If this was just the beginning of the trip, he didn’t want to think about what the rest of it would entail. Conner wanted to crawl out of his skin but Bree didn’t seem at all affected by their conversation. She just kept turning the pages of her murder-mystery novel, completely immersed in every word.
An hour or so into the flight Conner got up to use the restroom. When he exited the shoebox-size stall he was accosted by Mindy, Cindy, Lindy, and Wendy. They stood right in front of him, blocking his way back to his seat.
“Can I help you?” Conner asked.
“We need to talk to you,” Mindy said. They all scowled at him with the same serious eyes. They looked like a pack of hungry cats.
“Here?” Conner asked. “At the bathroom on a moving plane?”
The girls nodded. “We figured it was the best place to talk to you privately,” Cindy said. “And so you couldn’t get away.”
Conner looked for help but the closest flight attendant was serving drinks on the other side of the cabin.
“Have you been planning this ambush?” Conner asked.
Wendy nodded.
“Since the end of the last school year,” Lindy said.
“Okay…,” Conner said. “What’s up?”
All the girls looked to one another, excited to finally interrogate him.
“How’s Alex doing, Conner?” Lindy said. She crossed her arms. Her left eyebrow was raised so high it almost touched the ceiling.
“She’s fine,” Conner said. “She’s going to school and living with my grandma in Vermont. Why do you ask?”
Mindy threw her hands into the air. “Vermont! Vermont, he says!” she declared as if Conner had said his sister was living on Mars. “Do you have any proof of this? A photo or a postcard with Alex’s handwriting, perhaps?”
“You think I’m lying to you?” Conner asked. He was beginning to worry they might be on to something. How much did they already know?
Cindy stepped closer to him and looked directly into his eyes. “We practically live in the library, and last year we saw some things, some questionable things,” she said.
“Like what?” Conner asked.
“Well, for starters, Alex used to come into the library every day at lunch,” Mindy said. “And every day she would go to the back and take one book off the shelf.”
“She would hug it and whisper sweet nothings into its spine!” Lindy continued.
“Why would she do that, Conner? Your sister was the smartest girl in the school. It was so out of character for her to be talking to inanimate objects, don’t you think?” Cindy said.
Wendy squinted and nodded.
“So you’re ambushing me on a plane because my sister hugged a book?” Conner asked, trying to make them seem crazy.
“We think she was talking to someone!” Mindy said. “She used to say things like ‘Please take me away’ and ‘I want to go back!’ ”
“And then the next thing we know, Alex is gone,” Lindy said.
“Left for Vermont, or so you say,” Cindy said, and swiveled her head.
Conner tried to make his face as expressionless as possible. He didn’t want to give them any hint that their suspicions were remotely valid. “You guys are insane,” he said. “What are you implying? Do you think Alex ran away?”
Mindy clenched both her fists in frustration. “I don’t know if she ran away, is working for the government, was abducted by aliens, or something else,” she said intensely. “All I know is, something isn’t right and I know you know the truth! And even if you don’t tell us what’s going on, we’re gonna find out!”
“Because that’s what the Book Huggers do,” Lindy said. “We read between the lies and get to the bottom of things.”
Wendy nodded again and punched the palm of her hand in a threatening manner.
“The Book Huggers?” Conner asked.
“That’s what we’ve renamed the Reading Club,” Cindy said. “In honor of Alex… wherever she is.”
However close they were to discovering the truth, they were still the most obnoxious people Conner had ever had to deal with and that kept him from spilling any of his family’s secrets.
“I think you guys read too much,” he said. He pushed his way through them and went back to his seat. He could feel their cold glares on his back as he went.
When Conner sat down he noticed Bree wasn’t staring as attentively at her book as before and she had pulled an earbud out of her ear. Had she been listening to the Book Huggers assault him?
“So your sister lives in Vermont now?” Bree asked.
“Yes, with my grandma,” Conner said. Bree’s questions were much more difficult to dodge. He felt himself wanting to tell her the truth about his sister—and anything else she may have wanted to know.
“Vermont’s pretty far,” she said.
“It is,” Conner said. “But we talk on the phone a lot.”
“So that’s where you went ballooning, then, I take it?” she questioned him further, starting her own interrogation.
“Um… yeah,” Conner asked. “Why?”
“Just curious,” Bree said blankly. “So if you’ve never flown before, how did you get all the way up to Vermont?”
He knew she could see the uncertainty in his face. “Train?” Conner peeped.
A coy smile spread across her face. “Interesting…,” Bree said. “I see why they’d be suspicious.”
She wasn’t looking at him like a boy she thought had a crush on her anymore, but rather the way she looked at her novels: He was the mystery she was invested in now.
Bree placed the earbud back into her ear and returned to her book, occasionally side-eyeing him over the course of the flight. Conner made himself as comfortable as possible in his tiny seat. His first flight would also undoubtedly be the longest flight of his life.