“I know. You used to be the one who would go out and leave her at home alone. Now it’s the other way around.” Jess grinned. “When Katie had you, I got to be the cool one, going out, flirting with girls, calling her in the middle of the night. It was so different for me I may have rubbed it in her face a little bit. Diana’s probably just doing the same thing.”
The question I wanted to ask—Why are you choosing this exact moment to start reminiscing about my dead mother, when we’ve spent the last nine years pretending she never existed?—was replaced by a different one entirely: “Jess, how did Win make me ditch Diana and want to stop dancing?”
Jess looked surprised for a minute, as if she’d forgotten about my spell—or maybe she hadn’t known about Old Ari’s dancing change of heart. “Nobody’s ever made you do anything, Ari.”
That wasn’t an answer at all.
I picked up the phone and called Markos.
Cal wasn’t at the beach, the gym, or any of the shops along the main drag. Dev had already checked the hardware store and Cal’s friends’ houses. Dev joked as he and I went in and out of coffee shops and bars and bank lobbies, but as it got darker and Brian joined us, we stopped joking. I couldn’t tell by looking at them if they were really worried or just pretending.
I worried about Cal—sure. I wasn’t a monster. Not so worried I’d freak out and start handing out flyers at the bus stop, but he was my brother—the nice one. The one mom had been spelling. He’d been sick the last time I’d seen him, days ago, and my working theory was that he’d passed out somewhere.
But I’d have to be an idiot not to notice that they never put out any search parties for me when I’d gone to Diana’s. They let me disappear. It put a halt on my worry, made me pull away even as they were dragging me back in.
Brian led us around town, to the alleys and back streets I’d never thought to explore but that he seemed intimately familiar with. Bums with brown paper bags, street kids, people obviously fucked up on alcohol or drugs or spells. There was a whole secondary seedy town underneath the one I knew. Everyone knew Brian; no one had seen Cal.
I got the call from Ari as we checked the last open hole-in-the-wall bar and started to head for Brian’s squad car at the end of the block. I let it ring until it went to voicemail, and then it started right up again.
I hated Ari. I never wanted to talk to her again. She’d fucked over my best friend.
But my best friend had loved her.
—She can go to hell.
—Don’t be that way.
—Fine, then. Tell me what to do.
—See what she’s calling about, at least.
—But she’s the worst.
—She’s not. You know that.
—I’m still angry, though.
—Fine, be angry. But forgive her.
—What if I can’t?
—You can.
—What if I don’t want to?
—Shut up and do the right thing, dumbass.
“What do you want?” I said.
“Are you at your store?” she asked. Her voice seemed higher-pitched than usual.
“No. Why?”
“Diana’s bike’s here. She’s not answering her phone. The door’s locked, though, so I don’t know how she’d get in. I don’t know why she’d go in, either, if it wasn’t to find you.”
I stopped walking, letting Brian and Dev get into Brian’s car without me. “Diana’s not at home?”
“No, she left to find you, according to her mom.”
I could tell from her tone she thought finding me was the stupidest thing Diana could’ve ever thought to do. And for a second I agreed with her—the deal was, Diana would stay in place, and I would sit and wait for her.
Only I’d left my spot, and so she’d left, too. She didn’t get it. What, did she think me in her yard was her looking after me?
And then Brian honked his horn for me to get in the car and I knew why I’d been coming to her house in a way I hadn’t known before. It wasn’t so much that I thought she’d forgive me, or that I was doing penance. It was my version of Diana GPS: As long as I knew where she was, she wasn’t quite lost to me. Actually it was that I knew where I was: I was at her side.
But now she was lost. And so was I.
I didn’t fall sleep. I lay on my bed with my phone resting on my chest, waiting for Diana to call and let me know she was okay—waiting for her to save herself, if she could. I watched the room darken and the light from passing cars flash on the ceiling for hours, and she still hadn’t called. I wondered if the hook could accidentally kill her in its attempt to keep her near me.
It’s a blunt instrument, I reminded myself. It keeps people close and that’s all it does. Maybe it couldn’t calibrate finely enough to stop pushing them back to me before it was too late.
After midnight I heard Mina’s car in the driveway, and then a couple minutes later she tiptoed into my room and sat on the edge of my bed.
“Did she call?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“No luck on my end, either. Went to every diner and bar within twenty miles.”
“You were out looking for her?”
“Checked a few beaches, too, but no one had seen a teenage girl with ultra-red hair.”
“Why would you—”