by C. L. Stone
What did it mean to belong to the Academy and not have to go to high school or college? What did you do for work? How did you learn?
What happened if I didn’t join the Academy? Would I have to stay at Ashley Waters then? The boys had told me often if they didn’t stay, I wouldn’t either. But the reality was, I had to do something. Perhaps they’d have me working at the diner while they were on Academy jobs or whatever they did when they weren’t in school.
I leaned my head against the seat, tired of all the questions I didn’t have answers to.
I stopped thinking about it for now. Instead, I considered what I would say to Luke if he found us poking around and watching him.
When Nathan finally pulled into the laneway that lead to the Taylor Compound, he paused halfway down the drive and stopped the car. “If I go any further, it’ll trigger a warning bell for Luke if he’s here. Do we want him to know we’re coming?”
“Didn’t Kota say he wanted a visual?” Silas asked. “That’s all I heard. Is he grounded?”
“He might be,” Nathan said. “I might ground him if he’s done what we think he did.”
“Do I want to know?” Silas asked. “Are Kota’s tires orange now?”
I peered out the window at the trees but couldn’t see anything. “Do we need to walk up?”
“Yeah,” Nathan said, opening his door. “Let’s walk it from here. Depending on where Luke is, we might just camp out in North’s trailer.”
We got out. The road ahead was gravel. I could see little of the sky, the light blocked by trees around us, making it appear to be closer to twilight than late in the afternoon. Everything had a green-orange hue from evergreen trees and the fallen leaves and my nose was overwhelmed with the smells of pine and decaying leaves.
Before I could step around Silas and start down the road, he held out a hand, catching me by the waist. “Hang on there, Aggele,” he said. “Hang on. Let me toss you over the line.”
I didn’t understand what he meant, but walked behind him.
I watched as Nathan walked up to a spot and then took a jump, hurtling himself over to land on his feet several feet further. He turned back, looking both ways down the drive. “Did I trip it?”
“I don’t see a light,” Silas said.
“There’s a sensor somewhere?” I asked.
“A pressure plate,” Nathan said. “Walking on it will trigger it. North says if a deer walks over it, it’ll go off. Anything about the size of a dog and up will set it off.”
Silas came around me and held onto one of my shoulders. “Do you want me to toss you over? Or can you jump it?”
I guesstimated from where Nathan jumped from to where he landed was doable. “I can run it,” I said, “and jump, but I may need Nathan to catch me.”
Nathan moved to face me, stepping back a bit to give me room, but spread his arms out. “Why am I always catching you?”
“I’m not in a tree this time,” I said.
“Huh?” Silas asked, but stepped away to give me room.
“Long story,” I said, and dashed toward where Nathan had jumped from. I lifted off and in a second, I was crashing into Nathan’s shoulder. “Ugh,” he grunted but held me upright so I didn’t fall on the gravel.
Silas chuckled. “What’s wrong? She too heavy for you?”
Nathan made a face, and then bent over, scooping me up and draping me over his shoulder. I wasn’t expecting it, and ended up with my face in his hip, and my hair spilling, the clip falling from my hair.
“Just for that, I’ll carry her all the way to the trailer,” Nathan said in a deeper, challenging tone. He turned toward Silas, and from that point I was just looking at the gravel.
“Do it,” Silas said, challenging him back.
I shifted on Nathan’s hip. The phone in my bra fell out, clattering to the gravel. I gritted my teeth. Luckily it landed face up, so if anything, it was probably the cover that was scratched. “Hang on, I’m dropping things.”
Silas scooped up my clip and phone and held onto them. “I’ve got them, Sang,” he said. “Don’t fall off. I want to see him carry you all the way.”
I made a noise that was supposed to be a sigh, but when Nathan adjusted me, it ended up as a snort.
Silas laughed in his big, booming tone. “Shit. Too cute.”
“What, you don’t think I can do it?” Nathan asked, shifting me higher on his shoulder as he started walking again.
