And Then Everything Unraveled

by Jennifer Sturman

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a blur that was him approaching, and I heard someone say, “Delia?” But I kept kicking and pushing with the stick, concentrating on maneuvering the jellyfish out of his path and trying not to think about the way my heart was pounding.

  And at just the right moment, another wave came along, larger than the others. I gave a final, fierce push with my stick. The water carried the jellyfish away and safely out of striking range.

  I was relieved, but the relief was nothing compared to the euphoria.

  And the euphoria had nothing to do with the jellyfish. I’d practically forgotten about the jellyfish already.

  I hadn’t been able to make out his features before, when he’d been nothing but a moving shape outlined by the sun. But I’d recognized him immediately when he spoke. Hearing him before actually seeing him was getting to be sort of a pattern.

  More importantly, Quinn had recognized me, too.

  And it turned out that he knew my name after all.

  Thirteen

  The kids were named Bea and Oliver, and Quinn wasn’t just their surf instructor, he was also their brother. Which probably meant he hadn’t been reading aloud to himself the night before—he’d had an audience. And he hadn’t been hiding out, either—he’d been putting Bea and Oliver to bed.

  So that was a lot less strange. If anything, it was sort of sweet, and not at all what I’d expected. The elusive, teasing guy from school with the crew of Alliance followers didn’t compute with the Harry Potter-reading big brother.

  The kids had jumped on Quinn as soon as we reached the beach, and they made a fuss over me, too. I tried to protest that it wasn’t a big deal, but they were having none of it.

  “It was a gigantic deal,” insisted Bea. “You saved Quinn’s life.”

  “Now you’re responsible for him until he saves your life back,” said Oliver.

  “Is that how it works?” Quinn asked, amused.

  “It might be the other way around,” said Bea. “I can’t remember.”

  Just then a woman appeared at the top of a path leading up from the dunes, and I realized that we were practically in front of the Rileys’ house. “Beatrice! Oliver!” she called. She was wearing yoga clothes and big dark sunglasses, and it looked like she had her highlights done at the same place as Patience. “Time to come in. You have tennis, and then the Castelli children will be here for a playdate.”

  “Ugh,” said Bea. “I hate, hate, hate tennis. Hate it.”

  “And Ashley Castelli picks her nose,” said Oliver.

  “The Castelli children are very nice,” the woman said. “And one day you’ll be glad you’ve had all these tennis lessons.”

  “Which day?” asked Oliver.

  Her sigh was audible even from a distance. “Quinn, will you send them up here, please?”

  The looks Bea and Oliver gave Quinn were heart-wrenching, but Quinn shook his head. “Sorry, guys. It’s not up to me. You’d better go.”

  They trudged off like they’d just received a life sentence in one of those Iraqi prisons, but I got a hug from Bea first, and Oliver bumped his fist against mine.

  “Oh, and Quinn,” said the woman as she shunted the kids toward the house, “your father would like to see you. He should be home from his workout soon.”

  “Okay,” he called back, making no move to follow Bea and Oliver. He turned to me and shrugged. “Stepmother,” he said, as if that said it all.

  “Is your dad angry about the party last night?”

  “Were you there?” he asked, surprised. “I didn’t see you.”

  “Just for a little while,” I hedged. It wasn’t like I was going to admit that I’d been pretty much stalking him. “My cousins brought me.”

  “Oh, right,” he said, and the way he said it almost made me wonder if he’d asked around about me. How else could he know my name and who my cousins were? But someone like him must have better things to do. “No, I don’t think he and Fiona—my stepmom—even realize anyone was here, and Bea and Oliver won’t rat me out. Besides, my dad can wait. These waves are too good to pass up. Do you surf?”

  My heart gave a little skip. I didn’t think I was imagining the note of invitation in his voice, but I couldn’t be sure. “Uh-huh. But my board’s at home, in California.”

  “I’ve got an extra if you’re up for it.”

