Every Missing Piece

by Melanie Conklin

  I knew that love. I felt it every day, in her hugs and her kisses, but it seemed to me that love was just as likely to break a person in half as it was to save them. Every morning with Stan at our breakfast table was a morning Dad missed.

  “You can fall in love, but your heart can get broken, too,” I said.

  “Love can do both,” Mom said. “It hurts and it heals. You have to risk one to gain the other. But I have never regretted loving someone.”

  “Not even Dad?”

  She’d cradled my face in her hands. “Especially not Dad. He gave me you.”

  15

  APRIL FOOLS

  Mom made sunny-side-up eggs for April Fools’ Day, only when Stan cut into his, it was really a canned peach sitting in a pile of plain yogurt. He got Mom back, though. When she tried to scoop the cereal he’d poured for her, the milk was frozen. You wouldn’t think that breakfast pranks could make people laugh until they cried, but for us they did.

  Stan and I spent the afternoon on the paddle boats at the science center, trying not to spin in circles. Afterward, I biked over to Eric’s. This time I brought Frankie with me. She was thrilled to see Eric, but not as thrilled as he was to see her.

  “Hey, Frankie. Hey, girl,” he said as she licked him all over his face and arms. Frankie wagged as he scratched her ears. His fingers were dirty, the tips stained red from clay.

  “You been digging?” I asked.

  He looked up from loving Frankie to smirk at me. “Maybe.”

  “What for?”

  “Come see.” He took off toward the cemetery, and me and Frankie followed.

  We wove through the trees, ducking under tulip poplar branches full of baby red leaves. The treetops were filling in, and the air was sweet with honeysuckle. All around us, bugs buzzed and goldfinches tittered, busy building nests for the eggs they would lay soon.

  When we got to the Roach family cemetery, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Branches were piled all along the edges of the graveyard in a giant V. We stopped at the point of the V, and my foot twanged against something. I whipped around right in time to see a log swinging at my head, and hit the ground with a scream, only to watch the log swing to a gentle stop above us, held back by a rope.

  Eric clapped his hand against his scrawny leg and laughed. “April Fools’!”

  I gave him the stink eye while Frankie furiously licked my cheek. “That was not funny.”

  “Was too. You should’ve seen the look on your face!”

  I stood up, brushing off the dirt and leaves. “You’re fired. Right, Frankie?”

  She wagged at me, and Eric’s smile faded. “Aw, come on. You’re too short for this trap. It never would’ve hit you. I wanted to test it, and I figured it was April Fools’.…”

  I looked up at the log, which hung a good two feet above my head.

  “Don’t be mad,” he said, looking down at the ground like I’d broken his fool heart. It sure was tempting to give him a real hard time, but I had questions to ask and answers to find.

  “Where’d you learn how to do all this booby-trap stuff, anyway?”

  “YouTube. This is a screen. Anyone who comes through here will get funneled into the trap. See how the branches block the way?”

  I did see. And it looked plain wrong to me. “You can’t pile all this mess in a cemetery.”

  Eric shrugged. “What do they care? They’re dead.”

  “It’s disrespectful. Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean they don’t care. Their ghosts might care. I care.” His lips curved into a frown, and I thought of how Kelsey had yelled at him about the booby traps. If he shut me out, I wasn’t going to get any answers. “We could move it over,” I said. “That way it would cover more of the woods, too.”

  He considered what I’d said and nodded in agreement.

  I looped Frankie’s leash over a stump and we got to work, carrying branches to make piles, bending saplings and tying them down to make a fence. I pulled up some briars and draped them over the branches so it looked like a natural, overgrown stretch of woods. Afterward, Eric helped me collect bluets and star grass to decorate the graves, which only seemed right.

  When we finished, it looked like the Roach family had been there, keeping company. The Christ Baptist Church does the same thing every summer on Decoration Day, when families visit the graves and share a meal with their loved ones. I like the idea so much that every year on June 2, Mom and I picnic in the field where we spread Dad’s ashes.

