“You’ve been to his house before?”
“Plenty of times. His neighborhood’s out by Maplewood Cemetery—that’s why Margie’s buried there, so he could stay close to her. Now it just takes a little walk through the woods for him to visit her grave.”
So that’s why he’d been in the woods when I’d seen him at the cemetery all those weeks ago.
“We’ll get to the bottom of it,” Queenie said. “Meanwhile, it’s awful late. Your mama gone be off her shift soon?”
I nodded.
“Ray will be okay,” said Queenie gently, looking into my eyes like she could beam comfort right into my heart. “Promise. Us old folks, sometimes we just get a little forgetful.”
“I hope so,” I said, and slipped back out of the salon, letting the glass door swing closed between Queenie and me with a rush of cold, cold October air.
35.
Thursday went exactly the same way Monday and Wednesday had.
I spent all day at school trying to focus when Mitch passed me notes in science class or sat next to me at lunch, trying to pretend my thoughts weren’t a million miles away with Ray, wherever he might be.
I took the bus home and tried to ignore Mrs. Garcia’s worried eyes as I went into my apartment. “You okay, Annie Lee? You seem sad. Is something the matter with your new friend?”
I shook my head no, but I couldn’t bring myself to put on even a weak smile.
I snuck off to Brightleaf as soon as I’d heard Mrs. Garcia’s door close, creeping past her windows and praying that she had her back turned and couldn’t see me leaving. The last thing I needed was her saying something else to Mama to bring Mama’s suspicions roaring right back.
By that point, I’d given up trying to convince myself that I was doing anything except obsessing over where Ray might have gone. My homework sat in my backpack, untouched; yesterday afternoon, I’d hardly made it home from the mall before Mama got off work.
The next day was Mitch’s and my turn for our egg-drop presentation, and at this rate my own brain was as scrambled as a shattered egg.
I went right to Brightleaf that afternoon and didn’t even wait for the customer Queenie was blow-drying to leave before I pushed through the door into her salon.
“Be with you in a minute, honey,” Queenie called to me. “Just take a seat.”
I fidgeted in one of the chairs in the tiny waiting area, thumbing through an old copy of Seventeen until Queenie finished up and her customer paid and left.
“What can I do for you, Annie Lee?” Queenie asked, coming to sit next to me, looking glad of the excuse to be off her feet for a few minutes.
“Did you get a chance to go by Ray’s place yesterday?” I asked. I couldn’t handle small talk, not today.
“I did, but he wasn’t there. I knocked a couple times, even rang the bell, but he never answered.”
I scratched at the skin around my nails. “Where could he have gone?”
Queenie shrugged. “I wish I knew. He could be still feeling sick and avoiding me because he hates hearing me say I told you so. Or he could’ve gone out of town. Like I mentioned yesterday, he’s got a brother down in Georgia he’s real close with.”
“But you said he usually told you if he was going out of town.”
“Usually, sure, but there’s been times he’s decided to go last minute and I haven’t known ’til after.”
“Does he have a car? How could he get to Georgia?”
Queenie shook her head. “He sold his car years ago, when he lost his roofing job. He couldn’t keep up the insurance. He usually walks over here—says it’s good for his heart. Times he goes down to Georgia, he takes the bus.”
“You said he couldn’t keep up on his phone bills, though. Could he afford the bus?”
“I don’t know, honey.”
“Are you sure there isn’t anything else we could do? Could we fill out a missing persons report?”
“I’m not sure the police would take us very seriously if we said we wanted to fill out a report because somebody didn’t show up for their volunteer job for a couple days. And I don’t know yet that I think that’d be the right thing to do, anyway.” Queenie laid her hand on my arm. “Let’s hope for the best. He probably saw it was me through the peephole yesterday and decided not to answer because he was still all up in his feelings. Mr. Banks can be the same way when he’s sick—they’re both stubborn old cusses, never wanting to admit they’re only human and sometimes need to sit back and take a break.”
“But—how do you know that’s what happened? What if he got sicker? Don’t you think you should go by his house again?”
“He’d just say I was meddling if I did. Let’s give it a little more time and see if he shows up. I promise if he’s not back by next week, we’ll do some more investigating.” Queenie pulled me into a hug, her arms just as warm and soft as I’d always known they’d be. “You’re a real good friend, Annie Lee. Ray would be touched to know how much you care.”
“I just hope he’s okay.”
“Me too, honey. Me too. Now I got a few appointments to finish up this afternoon, so I’ll see you another day, okay?”
I nodded and disentangled myself from the hug.
A minute later, when I’d made it out of her shop and looked back through the window, I could see Queenie still in the same chair. She’d told me not to worry; she’d seemed sure Ray was just being stubborn. Stubborn enough to stay away from the mall without even thinking to cancel the lesson we’d scheduled first.
But looking through the window, I could see worry written out in lines across her forehead and pulled into puckers around her mouth.
36.
I dreamed that night about the place with the colorful umbrella sky, the place where always before I’d seen Daddy at the piano.
Except tonight, it wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare.
