Well, That Was Awkward

by Rachel Vail

  I sank onto their hall rug. Daphne sat on one side of me, and Emmett sat on the other. I gasped and sobbed, between them. They didn’t ask me any more questions, including the obvious one (had a zombie recently bitten me?), just sat there until Emmett eventually asked, “Is that your phone buzzing?”

  I took it out of my pocket and handed it to him. His thumbprint is the third key to my phone’s security, so he unlocked it.

  “Your mom seems kind of upset,” Emmett whispered, close to my face. “Runs in the family, clearly.”

  That made me laugh a tiny bit, which weirdly let me then breathe in a full gulp of delicious air. Phew. In that moment of relief, I realized I was also damp with sweat.

  Because, #sweatyguys.

  “What do you want me to tell her?”

  I snorted big and wiped my embarrassing nose on my sleeve. I looked into Emmett’s sweet worried face and whispered, “I lost Lightning.”

  “What?” he asked. “Where? Maybe she’s head-down in a boot again.”

  “No,” I said. “In the park.”

  “She’s in the park?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Crap.” Emmett stood up and ran into his room.

  “Gimme,” Daphne said gently, holding out her hand for the phone, which Emmett tossed to her as he went. She asked me, “Do you want me to text your mom and explain?”

  I shook my head. Everything was wrecked, though I could breathe again, a little. I seemed unlikely to die on their hall rug in the next few seconds. So, some good news.

  Depending on your interpretation of the word good.

  And your opinion of me.

  “How about if I say you’re here, at least?” Daphne asked. “Your mom is panicking, seems like. Wow. She’s fast at texting.”

  Emmett stood in from of me, holding his phone, his shoes on and untied as always. “Let’s just go up and tell your mom what happened and then we’ll run back to the park and find Tempus. Come on.” He put out his hand for mine and yanked me off the floor. “Let’s go.”

  He pulled me toward his door.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I mumbled.

  “Yeah, you obviously do,” he said, texting on his phone. “Ugh, this elevator is the slowest thing in the world.”

  “I fully don’t,” I argued. “Oh! I forgot the shoe box.”

  “It’s okay,” Emmett said. “I’ll text Daphne. She’ll bring it and meet us in the lobby.”

  “She doesn’t have to.”

  He just kept texting. The elevator door opened. We stepped in.

  “If we don’t find Lightning, we won’t need the shoe—”

  “Where in the park?” Emmett asked without looking up from his phone.

  “Riverside Park.” I slumped against the elevator’s back wall.

  “Yeah. Where?”

  “I don’t . . .” I closed my eyes. I was more tired than I’d ever been in my life.

  “Where? Gracie.”

  I didn’t open my eyes. “You know how you go in at One Hundred and Eighth?”

  “Yeah. Then left? Past the dog run? Or up toward Fairway?”

  “Left, then down by the water.”

  “That patch of grass before the tennis courts?” he asked. “With the pink tree?”

  “Yeah.” I’d never noticed the pink tree before today. How did he know? I looked at him. He kept texting. I closed my eyes again, but ding: 8.

  Emmett pushed me out. My mother opened the door before we even got to it. Dad was standing right behind her. “Gracie,” Mom said. “What the . . .”

  “Lightning got away,” Emmett said. “We have to go to the park to find her.”

  “Oh no,” Mom said.

  “I can’t . . . I think . . . I . . .” I was crying again. I didn’t even have a plan for what to say. I just wanted to curl up into a ball and go to sleep and wake up and this would all have been a bad dream. I leaned against the Never Gonna Happen door.

  “Let’s go,” Mom said.

  “I’m sorry,” I managed while she stomped into her shoes without first untying them.

  “Later,” Mom said. “You can be sorry later. Let’s go.”

  “Where are my glasses?” Dad asked.

  “On your face,” Mom said. “Keys.”

  Dad grabbed keys. I turned around to look for Emmett. He was back at the elevator, pressing the down button. By the time Dad got his loafers on, the elevator door was sliding open. The four of us rode down in grim silence.

  “How did you lose Lightning?” Dad asked.

  “Shhhh,” Mom said. “Later.”

  Daphne was in the lobby, holding the empty shoe box and my phone, wearing running shoes. “Let’s go,” she said, handing over my phone.

  “Thanks.” I sprinted ahead with her toward Broadway and across to the park.

  “Careful,” Mom called after us, but we were already across.

  “We’ll meet you there!” Emmett yelled.

  47

  LOST AND FOUND AND LOST

  I showed Daphne the spot where I’d last seen Lightning. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll walk up the hill looking. You walk down.” She placed the shoe box on the ground to mark where I’d been sitting.

  “Let’s do a grid search!” Emmett yelled, running toward us down the path ahead of my parents.

  “A what?” Daphne asked.

  “That’s what this website suggests,” Emmett said, holding up his phone. “We get as many people as possible and split the area into a grid, or a circle and then, you know, like a pie chart, we each take a slice.”

  “Or like a pie,” I said.

  “A what?” Daphne asked.

  “Pies are even nicer than pie charts,” Emmett said. “Pie comma easy as.”

  “If you look it up in the index,” I said.