  I knelt to run my fingers over a tombstone. You could read the date 1863 at the top, but the letters didn’t make much sense.

  Eric crouched next to me. “I think it says ‘Ophelia.’” He dragged my finger in a circle so I could feel the O. By the time we’d traced the whole name, my cheeks were on fire.

  I stood up, feeling like I’d been turned inside out. “What exactly are you building all these traps for, anyway? You trying to catch something?”

  “No. They’re just in case.”

  “In case of what? A bear?”

  He busied himself with a length of twine, tying and untying a knot. “My dad.”

  My breath caught. “Is that who Mr. Jessup was talking about the other day?”

  “Yeah.”

  Eric rubbed at his arm, and I noticed angry red scars along his inner elbow where the flesh is tender. Dread pooled in my gut. “Did he do that to you?”

  Eric yanked the sleeve of his Carolina sweatshirt down. “My dad isn’t a nice guy,” he said. Then he turned away and sat down with his back against a giant oak tree.

  Watching the way his shoulders slumped, I didn’t care about those notes Cress and I had made about Billy Holcomb. Maybe I could be Eric’s friend. Then the part of me that needed answers stirred, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to let it go—but I could still be there for him.

  I sat down next to him, and Frankie sprawled out between us, looking for a belly rub.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Eric stayed quiet, and in a way I was glad. Sitting close like that, I started listening to the sound of my own breath, trying not to be too loud. Every once in a while, I stole a peek at him. Was it my imagination, or were there dark roots coming in along his scalp?

  I’d finally gotten up the courage to ask when he said, “Is it true your daddy drowned?”

  All the wind rushed out of me.

  I shut my eyes, and behind my eyelids I saw that blue-gray color of the beach house, and the sky, and the ocean water when it runs fast and deep. The currents are invisible. They’re hidden far below the surface, and by the time you find them, it’s too late.

  A crashing sound built in my ears.

  At first I thought I was hearing the ocean again, but then Frankie started growling, the black fur along her spine standing up like porcupine quills.

  “Someone’s coming,” Eric said.

  We scrambled to our feet.

  Standing outside the screen was Kelsey, looking madder than a bag of wasps.

  16

  FLUFFERNUTTER

  This one time last year, Mom caught me spying on our neighbors, the Davises. Their garage was crammed with stacks and stacks of old newspapers, and I was sure their house was going to burn down because that’s a huge fire hazard. My plan was to sneak in and clean the newspapers out an armload at a time, but when I stood up from my hiding spot in the bushes to run inside the garage, Mom was standing in their driveway. She said I had to come home that very second.

  I didn’t argue. My whole body tingled with the shock of being caught. That’s how I felt when Kelsey found me and Eric out in those woods.

  “I told you to stay by the trailer,” she said, grabbing Eric’s arm. “You can’t wander around like this.”

  “Let go,” he said, twisting out of her grip.

  “Jessamyn said you ran off after school. Where’ve you been all this time?”

  “Here.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Hanging out. Like normal people.” He stubbed his toe i
nto the ground.

  Her glare softened. “Right. Okay.” She let out a breath. “Look, I’m sorry for yelling—”

  “And grabbing me.”

  “—and grabbing you,” she repeated, with a tiny smile. “You gave me a scare is all. Don’t run off like that again, okay?”

  “Okay,” Eric said, “but Maddy’s staying for dinner.”

  I started to beg pardon, but Kelsey fixed an eye on me and said, “Well. I guess you’ve got to eat.” She didn’t smile or ask if it was okay with my parents, but I texted Mom anyway.

  “Have fun with your friend,” Mom texted back, which made me blush. I reminded myself that I was not the type of girl who had crushes on boys. Boys were decent friend material if you picked the right one, but I was not interested in losing my mind over one of them.

  This was strictly a snooping opportunity.

  At the door to the trailer, I stopped to brush off Frankie’s paws the way Mom did at our door, to be polite. Once we were inside, Frankie strolled straight into the living room and plopped down, bracing her back against the La-Z-Boy chair with a satisfied grunt.

