my face in it and inhale deeply. But it had been washed a thousand times; you couldn’t smell her anymore.
“Really? Never heard about that. When was it?”
“The year 2000,” I said.
“Well, that explains it. That was the year your dad and I were gallivanting around Europe like a couple of college kids,” chuckled Mom. “Our last big adventure pre-Blair. We were gone, what, eight months? We probably missed the whole thing.”
I nodded. “So, you don’t know anything about it?”
“I don’t. That’s pretty cool, though. Can I see the picture?”
“I didn’t print it. I will next time I go to the library,” I said.
“Thanks. What are you up to today? It’s gorgeous out, finally. I thought that rain would never end. You should see if Sophie and Lex want to go out on the paddleboards.”
I shrugged.
“Everything okay there, Abigail? You girls in a fight or something?”
“No,” I said annoyed. “They’re just busy.” Busy having the best summer ever, from the look of their Instagrams.
“Okay. Sure,” Mom said hesitantly. “I saw Vanessa at Coontail’s on Wednesday, and she said Sophie was missing you.” Sophie’s mom. Oh, she was, huh? Did she break her fingers taking too many selfies with Lex and lose her ability to send a text message? Did she fall and get amnesia?
“Whatever,” I grumbled. “I’m gonna go swim or something.”
I got up to leave, but she stopped me.
“Abby? We’re going back to see Blair tomorrow. I know you don’t want to go, but we’re doing a family therapy session. Jade is coming, too. I want us to all be on the same page when she comes home. She’s doing so much better, sweets. It would mean a lot to me if you would come.”
My parents would be out of town? Sounded like a great time to get metal detectors.
And it sounded like a great time to not see Blair. What would we even talk about? What was there to say?
“Just think about it,” Mom said, her voice pleading. “She misses you, Abby. She asks about you every time I talk to her. I think she feels bad that you saw . . . the cupcake thing.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. But Mom just looked away sadly. Remember what I said: sometimes, I’m a liar.
9
AUGUST, PRESENT DAY
Twelve years old
We had a game plan.
I’d always thought I wanted to be an astronomer when I grew up. MIT, NASA, spending my nights looking up at the sky. But I thought the strategy I had formulated for Operation Star-Gazer Twelve Retrieval was pretty good. Maybe I should consider a career as a spy.
Here’s how it would go down:
Day: August 25.
Time: 2:12 p.m.
The eclipse, the eclipse, the eclipse: the entire town consumed, waiting for those few magical minutes. Dr. Leo Lacamoire had responsibilities. He was going to be interviewed by CNN on what an eclipse was and why the day was going dark. I would ditch my dad and hightail it to the library on my bike just before the moon hid the sun. I’d dig up the time capsule with a shovel I’d hide the night before, retrieve the telescope, and leave it in the kitchen of Eagle’s Nest. Then I’d race back to Main Street, nobody the wiser.
Okay, there were a few flaws.
Maybe more than a few. In fact, the more time passed, the dumber the whole thing seemed.
For starters, my dad. How was I supposed to sneak away from him? We’d been talking about the eclipse for months. It was Our Thing—the sky—and I was supposed to just miss it?
Then there was the part where I was supposed to somehow lug around a telescope on my bike. I’d had the same one since I was seven. It had Thomas the Tank Engine stickers on it, for cripes’ sake. It wasn’t exactly a truck—telescopes are heavy.
And what about timing? The eclipse was supposed to last about two minutes. I had told Leo it would take me thirty. But I was kinda doubtful that I could dig a deep hole and haul out an enormous box in that amount of time, let alone bike the thing back to Eagle’s Nest.
So it wasn’t perfect. But Dad would hopefully be distracted, yapping with other people in town, and he’d forgive me, eventually, for disappearing. As for the bike issue, well, I could always balance big stuff on my handlebars. If they could hold Sophie, they could hold a telescope. Even if it took longer than expected, the library wasn’t on Main Street—it was a mile and a half away, off Uselman. Nobody would be driving around. If anyone, by chance, did see me with a box, I’d say it was some delivery for my parents. And soon enough, Dr. Lacamoire and Simone would be long gone, taking the evidence with them.
There was still another problem, a Big Glaring Issue that was hard to tackle. We knew the time capsule was buried in front of the library where everyone posed for that picture. We just didn’t know where. For that, as
mentioned before, we’d need metal detectors. And for that, we’d need a hardware store.
“I am not stealing from Joe,” I said firmly.
I was sitting in the living room of Eagle’s Nest. Simone was wearing a swimsuit with a cover-up, and Leo had on that white stuff old people wear on their nose so they don’t get sunburned.
