Here

by Ella James

  My mind was running on overdrive, thinking about Milo in her Leia outfit, the way the turtle neck had hugged her chest. I thought about the way she looked asleep, with her dark hair spilled around her face, her long eyelashes black against the paleness of her face. I thought about what she’d told me about her dad.

  I remembered how she’d felt under my hands, when I’d wrapped my arms around her on the motorcycle. When I’d stood so close to her, dancing.

  I thought about the feeling I got when I imagined never seeing her again. The sensation that I needed to break away from…something. The sense that knowing Milo meant I might end up doing something that was horrible.

  What?

  By the time we reached our exit, I felt cold all over.

  I told Milo, “Sorry.”

  She said, “It’s okay. I know you’ve got to be stressed out.”

  We drove a few miles, while I decided that I hated New Castle—so small and dingy, everything looking insubstantial, like a gust of wind could blow it away and turn the land back to crumbing rock and trembling trees.

  I wished that would happen.

  Milo asked me to get the GPS out of the glove box, and I put Janice DeWitt’s address in. The mechanical male voice guided us to the place where we would part. And when Milo pulled up at a small yellow house with a big bay window in the front and a front yard with no trees, she fished around and found a pen and paper.

  “I’m giving you my number,” she said, looking at me with her big green eyes. “I want you to call me if you need anything, okay?”

  I thought the words: Don’t tell, and Milo didn’t hear them but I think she felt the point.

  “I’ll keep everything a secret. No worries.”

  I nodded and I hugged her hard. As I walked through the yard, I tried to keep the feeling of her heat.

  *

  It was Thursday afternoon before I heard anything more of Gabe DeWitt. I’d gotten through Tuesday—our first day back at school after the teacher holiday—and Wednesday by avoiding the TV, the radio, and Internet news sites.

  When Bree, Halah, and even Annabelle tried to ask about my cousin, I blew them off. I was so determined not to think of Gabe that in the mornings I got the books for all my classes so I could avoid the lockers—and my friends’ questions—all together. Halah didn’t remember much about “Nick,” so she didn’t press; she just said, “I know he’s not your cousin.” Annabelle was a little more insistent. She offered me $50 for Nick’s phone number, then accused me of being on “Halah’s side” when I wouldn’t give it to her.

  S.K. was the only one who knew a portion of the truth: that Nick was someone I’d met randomly, and for now, I didn’t want to talk about him. When she asked me in the bathroom after our mutual honors history class, my eyes were red and puffy; when I brushed her off, she didn’t press.

  I actually might have confided in her on Thursday afternoon, but she left orchestra practice with ComicCon Ami The Xylophone Player from Mullen High before I could track her down and spill my guts.

  Thursday night, a few minutes before 7 o’clock, I text’d Mom—she wasn’t coming home for another hour or two—then made myself oatmeal for dinner and turned the TV to Channel Nine Action News.

  Within minutes, Gabe’s face was in the corner of my screen, and my heart was sinking.

  The newscaster, an over-made-up woman with long black hair and the annoying habit of enunciating the wrong words, said things like “miraculous” and “extraordinary.” His friends and family, she said, were “overjoyed” to have him back. Then she interviewed two girls and two boys, the two boys wearing the black and royal blue of Coal Ridge High School. I watched their faces, not even hearing what they said.

  “Gabe’s grandmother, Janice DeWitt, says he is looking forward to getting back to school, where he plays wide-receiver for the Titans. For now, Gabe remains at a Denver-area rehabilitation center, where he will work with specialists to regain his memory and, ultimately, get over the strange ordeal that spared his life—but not his family.”

  And then it was over. I turned the TV off and stared, feeling cheated. That woman hadn’t told me anything!

  I climbed upstairs and combed through online news stories. Apparently Gabe had told people that he’d come to miles from the crash site, and had discovered who he was when he wandered into town and saw his picture on a newspaper. Who dropped him off? A “stranger.”

  I felt irrationally upset—at being described as a stranger. I felt worse when, in another story that had been published on Sunday, a girl named Halley Sturgis was quoted saying she was “holding out hope.” The newspaper had called her Gabe’s girlfriend.

  19

  On Friday, those of us performing with the Denver Youth Orchestra the next afternoon got the school day off. I slept until ten o’clock, intentionally leaving myself only 45 minutes before our marathon rehearsal started. I was sitting in my bed, staring at the Rubix Cube that Nick (Gabe!) had solved, when I heard the doorbell ring.

  I thought it was Nick (Gabe!!).

  Of course I did…

  So before I ran downstairs, I brushed my teeth and combed my hair and swapped my dingy navy sweatpants for a pretty, pale pink pair. Before I tugged the door open, I smoothed my charcoal Beam Me Up t-shirt.

  It wasn’t Nick (Gabe!!!).

  Instead, I found myself face-to-face with two of the most serious-looking men I had ever seen. They wore identical suits—sleek, black, and starched beyond perfection—and identical frowns.