  In the kitchen, Eric grabbed two glasses of soda and sat at the little table with the mismatched chairs while I watched Kelsey move around the kitchen and wondered what we would eat. She opened a cupboard, and without even washing her hands, dug out slices of white bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a jar of Marshmallow Fluff.

  “Plain or toasted?” she asked.

  “Plain is fine,” I said, even though I had no idea what she was making.

  She slathered a layer of peanut butter on one slice of bread and a layer of marshmallow on the other. Then she slapped them together and handed me the sandwich, no plate. I half expected her to say, “April Fools’!”

  But she didn’t.

  “Is this a joke?” I asked.

  “It’s a fluffernutter,” Eric said. “Haven’t you had one?”

  “No.”

  “Time’s a-wastin’, then,” Kelsey said, so I sucked it up and took a bite. Salty sweetness coated my tongue. As I chewed, the white bread melted away like it was made of air. The sandwich was surprising but satisfying, like that first lick of ice cream on a hot summer day.

  I must’ve smiled because Eric said, “It’s the best, right?”

  Kelsey handed him a sandwich and he tore into it like he hadn’t eaten in a week. She laughed. “He can’t get enough to eat these days. Been growin’ like a weed, haven’t you?”

  Eric smiled a little bit, and my mind raced, because that was the answer to one of our questions: Eric was a lot taller than Billy Holcomb… but it had been six whole months. He might’ve just grown.

  While Eric ate every last crumb of his fluffernutter and licked his fingers clean, I sat there thinking I should ask him if his daddy’s full name was Robert, but with Kelsey there, I couldn’t get the words past my lips.

  Kelsey put the bread and jars back in their cupboard and sat down next to us. Then she dumped out a paper bag full of broken pottery bits and began to sort them. The pieces were terra-cotta on one side and blue glaze on the other. Their edges looked sharp enough to cut hair, but Kelsey handled them with ease.

  “What do you think?” she asked Eric.

  For once, he didn’t make a face or get mad. “It’ll be a good one.”

  She smiled, the first full smile I’d seen on her, and it lit up her whole face.

  “She breaks them on purpose,” Eric said. He passed me one of the bowls with metal cracks, and I realized what Kelsey was doing. She was fitting the pieces back together.

  “I learned the technique while I was… away,” she said.

  “It’s called kintsugi. You use lacquer with metal to fix up the pots. It honors the history of the piece.” She moved her hands as she talked, and I noticed splotches of paint and smudges on her skin that I’d missed before.

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  Kelsey’s hands went still. She cleared her throat and threw a quick glance at Eric. “I think maybe it’s time for you to get home now, Maddy.”

  My face went hot. “Can I use your bathroom first?”

  She nodded, and I walked down the hall as slowly as possible, trying to catch a glimpse through the bedroom doors, but all I saw were clothes and beds. Normal stuff. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. It didn’t help that Kelsey was showing me this other side of herself, acting all nice and feeding me fluffernutters and smiling and stuff.

  In the bathroom, I spent a minute finger-combing my hair into something resembling order and wishing I had an ounce of my mother’s beauty before I washed my hands and looked for a towel to dry them. That’s when I noticed a plastic bag hanging on the door handle. It was a regular grocery bag, thin and white, which let the ghost of what was inside show through: a tall, narrow box with the close-up picture of a woman.

  My heart kicked up a notch.

  I pulled the bag open. Inside were two boxes of hair dye: one platinum blond, one ebony.

  For a second, it felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room.

  “Fluffernutter,” I whispered as my heart raced.

  I dug my phone out of my pocket, but when I went to dial 911, my fingers froze.

  My gut said these boxes mattered the way a trail of hoofprints matters when you’re tracking deer, but I still didn’t have any proof that Eric was Billy Holcomb. And no proof that he was in trouble. I couldn’t call Sheriff Dobbs. He’d laugh at me, or worse, call Mom about it.

