Come Find Me

by Megan Miranda

  ALSO BY MEGAN MIRANDA

  Fragments of the Lost

  The Safest Lies

  The Perfect Stranger

  All the Missing Girls

  Soulprint

  Vengeance

  Hysteria

  Fracture

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Megan Miranda

  Cover photograph used under license from Shutterstock.com

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Crown and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780525578291 (trade) — ISBN 9780525578307 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780525578314

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Megan Miranda

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Kennedy

  Chapter 2: Nolan

  Chapter 3: Kennedy

  Chapter 4: Nolan

  Chapter 5: Kennedy

  Chapter 6: Nolan

  Chapter 7: Kennedy

  Chapter 8: Nolan

  Chapter 9: Kennedy

  Chapter 10: Nolan

  Chapter 11: Kennedy

  Chapter 12: Nolan

  Chapter 13: Kennedy

  Chapter 14: Nolan

  Chapter 15: Kennedy

  Chapter 16: Nolan

  Chapter 17: Kennedy

  Chapter 18: Nolan

  Chapter 19: Kennedy

  Chapter 20: Nolan

  Chapter 21: Kennedy

  Chapter 22: Nolan

  Chapter 23: Kennedy

  Chapter 24: Nolan

  Chapter 25: Kennedy

  Chapter 26: Nolan

  Chapter 27: Kennedy

  Chapter 28: Nolan

  Chapter 29: Kennedy

  Chapter 30: Nolan

  Chapter 31: Kennedy

  Chapter 32: Nolan

  Chapter 33: Kennedy

  Chapter 34: Nolan

  Chapter 35: Kennedy

  Chapter 36: Nolan

  Chapter 37: Kennedy

  Chapter 38: Nolan

  Chapter 39: Kennedy

  Chapter 40: Nolan

  Chapter 41: Kennedy

  Chapter 42: Nolan

  Chapter 43: Kennedy

  Chapter 44: Nolan

  Chapter 45: Kennedy

  Chapter 46: Nolan

  Chapter 47: Kennedy

  Chapter 48: Nolan

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FOR MY FAMILY

  They say the universe is constantly heading toward disorder, and I believe it. Walls go up, and walls come down. Buildings crumble, governments fall, civilizations collapse. Stars explode.

  People live.

  People die.

  On and on it goes.

  Everything falls apart.

  Please don’t think I’m a pessimist. These are just the facts.

  * * *

  —

  I am, truth be told, an optimist. Otherwise I would not set my alarm for after midnight, when I’m sure Joe is sleeping, and I would not sneak out the side door behind the kitchen, and I would not bike six miles in the dark to the farmland behind my old home to pull the data from my brother’s radio telescope.

  But I do.

  I do all of this, every few nights, because I am an optimist.

  * * *

  —

  I leave my bike at the side of the house, hidden by the wide front porch, the swing creaking in the breeze. There’s still a split-rail fence from when this place had horses, and a faint scent of hay remains—something I only really noticed once I was gone. There are lights in the distance, to my left, from the neighborhood jutting up against our property. But to my right, it’s all darkness—untouchable forest.

  There’s no light on the footpath to the old stable, now makeshift observatory, behind the house, and I don’t want to turn on the outside house lights in case someone sees. On the off chance one of the neighbors notices that something’s happening at the Jones House—and calls Joe.

  The night is hot and sticky, and I could really use the air conditioning, a drink of water from the faucet, and the bathroom, in that order. Joe may have cut the TV, the phone, and the Internet, but he can’t shut down the electricity yet—hard to show a house in the middle of Virginia during June without the air on.

  The Realtor must have had the locks changed last week, but she didn’t know about Elliot’s window around back. He’d reconfigured the mechanism when we first moved in so the window tilted in and out, instead of sliding up and down, and he’d sacrificed the locks for the design. So if I used the deck railing, I could reach up and push at the top, and then the bottom would swing open. He was always tinkering with things, down to the smallest detail. Bedroom windows, before he got to radio telescopes.

  I feel my way through Elliot’s room, none of the furniture where I remember it. Someone—the Realtor, I guess—thought to turn this room into an office. Really, no amount of staging can change what people already know about this house.

  Our house has a quirky layout: it was probably designed as a sprawling ranch, with three bedrooms and the living areas on the main floor, but there’s a newer second-story loft that must’ve been added on after the fact, which now holds a storage area and an entertainment room. It’s where I used to bring my friends, to hang out. But I haven’t touched the second floor since the day I moved.

  Walking from Elliot’s room, I wait until I’m out in the hall to turn on the flashlight I’ve brought, keeping the beam away from the windows.

