I back out the front door, giving them one long look—because I should, because I never do. Turning around, I collide with something hard and immobile. Hands reach out for my shoulders, and I face forward, looking straight into the familiar ice-blue eyes of Agent Lowell. I used to have to look up to see him. I used to find his downward gaze intimidating. I don’t anymore.
Now I’m just pissed that he’s here at all, catering to the whim of a girl looking for attention. He’s still holding me by the shoulders. “Wow, you’ve really grown these last two years.” Then he notices the bag on my shoulder. “Where are you going, Nolan?”
I need to get back to the house, to the radio telescope, and pull the rest of the data. To figure out where the telescope is aiming, and to see if it’s still happening, because now I realize it’s not a mistake. Two incidents make a pattern. Make this an event that is happening.
Lydia still isn’t picking up the phone. I send her a text, asking if she’s still at my place. But the message just sits there on my phone, staring back at me. I wonder if maybe she’s like Elliot, who would get lost in his work, the rest of the world falling away.
I hear Joe talking on his phone through the thin walls between our rooms. He’s just there, on the other side, but it’s still too far to hear clearly. But I can tell from the rise and fall of his voice that he’s agitated, and I’m guessing he’s agitated by me. Or the whole situation.
Well, join the club. I’m on edge, made claustrophobic by the generic walls of this room that isn’t mine, and the half-unpacked boxes taking up floor space, and how every day we talk about these little trivial things to fill the silence (breakfast, what’s on television, the rising temperature)—when there’s a whole universe out there, waiting to be uncovered.
And now I believe there’s something out there. Something reaching back.
* * *
—
By the time Joe comes out of his room, I’ve wracked my brain for excuses. But I don’t need one, because it seems he’s been trying to come up with his own. “I need to head to campus for a couple hours,” he says, running his hand through his hair. He’s not even looking at me.
“Okay,” I say. I hope he’s meeting up with friends. Or a girl. Maybe lunch, or a movie, where he doesn’t have to think about being responsible for a sixteen-year-old who’s supposed to testify at a trial next week.
I don’t even wait for his car to turn the corner down the street before pulling my bike out of the garage.
I’m sort of a mess by the time I make it to my house, but at least I realize that. The heat is still strong, but the sun is hovering lower, turning the sky over the trees a glowing amber.
When I steer my bike into the dirt drive, the dust clings to the sweat on the back of my legs. My backpack clings to my T-shirt, which clings to my skin, and a cloud of dirt hovers in my wake.
I hop off the bike at the side of the house and leave it resting against the porch as I jog toward the shed around back. As I approach, I can see that the door is slightly ajar. I don’t want to spook her, so I say, “It’s me, I’m back,” but no one answers from the darkness behind the door.
“Lydia?” I call as I push the shed door all the way open, the creak cutting through the silence. There’s no one here. The box is still on the ground, half of Elliot’s things strewn around the floor and covering the desk. The computer monitor is on, and the chair is just faintly crooked, like Lydia was here just a moment ago and took off midthought.
I poke my head out the door and call her name into the fields. Her name echoes through the open space, but I don’t hear anyone call back.
Dinnertime, I think. But the way she’s left everything, the way the door is still open, sends a chill up my spine. I shake it off, then insert the flash drive into the computer and pull the rest of the data, all of it, from the last time I was here.
There are open notebooks around the desk, with Elliot’s instructions, or diagrams, or notes on the results. I wonder if maybe she’s left me a note, so I scan the papers on the surface. There’s a pad of paper to my right with nothing on it but a number. I pull it across the desk, closer to the computer, and look again.
12/4
No, I realize, it’s not a number. It’s a date. I can’t tell whether Elliot once wrote it down, or if this is Lydia. If it was written before or after. Only that this is the date that divides the before and after, that divides my life; that splits the universe straight in half. 12/4. December fourth.
As if everything is connected. Before. After. Here. There. As if this was meant for me to find.