  I left the bag on the doorknob and walked into the living room feeling numb. Kelsey was laughing over something, but her smile faded when she saw me standing there.

  “Everything okay?” she asked as Eric twisted around to look at me, too.

  Two strangers, staring back at me.

  “I have to go.” I waved my phone like Mom had texted, when really I felt like I couldn’t breathe. It was ridiculous to be scared of them, but I was.

  “I’ll come with you,” Eric said.

  Kelsey watched us leave, her eyes wary, her mouth tense. The idea that she might go to the bathroom and figure out what I’d seen had me rushing through the woods.

  “Is something wrong?” Eric asked as he struggled to keep up with me and Frankie, who bounded along like this was a fun game of chase.

  “I’m fine,” I said, even though I wasn’t.

  What did it mean, if Eric’s hair was fake? He might just like trying different hair colors, but why would Kelsey dye her hair, too?

  With a start, I realized that Kelsey was probably not even her real name.

  The world tilted, like some kind of April Fools’ joke gone horribly wrong.

  When we finally burst free of the woods, I took off running. Frankie leaped after me, excited to race even if she didn’t know why. We got to the ditch by the side of the road, and it took me a minute to process what I saw. I hadn’t bothered to hide my bike in the neighbor’s holly bushes. With everything that was going on, the territory wars had begun to feel silly, but I was kidding myself if I thought Diesel Jessup was going to ignore my trespassing forever.

  The ditch where I’d left my bike was empty.

  In its place was a ransom note.

  17

  BLACKMAIL

  The note was messy, with words crossed out and smudges of dirt here and there, like someone had gripped the paper with muddy hands and scribbled the message in the dark.

  Cress read it three times before she sorted it out.

  “You are guilty of trespassing,” she read as the bus pulled out of my subdivision. “Bring a six-pack of Kool-Aid Jammers or you will never see your bike again.” We were sitting far enough away from Diesel not to be over-heard, but close enough for me to shoot him dirty looks.

  Cress chewed her lip, thinking. “That doesn’t sound like Diesel.”

  “Of course it does. It’s blackmail!”

  “Well, you did trespass on their property when you went in the trailer, right?”

  I g
roaned. Sometimes Cress is too honest. This was the kind of situation where you took your best friend’s side, even if what she said was wrong.

  “You should talk to him,” Cress said. “Maybe this is a mistake.”

  “Diesel doesn’t listen to anybody. It’s like talking to a tree stump.”

  Cress frowned. “He’s smart, you know. He helped his dad fix our garage when that tree fell on it over winter break. He’s actually kind of nice.”

  That warm, sick feeling crawled over me again. “Do you like him or something?”

  “No,” Cress said, but she wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

  Instead, she opened the binder with our facts about Billy Holcomb. “I looked up that hair dye. It’s permanent. So they only need to do it again when the roots are growing out.” She’d copied this information onto neat Post-it notes in the binder. “It’s a good clue—”

  “But it’s not proof,” I finished.

  “No.” Cress ran her tongue over her new braces, making a weird sucking noise. “My cheeks feel like hamburger,” she said with a groan.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “It feels like my teeth are going to explode. And when I eat, all the food sticks in there. I have to floss every single tooth like three times and it takes forever.” She hung her head and I pressed my arm against hers. “Plus, I finally decided on Harriet Tubman, but Becky Thorpe already signed up for her, and she’s not even black!”

  “Forget Becky. You’ll find someone else. And your project will be the best. It always is.”

  Cress nodded, her lips pressed together to hide her braces, and I ignored the whisper of worry in my mind that said time was ticking down and I was no closer to figuring out who I was going to be, either.

  On our way off the bus, Eric and Diesel caught up to us. Eric gave me a little wave while Diesel strolled by like he didn’t see me at all, much less like he was black-mailing me for parking my bike on his lawn. As they went down the steps, Diesel even had the nerve to glance back at Cress and smile.

  My stomach sank when she smiled back.