“What’s that?” I asked.
She glanced around to make sure nobody else was listening. “I call them the Apathy Alliance.” Then she did a double take, startled by something she glimpsed over my shoulder. “Speaking of which, guess who’s heading this way. I wonder what they want.” Disdain mixed with apprehension in her tone.
I twisted around in my seat and saw a tall, slender girl strolling toward us with a matching tall, slender guy. They both had nearly white-blond hair, and there was something familiar about the cool blue gazes that looked me up and down.
“Cordelia?” said the girl. Her voice sounded hoarse, like it was rusty from lack of use.
“Delia,” I said with a bright California smile. “I go by Delia.”
“I’m Gwyneth. Your cousin. This is Grey. With an E. He’s also your cousin. We’re both seniors here.” She spoke in a languorous monotone, completely stripped of inflection, and she managed to get the words out with the barest minimum of facial movement. Grey didn’t speak at all.
I kept the smile going, trying to make up for their lack of enthusiasm with my own. “Hi. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Our mother wanted us to introduce ourselves and make sure you feel welcome,” said Gwyneth as Grey stifled a yawn.
I said I did, but mostly I was busy trying to remember which movie had the villain whose superpower was putting people to sleep.
“Good. Then I suppose we’ll see you this weekend in Southampton. Come on, Grey.”
“Are they really your cousins?” asked Natalie as Gwyneth and Grey strolled out of the lunchroom.
“I guess so,” I said. Inwardly, I was busy wondering how the same gene pool had produced T.K., Charley, Patience, the ennui twins, and me. There must have been some major mutations along the way.
“Well,” she said, “Gwyneth is a charter member of the Apathy Alliance. So is Grey.”
“Then who’s the president? Or whatever an alliance has?” I asked.
“He’s more than the president,” said Natalie. “He’s like the founder and the king and the Grand Pooh-Bah all rolled into one. If the Apathy Alliance were a galaxy, he’d be its sun. Your cousins would be orbiting around him.”
“Who is he?” I asked again.
“Quinn,” breathed Natalie. And while she might not be a fan of the Apathy Alliance, she did say his name with a certain amount of awe. “Quinn Riley.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be on the lookout for Quinn Riley.”
“Oh—” said Natalie, startled by something else over my shoulder.
And at the same moment, a teasing male voice spoke close to my ear.
“No need to be on the lookout,” the voice said. “Quinn Riley, at your service.”
I didn’t even have to turn around. I knew exactly whose gray-green eyes I’d see.
Sure enough, Quinn Riley and the Stairwell God were one and the same.
Eight
I did myself proud all over again, paralyzed brain and partially open mouth included. But this time I did manage to cough up some words. Well, one word. Here’s what I said:
“Thanks.”
Like he actually meant he was at my service, and like I was actually thanking him for it.
Then the bell rang, and Quinn Riley was gone, strolling away in what I soon learned was the signature gait of all Alliance members, though he did do it particularly well. The other kids parted before him like he was Moses and they were the Red Sea.
Left to my own devices, I probably would’ve sat there, staring at the door he’d walked through, until school shut down for the night. But Natalie was in my next class, too, and somehow she got me up and to the right classroom. At least, physically she did. My mind was in a different place entirely. I just kept replaying the same two scenes in my head on a continuous mental loop: first, Quinn and me in the stairwell, and second, Quinn and me in the lunchroom. And with each new playback, I had to mentally kick myself all over again.
There I’d been, practically face-to-face with the perfect guy—and I’d blown it, not just once but twice. It was like seeing that perfect wave rolling in, the type of wave most surfers only dream about. But instead of owning it, I’d let it wipe me out completely.
So I continued to obsess all the way through Modern Western Civilizations, and then some more as I drifted through precalculus. And the strangest part was that I don’t usually obsess. I mean, nothing in Palo Alto had prepared me for such an immediate crush, much less for anybody like Quinn, but I’m mostly pretty good about picking myself up and moving on.
Either way, it wasn’t until precalculus was nearly over and the mental playback/kicking myself count had reached double digits that the obsessing screeched to a halt and I finally had an epiphany. Suddenly, it all became perfectly clear.
The problem was much bigger than my pathetic reaction to an almost total stranger—it was my reaction to everything that had happened in the last week that was so wrong.
The cold ugly truth was that I’d been letting circumstances and chance own me. Which was the opposite of what my dad had taught me, and what my mother had taught me, too, though in a non-surfing way.
Ever since Thad and Nora told me the news, I’d been allowing other people to make my decisions. And the whole time, all I’d been doing was feebly trying to explain that T.K. wasn’t dead and waiting for something to change, or someone to come to the rescue.
When what I should have been doing was taking my destiny into my own hands. There was absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t find my mother myself.
Last period was drama, but since it didn’t start until the following week I had the hour free. And for the first time in days I knew exactly what I should do.
The Prescott library was on the top floor, stretching across both of the buildings that housed the school. I bypassed the shelves of books and rows of study carrels and made for a bank of computers along one wall.