  The hall and the living room look much the same as when I last lived here, six months ago—except all the photos of us have been hidden away. There must’ve been a showing recently, because someone has finally closed the kitchen cabinets. But I smile, picturing a family standing at the edge of the kitchen, seeing all the empty cabinets swung open in an eerie formation, imagining the chill making its way up their backs.

  I don’t believe in ghosts. But it helps that other people do.

  This time, I decide to mess with everything on the walls. I tip the paintings so they hang at odd angles, and I take a few off the walls, laying them haphazardly along the floor—so they look like they were knocked down in a rush. I stand back to assess the room. The whole effect is vaguely unsettling, which is kind of the point.

  The air feels cool against the sweat on my legs, and I drink the water from the kitchen sink, and use the bathroom attached to my room—which is nearly empty, as everything of value to me, including the f
urniture, has been relocated to Joe’s.

  In the distance, standing near the window of Elliot’s room, I hear a voice. Even some laughter. I quickly turn off the flashlight and crouch below the window. I already know who it is: Marco, Lydia, and Sutton, probably. I should be annoyed that they still use the land beyond our house to meet up. I should probably feel some sense of propriety, or betrayal. I should want to know why they’re here, on a Friday night, without me. Mostly, though, I just want them to go.

  But it’s too late. I hear gravel kicking up as someone jogs toward the house.

  I peek out between the curtains, see a shadow near the detached garage behind the house. I can tell it’s Marco from the way he stands with his hands in his pockets, and the way his hair, which I used to love to run my fingers through, sticks up at odd angles.

  “Kennedy?” he calls, his voice unsure. He takes a step closer. But not too close.

  When I don’t answer, he rocks back and forth on his heels and drags the side of his foot through the dirt. He takes a tentative step forward, and then back, before looking up at the sky as he turns around. He stops moving.

  “Come on,” he calls, turning back to the house. “I saw the light. I see your bike. I know you’re in there.” I watch as he shifts from foot to foot. “I’ll just wait you out,” he adds.

  But he won’t. He also won’t try to come in. He hasn’t even crossed into the yard.

  Marco spends what feels like an eternity hovering around the garage. Standing beside it, sitting in the dirt, standing again. “Kennedy!” he finally shouts, drawing out each syllable and tilting his head back like he’s a wolf and I am the moon, and I wonder if maybe he’s drunk. The voices nearby stop. “I’m sorry,” he adds, and that’s how I know he must be drunk. The words come six months too late.

  He eventually walks back toward the voices, shaking his head. I check my watch. Seven minutes. A Herculean effort, for sure.

  I have to wait another hour for the voices to disappear. Unlike Marco, I’m practiced in the waiting. I’ve grown comfortable in it, though nothing quite like Elliot, who was patience personified. Everything takes time, Elliot told me, fidgeting with the tiny wires of the satellite dish, turning it into something that could listen to the vastness of space. Anything worth something.

  After I’m sure I’m alone again, I slip out the window, heading back to the observatory. The dish sits in the middle of the abandoned farmland, a cable running to a shed that had once been a small stable, until Elliot converted it to this. Now it holds an old computer with several monitors set up—the base of his solo operation and his contribution to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)—and it still works as long as the electricity is kept on, even if I can’t access it through the Internet. I wouldn’t let the Realtor touch it.

  I take my flash drive and download the last few days’ worth of data, searching for radio signals that could’ve been sent out by intelligent life beyond our world. I’ll spend the weekend sorting through it, unspooling the data like a lie detector test, little blips in frequencies giving rise to more questions: Is it real or background noise? Is it the truth or something else, like a trick of light? I’ll map the coordinates, check the amateur SETI message boards, and tag and file every one, like Elliot taught me.

  Most searches have scanned just a fraction of the universe. They’re guessing, grasping, listening for a very specific signal. It’s no wonder they’ve come up empty so far. Elliot said there had to be something more. We’re new, he told me. Humans, I mean. Earth is 4.5 billion years old; the universe, closer to 14 billion. Modern humans first came on the scene 300,000 years ago. That’s a lot of unaccounted-for time in the universe for intelligent life to develop elsewhere. That’s a lot of chance.

  This is boring, I told him the first time I sat beside him in this very room. We were the new family in town last summer, and I hadn’t met anyone yet. Hanging out with my older brother was better than nothing, but it didn’t stop me from complaining, even then.

  This is everything, he said, his face glowing, his fingers mapping the frequency readouts, as if he could commit them to memory. Three hundred thousand. Fourteen billion. Do the math. Don’t tell me there’s nothing else. All I saw were tiny peaks and tiny valleys on a screen, meaning nothing. Elliot was like that, though, seeing something where the rest of us couldn’t. Excited by the possibilities of the things he imagined—the world he believed might exist one day.

