We exchange our good-byes and I head upstairs to my room. After ten minutes pulling out a few outfits, I can’t resist any longer.
I have to at least tell him I’m leaving.
Adam answers on the third ring, and I can hear music in the background. “Are you finally not grounded?”
“Sadly, I think that sentence has a couple more years on it,” I say. “But I do have some good news.”
“What’s that?”
“Maggie and I sort of mended the fences or whatever.”
“Hell of a feat when you can’t even leave the house,” he says. I can hear the smile in his voice.
“Well, Mom is fine with Maggie coming by.”
I wince as the silence on the other end of the line stretches. Damn it. That came out completely wrong.
“I’ll take it your mom disapproves of the company you were keeping as much as the lie.”
I sigh, sinking onto the foot of my bed beside a pile of tank tops. “She’s upset that I lied, but yeah, she’s concerned about you too.”
“But not about Blake,” he guesses, his laugh so low and bitter I feel my stomach clench at the sound. “That’s rich.”
“Look, she doesn’t know you, okay?”
“But she wasn’t exactly ready to give me the benefit of the doubt, was she?”
“It’s not—” I cut myself off and press my free hand to my forehead. “My mom works at the hospital. She was on shift the night you hurt your arm.”
Silence greets me on the other end of the line. It stretches out long enough for me to wonder if the call dropped or if maybe he’s not planning on responding. And then he does.
“So I suppose she gave you the whole story then.”
“She told me what she knows of it. Or what she thinks she knows. She’s just worried, Adam. All moms worry.”
He laughs, and it’s so caustic, I’m surprised my ear doesn’t sting. “No, Chloe, not all moms worry. So now you’re worried too, right?”
“I’m not.”
“Then why is this bothering you, because it obviously is?”
“Look, just because I pulled a damn fire alarm and snuck around a construction site doesn’t mean I’m cool with felony, okay?”
A beat passes, and I imagine my words spraying at him like bullets.
When he speaks, he’s quieter. “You think I stole drugs. That I was dealing maybe.”
“You broke into a pharmacy. Am I supposed to think you did it for the free measuring spoons?”
“Why I did it doesn’t really matter to you, does it, Chloe?” he says, and I hear him scoff.
The thing is, it does matter, and I want to tell him, but I’m somehow frozen. All I can think of is that newspaper article and sitting my parents down to explain why dating a thief is a smart choice. And I can’t. I just can’t imagine it.
Not any more than I can imagine Adam breaking into a pharmacy.
“I think your silence is a pretty good answer,” he says.
The line goes dead while my mouth is still opening to speak.
My throat is hot and swollen, and my eyes itch like crazy. I swipe at the tears that find their way out with the heel of my palm and tell myself that I will figure this out. I will calm down and call him back and everything will be fine.
Except that deep down inside, there’s a scared part of me that doesn’t think it will.
Chapter Twenty-one
The airport distracts me from the Adam angst. I’ve always enjoyed the airport on holidays. Yes, the lines are long and cancellations can cause riots, but if things run smoothly, it’s the happiest place on earth.
I cross my legs to make room for a family of four moving past me. They trail by with an endless stream of chatter and video games and brightly colored kid luggage.
“I remember when you two were that little,” Mrs. Campbell says wistfully.
On my right, Maggie props her chin in her hand and gazes at them. “I wonder where they’re going.”
“Home, I guess,” I say.
In a way, that’s where I’m headed too. I glance at Maggie, and we exchange a tentative smile before I take a sip of the Starbucks she bought me. At the boarding call, we stand up and pull up our luggage, and it’s all as simple as it’s ever been between us. It’s crazy ironic that I’m flying two thousand miles, hoping to God to end up right back where I started.
Maggie and I buckle into two seats by the window. Mrs. Campbell ends up across the aisle from us, headphones in and a crossword puzzle out before we’ve even taxied down the runway.
“So how much of this do you have planned out?” I ask Maggie as Cleveland shrinks into a quilt of freeways and lights outside my window.
She snorts indelicately and pulls out a notebook. There are two pages filled with inconspicuous academic stuff. Notes on some science theory or whatever. She flips right past those, opening the book to another section. I see a listing of train departure times and directions to an unfamiliar address in San Diego.
“Yeah, what’s up with that? Everyone else said it was San Francisco.”
“Yeah, well, the p-post office called it an address forwarding error.” Maggie makes little air quotes around address forwarding error like she doesn’t believe that for a second.
“Wait a minute, are you saying they didn’t even admit to the right city?”
Realizing my volume, I glance over at Mrs. Campbell, who’s dozing off, her pen slack in her hand. I drop my voice to a whisper anyway. “Why would they lie about that?”
“Technically, they d-didn’t,” she says. “The Millers were really vague about the whole thing, remember?”
I give her a pointed look, and Mags waves, looking contrite. “Right. Sorry. They said they were moving t-to California for some great business opportunity and didn’t have a permanent address, but everyone knew it was about Julien. She’d b-been a mess all summer. They never let her out of their sight.”
I feel my eyes growing wide. “So other people are suspicious too.”
“Hell, no. Ridgeview’s t-too small-town. They just thought the p-perfect little Miller girl had cracked.” She shrugs. “It happens. It was still freaky though.”
“Yeah?”
Maggie puts up her hands. “It’s the Millers. Moving across the entire damn country!”
“Thank you!” I say, glad someone has seen the pertinence of this fact. I chew the inside of my lip, still trying to work it out. “And it’s even weirder that they don’t let Julien keep in touch. It’s like they cut her off completely. Do you think her parents did something illegal?”
Mags gives me a disbelieving look. “Mrs. Miller was a choir director. Literally.”
“Okay, fine, but what about her dad? My parents never could stand the guy. I’ve heard my dad talking about him.”
“Well, if they up and left for no reason, maybe, b-but they had a reason. A bat-shit crazy d-daughter they wanted to hide.”
I swallow hard, shocked at the idea of it, but a little afraid to ask whether or not she’s joking. Because if all of this happened to Julien, it might still happen to me.
The flight attendant arrives offering drinks, saving me from my total lack of response. I sip my ginger ale and pretend to be mesmerized by the scenery outside my window.
Mom and Dad took me to New York once, and I remember flying over the city with my nose pressed to the glass. My eyes had to be the size of dinner plates. I couldn’t even conceive of a city so immense, of so many buildings clustered around the brilliant green rectangle of Central Park.
Landing in Los Angeles is totally not like that. It’s kind of like landing in Cleveland. Except I spot the Hollywood sign just before I hear the landing gear grinding down.
Maggie’s mom must be even better in the kitchen than I think because we’re whisked to the hotel by a chauffeured car. Granted, it’s not a limo, but still. A sleek black town car with leather seats and television screens in the backs of the seats is a far cry from my decrepit Toyota.
Everything is green and alive in California, as if November doesn’t even exist here. After spending every winter of my life in northern Ohio, I feel like I’m on another planet.
“Wow,” I say, gazing out at the seemingly endless stream of palm trees and slick cars. “It really is kind of like the movies.”