I pulled out my phone and recited the numbers. He stepped into the other room to make the call. I propped my chin on my hands and listened hard. Words floated back through the entryway: some creep following my friend; she’s seen him behind her car every day for, like, a week; she just wants to make sure he’s not a threat. No, Dad, I’m not going to go after him with a baseball bat; that was a onetime thing. I cocked my head, and my interest grew. So he wasn’t just some pretty boy with a nice smile and a nice tan. He could lie with the best of them, aka me. And he had a violent side.
Maybe we would be good together.
Michael walked back in, tucking his phone in his pocket. “My dad’s going to look him up for us,” he said. “Don’t worry. In the meantime, you should eat something. I was going to teach you how to chop vegetables the right way, but you should probably just sit there. We can do that next time.”
I smiled at him as he took up his spot by the stove. “You shouldn’t even bother. I’d be terrible anyway,” I said. “I’m not good with knives. I’d be terrified of serving you a salad with bits of Lucy finger in it.”
“It’s not so bad once you’ve got the hang of it.” He grabbed an onion and mushrooms and reduced them to chunks in a blur.
“Now you’re just showing off.”
He flashed a cocky smile over his shoulder. “So what if I am?”
The vegetables hit the pan with garlic. The rich, earthy scent of them filled the kitchen, and my mouth watered. “What are you making?”
“I make a mean lasagna. So mean it tortures puppies and steals lollipops from little kids.”
“I love lasagna.”
He stirred the pan, and just as the scent grew fuller somehow, he dumped in a can of diced tomatoes.
“Canned tomatoes? Surely you jest.”
“Would you like to make the sauce?” Michael raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think so.”
I rested my head again on the table. The pain seemed to be getting better. To distract myself from the weight of my eyelids, I asked, “So you said you have sisters?”
“Three. I’m the youngest,” he said, giving the pan another stir. It smelled almost like pizza, and I had to lift my head to avoid drowning in a puddle of my own drool. “Alicia, Alianna, Aria, Michael. I’m the only one who didn’t get an A name. Just one of the many things that make me special.”
I rolled my eyes. “Are any of them at home?” Meaning would any of them want some of this lasagna? Because I was pretty sure I could eat the entire pan right now.
“No. Alianna and Aria are in college, Berkeley. Alicia lives in Manhattan and does something in advertising. Or fashion. Something like that.”
“How could you not know what your own sister does?” I always knew what my brother was doing. Always. I knew when he was sleeping; what class he was in; how long he’d be at swim practice; what movie theater he went to on his one and only date, when I’d begrudgingly made him go out with Liv to stop her whining about how cute he was and how he would never, ever notice someone like her.
He shrugged and tasted the sauce, then lowered the heat and topped the pan with a lid. “She’s thirty-two. By the time I was potty-trained, she’d pretty much moved out. She went to college at NYU and only came home for Christmas and a few weeks in the summer. She’s more like an aunt than a sister, honestly.”
My face felt stuffy with tears. “That’s so sad.”
As the cops escorted me out of my high school for the last time, I didn’t cry. I held my mother as she sobbed over my brother’s still form, and I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry when we left behind the only home I’d ever known.
And yet, right now, I felt as if I was going to cry.
Maybe my headache was giving me brain damage. Maybe it was a tumor after all.
I changed the subject. “So, swimming. How long have you been—”
Michael’s head jerked, and he pulled his phone out of his pocket. I could hear it buzzing; he propped it between his shoulder and his ear as he filled a large pot with water and then flurried it with salt. “Hey, Dad.”
I perked up. My teeth started to hurt, like I’d eaten too much sugar.
“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. No, not now. Okay. Wait one sec.” He grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper from the counter and scribbled something down. “I’ll let her know. Thanks. Bye.” He hung up, and when he turned around, his face was grave. “That license plate belongs to a Joseph Goodman, address 477 Gates Avenue, phone number 707-555-1299. Does that sound familiar?”