I hadn’t fully formulated a plan of attack, but I figured if I gathered as much information as I could about my mother’s trip, I was bound to come up with some ideas. And it didn’t take long to realize how little I knew about where she’d been going and what she’d intended to do. Patience wasn’t the only sister whose name didn’t fit—T.K. was involved in so many causes that it was hard to keep track, and she was pretty zealous about them all.
The obvious move would be to get in touch with Thad. He’d always insisted on knowing where T.K. was, in case anything urgent came up—he’d definitely have the itinerary for this last trip. He’d also probably have a good sense of what she was trying to accomplish, since T.K. had funded the excursion through TrueTech.org, the company’s philanthropic arm.
But I was hoping that if I kept a low profile where Thad was concerned, he’d forget about the whole training-me-to-take-over-the-business thing. And given that he was the first person to insist that T.K. was dead, reaching out to him was far more likely to result in another lecture about denial than anything remotely helpful.
No, Thad was a nonstarter. But T.K. was enough of a public figure that there would be lots of information about her on the Internet, and some of it would have to be about recent events. So I pulled up a browser window and Googled T.K.’s name.
And while I knew my mother was pretty famous, at least in tech circles, nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.
On the screen was a long list of blue links, and each link led to an obituary.
I felt like all of the air had been sucked out of the room. The text went blurry, and there was a ringing noise in my ears. Without conscious direction, my hand reached out to the mouse, and the browser closed, but the images still seemed to linger on the screen.
No matter how confident a person is that she’s right and everyone else is wrong, Google returning several hundred links that seem to agree with all the people who are wrong isn’t the most comforting experience. If anything, it’s the sort of experience that can make a person hyperventilate.
Whi
ch meant it was several minutes before I felt like I could breathe normally and face the computer again. But this time around I was more careful. I opened up a fresh browser window and went directly to TrueTech.org.
T.K. believes in keeping overhead low, and this was particularly true for the company’s philanthropic activities—she always said she’d rather spend money on causes than fancy offices and staff. As a result, things like updating the Web site sometimes fell through the cracks, since nobody was paid to do it. And I was in luck—it looked like the site hadn’t been touched since my mother left. There was a link right off the home page to a page that was all about the Antarctica excursion, like it hadn’t even begun yet.
The stated objectives were to “Document the impact of global warming on Antarctic ice shelves and explore other environmental occurrences in the area,” and the schedule called for the participants to meet up in Buenos Aires and catch a flight to Ushuaia, a port in Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of Argentina. From there, they would board a small ship called the Polar Star, which was supposed to sail down and around the western side of the Antarctic continent, stopping every so often to do whatever tests they had planned and returning via New Zealand. The entire trip was scheduled to take nineteen days.
This was all still sort of vague, but at least I had more to work with. I made some notes in my otherwise-empty notebook, and then I went back to Google and typed in Polar Star. And that’s when things got seriously weird.
According to the articles I found, the ship had sent its SOS signals on the morning of its seventh day out, from a point in the Amundsen Sea roughly between Thurston Island and Cape Dart. After that, it went radio silent. Meanwhile, the first rescuers arrived at the spot only an hour later and there was nothing at all to be seen, just like Thad said. The ship had vanished into thin air.
But it turned out that it wasn’t easy for a ship to simply vanish, and especially not that quickly.
The general consensus was that the Polar Star must have hit submerged ice, which is what happened to a cruise ship called the Explorer in 2007. But the Explorer took nearly twenty hours to sink, which gave everyone on it plenty of time to evacuate by lifeboat. Even the Titanic had taken three hours to go down, which had been more than long enough to escape—there just weren’t enough lifeboats for people like the guy played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
And I knew there was no way T.K. would’ve set foot on a boat without enough lifeboats. She wouldn’t even release the parking brake on the Prius until everybody’s seat belt was buckled.
So, given the lack of an actual sinking ship or lifeboats or anything, the hitting-ice-and-sinking theory seemed pretty weak.
I also found a lot of blog posts from people who had theories of their own. There was one guy who was convinced that T.K.’s ship had fallen prey to a band of marauding polar pirates. Another must have been watching too many old episodes of The X-Files, because he chalked it up to an alien abduction, an Antarctic version of the Bermuda Triangle, or some combination of the two.
These people might not be all that reliable, but a couple did point out something interesting. There are hundreds of satellites orbiting the earth, not just for beaming down TV to places that can’t get cable but for taking pictures and measurements, too. Some of these satellites are dedicated to scientific research—observing changes in the earth’s climate, for example. Others are used for less aboveboard activities, like spying on rogue nations’ nuclear facilities and stalking celebrities.
Anyhow, according to the bloggers, there was a set of satellite images of the Amundsen Sea right before the Polar Star sent out its SOS signal, and the ship could be seen clearly, perfectly fine and sailing along without any problems. The next set of available satellite images for the area was from only a few minutes later, and the ship should still have been visible.
But the Polar Star was completely gone—like it really had vanished into thin air. There wasn’t any disturbance in the water to indicate a sinking ship, nor was there any smoke or debris from an explosion.