  Ohhhhhhh, Men in Black was the first thing that I thought, and almost said it.

  Lucky for me, I didn’t, because the taller, darker one—a handsome African-American man two feet taller than me and three times as wide—fixed me with a death stare.

  “Mrs. Mitchell?” he said. His voice was like a dog’s bark: sharp and clear and startling.

  I nodded, though of course, I wasn’t Mrs.

  He pointed to his sidekick, a younger man—I thought of him more as a “guy”—with blond hair and the kind of lean physique that made me think of parkour. “This is Agent Diego. I’m Agent Sid.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out an ID badge. Diego just stood there, looking smug.

  “We’re from the Department of Defense,” he said, like that might mean something.

  I nodded, stupid. “My mom is Mrs. Mitchell,” I blurted. “She’s up at the turbines.” I swallowed, regretting that I’d told them that. “Is something wrong?”

  “Something was,” said Sid.

  I waited a beat for him to explain, and Diego, the blond, stepped forward. “You are aware that the area recently experienced a large power outage?” I wanted to say, ‘You mean the one that just happened like two days ago?’, but nodded instead. “We’re trying to find out why. Shouldn’t take us long, but we need access to your property.”

  “Uh…” I was confused. What did the Department of Defense have to do with a power outage? I was trying to work up the courage to ask, when I glanced at Sid. His gaze left a trace of heat. “Okay…”

  Sid nodded, and Diego said, “Okay.”

  I ran my palm over my hair. “Well, let us know if we can help. My mom or me.”

  Diego nodded.

  I started to shut the door, but at the last minute I stuck my head back out. “Do you think we had something to do with it? I mean, the turbines?”

  Diego said, “No,” at the exact moment Sid said, “We can’t be sure.”

  They exchanged a look—one where I couldn’t tell who was chastising whom—and then nodded, in absolute unison. Then they turned away.

  *

  Rehearsals happened at Boettcher Hall, a concert hall in the middle of the Denver Performing Arts Center, right in the heart of downtown.

  Boettcher is unusual because it’s round. Concert halls usually aren’t. Sitting on the stage, I usually feel like a fish in a bowl, even if the seats are empty. I keep it together during performances, but practices always kick my butt. That Friday, I messed up
my part on the piano not because of nerves, but because my mind was somewhere else.

  I thought about Nick, of course.

  I’d been thinking about him almost every second since I’d dropped him off. But that morning, as I’d watched two black Tahoes drive toward the turbines, I thought again about the moment I found Nick. It had followed a flash of light. The power had been out when we got to my house.

  The more I thought about that, the more loony I felt. Like I was being paranoid. Except what really made me paranoid was to write the whole thing off, as if it didn’t matter. I felt so certain that it did. That Nick did.

  His face kept swimming through my head, so instead of messing up once or twice, I botched my part all four times we ran through our stuff. I was so bad that Dr. Fawn pulled me aside afterward to ask if I had hurt my hands.

  “Is it the piano?” he asked when I shook my head. “They’ve switched them out—you noticed that. The Steinway you usually use was mangled by some drunken Frenchman.” Dr. Fawn wrinkled his blade-straight nose.

  “I think it may be the piano,” I lied. (Honestly, I hadn’t even noticed). “I promise I’ll do a better job tomorrow.”

  The thing about Dr. Fawn was, for a perfectionist, he could be seriously flighty. Not to mention unobservant. Any conscious person who didn’t have his head completely up in space would have noticed I was not myself that day.

  I’d taken Dad’s Agusta to rehearsal, wanting to feel the cold smack of the wind, to feel like I had as much control over my life as I did over the bike. Control had always been my thing, going back to after Dad died and I decided not to eat about 95 percent of the world’s foods, and ended up in Dr. Sam’s office getting “therapy.”

  Of course, driving a motorcycle didn’t solve my problems. By the time I turned onto Mitchell Road, I was feeling anxious and unhappy.

  I sped up at the mailbox, wanting to fly down our driveway—and I was, when I noticed the black SUV, parked in the same place it had been four hours earlier.

  Even at the speed of light, I could make out Sid and Diego’s bleary figures standing on the doorstep. For a moment, I felt sure that our front door was open, but the next instant it was shut.

  If I was paranoid then, it was worse when I parked the bike, tucked my sweater around myself, and climbed the front porch stairs.

  Instead of Sid, this time Diego nailed me. He stuck out his tanned arm and caught my hand like we were buds or something. “Milo,” he said. “You got a second?”

  “Um, sure.” I extricated my arm, feeling somehow both rude and violated.

  “You remember Saturday morning?” Diego asked.

  Oh, crap.

  “What were you doing?” I blinked at Diego’s raspy, young-ish voice.

  “Um, Saturday?” I sounded like a liar. Already. “Saturday morning… I guess I went to my old tree house.” When my face got hot from lying, I shrugged and tried to exaggerate it. “Kind of dorky, I know. I go there sometimes, to relax.”