  I should start back for Joe’s, but I’m tired, it’s the weekend, Joe sleeps late. This is what I think as I climb back through Elliot’s window, feel my way to my mother’s room on the other side of the living room, sprawl out on top of her covers, and shut my eyes, listening to the sounds of the empty house.

  Elliot was right, of course. I can see that now. There must be something more than this.

  Marco in the night, the empty house, the endless sky.

  This cannot be everything.

  This cannot be all that exists.

  I could tell you at least ten different stories about the woods of Freedom Battleground State Park—mostly ghost stories, a couple of legends thrown in for good measure—but there’s only one that matters.

  Here it is: Seventeen-year-old Liam Chandler takes his dog for a run into the woods during a family picnic held between the tire swings and the park-owned grills. His younger brother gets a premonition—one of those all the hairs stand up on your arms moments—when he suddenly remembers the dream he dreamt the night before, the one he hasn’t remembered until that very moment when it’s already too late. The dream was one of those running-in-molasses types, where no matter how fast you run, you never seem to get anywhere. And no matter how hard you try to scream, your voice won’t come. So the word he’d been trying to yell—Liam—remained lodged in his throat until morning, when his mother woke him for the picnic, and the light from the window made him groan, and he promptly forgot the dream entirely.

  Liam and the dog—this mutt of a thing they’d adopted years earlier that preferred Liam to all other life-forms, except maybe rabbits—had been gone for, what, ten minutes, maybe, by the time the dream came back to the brother? By the time the hairs on his arms all stood on end and the boredom turned to panic? Ten minutes, we’ll say.

  “Where’s Liam? Liam!” The brother starts running. He starts searching, tearing through the twigs and underbrush, following the unpaved paths deep into the woods and back out again. Eventually his parents, hearing the desperation in his yells—this time, not stuck in his throat—ask him what’s the matter. The brother tells them, with an air of inevitability, that Liam is gone. No, they say, he’s with Colby. He’s out for a jog. He’ll be back soon.

  The premonition tingles like static electricity.

  The boy and the dog are never seen again.

  * * *

  —

  That was two years ago. My brother is still gone. Missing. The police, the FBI, the volunteers who have devoted thousands of hours of labor, have found nothing. The newspaper headlines crackled for attention: The Unsolved Mystery of Promising Student Athlete; All-State soccer goalie, National Merit Scholar, golden child of Battleground High, disappears without a trace. Liam Chandler, stuff of legends.

  Liam Chandler, reduced to nothing more.

  * * *

  —

  Allow me to set today’s scene: It’s Saturday morning, barely dawn. I’ve got a loaded backpack, schoolwork dumped out on my floor. The phone rings. My dad paces downstairs while he talks. My mom works at the computer station in what was once our living room with earbuds in, her head nodding in agreement to some statistic or statement on one of her podcasts. Eventually, the doorbell will ring, and the hum of activity and the scent of coffee will overtake the house. It’s the same every weekend. Worse, now, with the influx of kids back from college, partnering with my parents’ foundation for volunteer credit. Even wor
se because I recognize a few of the names—kids who were at my high school a few years ago.

  This is the best time to leave, before the phone lines become congested, before their voices start to carry up the steps, before they decide they could really use another set of eyes, or hands, or ears, and somebody inevitably calls, “Nolan?” I head down the back steps, out the back door, walking around the outside of the house to the driveway, partly to avoid my parents, who will ask why I’m heading to work so early, but mostly to avoid the pictures.

  I should explain the pictures.

  They started in the living room—just a few taped sporadically to the walls—but they’ve slowly and steadily seeped into the dining room, down the hall, and have recently begun encroaching on the kitchen. They’re like wallpaper, their edges overlapping, eyes of the missing following as you pass. Their names and measurements, birth dates, and last reported seen statistics written in Sharpie underneath. A girl, age twelve, from Florida, over my seat in the dining room. Next to a boy, age fourteen, from West Virginia. Round and round they go.

  It was a rapid progression from a seemingly normal house to this: First, the police, the FBI, the psychic my parents consulted—clinging to her every word even while looking embarrassed for themselves—failed to provide any answers. Next, the volunteer-run center migrated from the generosity of the coffee shop meeting space to our living room, and my parents redoubled their efforts. Then, getting nowhere, they tripled them, spinning faster and faster until they finally landed in some exponential realm so that instead of just finding Liam, they’d inadvertently taken on the case of every missing child on the East Coast. Or so it seemed to me.