It wasn’t worth getting between them, so I just accepted that I was going to be carried. I wondered about Silas egging Nathan on. Did he do it a lot?
Nathan moved quickly while Silas trailing behind—I could see him smirking, even though I was upside-down.
I kept expecting the edge of the Taylor Compound to come up soon, but remembered any previous time I’d been here, I’d been in a car, so hadn’t noticed how long the drive was.
Nathan didn’t seem to have any trouble carrying me until we turned a bend and then he kept trying to adjust me. I almost fell off once, and Silas swooped in to catch me, before Nathan turned away. “I’ve got her,” he said.
“Don’t drop her,” Silas said with a chuckle. “You need me to do it?”
“She’s just unbalanced,” Nathan said with a grunt. “I keep thinking she’s going to slip off.”
“Uh huh,” Silas said, sarcasm in his voice.
Nathan mumbled something that I didn’t catch, but as they continued to walk, Silas stayed right behind Nathan.
All I could see was the gravel and the lower parts of trees and the boys’ legs. It was easier just to relax and lay limp.
“Almost there,” Silas said. “I think it’s coming up…”
“I thought there was a tree,” Nathan said. “Isn’t there a white oak before…” He stopped abruptly, rocking forward.
I felt something, too, a strange prickling feeling through my body.
“Shit,” Nathan said, and shuffled me more as he arranged an arm over my thighs. With one hand, he reached back quickly for his pocket, pulled out his phone and brought it around out of my sight. “Yeah?” he said.
“What the hell are you doing? What’s wrong with Sang?” North’s voice still was deep, even through the cell phone.
Nathan stopped and then put me down onto my feet. I stayed standing, but not without a wave of colors flashing over my eyes and as the blood rushed out of my head, making me dizzy. I held onto Nathan for a bit of support until my head stopped spinning.
“Did you just shock me?” Nathan asked and then turned his head. The breeze flattened his reddish hair as he gazed at the trees. “You didn’t tell me you had cameras out here.”
Silas stepped around Nathan, taking my hand and leading me on, chuckling. “Sounds familiar.”
I sighed, feeling a little funny after having been carried upside down for so long. I combed my fingers through my hair. “He shouldn’t be spying on us like that.”
“Are you going to shock him again?”
I shrugged, but then paused to let Nathan catch up to us.
Nathan mumbled complaints into the phone. After a while, he shook his head. “Fine,” he said, shoulders relaxing, defeated. He hung up on North and pointed the phone at me. “I could have carried you all the way to the house.”
“Why is he watching?” I asked.
“He’s keeping an eye on the cameras for Luke; Kota said he didn’t see him anywhere. He spotted us coming up.” He stuffed the phone into his back pocket. “When he realized you weren’t actually hurt, he got after me for…I think he said wearing myself out during an emergency.”
I felt a little put out since I’d wanted to text North about spying on us, but now I realized I didn’t have much of a leg to stand on in that fight. He was probably right. We didn’t know if this was an emergency and we had been goofing off. “Let’s just find Luke,” I said.
Nathan and Silas nodded, their blue and brown eyes now serious and trained ahead at the road.
The Taylor Compound was
quiet as we approached. Silas and Nathan skirted the perimeter to the left, closer to the trailer. I moved behind them, studying the house. It looked quiet. A couple of lights seemed to be on, but it was hard to tell since it was still daytime.
The boys stopped right behind the trailer. We were facing trees, hidden from the main house.
“This is stupid,” Silas said. “I feel like an idiot. We should just go up to the house and look for him.”
“We need to leave him alone,” Nathan said. “We just need to see him and make sure he’s okay.”
“I don’t know,” Silas said, looking steadily at a tree, thinking. “I mean he knows us, he’ll know where to hide so we can’t find him.”
“We don’t want to bug him,” Nathan said. He wiped his fingers across his brow and then across the front of his Bob’s Diner shirt. “Look, let’s just find him, and when we do, we’ll just keep an eye on him. That’s what we’re here to do.”