  “Exactly.” Emmett tucked his phone into his pocket. “We’ll find her.”

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. “You have to prepare yourself that we—”

  Mom touched his sleeve. “Shhh,” she said. “Take your slice and start looking.”

  “I’m looking, I’m looking,” Dad said as Emmett pointed him diagonally up the hill to the left.

  He pointed me down the hill, to the right. I went, stepping carefully, scanning the grass. Emmett took the slice of ground beside me. I heard him whispering his names for her. “Frightening, Light-Year, Tempus,” he whispered.

  I don’t even know if tortoises can hear.

  I heard, though.

  I turned toward him and saw Sienna running down the hill toward us.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, but Emmett was telling her where to look, explaining the slice idea. Meanwhile, Michaela and Beth ran toward us on the jogging path from the other direction, holding their tennis racquets over their shoulders.

  “We came for the tortoise hunt!” Beth yelled.

  “Emmett said your tortoise escaped?” Michaela asked.

  I nodded.

  Emmett sent them down toward the rocks, across the path, to search there. I tried not to picture Lightning lying broken and smashed there, and Beth and Michaela devastated to discover her, wishing for the rest of their lives they’d kept working on their backhands instead.

  I lowered my eyes and kept looking.

  “Hey!” Dorin called, from the path above. She was on her scooter, her helmet tightly buckled under her chin.

  “Hey!” I called back. “Dorin, you’re here?”

  She ignored the ridiculousness of that question. She dropped her scooter and stepped over it, pointing. “Has anybody looked for the speed demon in these bushes yet?”

  “No,” Emmett said.

  “I’ll take them,” Dorin said.

  “Good call.”

  I took a second to stop searching for Lightnin
g and looked around instead. My parents, Emmett, his sister, Sienna, a couple of girls from school I didn’t even think were my real friends—all hunched-over Quasimodos, silently searching, as if they’d lost their mother’s diamond in the dirt.

  “Thank you,” I whispered in Emmett’s direction.

  He didn’t respond. I don’t know if he heard.

  The sun was heading toward the tops of the buildings on the Jersey side of the river. If we were going to find Lightning, I thought, we probably would have by now.

  If it got dark, we’d all have to go home. Maybe we’d try again in the morning, or after school. Lightning would have to spend the night out in the park alone. Or, worse, not alone. With the bad guys and predators and who knows what else?

  “Well, this is interesting,” Dorin called from deep in the bushes. I looked over but couldn’t see her. Just bushes.

  “What’s interesting?” Emmett yelled.

  “I can’t be sure this is the correct tortoise, but there is definitely a Russian tortoise here with a lot of go in her.”

  We all ran up the hill toward her voice. She was deep in the bushes, crouched down in a squatting position, her helmet still on but unbuckled now. And there was Lightning, sitting on Dorin’s sneaker.

  “That’s her,” I whispered, and started to cry again.

  Sienna’s arm grabbed me around the waist.

  “I think she thought I was you,” Dorin said. “Must be the sneakers. I got the same ones as yours yesterday. See? They really are comfortable, Gracie, you were right. My half brother? He’s so adorable? He said the most hilarious thing, that they look like clown shoes? But I—”

  I wasn’t listening. I was leaning past her and grabbing Lightning and holding her up for everybody to see.

  They all cheered, even Michaela and Beth, coming up the hill, still holding their racquets, and Mom and Dad, raising their arms into the air.

  “You guys are the best,” I said to them all. “All of you.”

  “None taken,” Dorin said. “Since I’m the one who found her.”

  “I’m the one who called everybody,” Emmett protested.

  “We blew off our tennis lesson,” Michaela said.

  “I ran up from Eighty-Fourth Street,” Sienna said.

  “Well, I’m the one who lost her,” I said. “So, other than me, you guys are seriously all amazing.”

  “Well, if you hadn’t lost her, we wouldn’t’ve had the chance to prove it,” Emmett said.

  I hugged Lightning. She looked at me like, Dude, I’m still a tortoise.

  So I put her back down on the grass. She headed toward the bushes again. “Uh, no. No freaking way,” I said, and grabbed her up again. Beth laughed. Michaela asked Dorin to show them where exactly she’d found Lightning, while Daphne held out the shoe box and I placed her, gently this time, inside.

  “Let’s go home,” Mom said. “Thank you, everybody.”

  We all said our good-byes.

  “I’ll text you later,” Sienna said. “See how you’re doing.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I could hear my friends chattering behind me about how scared they’d been that they wouldn’t find Lightning, or that they’d find her dead. Mom and Dad kept shooting each other knowing glances and rubbing my back. I knew there was going to be a lot to discuss when we got home.

  “I want to thank Emmett,” I told them. They nodded, so I caught with Emmett and Daphne. “Thanks,” I said. “Seriously.”

  “No problem,” Daphne said.

  “You texted everybody?” I asked Emmett.

  “One of the websites I found said to gather as many people as possible to do a grid search, so—”

  “I didn’t even think of . . . I was so scared.”

  “Sure,” Emmett said. “Promise this wasn’t just your feeble attempt to get out of racing Spark Plug against Fluff?”