“Joe? You mean Hank?” asked Simone.
“Joe owns Hank’s Hardware and More. Hank was his grandpa’s cat or something,” I said. “And he’s really nice.”
“The cat or Joe?” asked Simone.
“I’m not stealing from him!”
“Nobody’s asking you to steal. You’re being very dramatic,” said Leo, waving a hand. “We’re paying for the metal detectors, for heaven’s sake. I would never shoplift. We’re just purchasing them after hours.”
“When there isn’t anyone there. And the door is locked,” I said.
“You’re not thinking clearly, Abby!” said Leo, annoyed. “Metal detectors? Then a dug-up time capsule? Hello? We’ll be prime suspects.”
“I don’t get it,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re acting like Moose Junction is going to get its entire police force on this. And if they do, it’s Officer J.J. He does the presentations about smoking at our school. His main job is getting cats out of trees. He’s not exactly Sherlock Holmes.”
“We can’t be too careful,” said Leo. “We’ll leave the money right on the counter. Tell me you don’t know where John keeps the keys.”
“Joe.” And of course I did. They were under the mat, though he probably didn’t even lock the doors. There hadn’t been a real crime in Moose Junction since some college kids vacationing here let a deer loose in Coontail’s.
“I’ll buy them,” I said. “I’ll tell him it’s for . . . a school project.” Mr. Linn flashed in my head: O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive! Some old dead guy had said that once, and Mr. Linn repeated it whenever someone claimed their dog ate their homework. It’s better to be honest, he’d said, and face the consequences.
Well. Easy for him to say. He was an English teacher. His life wasn’t that complicated.
“In August,” Simone pointed out.
“Summer school! Look, digging up the time capsule won’t send us to jail. But breaking into a hardware store might,” I said. “Besides, security cameras? Hello?”
They both looked stumped at that, even though I highly doubted Joe had cameras in the store. He could build a bench or fix a roof but he still needed help sending text messages. He didn’t even take credit cards.
“Fine,” said Simone. “I say we go for Abby’s plan. I just don’t want them pinning this on Leo.”
“Done,” I said.
Leo handed over some cash, a few crisp bills that were larger than any I’d ever held in my life.
“Good luck, stargazer,” said Simone.
The two of them headed out back toward the dock, talking about some TV appearance Leo had booked for the fall. They had plans to take a boat out, which made me nervous. Leo said if he could find new planets he could probably operate a speedboat, but they weren’t really the same skill set. Whatever. Mom and Dad’s problem, not mine.
I was learning some things about Leo, more than you could find in a Google search. For starters, he was a person with secrets. That was okay by me; everyone has pieces of their life they don’t want to talk about. Sometimes at sleepovers Lex cried a little in the middle of the night and I’d never even asked her why. I have plenty of stuff I wouldn’t broadcast on a billboard. But Leo had never mentioned any family or friends besides Simone. He said he was “married to work,” whatever that meant.
He could also zone out in the middle of conversations. Earlier, when we’d been plotting our time capsule mission, Simone was going on and on about the exact timing of the eclipse. When we asked Leo his thoughts, he blinked as if he hadn’t even been in the room. He’d been thinking about the galaxy, he said. What about it, I’m not sure any of us knew.
Mom had actually become buddies with Simone. I would look outside sometimes and see the two of them chatting on the front porch of Eagle’s Nest, Mom usually talking and Simone nodding, occasionally bursting into laughter. I could see Mom chuckling and giving off “mm-hmms” while Simone ranted about Leo’s obsession with his coffee being a certain temperature, and Mom in return would go off about the reporters from Chicago who kept complaining about the sometimes-unreliable Wi-Fi. The other night, they’d even gone to the Green Lantern together. I’d spied on Leo through my telescope. He’d been busy with his own stars, testing out his different telescopes in the observatory. I couldn’t help but wonder how on earth the Star-Gazer Twelve had slipped from his grasp and wound up buried. How could you let something like that go?
I rode my bike into town. I’d obviously opted not to go to Harvest Hills. I couldn’t believe Jade was going, but she’d gotten someone to take her shift at the theater and everything. Mom asked me again in the morning but I’d said I had a headache. Sitting around pretending Blair was going to come home and everything would be perfect felt like a waste of time. I didn’t want to see her, sad and skinny, in a visitors’ area with a bunch of sick people. Blair belonged in a place where she could be dancing or drawing, under a spotlight with all eyes on her. Not in a place with depressed-looking brochures. On the Harvest Hills website, they had a huge picture of a girl with long blond hair and sad eyes looking out a window. It didn’t exactly make you want to spend a day there.
