by Emily Henry
Did he see us? I thought again and again, like a skipping record.
“They’re beef cows,” Arthur said.
I shot him a pleading look he ignored. Lying to the sheriff was one thing. We didn’t also need to be assholes.
The sheriff sighed. “Look, under different circumstances, I wouldn’t be here, but we’re getting a lot of pressure to put a face on all this.”
Dad pulled at his flannel collar. “I see.”
Arthur cleared his throat. “Sheriff, where do we come into this?”
I’d texted the others to tell them what Remy had said (minus the part about needing to meet me), then ridden straight home and walked into this interrogation.
All I could do was hope Arthur had seen the message, or at least was still committed to keeping his UFO under his jurisdiction. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt that mostly hid his scars, at least.
“Look.” The sheriff thumbed his hat. “I know you all didn’t burn Mr. St. James’s field, but I don’t know where you were that night—”
“At Levi’s!” I volunteered. “Watching The Shining.”
The sheriff held up a hand and continued. “—but from our cursory look at the substation’s security footage, the cameras malfunctioned twelve minutes before midnight.”
Arthur and I exchanged a look. The possibility of security cameras hadn’t occurred to me. I hadn’t stopped to wonder why no one had come running out when the disc hit the tower. “Malfunctioned how?” I asked.
“Stuttered and then froze,” he said. “To the security guards, it just looked like all was calm. Which is one reason we have to treat this as a criminal case until we know more.”
Arthur crossed his arms. “And we’re the criminals?”
“Arthur,” Dad warned, but the sheriff gave a warm, Remy-esque smile.
“I highly doubt it. But we went ahead and pulled the footage from the new traffic camera. Just to see who all might’ve been headed that way before the incident.”
So St. James hadn’t seen us.
Splendor’s one traffic camera, fixed to a two-way stop where three people had died in the last four years, had. Nerves fizzed in my stomach, but Arthur quickly said, “We had to pass through that on our way to Levi’s.”
The sheriff nodded. “That’s exactly what I told St. James. We’re following up on every lead, checking for alibis, and for now, we have no reason to doubt yours. But, Arthur, Frances . . . I need you to understand: Whether you actually had anything to do with what happened in that field, if anything turns up to suggest you were there—for example, any of the missing debris—it’s going to look bad.”
“Missing debris?” Arthur and I said in unison. A wild flare of concern, or maybe something more territorial than that, flashed in my brother’s hazel eyes.
Sheriff Nakamura’s dark gaze probed us for signs that we were acting, pretending to be shocked by what he’d said. “The top of a tower. Some pieces of transmission lines, a metal coil.”
I thought back to yesterday morning. Had any of the wreckage been gone when we woke up? As soon as my mind reached backward, painful white unfurled across it, blocking out the room.
A horrible sound.
White light, everywhere.
Pain in every fiber of my body, cold hardening ice-like in all my cracks, breaking me apart. Force on every side of me, shaking me like gelatin as I hurtle through—
“Why would anyone take that?” Arthur asked.
The white retreated like a tide. I was sitting on the couch, shivering, my fingernails sinking into the cushion and a layer of sweat shining my skin.
No one seemed to notice that I’d just gone to cold, sweaty jelly. That for a moment, I’d left my body.
Oh God. What had happened to us?
My hand went to my throat, searching for something to ground me, but of course the necklace was missing. I stuffed my hands into my hoodie pocket.
“We’re not sure,” the sheriff answered Arthur. “If someone did in fact cause this, they might have taken it as some kind of trophy. Or someone might’ve witnessed it and taken pieces as a souvenir. Happens all the time when street signs get knocked over or when stoplights fall during storms.”
“Well, we didn’t take that junk,” Arthur said. “Like Franny said, we were watching The Shining.”
The sheriff’s lips pressed tight. “The thing is, the debris wasn’t taken the night of the incident. It was taken last night. The new security cameras malfunctioned, in just the same way, and this morning, the rubble was gone. Which suggests whoever was involved, in whatever capacity, is still in Splendor.”
Arthur’s brow scrunched as he tried to think through what this meant, or possibly wrestled with frustration that some other trespasser had made it onto the crash site before him.
The silence stretched uncomfortably. Arthur, too deep in his head to bother with this conversation; Dad, possibly too out of touch to remember how to keep one up; Sheriff Nakamura, giving us every chance to fess up without outright asking where we’d been last night.
“Well, I hope you find whoever did it,” I said.
You know what did it, a voice warned in my head.
I buried my fingernails into my palms to keep from falling into that fragmented memory of the light.
Sheriff Nakamura smiled faintly. “Well, I should be going. Thank you—Frances, Arthur, Robert.” He nodded at each of us in turn. “You’ve been an enormous help.”
We had not.
“Of course, Sheriff,” Dad said. “If there’s anything else we can do . . .” He trailed off, but honestly, good for him, for managing to fulfill that much of the social contract. “I’ll walk you out.”
Droog hopped up to follow them. She had no real allegiance to any of us. She’d been Mark’s dog, really, ever since he found her by the dumpster behind Burger King with a broken leg. She was content to spend her days following any one of us around, but at night, she still slept on the woven mat at the front door, waiting for her boy to get home.