  “Did you see how far Lightning got?” I asked, trash-talking right back, so relieved to be able to be happy. “No way Fluff stands a chance. Lightning was supposed to be an ironic name, not an accurate one.”

  “We’ll see,” Emmett said. “Fluff can be fast when he wants to be.”

  “My money’s on the speed-demon tortoise,” Daphne said, and then put her earbuds in.

  We clomped up the stone steps out of the park behind Daphne, ahead of my parents. Lightning was scratching at the sides of the shoe box, eager to regain her freedom. Ha. No.

  “I wasn’t kidding,” I whispered to Emmett as we got to the top.

  “About what?” He looked suddenly serious.

  “That I completely didn’t know what to do.”

  “Oh, that,” he said. “You did so.”

  “I fully didn’t.”

  “You did!” He shrugged. “You came to get me.”

  I opened my mouth to say something back, but there were no words.

  48

  OKAY

  We put Lightning in the bin, which she resented after all that park freedom, but tough darts. I lay down on my bed and waited. My parents didn’t come and didn’t come. I knew I was in trouble and they were going to Have a Talk with me.

  I was so tired, I just stared at the ceiling, wondering, by habit, what Bret would advise me if she were alive. I couldn’t think of a thing. I silently thanked her, in case she was actually my guardian angel as well as imaginary friend, and had pointed me toward Emmett, Emmett toward Dorin, and Dorin toward Lightning.

  “Gracie?” Bret said. I might’ve been starting to fall asleep because I was pretty sure Bret was standing in my doorway, calling my name.

  “Mm-hmm?” I responded, half dreaming, maybe, not wanting her to leave.

  “Get some sleep,” she said. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  “Okay,” I answered.

  And I didn’t wake up till morning.

  49

  NOT SO SLOW, NOT SO QUIET

  All day people were talking about Lightning. Sienna sat between Michaela and Beth at lunch, which felt like a punch in my heart. But there it is. I sat at the end of the table between Harrison and Dorin. Still, I smiled and didn’t cry.

  Cute toes. Live tortoise.

  Michaela and Beth had everybody laughing, telling about their search down by the Hudson, so scared the crumpled thing that ended up being just a takeout container was dead Lightning and so relieved when Dorin called out from inside the bushes.

  “How do you even lose a tortoise?” Riley asked, rolling her eyes.

  Nobody answered her. She clearly felt left out that she didn’t get a text inviting her to search. And when Riley feels bad, watch out.

  Sienna gave me a micro headshake. I did the same back.

  That’s something, I told myself.

  Awesome Ms. Washington called us all into the gym for dodgeball. As we walked in, Riley leaned toward Sienna and said, “I mean, how slow do you actually have to be, to lose a tortoise? Right? LOL. Just saying.”

  “How insecure do you actually have to be, to be so nasty?” Sienna asked in her usual calm quiet voice. “Right? Just saying.”

  Riley stopped and stared at Sienna, her hand on her slender hip. “Excuse me?”

  Dorin stepped between them, smiling broadly. “Actually some Russian tortoises can be very fast. You might be surprised. Many reptiles—”

  “Ew,” Riley said to Dorin. “You’re a reptile.”

  “Stop embarrassing yourself, Riley,” Sienna said, loud enough for everybody to hear.

  “I’m not the one who—”

  “Yes, you are,” Sienna said. “You’re always the one who.”

  “What does that even—You’re just trying to show off for AJ, now that you—”

  “No, Riley, I’m not trying to show off for anybody. I’m just bored of your nasty pettiness. Everybody is.”


  Riley looked around at us. I nodded. Emmett nodded, and AJ nodded. Michaela and Beth both nodded too.

  “You’re just jealous,” Riley said, her cheeks burning red. “All of you.”

  “Nobody’s jealous of you,” Dorin said.

  “We just think you’re kinda pathetic,” Sienna said.

  “Well,” Riley said. “I don’t . . . You’re all just . . .” And she ran out of the gym.

  Nobody ran after her.

  We rocked at dodgeball after that, all of us. Emmett and I were on the same team again. We lost, but it was close.

  50

  ENOUGH

  “Let’s go to the market,” Mom said when I got home.

  I said okay. I wasn’t sure if I was in trouble or what. Usually Dad does the grocery shopping, and Friday nights we often go out for Korean or Indian food, maybe sushi, occasionally tapas. I wasn’t asking, though.

  We wandered through Westside Market, quietly choosing things. We waited in line and I bagged while Mom said, “Credit,” and signed the slip. We each carried two bags full of food out of the store.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” I said, passing the flower selection.

  “Which thing?”

  “Bret’s plate,” I said. “I didn’t break it on purpose. I mean, obviously I didn’t mean to lose Lightning, either. Or yell at you.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Are you mad?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer right away.

  “It’s okay if you are.”

  “I’m a little sad,” Mom said. “I loved that plate.”

  “I know you did,” I said. “I’m sorry. About everything.”

  She took my hand. “We could make one with your hand if you want,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “My big paw? Too weird.”

  “I love your hands,” she said, holding it up to admire it by the light of the pizza shop we were passing, the one we never go to. “They’re so strong, and so beautiful.”