I quickly skimmed the most recent entry.
I’m afraid my relationship with Vanessa is still recovering. I continue to give her space while trying to make sure she knows I’m available if she needs me, but all I receive in response is curt conversation and the occasional smile. And in that expression, which once was one that could’ve lit the entire city of Boston in the middle of a blackout, I see disappointment. Sadness. Resentment. I know she’s suffering, and why wouldn’t she be? In their brief time together, she and Justine were closer than two sisters with decades of shared time and experience between them.
My eyes stuck on that last sentence. He didn’t understand. If Justine and I really had been that close, she’d still be here.
Somewhere above me, I heard Dad call for Mom. His voice was followed by light, muffled footsteps hurrying upstairs. Guessing I still had a few minutes before they gave up on the fleece search, I continued reading.
I just wish she’d let me in. I wish she’d talk to me the way she used to. If only she would, I think our healing could improve tremendously. And unfortunately, I can’t broach the subject with Jacqueline. She’s barely functioning as it is, drowning her sorrows in meaningless chores and tasks, and I fear making a bad situation worse. Goodness knows how she’d react if she actually realized we were losing our other, living daughter.
I’m a desperate father, running out of ideas. If you have any advice, I’m all ears—or eyes, as the case may be.
This prompted countless questions, like, Why was Dad keeping this journal, or log, or whatever it was? Was he writing to a real person, as suggested by his request for advice, and divulging our—my—private troubles to someone who had no idea who I was or what was really going on? It didn’t sound like Mom had any idea what he was doing when he claimed to be grading papers or working on his book, so why was he lying? If this was just his way of sorting out thoughts, which was the only logical explanation I could imagine him giving, why the big secret? Why go to such lengths to hide what he should be able to say out loud if he truly cared about our family?
And could he really, possibly not know why I looked at him with disappointment? Hurt? Resentment?
The answers would have to wait. A quick glance behind me showed the back stairwell dark and the laundry room lit.
“Come on,” I whispered, clicking on the Internet Explorer icon. The blue e turned like it was waking up from a long nap. “Come on, come on, come on.”
Finally, a new window filled the screen. I automatically clicked in the address bar and started typing Hawthorne’s Web address. I had about thirty seconds to sign on to the school server, get into my e-mail account, send Dad’s log to myself, and erase his browser history. It’d be a tall order on a brand-new, superfast laptop, and nearly impossible on this one.
I would’ve risked it… but then I registered the Internet’s home page.
Gmail. It wasn’t the regular landing page, where you had to sign in with your username and password. It was the inbox page, like Dad had forgotten to sign out—or hadn’t bothered to, since he’d planned to return to it soon.
I stared at the screen. He’d never told me he had a personal account, which might’ve been useful information to have for the times when Newton Community College’s server went down.
But then, maybe I shouldn’t have felt slighted. It wasn’t like he’d told everyone but me. In fact, judging by the long list of e-mails filling the inbox, he’d told only one person. One person who appeared to write to him every day. Who’d written to him as recently as twenty minutes ago.
Someone with the initials W.B.D.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
I slammed down the laptop screen. “Paige.” I grabbed my chest as she came around the table and sat across from me. “Don’t scare me like that.”
“Sorry. I won’t ever again—as long as you tell me what’s going on.”
I’m snooping. Dad’s divulging family secrets to strangers. Mom’s clueless. Oh, and by the way? Mom’s not really my mother, and you and I are more like sisters than we realized.
“What do you mean?” I pushed away the laptop.
She held out her open cell phone. My eyes froze on the familiar number before continuing down the small screen.
V not answering calls or texts. Is she okay?
“He also left three voice mails asking the same thing.” She closed the phone and reached into her jeans pocket. “I didn’t want to answer without talking to you first, then when I went to your room, I heard a strange buzzing. It took me a while to figure out where it was coming from, but finally I did: a sneaker in the bottom of your suitcase.”
She held out my cell phone. The flashing red light indicating new messages was like a strobe light atop a police car.
“Since Saturday, Simon has called you twenty-four times and sent thirty-one texts. But you wouldn’t know that because you somehow lost your phone inside the toe of an old shoe.” She placed the phone on the table when it was clear I wasn’t going to take it. “What happened? Did you have a fight?”