Dad reappeared a moment later, and I braced for the kind of punishment Arthur and I had avoided for five years straight.
But Dad just looked at us for several seconds, with this open, bewildered expression like we’d been newborns when he left the room and he came back to find us like this.
“You two stay out of trouble, okay?” he said finally.
We nodded, and then he shuffled back upstairs.
When we were sure he was out of earshot, Arthur smacked the pillow next to him. “Obviously the alien took the debris.”
“What? Obviously, how?” I asked.
“They’ll increase security now.” Arthur touched his chin. “It could be days before we can get back into that field.”
Good, I thought. No matter how badly I wanted my necklace back, as long as that thing was wandering around Jenkins Lane, I wasn’t going near it.
Even as I thought it, the white rushed forward over my mind, trying to drag me back.
“It’s just a few days,” I said. “It will be fine.”
What I meant was: Hopefully you’ll have forgotten about it, moved on to something new.
Hopefully we all would have forgotten about it.
But something about this—the news coverage, Cheryl Kelly’s blazer, the visits from police officers—kept pulling me back to what had happened five years ago, trying to hold me captive in memories I thought I’d buried.
EIGHT
THE CAR WAS BARELY stopped before Mom tumbled out of the driver’s seat and ran for the hospital’s automatic glass doors. It was funny, the things a person remembered to do and those they forgot in crisis. She’d thought to hit the key fob, to lock the Voyager’s doors, but she hadn’t checked whether we were with her.
Arthur’s lanky strides had carried him halfway across the sun-warmed asphalt, but I’d
barely managed to get my seat belt off when the van’s locks snapped downward.
I hadn’t cried when Mom had told us Mark had been in an accident, or on the ride over. But my eyes stung then as I jerked at the handle.
I knew I had to unlock the door to open it—I was twelve, not five—but Mom’s shiny curls, her blue cardigan and khaki pants were disappearing through the doors, and I pulled again and again, a jumble of fear and loneliness overtaking any logical thought.
“Don’t just leave me!” I hissed as I yanked against the handle. “You can’t just leave me stuck here.”
Arthur had realized I wasn’t behind him and doubled back.
“Franny, stop,” he said, voice muffled by the tinted glass. “It’s locked.”
He was annoyed. Some part of my twelve-year-old self understood why he would be, but all I could do for another second was pull at the handle, still crying under my breath, “You can’t just leave your kid in the car.”
“Franny, unlock the car!” Arthur yelled. “I can’t do anything to help you! Unlock the freaking car!”
I pushed the lock up, and Arthur threw the door open, then turned and ran.
I jumped out of the van and chased him across the lot, feeling stupid and lonely and angry and scared all at once, feelings caught in my belly like a rock too big to pass through my intestines.
I wasn’t thinking about Mark.
All I was thinking was, She didn’t notice I was stuck. She didn’t even notice.
She was a good mom. My parents were good parents. The kind who told you they loved you every time they dropped you off at school or said good night. They took us camping in the summer and bought pumpkins for us to carve in the fall, and they knew our teachers’ names and whether we liked them or not, and when I got inside, I was sure she would wrap her arms around me and apologize for leaving me, and I would know that everything was going to be okay.
* * *
* * *
My bedroom doorknob shocked me on my way out to meet Remy. This was getting ridiculous. In the time since the sheriff left, I’d mildly shocked myself on the teakettle, two light switches, and the spoon I’d eaten cereal with at dinner.
And not when I’d picked it up. I’d just been holding the spoon when suddenly, a pale-blue spark jumped between my skin and the metal.
Whatever else that thing had done to us, it had left me statically charged.
No sooner did I have the thought than the memory rushed painfully over me.
A horrible sound.
No, a terrifying sound, but beautiful. A thousand violins drawn across strings. Sound everywhere. Sound inside me, and the pain it causes. Splitting me open. Too much pushing through me, my body a sieve for the light to pour through and—
I gasped clear of the memory like I’d just come up from water, and collapsed against the door, breathing hard. I reached for the necklace, and my bare throat felt rubbery and foreign to me.
I spread my palm on the door.
Solid, wooden, sticky with humidity. This was real; what had just happened was, at best, a splotchy memory, and more likely, my imagination.
Still, my teeth were chattering, and the pain throbbing through my body was taking its time easing back.
I looked over my shoulder, checking the crease of light around the door to Mark and Arthur’s room. I’d waited to sneak out until the last possible minute, with the hope that Arthur would have gone to sleep by now.
But now I was relieved to find the light on.
It reassured me I wasn’t alone, that I hadn’t actually been pulled out of my house and body, into a blinding white.
You’re here and whatever that was, it’s over.
I wouldn’t think about it again. If Arthur wanted to spend his last two weeks here going all regressive hypnotherapy to recover those few hours, I couldn’t stop him, but as soon as I talked to Remy tonight, I planned to be done with all this.
I tiptoed down the stairs, and Droog clambered up from the woven rug, tail thwapping the wall. Silently, I signaled for her to lie back down, but she turned her nose to the door and whined.