  “So you were outside when it happened?”

  “…It?”

  “The outage.”

  I shrugged. “I guess so.”

  Sid cut in. “Did you see anything unusual?”

  I shook my head, frowning. (That much was not hard to do). “Like what?”

  “Anything,” Sid said firmly. “Anything at all.”

  I told them I’d seen some deer, but other than that, it had been an uneventful morning. A few minutes later, I shut the door behind me. In addition to shooting someone with deer tranquilizer and leaving an acquaintance for dead, now I had lied to the Department of Defense.

  Good stuff.

  By eight o’clock, my mind was so boggled I could hardly see straight. I’d been wandering the house, Nick’s Rubix Cube (somehow his touching it had made it his) in my hand, staring at walls and pictures. I should have been practicing on my keyboard. I could have turned on the TV news.

  Instead, I found myself online, looking up Janice DeWitt’s home number.

  I curled up in my bed, piled the covers on, and dialed with spaghetti fingers.

  Riiiiing.

  Riiiiiing.

  Riiiiiing.

  C’mon, Nick (GABE!), answer!

  Then someone did. “Hello.” The raspy, tired voice belonged to Gabe’s grandmother. I pictured her crying in that small house all alone. I pictured her crying even more when she found him on her doorstep.

  “May I speak to Gabe, please?”

  In the silence that followed, I couldn’t breathe. Then, “You nosey reporters need to stop calling my grandson! He’s got enough to deal with! THANK YOU, NOT!”

  And the phone went dead.

  I held it for the longest time, feeling numb inside.

  I wondered why he hadn’t called. I chided myself for being selfish.

  20

  The day of the recital, I practiced my solo plus the whole concert three times. I set up the keyboard on my bed, playing hunched over my lap, pretending I was Beethoven—or someone equally tortured.

  When I was finished, I drank a glass of apple juice and forced myself to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Like most other foods, this had been off-limits at one time, and I was under strict orders to eat something that made me weird whenever I felt stressed.

  For this concert, we were wearing burgundy gowns. “For autumn!” Dr. Fawn had said. I put my gown on at four o’clock and went downstairs, and talked to Mom about the people from the DOD.

  “So weird,” she said, in the same way she said weird when she was talking about me. I nodded and said something I don’t remember anymore.

  The ride seemed to last forever and take no time at all. It was raining and the Volvo made its old rain noise, a clinking metal sound no one had ever been able to ID. I held my hands in front of the vents and tried to absorb the heat, but when we got into Denver, I was freezing, prompting Mom to ask me, “Have you eaten?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “A lot of different stuff.” I shot her a look that said Get off it, and Mom gave me one that said Are you lying to me, young lady?

  “I’m fine,” I snipped. “Just nervous.”

  For the rest of the ride to Boettcher Hall I thought about Nick—Gabe—Nick. How, to me, he would always be Nick. I thought about the day that I had shot him, how warm I’d felt when I looked at him as we walked. I thought about him touching my leg. About the way he looked when he’d said he wanted to turn the TV off anyway. How he had given me that out. How he had hugged me right before he hopped out of the Volvo.

  He’d been sitting in this very spot, where I was now. Even driving to his grandma’s house, he had seemed…so permanent.

  And now he was gone.

  And how selfish was I that all I could think about was me, when Gabe was going through heaven knew what, and his family and his friends…

  I was no one to him. I needed to quit thinking about him.

  The concert went well. I played my solo without any errors—not even the minor, tempo kind. I played like I belonged in an orchestra. Bree came up to me afterward and told me I had done well, and seeing her and her oboe was like a knee right to the chest. I’d given Sara Kate some thought (mainly of the Hoface is ditching me for Ami sort), but Bree… Well, I’d forgotten Bree existed in the last few days.

  Impulsively, I hugged her. “You did great, too, B.”

  She smiled, and I was smiling at her when a warm weight dropped onto my shoulder. I turned.

  “Nick!”

  I didn’t mean to say his name (ex-name). It was just like in the movies, where the person does this little gasp, then blurts something in a breathless voice that always sounds contrived.

  As soon as I had thrown my arms around Bree, I forgot her again—everything lost in the shock of seeing Nick.

  “Gosh, I’m sorry. Gabe.”

  Before I knew it, I’d thrown my arms around him, too. I was pretty much the opposite of what a nervous high school girl shou
ld be. Seeing him again had made me crazy-bold. I squeezed him as hard as I’d been wanting to—a little harder, even, just to let him know I cared. It never crossed my mind that Gabe would be somewhere else, in mind or emotions or whatever. In that second, I was just a girl—not a stranger he’d spent the night with—and Ni—Gabe! was just a guy I liked.

  I’m embarrassed to say he pulled away first. I was so embarrassed in the moment, it took me a second to notice that he had his hand on my hip; his arm was draped around my waist. To my surprise, he leaned his forehead against my hair for just one second, hugging me one more brief, hard time.