The sky behind the umbrellas was bruised and purple, weeping rain that stung my skin and ran off the ebony of the piano in shining, sorrowing rivers. The umbrellas themselves were ripped, their spokes bent at awkward angles, like a giant had tried to swat them out of the sky.
Daddy wasn’t there. The whole strange dream place was empty, empty, empty.
It was the kind of emptiness that had been on Daddy’s face, the night before the funeral when they’d laid him out in white clothes in the glossy coffin. He hadn’t looked a thing like himself, lying there in that box with his eyes closed, like the mortician was pretending my daddy would wake up any second.
He hadn’t looked like anything at all—only a memory. Only a hollowness, a wanting. Just like this dream place was tonight.
I tried to open my mouth, to call out to him, to will my voice into making him appear right there, his hands running up and down the keyboard and making the kind of music he’d always wished to play. But my words were swallowed in silence before I could even get them out.
It was worse than being invisible. It was like being wrapped up in four or five invisibility cloaks, until I was so faded that nobody even remembered I’d ever existed.
When I finally woke up, I could hear James Taylor playing somewhere in our midnight apartment, even though all the lights were off and I knew Mama was asleep. I pictured the ghost, sitting there in the darkness of the living room as the nonexistent record spun its way through the player over and over and over.
And for the first time in maybe months, I shoved my face into my pillow and cried, and cried, and cried, until all my tears were gone but my body still shuddered like it wanted to keep on going.
37.
The next day, Friday, Mitch and I were scheduled to do our egg drop.
I didn’t go to school.
Mama took me to the bus stop, hovering until the bus pulled up and I climbed on. I slid into the seat beside Mitch—our usual row, halfway between the front and the back.
“Listen,” I said in a low voice, so nobody else could hear. It wasn’t hard, since the rest of the bus was loud and row
dy anyway. “I need your help with something.”
Mitch looked up from the book she’d been reading with her eyebrows raised.
“I have to get off the bus early,” I whispered as fast as I could, before I could chicken out. “I can’t go to school today. I need you to cover for me.”
I unzipped my backpack and pulled out the egg-drop supplies I’d brought: notes for my half of the oral presentation, a box of straws, and an egg—wrapped in a towel so it didn’t break in my backpack. Mitch had the duct tape, since it was the most expensive thing on our list.
“Tell Mr. Barton I had a family emergency and that I’ll talk to him about it on Monday,” I went on. “If you need to, you can tell him to give all the credit to you, not me.”
Mitch stared at me, not raising her hands to take the egg and the straws from mine. “Are you freaking kidding me right now?” she hissed, each word like a sharp little dart. “You’re seriously going to sneak off and leave me to take the fall for this? It’s the biggest day of the semester, Annie Lee. You heard what Mr. Barton said about participation and attendance for this project! It isn’t enough just to give me all the stuff—we’ll both end up getting our grades docked if you’re not there.”
“I know. I know.” The back of my throat burned with unshed tears. “I’m sorry. I have to, though. It’s really, really important.” I closed my eyes. “Listen. Remember what my mom said at the sleepover, about how I was gone when our neighbor came by?”
Mitch nodded warily. “You said you were just out riding around your neighborhood.”
“Well, remember how I told you a few weeks back I was taking piano lessons? And how I’ve been working on stuff for that competition in December?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Well, I am. Except, my mom . . . kind of doesn’t know about it.”
“What do you mean?”
I closed my eyes. “I was telling the truth when I said I went off on my scooter when Mama was working, but there’s more to it. The week school started, I rode over to Brightleaf Square mall, and I met this man. His name is Ray. He plays the piano like nobody I’ve ever heard before—it’s magical.”
“Girl, this story is not going to have a good ending,” Mitch interjected.
“I know it sounds bad, okay? But he’s really nice. He’s old and has trouble getting around sometimes because of his arthur—I mean arthritis. But everyone at the mall knows him, and they all love him. He’s been volunteering there for a long time.”
“So you just asked some strange old man for piano lessons and he said yes?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
Mitch whistled. “That is pretty messed up, but keep going. What does any of this have to do with our project?”
“He’s missing. He hasn’t been in his usual place for a week, and nobody knows where he is. My friend Queenie—she works at the mall—she thinks he’s just avoiding her because they had a fight, but I’ve got a bad feeling about it all. Last time I saw him he didn’t seem like himself. He was coughing pretty bad. I’m real worried about him, Mitch. I think something happened to him.”
“So, what exactly are you saying?” Mitch looked down at the bus floor, where my folded-up scooter sat beside my backpack. “You’re seriously telling me you’re going to get on your scooter and ride out to . . . wherever this dude lives? By yourself? You realize that’s how horror movies start, right?”
“I don’t know what else to do.”
“Tell somebody! An adult!”
“My mama would straight-up kill me, Mitch. She wouldn’t go after him. She wouldn’t make sure everything’s okay. And I’ve already talked to some of the people at the mall, and none of them are doing enough about it. Please, Mitch. I can’t wait until this afternoon. He lives a lot farther away than Brightleaf, farther than I’ve ever been on my scooter, and I don’t know if I could get to his place and back before Mama got off work. And—I just can’t shake the feeling that something’s really, really wrong. That he needs me now.” The tears had finally spilled over my eyelids and were rolling down my cheeks now. I caught a glimpse of the blond eighth-grade girl in front of us staring at me. “Please help me.”