  When he looked at me with those gray-green eyes, he could’ve been asking if I was up for hunting down that jellyfish and eating it for lunch. Either way, I would’ve said yes.

  Quinn’s extra board was from when he was younger, so it wasn’t too long for me, and the water was warm enough that I was fine without a wet suit, though I was feeling a bit exposed in my one-piece. But I forgot about that as soon as I was back in the water. And while the surfing was great, the best part was that between the jellyfish drama and meeting Bea and Oliver and everything, the brain paralysis hadn’t had a chance to kick in—I was actually acting like a normal person for once, or at least mostly normal.

  We’d been out there for about an hour when I started thinking I should probably get back. Charley didn’t know where I was, and while I didn’t want to go, I also didn’t want her to worry.

  “I’ll walk you,” offered Quinn.

  “Do you have time?” I asked, thinking about his father waiting for him.

  It was like he could read my mind. “Trust me—Hunter will track me down eventually. He always does. Besides, he probably just wants to get on my case about the usual.”

  “What’s the usual?” I asked as we left the boards planted in the sand near his house and headed in the direction of my grandparents’.

  “School, SATs, college applications—the standard senior-year thing. Basically, my whole future. Fascinating, right?”

  “I guess it depends on your future,” I said, trying to match his easy tone.

  “That’s nothing to worry about. Hunter—my dad—has conveniently figured it all out for me.”

  “Is it? Convenient, I mean.”

  “It would be if he didn’t expect me to follow in his footsteps,” said Quinn. “If you’re going to be a financial genius, you need to be good with numbers. Places like Wharton and Harvard Business School expect that sort of thing.”

  “And let me guess,” I said. “You’re not good with numbers?”

  “ ‘Not good’ would be the understatement of all time.”

  We’d arrived at the spot where I’d left my dad’s shirt, and I picked it up off the sand. “I don’t know if this will make you feel any better, but my mother has this grand plan that I’ll take over her company one day. But it’s a tech business, and I can barely even figure out how to turn my laptop on and off.”

  “Mac or PC?” he asked, so seriously that it took me a second to realize he was joking.

  I laughed, but I didn’t get a chance to answer him before a twiggy, spandex-clad figure sprinted up toward us. It was Patience, dressed in fancy workout clothes, complete with wraparound shades and a complicated-looking runner’s watch. She glanced at Quinn with approval.

  “I’m so glad you’re making friends, Delia,” she said, pumping her arms to keep her heart rate up while she jogged in place. “Gwyneth and I are going to capoeira later. Do you want to join us?”

  “Uh—”

  “Capoeira builds muscle tone and is an excellent form of self-defense. And some very important people take this class. We won’t be leaving for another”—she checked her watch—“forty-seven minutes if you’re interested. Quinn, do give my regards to Fiona and tell your father I’ll look forward to seeing him again soon.”

  Then she dashed off.

  “She’s energetic,” said Quinn.

  “That’s one word for it,” I said as I started putting on my cover-up. But I’d forgotten that I’d put my phone in the breast pocket, and it fell out onto the sand as I pulled the shirt over my head. Quinn picked it up and handed it to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, brushing off the scre
en. With a jolt, I saw that I’d missed a call. And the caller ID read “Out of Area.”

  Quinn was saying something, but I didn’t really hear him. “Sorry—I, I just need to check this.”

  “No problem,” he said as I punched in my password. The automated voice told me that I had one new message, from an unknown number, sent at 8:32 A.M., and with a duration of fifty-six seconds.

  There was a weird rushing noise in my ears, and Quinn and the beach and the ocean seemed to fade away as I waited for the message to play. It felt like the pause lasted forever before a woman’s voice finally began to speak.

  But it was the wrong woman.

  Delia, honey, it’s Nora. I’m in San Diego, staying at my son’s to help with his new baby, and the little devil keeps getting me up at the most ungodly hours. But since I’m up, I figured I’d take advantage of the time difference and see how you’re settling in with your aunt. Give me a call when you get a chance, okay, hon?