“No,” I said, my mind whirling. It could be an alias for Spence. If he was out here stalking me, he probably wouldn’t do it under his own name. He was smart. He was a doctor. Or the car could be stolen. Joseph Goodman might be some feeble old man, doddering, milky-eyed, oblivious to the missing car he never drove.
There was only one way to find out.
“Thanks for talking to your dad,” I said honestly.
“You’re welcome,” Michael said. “Do you want me to give this Goodman a call? Threaten him?”
I jerked my chin at the stove. “Your water’s boiling.”
He dropped sheets of pasta into the pot and turned back to me. “Do you?”
“No,” I said, oddly touched. He might have taken a baseball bat to somebody at some point, but a baseball bat couldn’t fix what was happening here. A baseball bat could shatter Lucy Black’s precarious existence, though. “Listen, it might just be a coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t even him and I freaked out over nothing.”
He clamped his lips together and shook his head. “It didn’t seem like nothing, Lucy.”
“Can we just not talk about this for a little while?” My words were squeezed, as if I were forcing them through a clog in my throat. “I just need a few hours where I can not think about him.” I didn’t specify which “him” I meant: Spence or my brother. “Okay?”
He looked down into his boiling water, then at me, then at his pan of simmering tomatoes, then at me again, and then he did something entirely unexpected: he strode over to me, knelt before me like I was about to knight him or something, and wrapped his arms around me so that his face hit my shoulder. Not my chest, I noted. I wasn’t surprised. He was a good person. He deserved better than me.
Still, I leaned my head forward, rested my nose in his hair, and drew in a deep, shuddering breath as his curls tickled my nose. He smelled like chlorine, with a hint of garlic and onion, or maybe that was just the sauce finally beginning to come together.
I didn’t say anything, and neither did he—if we didn’t speak, neither of us could ruin this moment. No, that role was left to his father, who closed the front door with a slam and announced his presence with a couple of very emphatic throat clears. Michael and I jumped apart; my chair skidded back a full foot, and Michael just barely escaped slamming his head against the counter. The shock startled away my own headache.
“Evening,” his father said gruffly. He was still in his uniform, police hat firmly on his head, his chest shiny with multiple badges. “You’re Lucy? The one being followed?”
“That’s me.” I pasted a smile on my face. “But it’s okay. I’ll be okay.”
The look he gave me made me feel as if he could see through my skin, from the coils of my small intestine to the glub-glub-glub of my heart to the blood pumping toward my face. I felt worse than naked. “Well, you let me know if someone’s bothering you,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
I had a feeling his version of taking care of it was very different from mine. “Thank you, sir.”
He shot Michael an appraising look. “Well, then,” he said. Michael was staring into his sauce like there might be pirate treasure hidden in its depths. “What are we having?”
—
When Michael’s dad thumped down at the table and his mother, a stout, pink-faced woman with iron-gray curls tight against her head, followed suit shortly thereafter, my head began running through all the excuses I could think of to get out of there: I wasn’t feeling
well. I just remembered I was deathly allergic to tomatoes. My dog got smashed by a bus and I needed to be there when my parents rushed it to the vet.
I kept delaying, though, and before I knew it, I was shoveling lasagna down my throat. I was content just to eat and watch them interact, almost as if I were watching animals in a zoo or subjects in a medical study. Look how the mother gently rubs her son on the upper arm when he accidentally lets a curse word slip, her grip firm but not hard enough to leave a bruise. Observe the father laughing at a joke his wife made, spraying little globules of tomato onto the table’s clean surface. See the son’s eyes glow as he looks at the researcher, and watch how the researcher reacts by suddenly becoming very intent upon her pasta. The way this family touched, the way they looked at each other, the way they poked fun—it was love, and I found love endlessly fascinating.
After the lasagna came ice cream, and after the ice cream came shocked exclamations of “Look how late it is!” from the mother. “You should get home, Lucy,” she said. “I’m sure your parents are worried sick.”
I didn’t say, Sure, if by worried sick you mean having no idea I’m even gone. “Yeah,” I said instead.
“Will you be okay driving home?” the mother asked.