I waffled for a minute. If I left her here crying, Arthur might hear and realize I was gone. I grabbed her leash, clipped it on to her, and slipped into the inky night.
As soon as we were outside, Droog started straining against the leash, trying to run back through the field. Usually, she knew better than to tear back there—I wasn’t convinced the hermit wouldn’t snap her neck and eat the meat off her bones if she got too close to his fence—but tonight she was throwing a fit, crying and pulling desperately.
I dragged her to my bike and carefully grabbed the rubber handle to avoid another shock as I boarded, then looped the leash around my hand. I flicked on the headlight Arthur had attached to the handlebars for my birthday. He was always getting on me for riding without it, just like he did whenever he saw I’d left the Mace key chain at home.
“I paid good money for that!” was his go-to defense for why it made him so angry, but I suspected it had been shoplifted by Nick, who, in addition to lying, might’ve been a little bit addicted to stealing.
It took only a handful of trips to the mall with him to realize he had a habit of showing up wearing the expensive neon sneakers and black band T-shirt you’d watched him not buy the day before. From there, you started to wonder how a part-time Walmart employee—one responsible for keeping his mother fed and housed—could afford to randomly and regularly present his friends with the exact items he’d watched them pining over.
Sofía, in particular, responded with visible anxiety whenever Nick gifted her something she’d just been eyeing. But our family’s budget was comparable to the Colasantis’, and I probably would’ve felt more guilty if Nick had actually spent money on the baby-duck phone case I was now using.
As I pedaled and Droog bounded along beside me, I checked the time on my phone. Two minutes until midnight.
We sped up the access road, and at the top, I hopped off my bike and walked it, Droog and I making our way through the bleached rock to the tracks.
That first summer after the accident, when Remy and I were thirteen and twelve respectively, we’d met here a lot. He wasn’t a good sleeper, due to his nightmares, and the sheriff took his phone every night so he wouldn’t just stay up playing on it.
But Remy and I had found a way around this: We’d invested his lawn-mowing money in a pair of a five-mile walkie-talkies that could just barely reach between our houses. We’d turn them on every night at eleven, just in case one of us had something to “report,” but really, we coordinated meet-ups at the train tracks for no real reason except Remy wanting to avoid his nightmares and me wanting the rush I got from leaving my house without anyone knowing. It made me feel capable and independent, like I could manage the world on my own, without worrying my parents, who were busy with their own troubles.
Tonight, I’d figured Droog and I would have to follow the tracks halfway to Remy’s house, but he was right inside the tree line, sitting on the propane tank.
He hopped off it and came toward us, ignoring Droog’s excited snuffling, to pull me into a rough hug for a few seconds. The soft scent of grass, sweat, and bonfire hung around his denim jacket, weeks of skateboarding and filming and nights around the fire pit distilled into the smell that would always mean Remy Nakamura to me.
It still caught me off guard whenever he or Levi hugged me. Even before the accident, my family had never been very physically affectionate, but the Lindquist-Nakamura clan were big on hugging hello and goodbye. It took a couple of years of seeing each other multiple times each day for Remy’s and Levi’s habit to fade. Now their tight embraces were saved for special occasions.
Like seeing each other for the first time after a possible near-death experience.
The white rushes into me, cold and—
“How did the
interrogation go?” Remy asked, releasing me. “My dad wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“It was more weird than anything,” I said. “Apparently someone stole the wreckage from the electrical tower. Your dad basically warned us to get rid of it before we get busted.”
Remy’s brows peaked. “But you didn’t take it, right?” Droog nosed his hand, and he began to pet her absently. “Arthur didn’t go back for it?”
“He was as surprised as I was to hear it was gone.” And twice as intrigued. Ready to follow the missing debris right to the thing from the video. My skin crawled.
Remy’s shoulders relaxed. “Good. Your brother needs to stay out of this.”
My stomach twisted. Remy didn’t know Arthur was absolutely not going to stay out of this, because Remy didn’t know about the video.
“There’s something you need to know. About what happened the other night.” Tears sprung into my eyes, not from fear but from the sudden rush of sensation. I jammed my eyes shut.
White light. Voices. Pain that isn’t quite pain. It’s more like . . . awareness, feeling every fiber of your being existing at once as the cold rushes through it, rattling you.
A gentle touch on my arm brought me barreling back into my body as if I’d been hovering two hundred miles over it and made the journey back in a millisecond. “You remember?” Remy said.
I opened my eyes. His brows were pitched together, his brown eyes narrowed and a worried dimple in his chin. “I’m so glad you remember. God, Franny, I didn’t know how I was going to tell you . . .”
I balked. “You remember?”
He nodded. “Not all of it, and not all at once, but I think I woke up first—maybe because I was farthest from it. I don’t know, but Franny . . .” His voice thickened. “I saw what that thing did to you, and I’m—I’m so sorry I couldn’t stop it.”
“What?” It came out as a whisper. It was hard to hear over the blood rushing through my eardrums, and possibly the crust of the Earth coming apart underfoot. “What it did to me?”