  Then she left her son’s number in California, which I didn’t have stored in my address book and which must have been unlisted to boot. Which was why it had shown up as “Out of Area.”

  The disappointment was so intense that it felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. And this time there was no way to stop the prickling in my eyes. The tears were already poised to spill out.

  “What is it?” Quinn was asking. “Delia?”

  But I didn’t trust myself to speak without completely losing it. All I could do was flee.

  Fourteen

  I ran blindly toward my grandparents’ house, desperate to be where nobody could see me cry. I drew the line at sobbing in front of near-strangers, especially if they looked like Quinn. I heard him calling out, and I almost crashed into Charley on the stairs leading up from the beach, but I mumbled an excuse and pushed past her. I didn’t stop running until I’d reached the sanctuary of my mother’s old room and the door was safely closed behind me.

  As crying fits go, this one was pretty severe. I kept telling myself that nothing had changed—I still knew about the satellite photos, and the first “Out of Area” call was still mysterious. And I tried to reassure myself that I was still going to be able to figure it all out. It was just the collision of a perfect golden morning with a crushing disappointment that had sent me into emotional overload.

  By the time Charley knocked on my door, maybe half an hour or so later, the tears had slowed to a trickle, and I had that wrung-out, dazed feeling you get after a session of torrential sobbing. I blew my nose and wiped my eyes and went to open the door.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

  I knew that if I did, the crying would start up all over again, so I shook my head. And being Charley, she didn’t press or pry. She only said, “It’s probably healthy to let it all out.” Then she made a face. “I can’t believe I said something that lame. More importantly, have you checked the weather?”

  Outside, a mass of purple-black storm clouds had gathered on the horizon. They looked as gloomy as I felt, but Charley had a different take.

  “Isn’t it fabulous?” she said. “Just the excuse we need to cut out early from the Truesdale house of horrors. And I know the perfect way to spend a rainy day.”

  I was worried that Charley’s idea of a rainy-day good time would involve another shopping trip, and I didn’t think I could deal with that many mirrors given what I must look like after all the sobbing. But instead we packed up and went to an enormous multiplex somewhere in the Long Island suburbs.

  We watched two movies, played every single arcade game in the lobby, and systematically worked our way through the menu at the concession stand. Then we topped it off with the drive-through window at a Dairy Queen on the way back to the city.

  T.K. would’ve been appalled, and I did feel sort of queasy when it was all over, but Charley was right—it really was the perfect way to spend a rainy day. I even felt recovered enough to tell Charley all about Quinn on the beach, and how different he was from the Quinn at school, and how we’d surfed and I hadn’t choked up or embarrassed myself. At least, not until I’d fled.

  It was after midnight by the time we got to the loft, and when the elevator doors opened, we walked smack into a tower of cardboard. It turned out that all of my boxes had arrived from Palo Alto, and the super had brought them up and stacked them in the foyer while we were away.

  I was too tired to begin unpacking that night, but I got on it as soon as I woke up Sunday morning. I didn’t care much about the clothes, though I pretended to for Charley’s sake—she was always interested in clothes, even boring, T.K.-approved outfits. But between what she’d bought me and having to wear a uniform most days, I already had everything I’d need for New York. In fact, it would probably be more efficient to leave the boxes packed for my return to Palo Alto, but I couldn’t tell Charley that.

  Fortunately, she had plans to go to an art show with friends in the afternoon, and when she urged me to come with her, I pled homework. But as soon as she left, I turned my attention to what I was really interested in: the laptop and the file folders I’d grabbed from T.K.’s desk at home.

  I didn’t know what they’d tell me, if anything—I’d only shoved them in with some sweaters at the last minute, after it became clear that I was being sent to New York no matter how much of a fuss I made—but I was still glad I had them now.

  My mother loves her shredder almost as much as her label maker, so I started with the folders. I figured that whatever papers she’d bothered to hold on to had to be important, and that they’d be current, too, since she hadn’t yet put them away in her file cabinet. And I also knew they’d be about me, because they were all stowed in the desk drawer marked CORDELIA.