“Sort of.” I looked at my hands, imagined them in his.
“Sort of? What does that mean? He swung and you ducked?”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. I’d said the words to myself countless times over the past three days, preparing for the moment when I’d have to say them out loud… but that didn’t make this any easier.
“We broke up.”
Paige’s face fell. “You what? Why?”
“It was just too hard. The long-distance thing, I mean.”
“The long-distance thing?” she repeated, exasperated. “That’s not hard.”
“Of course it is. People break up because of it all the time.”
“Some people, yes—the ones who weren’t supposed to be together in the first place. But they’re not you and Simon. Call it fate, soul mates, divine intervention, whatever, but you were put on this planet for him, and vice versa. A few miles can’t
change that.”
I didn’t answer. I was afraid I’d break down if I did.
“I can’t believe this,” Paige finally said, resting her elbows on the table, her forehead in her hands. “You guys were so perfect together. When I was with Jonathan… when I think about the time we spent together… I think that’s the closest I’ll ever get to what you and Simon have.” She paused. “What you… had.”
What we had. Past tense. Over and out.
“Maybe this is just temporary?” she suggested. “Maybe it’s a small freak-out that’ll eventually blow over? So he can focus on fruit flies and lab rats, you can enjoy senior year, and next summer, when you’re both back in Winter Harbor, you can have a passionate reunion that will last, like, forever.”
I was glad the outside light shone from behind me so she couldn’t see tears form. My eyes had been watering every morning and night—and sometimes in the afternoon, usually when I passed by the science labs at school. They never spilled over so that I was actually crying, making me happy for perhaps the very first time that my body depended on every drop of salt water it could find to function.
“It’s a nice idea,” I said softly. “But I don’t think so.”
She sniffed and fanned her watering eyes with both hands. “Come to Winter Harbor this weekend.”
“What?”
“Grandma B asked me to visit. I’m going to take the bus to Portland and meet Riley there, and he’s going to drive me the rest of the way.” She took a breath. “If you come, you can call Simon, and maybe he’ll meet you. And then you guys can talk and try to come up with an alternative to breaking up.”
Simon aside, getting out of town was tempting; if I was alone here this weekend, I knew I’d replay in my head everything that happened last weekend a thousand times.
“Success!”
I jumped at Dad’s voice. Swiveling on the bench, I saw him standing on the top of the back stoop, holding my blue fleece triumphantly overhead like it was a trophy.
I glanced at Paige. She looked at her phone.
“But your mother, the all-knowing woman that she is, found your favorite blue fleece buried in a mountain of clean clothes in no time.”
He reached the picnic table and held out the jacket. I looked at it, then up at his proud, smiling face, then at Mom. I could see her through the kitchen window, washing dishes like everything was normal. Like this was any other night. Like her husband hadn’t ruined her family seventeen years earlier and didn’t talk about her to perfect strangers.
“Actually,” I said, turning to Paige, “I think a trip to Winter Harbor is exactly what I need.”
CHAPTER 16
THE NEXT MORNING, we got to school early. Paige wanted to ask Ms. Mulligan about a new restaurant-management program she’d found online the night before, and I wanted to spend some time on the Winter Harbor Herald Web site in the privacy of a near-empty library.
As soon as we stepped into the main lobby, it was clear we weren’t the only ones getting a jump start on the day.
“They’re up to something,” Paige said as two teachers brushed past us like we weren’t there. They walked quickly, closely, talking in hushed voices. “Has Hawthorne ever given a school-wide, all-day pop quiz?”
“Never.” But she was right. If the faculty wasn’t up to something, something was definitely up. In a matter of seconds, a dozen more teachers flew past, and not one stopped to ask what we were doing there so early. They all hurried in the same direction.
“I’m going to try to catch Ms. Mulligan before the guidance department evacuates,” Paige said. “Meet me outside the gate in the event of a real emergency?”
As she turned left, I headed right, narrowly avoiding a four-person pileup as a trio of history teachers darted out of a classroom and into hallway traffic. I tried to decipher the whispers, but there were too many, and they moved too fast. As soon as I made out a cluster of words—“sudden,” “sad,” “damage”—the speakers were five feet ahead of me and out of eavesdropping range.