Silas looked back at him, frowning slightly before he looked at me. “You’re okay with this?”
“We don’t need to snoop,” I said. “I just want to make sure he’s safe. That’s all.”
He inclined his head slowly forward, almost a nod. “Let’s just get this over with.”
I fell behind them as they peeked in North’s trailer windows. I wondered if he was watching us from the diner, or if he’d gone back to the house with Kota and Gabriel.
Silas and Nathan wanted to start at the trailer, circle the woods to the garage, and then travel around to the back of the main house.
The trailer was dark, empty. We only had to glance through one of the garage windows to see Luke wasn’t in there, unless he was sitting in the dark behind one of the vehicles inside.
The main house was an old Victorian, with a turret and huge porches. A lot of the windows had been replaced with new ones, but the outside looked shabby and was in bad need of some paint.
Silas asked Nathan and I to stay in the woods while he peeked into the lower windows of the house. The windows were high, and even he needed to stand on his toes to look in.
“I don’t think he’s here,” Nathan said as he put an arm around my shoulders.
I leaned into him, feeling odd to be standing in the dark woods, sneaking around. Since Silas had said he was uncomfortable spying on Luke, I was starting to feel the same way. I wished there was an easier way to check on him. Even spotting him on the cameras would at least confirm he was okay. “When I called him, he said he was on his way to town. When we checked where his phone was, it said he was here. How could he answer his phone if he wasn’t here?”
“He could have left before we made it here,” Nathan said.
“I don’t know…” I said, getting worried. “Something just doesn’t feel right.”
“Spying on someone never feels right,” Nathan said.
Silas waved at us, signaling for us to come along. He walked onto the back porch.
Nathan and I joined him. We each peeked into windows, seeing rooms filled with ladders and wood and paint buckets and wallpaper. It wasn’t a wonder that North was still living in the trailer; the house didn’t really seem livable.
“Let’s just go in for now,” Silas said. “Let’s just tell him McCoy was spotted nearby and we were checking to make sure he’s not inside the house.”
“Okay, but say it was someone else,” Nathan said. “We wouldn’t have Sang here if it was McCoy.”
Silas shrugged, thinking. “Rocky? Maybe looking for North?”
Nathan nodded and then pointed to the door. “That’d be strange enough.”
Silas tested the back door, finding it locked. He pulled out his keys, unlocked it and let us in.
The back hallway led to a kitchen to the right. Further on, there was a front parlor and to the left there was a set of stairs, and beyond that, more rooms. The smell was a mixture of paint, wood, and must. My nose tingled and I kept my elbow near my face, waiting for a sneeze that never came.
Silas lifted a roll of wallpaper that was on a side table. “I wish North had told me he was still sanding the walls down. I could have helped.”
“He likes to wait until you have a free couple of days,” Nathan said. He bent down and scooped up a stack of used-up sandpaper. “You know him. He wants to go nonstop for two days and then chill for a week to do Academy stuff. He works in stages. Some of this is probably Uncle. He’s the one that leaves a mess after he works. He doesn’t clean up until the job is done.”
I walked around them, tidying up a bit. I couldn’t help but smile to myself at hearing their talk about wanting to help North. It’s not like we’d had loads of time lately.
I wandered through a downstairs hallway, feeling small as the rooms were large with high-ceilings, our footsteps echoing off the bare walls. One was lined with a bunch of empty bookshelves. Another was a bathroom with really old black and white tile and a claw-foot tub but was missing a toilet and a sink.
When I circled back, the boys were in the kitchen, looking around at the work that had been done. I left them and climbed the stairs quietly. Luke wasn’t here if we were making this much noise and he hadn’t come down to see what was going on.
The stairs were solid and I could sneak up them very quietly without much effort. Either they were original and built well, or North had fixed or replaced them and had done an amazing job.
Once I was up the stairs, I was faced with a lot of closed doors. I opened the first one to the right and found a large bedroom. There was a lower level toward the front of the house, and then two steps that went to an upper room.