Once upon a time, Blair had been my favorite person in the world. But that was before Anna Rexia blindfolded her and kept her prisoner. Now, just thinking about her made my throat start to pinch shut. It was a lot easier to pretend Jade was my only sister, as terrible as I know that sounds.
You can judge me all you want. You live with someone who’s afraid of a cupcake and tell me how it feels. You let your best friend be kidnapped by a monster and act like everything’s fine. Family, love, support, blah blah blah—more brochure words. The truth is, sometimes you just want to eat a family dinner without someone bursting into tears.
I walked into Hank’s Hardware and More, waving to Joe, and found the metal detectors. Man, those things were expensive! I grabbed three and went up to the counter, playing it cool.
“Hey, Abby,” said Joe. “Going treasure hunting?”
“Extra credit project. Summer school,” I said. Hey, I was getting good at this. Apparently lying was like ballet: the more you practiced, the more graceful you became.
“Where are you taking these things? The shore?”
“Yup,” I said, nodding. I should really do that, I thought. Snap an Instagram. Make it look extra convincing. Not that Joe was perusing social media.
“You, Sophie, and Lex working together?”
“What?”
“Three of ’em,” he said as he rang them up.
“Oh. Yup. Group project.” Of course, now I had to be paranoid that he was going to run into them and ask them how the metal detectors were working. Lies—they grew and grew. You could drop a seed by accident and find yourself with a field full of weeds.
“Hey, by the way, how’s Blair? Georgia wanted me to ask.” Joe’s wife loved Blair. She even drove to Milwaukee once to see her in The Nutcracker. But really, everyone loved Blair. I could hardly walk down the street without someone asking about her.
“She’s good,” I said, forcing a smile. As if I knew. I hadn’t seen her in months. I knew about as much as Georgia did.
“Good to hear.”
The next phase of the plan was simple: meet at the library at midnight. Except for the very obvious facts that I shared a bedroom, it was on the second floor, and Obi was the world’s lightest sleeper, of course.
My family came home late that evening. The sky was clear and I had been up in the attic, still looking for Scorpius. As usual, everyone was exhausted, but maybe a little happy, too. Mom and Dad were, at least. Jade seemed ticked off.
“Who p
eed in your Cocoa Puffs?” I asked her when she slammed our bedroom door.
“Shut up,” she said. “I just spent, like, all day talking about my feelings. I need to take a shower or something. Get all the sap-crap off of me.”
“I don’t know why you even went,” I said.
“I’m surprised you didn’t go,” she said. “Saint Abby didn’t want to do exactly what Mom asked her?”
I glared at her and rolled over. Hopefully, she’d fall asleep early. Obi may wake up at the drop of a hat, but Jade could usually sleep through just about anything.
“It wasn’t so bad,” she said from her bed, staring up at her ceiling. “I mean. I told Blair what I thought. About how messed up she had been last year. And how I wanted her to be okay before she came home.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Stop, stop, stop. I wanted to hear everything and nothing at the same time. I wanted every detail and total silence. I wanted Blair to be perfect and Blair to not exist. I wanted a crack to open up in the Earth, swallow me whole, and spit me back up into the stars. I wanted to ride a rocket to the moon and start a colony there where Anna Rexia could never find me.
“Maybe next time you’ll come. Or not. Whatever. She’s coming home in nine days; did you know that?” said Jade.
Nine days. Nine days until Blair would be back, counting calories and causing Mom to get worried eyes. The mood in the house would return to being a thunderstorm. Dr. Leo Lacamoire and his Star-Gazer Twelve would be headed to Massachusetts.
“I’m tired,” I said, reaching over and turning out my light. “Let’s go to sleep.”
While I waited for Jade to start snoring, I thought about the time capsule. All those memories, stuffed in one place. What would I put in my own time capsule?
The first draft of Planet Pirates.
Dolphy, my creatively named stuffed dolphin that I still slept with every night.
Honey Nut Cheerios, which I ate for breakfast every single morning.
One of Obi’s chew toys.
Maybe some pictures, too. Of Obi when he was a puppy and we brought him home from the pound looking like a fluffy little snowball. My mom in her garden with those crazy polka-dot gloves she loved. The one of the five of us picking out a Christmas tree that my mom kept in the office. I had on such a puffy coat you couldn’t even see my face, but my sisters looked so happy. Pictures are kind of like stars. When you see a star, you’re really glimpsing light from something that died, like, a bajillion years ago. But the glow is still there, even if the star isn’t.
What Happens Next Page 8