When the library doors appeared, I slipped inside, noting as I did that the traffic slowed to a crawl at the end of the hall before trickling inside the auditorium.
I found a computer station behind a tall shelf filled with dusty reference books and signed into my e-mail.
ALERT!!!
The message at the top of my inbox greeted me like a road-block. The subject was in all capital letters. The type was red, the font bold. Hawthorne prided itself on proper e-mail etiquette, and this one word broke every rule. I would’ve thought it spam and deleted it, but it had been sent from the president’s office less than ten minutes before. In all my time at Hawthorne, there was only one other instance when an important mass e-mail had come from the president’s office instead of the vice president’s. That e-mail, which I’d deleted without reading as soon as I realized what it was, had announced Justine’s death.
Holding my breath, I clicked on the e-mail.
To Members of the Hawthorne Community:
It is with great regret that I report the passing of our dear friend and Hawthorne Preparatory sophomore Colin Milton Cooper.
For those of you who were fortunate enough to spend time with Colin, you know that he was one of the brightest, kindest individuals ever to grace our halls. For those of you who weren’t, I’m sorry to say that you missed the chance of a lifetime.
I expect that as representatives of a centuries-old, world-class educational institution, you will conduct yourselves accordingly during this transitional period. If you have any questions or concerns, my door is always open.
One final note: In today’s digital age, news travels fast—and, oftentimes, erroneously. That is why I ask you to refrain from discussing this development with anyone outside of the Hawthorne community. All media inquiries should be directed to Mr. Harold Lawder, public relations manager.
With condolences and warm regards,
Dr. Martin O’Hare, President
Colin Milton Cooper had been a current student. That must’ve been why the school was panicking. His death alone would’ve been reason for mass e-mails and staff assemblies, but Justine had been an alumnus for all of a week when she died, which meant Hawthorne had basically lost two students in a matter of months.
I reread the note, trying to picture Colin. I didn’t know many underclassmen and couldn’t put a name to the face.
Keeping the e-mail up, I opened another window and searched “Colin Cooper.” When that turned up thousands of responses, I added “Milton” and “Hawthorne Preparatory.” I was just about to hit Enter when my eyes fell to the last entry on the first page.
Meet COLIN MILTON COOPER and other single
professionals at IVY TRAILS, your first step down the
pathway of intelligent matchmaking!
Intelligent matchmaking? As in an online dating service? This Colin Milton Cooper couldn’t be the same one; if he was a sophomore he’d have to be sixteen years old, max, which just seemed too young to be matchmaking online. It also seemed too risky. If anyone else at school ever found out, they wouldn’t let him forget it. Hawthorne kids might’ve had more money than a lot of other kids their age, but that didn’t make them more mature.
Determined to rule it out, I clicked on the link.
“Oh, no,” I breathed.
According to the education history listed on his profile, the Colin Milton Cooper on Ivy Trails was a current Hawthorne student. But that wasn’t what got me.
It was his picture. Because as it turned out, I was among those who’d spent time with one of the brightest, kindest students ever to grace our school’s halls. Not much—but enough to recognize his curly brown hair and green eyes.
Colin Milton Cooper was the guy from the Beanery rest-room. The one who’d been crying, whose e-mail I’d found.
“He jumped off a bridge.”
I leaped out of the chair.
“Sorry.” Parker leaned against a bookcase, holding a coffee cup. “You looked curious.”
Heart pounding, I dropped back into the chair and reached for the mouse. “Then you’re seeing things.”
“I take it you got el presidente’s cease and desist?”
I signed out of my e-mail, closed the search results window.
“It’s ridiculous the things they’re scared of.”
I was about to click out of the Ivy Trails window, but something in his tone made me stop. “Like what?”
He stepped closer and perched on the edge of the desk. “You know what they say about bad publicity?”
“That there’s no such thing? Because any publicity’s good publicity?”
He nodded. “Know what Hawthorne says?”
I was suddenly very aware of his eyes on mine. I couldn’t think of anything else—including an answer to his question.
“Kill it or be killed. That’s why the mass e-mail and early-morning staff meeting. They want to keep the story as quiet as possible before the press has a field day.”
“And what would that story be?” I asked, wanting to know as much as I didn’t want to know.
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