“I don’t drive,” I said.
“Why not?”
I stood. “I just don’t. I can call my dad.”
“Don’t call your dad,” Michael said. He shot an annoyed look at his mom, and a wave of calm swept over me. So it wasn’t all love all the time. “I drove you here; I can drive you home.”
“Thanks.”
His parents kissed me—actually kissed me—good-night, and sent me on my way with a plastic container of lasagna. It sat in my lap, heavy and warm, and I knew I’d toss it as soon as I got home. It just wouldn’t taste the same in my kitchen.
“Well,” Michael said as we pulled up to my house. The ride had been quiet, again, but this one was a comfortable kind of quiet. Like the quiet after a thunderstorm, when the air is soft and everything still smells like rain. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I guess. Thanks for the ride.” We stared at each other; the look in his eyes, soft as the air, made my stomach squirm.
“What do you think of the name Julia?” The words burst out of my mouth without any warning.
Michael cocked his head. “It’s a nice name,” he said. “Nowhere near as pretty as Lucy.”
He looked at me and I looked at him, and before I could stop myself, I leaned over and pressed my lips against his cheek. He stilled; I could feel his heart beating under his skin. His skin was smooth. He swallowed hard, and the reverberations traveled through his bones and his muscle and his smooth, smooth skin and straight into my own head. “Lucy…”
My fake name broke the spell, and I pulled away, feeling like an idiot. I sprang out of the car, afraid my traitorous mouth would say—or do—something else. “Good night!” I called, and fairly sprinted into the house. I made sure not to look back, not even once, but I didn’t hear him pull away until I’d stepped inside.
Tomorrow. I’d see him tomorrow. A happy glow spread outward from my stomach, but I squashed it before it could reach my heart. I had other things to think about.
Tomorrow, danger or not, I had to pay a visit to 477 Gates Avenue. And Mr. Joseph Goodman.
I spent the rest of the night on a hot date with my friend Google. It’s amazing—and a little bit spooky—how much you can turn up with a name, an address, and a phone number.
Okay, the name alone—not so much. It turns out there are a whole lot of Joseph Goodmans in the world, a positive plague of them. When I Googled his name, most of what came up were profiles and reviews of a cosmetic dentist to the stars. When I dug a bit further, a plethora of others came sprouting from the earth like mushrooms after a storm: a minor-league baseball player, a middle school teacher who had won a number of community-service awards, a police officer who had thrown himself in front of a bullet intended for a past mayor—the bullet had embedded itself in his lower leg, leaving him with a prosthetic limb and several commendations for bravery—and a local theater star with his own website and a clearly overinflated ego. My Joseph Goodman could’ve been any one of them, or none of them.
The address brought me more luck. Google Earth brought it onto my laptop screen in high-def: it was a small, humble ranch with brown streaks on the siding and a dry, patchy lawn. Though the Google Street View car had clearly trundled by during the daytime, all the windows were shut tight, and the pile of newspapers on the front stoop showed that nobody had been there in at least a week. Or at least that nobody had gone outside. It was an unassuming building that could’ve been located anywhere. This particular one was located an approximate twenty-eight-minute car ride away, according to the handy directions Google Maps pulled up.
“Lucy?” I jumped. My eyes burned as I turned to look at my mother. She was hovering in the doorway, her nails tapping nervously on the frame. She probably wanted to varnish it or something. “Are you still up?”
“No, I’m very clearly asleep,” I said.
“No need to be rude,” she said mildly. “It’s past midnight. You have school tomorrow.”
Before the band room, my mother would have told me to get my butt in bed. Now she just kept tapping her nails.
I wanted her to tell me to go to bed. “So?” I dared. “So I’ll be tired. I can stay up however late I want.”
Click. Click. Click. “You’re only seventeen,” she said.
“And?”
The nails clattered harder, as if she were trying to poke holes in the wood. “Lucy…” She trailed off.
“Yeah?”
Footsteps thumped behind her, and I startled to my feet as my dad loomed in the hallway. “Lucy Black,” he said. “You heard your mother.”