* * *
—
I’ve been pacing the short length of the shed with the phone pressed to my ear. She hasn’t answered my calls, or my texts, and she’s gone. My head fills, suddenly, with a thousand different possibilities. Lydia scatters in my mind, existing both nowhere and everywhere. Like I’m scanning the universe for her, and she’s always there, at the edge of my vision, but fades from view each time I look head-on.
The possibilities are endless: taken; disappeared; ran away. I wonder if I should call someone, or whether I’m overreacting. I picture her simultaneously at home, at Sutton’s, in the woods, fading into a void…
I step outside into the late-afternoon sun, ready to make my way to her house, to check on her, when I suddenly see her walking in the distance, on the other side of the fence with Marco.
My immediate relief is replaced by aggravation that now Marco will be involved.
They’re deep in conversation, Lydia moving her hands, gesturing to the house. To me.
I wave, but no one seems to notice at first. Marco climbs over the fence, and Lydia ducks underneath, between rails. They slow when they’re within earshot. “Oh, look,” Lydia says, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “she’s here.” She places her hands on her hips.
Okay, then. “I’ve been calling you.”
She shakes her head, her high ponytail swaying, and strides across the empty space between us, Marco lagging a few paces behind. “What, so you can spook me again? No thanks, Kennedy, I’ll pass. I’m just here for my phone.” She holds out her hand, palm up.
“Your what?”
“My phone.” She wrinkles her nose, and it makes her look younger, more vulnerable. “I left it behind when…” She shakes her head. “Come on, I know it was you.”
“What was me?”
Lydia widens her eyes at Marco, clearly exasperated, as if this is his part, his line, which he’s forgotten.
Marco clears his throat. “Kennedy,” he says, but he’s not even looking at me. Marco’s expression is far-off, like he’d give anything to be somewhere else, not having to pick sides, navigate the complexities between his best friend and his ex-girlfriend. “Look, we know you do that.” He lifts his chin toward the house. “Move things around, try to freak people out.” He cringes when he says it, still not looking at me straight-on.
I narrow my eyes at his face, but he doesn’t notice. I mean, yes, I do those things, but I still have no idea what this has to do with this moment, and Lydia’s phone. I also had no idea they knew about it. I wonder if they’re out here more often than I realize.
“Seriously,” Lydia begins, emboldened by Marco at her side, on her side. “There’s something wrong with you, even bef—”
She cuts herself off.
Before. My body language suddenly mirrors Lydia’s. Hands on hips; self-righteous anger. A sting of bitterness. “Yeah, I remember. I’ve heard you refer to me as Child of the Corn, Lydia. Even before.”
She cringes and shakes her head, like even she realizes she’s gone a step too far. Which she has. Still, there’s something I like about it, how she doesn’t tiptoe around the things she thinks she shouldn’t say. She lowers her voice. “You just appear sometimes, from nowhere. You make no sound. It’s freaky.”
I look to Marco, who stares at the side of Lydia’s face, like he can’t believe she’s saying this.
She shrugs and continues. “Sometimes I would forget you were there. I’d be talking to Sutton and Marco, and then boom, there you were, standing in the corner.”
I can feel my voice rising, the anger shaking loose. “So, basically, I freak you out because you forget I exist?”
“Well, this is a little different. This is…” She moves her hands, searching for the word. “Intentional.”
“Kennedy,” Marco says, like he’s suddenly the voice of reason, “we’re sorry, okay?”
Lydia puts her hands out, as if to calm me, to rationalize. “If this is to get back at me and Sutton and Marco for hanging out on your property, I get the picture. We won’t do it again. Okay? But this is seriously messed up.”
“I have no idea what you guys are talking about. I just got back.”
Marco gazes at me from the corner of his eye. “You weren’t in the house?”
“No.” I fish my visitor badge from the meeting out of my pocket, try to flatten it out so she can see my picture, my name, the time stamp. “See? I was…here.”