Mitch looked at me like I’d grown an extra head. “Are you for real right now, Annie Lee?” She shook her head. “Look. You know how hard it was for me to come up and sit by you at lunch the first week of school? I already told you how much trouble I have making friends. You know, I’ve never told another single soul all that stuff I told you at the sleepover. About my old school? You know you’re, like, the first real friend I’ve had since kindergarten or first grade?”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
“I even covered for you with your mom last week, and now you’re telling me you weren’t even honest about why?”
I squirmed in my seat. “Yeah.”
“You know, I’ve been thinking for months that if I just gave you some time, if I just tried as hard as I could to be a friend, you’d eventually act like a friend in return. But you know what? All you ever do is ask, Annie Lee. All you ever do is ask for help, like it’s never even occurred to you that maybe I needed things, too.”
Ever since I’d met her, Mitch had seemed like the strong one, like I was the one who needed her to help me stay steady. But maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe it went both directions; maybe we were both strong and we were both weak, and we both needed each other in different ways.
Maybe I’d been too stuck inside my own grief over Daddy and the M&Ms to realize that until now.
Still, I couldn’t make my plan work without Mitch’s help.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll make it up to you, okay?”
“No.”
“Please.” I was crying again. “Please, Mitch. I don’t know what else to do.”
“You’re going to end up getting murdered!”
“I won’t. I’ll be fine, okay? But I need you to cover for me with Mr. Barton.”
Mitch looked at me for what felt like a hundred years. She was paler than normal, her freckles like dark stars across her face. “Fine, Annie Lee Fitzgerald. I’ll do it.” She took a breath. “But you might have to find yourself another lunch seat from now on.”
Her words were an earthquake; part of me was surprised the bus didn’t break right apart beneath us.
Could I really do that? Trade Mitch for Ray?
I thought of the way Ray’s hands had trembled at our last piano lesson. The way he’d coughed and I’d heard it echo all the way down to his lungs. Even Queenie had said he’d been under the weather last time she’d seen him; I couldn’t get the picture of him, sick and alone—maybe in serious trouble—out of my head.
I didn’t have a choice.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and jumped forward to give Mitch a hug. Her bouncy curls were soft against my cheek.
She didn’t hug me back.
If I’d had my lucky quarter, would I have been able to make her understand why going after Ray was so important? If I’d had my lucky quarter, would I have been able to keep them both?
The next time the bus stopped, I got up and told the driver that I’d gotten an emergency text from my mom and she was waiting for me in this neighborhood, and he let me off.
Then I sped all the way back to the apartment, dumped my school stuff out of my backpack and filled it with a water bottle and a couple of granola bars, slung it over my shoulder, and left.
I’d looked at the map on the computer earlier, using a pen to trace its lines on the back of my hand just in case I forgot. I recited the street names to myself: Mangum. Chapel Hill. Duke University Road. It seemed easy enough—no different from all the other days I’d ventured out into the city without anybody being the wiser, just my scooter and me fading into the world around us.
Except it was different, and nothing I told myself could take away the snake of unease that curled and twitched in my insides.
As I rode, I tried hard not to think about anything: not about Ray, or what might have
happened. Not about Mama, and how she’d react if she knew that I was playing hooky and wandering the city alone.
And definitely, definitely not about Mitch. Would she say a single word to me ever again after this?
I tried hard not to think about her getting up in Mr. Barton’s class and stumbling through my half of the speech, and tried even harder not to think about her alone up on top of the school roof, waiting to see if our design worked without a best friend to wait with her.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop hearing the wet smash of the egg as it hit the parking lot below. It echoed in my ears with every sidewalk crack my scooter wheels ran over. Snap. Crunch. Snap. Crunch. Smash.
Our prototype had worked, and we’d thought it was so strong.
But I’d also thought Mitch and I would be friends forever—or at least all of sixth grade.
And I’d never expected Ray to disappear.
38.
The city around me was busy in a different way in the morning than in the afternoons, when I usually rode: the streets were filled with cars that crawled like insects in a row, herded through stoplight after stoplight.
As the forgotten neighborhood where Mama and I lived eased into the bustle and shine of downtown, the sidewalks, too, got busier, filled with people walking purposefully into tall buildings, their cell phones pressed to their ears or held in their hands like treasure maps.
Not a single person looked over at me, my invisibility cloak wrapped thick around my shoulders. I glided through the town like I was a ghost myself.
It took me more than twenty minutes to pass through the heart of downtown, to the line that was a double-thick slash across the map on the back of my hand:
Durham Freeway.
The road I was on ran right over the top of the freeway like it was no big deal, cars rushing down it fast enough to make breezes that ruffled my short hair as I stood there on the sidewalk, one foot poised on the scooter.
Beginners Welcome Page 15