“She talked, but she didn’t say anything,” I said. Tears jumped to my eyes, blurring my parents into an abstract painting.
He glared at me, then swung his arm around my mom’s shoulders. “Go to bed, Lucy,” he said, pulling her away. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”
I knew we wouldn’t.
—
I woke a painful half hour early the next morning to steal my dad’s gun. After I’d dragged myself out of bed, brushed my teeth, and rubbed the stickiness from the corners of my eyes, I remembered that we no longer had a gun. It was in the Elkton police station’s evidence room, sealed inside a plastic bag, marked with an evidence number, and abandoned inside a cardboard box stacked among hundreds of other cardboard boxes.
Maybe it was for the best. I didn’t have to rush in, guns blazing. Given what he knew of my brother, Spence probably wouldn’t take that well. He might be dangerous, but I remembered him as tall and weedy, stringy in the arms and legs. I could take him. I could certainly outrun him. All I wanted to do was fix him with my cold stare and ask him why he was following me. Really, if he wanted to hurt me or kill me, he’d had plenty of chances to do it already. Clearly he wanted something else.
I’d go by the example of Eddie Meyer, the third to die according to the gripping, Pulitzer-nominated narrative of the attack, pieced together by ace reporter Jennifer Rosenthal, aka Jenny, from the police reports, coroners’ reports, interviews with students, and one incredibly unhelpful talk with the sister of the shooter. Right after Evan and Liv were pierced by bullets and everybody else was either too shocked to move or scrambling to find an exit, Eddie grabbed his baseball bat (like Evan, he was not in band; if only I could remember what he’d been doing in that band room, I’d have the final piece for Jenny’s puzzle) and rushed my brother. My brother shot him five times in the chest. Poor Eddie—he was brave, but he wasn’t very smart.
When I said I’d go by Eddie’s example, I didn’t mean die. I meant I’d face the danger head-on.
So pepper spray it was. Just in case.
Alane picked me up promptly at seven-thirty-five, as she did every morning. She was so unfailingly punctual I sometimes w
ondered if she idled around the block, waiting for the perfect moment to pull in front of my house. “So?” she greeted me as I slid in. “How’d your date go?”
“It wasn’t a date.” I rummaged around in my purse, making absolutely sure the pepper spray was at the very bottom. It was, naturally, forbidden at school, but this wasn’t Elkton, where, I heard, kids now had to walk through metal detectors and endure bag searches just to get to class. Like that would have stopped my brother. “Hey, I need a favor.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “It was so a date. He cooked you dinner at his house. If that’s not a date, I don’t know what is.”
“Fine. It was a date. It was fine,” I said. “His parents were there, so it was a little weird.”
Her mouth dropped open, and she blinked so many times, and in such rapid succession, I worried she couldn’t see the road in front of her. “You’ve already met the parents?” she said. “Lucy, how could you not tell me this?”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “It wasn’t like he was, like, ‘Hey, Lucy, meet my parents. We’re having dinner with them.’ It was more like they walked through the door and plopped themselves down at the table.”
“Still.” She sighed and fluttered a hand against her heart. “That’s got to be a good sign. As long as they liked you.”
People always liked me. “I think they did,” I said.
“Oh, good.” Her eyes fluttered this time, like she was dreaming. Seriously, was she watching the road? “It’s important for your boyfriend’s parents to like you.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said automatically. Okay, time to change the subject. “Soooo, I’ll love you forever if you give me a ride somewhere after school today.”
“You’ve already promised to love me forever,” she said. “Are you going back on your word?”
I raised my eyebrows and pursed my lips. “I might have to have Michael’s babies instead.”
“Never!” she said, scandalized. “But I have a dentist appointment after school, babes. Can we take that ride tomorrow?”
I made my shoulders sag, ducked my head so that my hair fell around my face in a curtain. “It’s really important,” I said, my voice low. “I mean, like, life-changing important. And I have to go today. Maybe I could ask Ella for a ride. Or Michael.”
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