The bloggers used this as evidence to justify their random theories. Of course, they also believed in things like polar pirates and the Bermuda Triangle.
Still, I wanted to see those satellite images for myself, from the original sources. After all, ships don’t just evaporate, complete with their crew and passengers and equipment and everything. Especially not when one of those passengers was my mother.
And I couldn’t be the only person who thought there had to be more to this story than we’d been told.
Nine
Charley had texted earlier, offering to come pick me up, but I was sort of fascinated by the subway and told her I’d be fine getting back to the loft on my own. She replied with several texts’ worth of instructions about which station was most convenient to Prescott, how to buy a MetroCard, which line to take, how to behave on the subway platform and in the train so that people wouldn’t think I was a tourist, which stop to get off at, and the best route from there to the loft. If I hadn’t realized that she was still overcompensating for the airport mix-up, I would’ve worried that she didn’t think I was very bright.
Anyhow, when the final bell rang, I was ready to go. I collected my things, checked Charley’s instructions again, and dashed to the nearest subway station. The entrance was exactly where Charley had said it would be, and it wasn’t hard to buy a MetroCard or figure out which train was the right one.
As it rattled through the tunnel, I felt buoyant, like I was floating instead of underground. I couldn’t wait to tell Charley everything I’d learned about the Polar Star and get her thoughts about what to do next. And even in my excitement—after all, the evidence I’d found clearly suggested that T.K.’s ship hadn’t gone down, at least not the way everyone said it did, which could only be good news—I couldn’t help but think that Charley would probably have some helpful ideas about Quinn, too. She was gorgeous and confident and she definitely had far more experience than I did in these matters—just about anyone did.
The subway was amazingly fast, and it was also a lot less stressful than the ride uptown with Patience had been. Half an hour after I’d left Prescott I was back at the loft.
I found Charley sprawled on a sofa. They’d finished filming the night I’d arrived, so now, at Dieter’s insistence, she was reading a book titled The Theory of Meta-Surrealism in Neo-Industrial Film: Post-Production as Praxis. Dieter said it would be impossible to begin the editing process until everyone involved had finished “zis mastervork,” as it had inspired his artistic vision. Charley seemed to be finding it less inspiring.
“Oh thank God,” she said when she saw me, slamming the book shut and practically leaping up from the sofa. “I’m so glad you’re here. You have to tell me all about your day. I want to know everything, from the second you got there to the second you left, and not just because I’ll poke my eyes out if I have to slog through any more of this book. And I think we should do it over ice cream. But I need to go get some, which means you have to chaperone me so I don’t buy out the entire store. I have absolutely no willpower when it comes to ice cream. Want to run to the deli with me?”
“Sure,” I said, but just then her phone started to ring. She checked the screen and frowned.
“I should get this,” she said apologetically.
“I can go,” I said.
“Are you sure? Do you know where it is? Do you need money?”
“I’m all set. What flavor do you want?”
“Chocolate anything is good. And don’t let me eat more than half a pint by myself. Or maybe three-quarters if I behave myself and ask very nicely.”
There was a deli on the corner, and I carefully selected a pint of chocolate peanut butter and another of chocolate chip cookie dough from the freezer section. And then, after a little more careful thought, I added a pint of java mocha fudge.
The guy at the counter looked from me to the ice cream and back again. “You are relative of lady down the street?�
�� he asked. It wasn’t clear whether he figured this out based on my appearance or my selections, but apparently Charley was a regular visitor to his freezer section.
I had a full set of keys by then, including one for the elevator, but I took the stairs to justify the java mocha fudge. I figured the climb to the fifth floor was worth at least a quarter-pint and maybe more, since carrying the ice cream was sort of like carrying hand weights.
While the elevator opened directly into the apartment, announcing its arrival with a beep, the entrance from the stairs didn’t have that feature, so Charley didn’t hear me come in. And while she’d taken the phone into her bedroom, she hadn’t shut her door, and the loft had the acoustics of a concert hall. Which meant her side of the conversation sounded as clear as if she were standing right next to me.
“The poor kid’s already had to adjust to a lot in a short period of time,” she was saying in an aggravated way. “And I think she’s making good progress. There’s no need to rush things.”
There was a long pause, which gave me every opportunity to make some noise and let Charley know I was back, but it was impossible not to want to listen in. I mean, I didn’t know what ‘poor kid’ she’d be talking about besides me and, judging by her tone, it was probably Patience on the other end of the line.
“I wouldn’t describe it as a fantasy,” said Charley. “More an understandable reluctance to meet reality head-on—”
Patience, if it was Patience, must have interrupted her then, because there was another pause before Charley spoke again, and when she did, she sounded even more aggravated than she had before.
“As usual, you’re completely overreacting,” she said. “She hasn’t said a word about it since right after she got here. I knew I shouldn’t have told you. You’re blowing it all out of proportion. There’s no need to take such drastic measures.”
And Then Everything Unraveled Page 5