On the upper level there was a white metal-framed bed covered with light blue blankets. On the white painted nightstand sat a soda can and an empty candy bar wrapper.
This had to be Luke’s bedroom.
I stepped in quietly, closing the door behind me. I stood just inside the door, surveying the room.
It was strange to be in the room without permission, and yet at the same time, I felt comfortable being there.
I noticed the lower level had a couch and an entertainment center with various game systems. His 3DS was on the couch and I went to it, opening it to find a paused game: Animal Crossing. He was still playing? I’d almost forgotten about my little town.
I put the DS back where I’d found it. Boxes were lined up against the wall, some filled with wallpaper and tiles, and others holding personal objects, stacks of books, collectables.
I tried not to be too nosy, but I couldn’t help wanting to poke around. I did a circle of the lower level, peeking inside the boxes, but not reaching in for anything. I spotted a box filled with very random items: a black-handled hammer, a blue Frisbee, a worn and faded leather wallet, a couple of old day planners.
Several had names that weren’t his. Did he…steal these? And kept them?
I went to the second level and sat on the bed. The mattress was firm and felt new, even if the frame seemed to be an antique. There were posters on the walls, mostly of faraway places like exotic beaches and waterfalls.
Did he want to travel? Or did he just like the look of the places?
The smell of the bedroom was like a lot of the rest of the house, musty and of wood and paint, but there was a layer of sugar and vanilla the deeper I got into Luke’s bedroom.
I noticed a closet and got up to look inside. Clothes, many sorted by—I assumed—Gabriel. There was a lot of blue, white T-shirts, and jeans. There were a few nicer clothes, and several sets of the faux uniform they wore at school. There was a small bucket for dirty clothes.
The smell of vanilla was the strongest in here.
I was about to leave when I spotted some pink. It was hanging behind a lot of his other clothes. It was just a small little bit of cloth that poked out.
What would Luke wear that was pink?
I leaned in, pushing the other hanging clothes out of the way for a look.
It was a pink tank top, very girly, and familiar. Was it mine?
I tried
to recall how Luke would have it.
Then I spotted another shirt, a lightweight yellow hoodie.
There was a skirt, too, blue, older. One I hadn’t worn in a while.
I froze then, seeing more clothes in the back that had once belonged to me. It was a small section of clothes that had been used when I’d gotten them.
Clothes I hadn’t seen since…
My mouth fell open. I couldn’t move at all. I just stared. Disbelief. No. He wouldn’t have.
Danielle, the neighbor up the road, had stolen a bunch of my clothes. The group consensus among the boys was that she’d keep them, but Victor and the others had bought me new items.
She’d thought she’d won, even if none of the clothes fit her and she didn’t even wear them since once getting sent home from school for having too short a skirt.
I’d already forgotten about them.
But thinking back, Luke had been upset. Maybe he hadn’t forgotten.
I’d told him not to sneak into Danielle’s house and take the clothes back. He clearly did at some point, yet he didn’t give them back. When would he have done it?
And why didn’t he tell me?
Was it because I told him I’d never talk to him again if he tried? I was sure back then any confrontation with Danielle, like stealing the clothes back, would result in Danielle confronting my stepmother and causing many more problems than a few missed outfits.
He had asked me to trust him, and I had begged him not to do it.
He’d done it anyway, for whatever reason. When and how was unclear, but he obviously hadn’t been able to let it go like I thought he had.
I backed out of the closet and returned to sit on the bed. Mixed feelings crossed through my mind. Should I be flattered he cared so much to take them back? Upset that he had taken such a risk?
Scared that he’d do it and not tell anyone?
How many other secrets was he keeping?
I blew a warm breath from my lips. I wished he was here. I wanted to believe in Luke, but I needed some reassurance. He was so playful and fun, and yet…he cared so deeply. So much so that he’d put himself at risk just to right Danielle’s wrong against me.