“Did you send me a letter or something?” I asked, just to be sure.
“No, sweetie.” She tilted her head to the side. “If you paid for the visit, there would be no invoice mailed or anything. Unless you want one. Is that why you’re here?”
I shook my head. “I have to go.” I pushed the chair back hard, the wooden legs screeching on the floor. “This was a mistake.”
“Well, you come back if you ever do want a tarot reading, okay?” she called after me as I raced through the curtain.
The guy at the counter said nothing to me as I pulled the door open, clanging the stupid brass bells against the wall. I ran down the now-icy sidewalks, skidding to the bus stop, where I waited under the cold bluish light for my bus to come. My cheeks burned red, not from the cold but from embarrassment. How stupid I had been! Of course it wasn’t Azul. And suddenly, I felt sick, my school lunch rising up my throat. I threw up into the black-lined garbage pail next to the bus stop, knowing just one thing: If Azul hadn’t sent those emails, someone else had. Someone who knew. Someone who saw.
Now I knew who that person was. Two years ago, when the article came out, Azul had obviously picked it up. Took my parents for suckers, and her plan worked. But Paula had been mentioned in the article too. A photo of her and Max together, smiling. And the questions started: Why was Sarah’s best friend dating her boyfriend? Did she know something—did they both know something? The speculation. All eyes were on Paula. I remembered the fallout afterward. How colleges rejected her, how her friends even looked at her differently. Her parents separated, finally divorced. Instead of making her life better, Sarah’s disappearance had made things worse, much worse. Max was the only one she could go to. And me. Then Sarah came back, and everything was about her, even Max. The fragile life Paula had built was crumbling again. She wanted someone to blame. But now she had gone further than vague emails; she had gone to the police.
“Nico?” Sarah asked again, yanking me from the dark memories, back into the situation we were facing. “Why do you think it’s Paula?”
“Because, she . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t tell her. “Because she knows,” I burst out. I leaned into Sarah and cried on her shoulder while she gently patted my back, asking for no more details.
She pulled back from me and put her hands on my face, looking me straight in the eye. “Nico, we’re going to fix this. Don’t worry. We’re a team, right? Me and you,” she said, pulling me in and wrapping her arms around me. “We’re a team.”
SARAH
IT WAS JUST A game. That’s what Ma said, like dress-up. Sometimes we pretend to be other people. The first time we played was when the Very Special Visitor came to the house. I answered her questions the way Ma said to, even if it wasn’t totally the truth. But it wasn’t lying because I was playing, pretending. Pretending to be someone else, a little girl who was happy, who hadn’t been burned and broken. And it worked.
Later, it became more complicated. We had to move when I was in second grade because Ma had written some checks that the landlord tried to take to the bank too soon. “I told him to wait until Friday—now look what happened!” she screamed as she tossed our clothes into garbage bags that would have to work as luggage and hauled them out to her van.
When we went to the new place, an apartment with only one bedroom, Ma told me how to act, how to be, what to say. I was her sister’s kid, she said. Her sister was dying of cancer, we were just collecting money to help take care of her. People gave and gave, sympathetic looks and dollar bills. “No checks,” Ma said. “Cash.”
Of course, Ma didn’t even have a sister, but nobody had to know that. It was the Stranger Game. We were strangers, and could be anyone we wanted—anyone you wanted us to be.
“You’re awfully good at this.” Ma eyed me as we sat in the front of the van, counting the money in the coffee can she had given me to hold on the street corner. There was a Polaroid of a sick-looking woman taped to the front, and a note that said Please Help My Mommy. I was eight years old, and flipped through the bills, doing the math in my head. I handed the stack to Ma, announcing, “That’s seventy-eight dollars, or about forty dollars an hour.”
Ma took the wrinkled bills and straightened them on her lap, shaking her head. “You’re almost too good at this, Libby.”
Later, when I was in eighth grade, my math teacher, Ms. Lay, pulled me aside after class one day. She told me I had a special skill—an ability to do math problems, even complicated ones, in my head without scratch paper. “How long have you been able to do this?” she asked.