  But most of the folders were pretty dull, though they did make me wonder if T.K. was suffering from a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder that involved giving every single item its own properly labeled home. She’d labeled one folder CORDELIA—FALL CLASS SCHEDULE, and all she’d put in it was a lonely copy of my fall class schedule for West Palo Alto High. Then she’d done the same thing with the schedules for my soccer games and school holidays.

  There were only a couple of folders that looked like they might be interesting. The first was labeled CORDELIA—POSSIBILITIES FOR BAYEE, which sounded nice and cryptic. Inside I found a bunch of notes in my mother’s writing, scrawled on random scraps of paper and held together with a binder clip.

  Deciphering anything T.K.’s written usually takes a while. Part of the reason she loves her label maker so much is that her actual handwriting looks like it belongs to an adolescent boy, so if she wants things to look neat she needs mechanical help. But these notes turned out to be ideas for projects I could do for the Bay Area Young Einstein Expo.

  The other folder I thought might be interesting didn’t have my name on it, and I thought maybe it had ended up in the Cordelia drawer by accident. It was labeled simply ROSS. I didn’t know any Ross except for Ross’s Cove, and I’d never heard T.K. mention anyone by that name, so this was even more cryptic, but I’d just learned the hard way not to expect too much from cryptic labels. Inside I found three pieces of paper: a letter, a Post-it, and a drawing.

  The letter was on formal stationery, with a logo at the top. It spelled out EAROFO in big capital letters, and below the logo was an address on K Street in Washington, D.C. The letter itself was short but not exactly sweet.

  Dear Ms. Truesdale,

  Thank you for your inquiry. Due to the high level of demand for our services, we are unable to accommodate your request.

  Sincerely,

  Melvin P. Stern

  Executive Director

  Melvin P. Stern hadn’t bothered to personally sign the letter, which seemed sort of rude. Nor was there any indication as to what kind of services he and EAROFO offered that were in such demand.

  I Googled EAROFO, but all I learned was that it was a Greek word for “putrid, rotten, and bad.” I doubted that had been what Melvin P. Stern wa
s going for when he named his organization or business or whatever it was—it was more likely to be an acronym for something else. But that something else didn’t show up in the search results, and when I looked for an EAROFO Web site, trying all of the standard suffixes—.com, .net, .org, .edu—the browser only returned error messages.

  And just in case the letter wasn’t insufficiently enlightening on its own, stuck to its bottom was the Post-it. And on the Post-it T.K. had scrawled five words:

  Typical! Don’t go through Thad.

  Which was totally bizarre. As a general rule, Thad knew more about T.K. than T.K. did—I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she wouldn’t want him to know or why she wouldn’t want him to know it. After all, he probably already did know, whether she wanted him to or not.

  I flipped to the drawing, but if I was hoping it would explain anything, I was out of luck. It looked like a bad copy of a bad copy of a picture of a bunch of wavy lines in a box. There was no regular pattern to the lines or the stripes they created, though they reminded me of one of those executive toys my dentist had in his waiting room, a Lucite rectangle with layers of different colored sand trapped inside. When you tilted the rectangle, the sand would pour from one end to the other, rearranging itself in new layers. It was better than back issues of Highlights and Family Circle, and also pamphlets on the glories of flossing, but that was about it.

  Anyhow, this drawing looked like a black-and-white version of that toy. And there wasn’t a title or a signature or anything to indicate what it was supposed to be—just some typed numbers and letters in the top right-hand corner of the page:

  81°S/175°V

  The numbers and the degree symbols were clear enough, but the letters didn’t work on any scale I knew. I mean, for temperatures F was Fahrenheit and C was Celsius and K was Kelvin, but none of those letters were the ones on the page. The S could mean South, but that didn’t explain what the V stood for. And when I typed 81°S/175°V into the search engine, even the Internet was stumped.