Things We Didn't Say

Chapter 8

Jewel



Bye, Mrs. Morton,” I say, hopping out of her great big car with my backpack. I can’t wait to tell Dad about school today. We studied alligators, which are as old as dinosaurs. I didn’t even know that. And I know a lot about dinosaurs.

“Bye, Jewel,” Mrs. Morton says. “Have a nice night.”

Something’s weird, though. I can tell right away. Something about the house. In this book I read there’s a whole part about trusting your gut, and right now my gut says, “Uh-oh.”

My mom is here? She gives me a hard hug, and her belt buckle presses into my chest. After she lets go I see Angel behind her, who’s supposed to be at play practice, and Dad’s home early, too.

“Dad? What’s going on?”

“Come here, honey, there’s something I have to tell you. Let’s talk upstairs.”

Mom turns to Dad. “What’s wrong with talking right here? With both her parents?”

My stomach is pinching me. That’s how it feels when something is going wrong. I wonder where Casey is.

“What, Dad?” My dad sits me down on the sofa, and my mom sits on the other side. “Did my other grandma die?”

“No, J.,” says my mom. “Dylan’s missing.”

“What?”

My dad looks over the top of my head, giving my mom his mean-face look. “Try not to worry, Jewel. He skipped school today and didn’t take his phone, that’s all. We’re having trouble tracking him down.”

“That’s the same as missing, Dad. I’m not an ignoramus.”

I just learned that word. I like the sound of it.

“But there’s missing and then there’s missing, like being on the news and with the police looking for him. He’s not missing.”

“Yet,” says my mom.

I look up at her and her arms are folded, but her whole body is jiggling, like she’s on one of those massage chairs in the mall. Uh-oh. This is one of the warning signs, like a volcano. I saw on PBS one time a special about volcanoes, and there was this machine—I forgot the name, but it was something-graph and it detected tremors before a blow. I don’t need a something-graph because I can see it right in front of me.

“Where’s Casey?” I ask Dad.

My mom makes a little disgusted snorty noise, and my stomach pinches harder. Angel rolls her eyes. She’s slouched in a chair, texting on her phone.

Dad answers, “Casey had to run out for some milk. She’ll be back soon.”

I shrug, to show I don’t really care.

My mom pulls me close to her, and the stomach pinching relaxes a little because her breath doesn’t smell like drunk.

“I want to go lay down a minute,” I tell them. I stand up, and my mom’s hands cling to me for a bit, like when you walk through a spiderweb and all those little threads hang on.

I go upstairs to my room and curl up on my bed, still wearing my shoes.

For a while I liked the funny smell of Mom’s breath—though sometimes she chewed a lot of mints, which covered it up—because my mom was calmer when I smelled it. She wasn’t so likely to yell. I didn’t know what it was.

Then there was that day at school. My stomach started pinching me because I couldn’t remember to write my numbers not-backward. It was only kindergarten, and I wasn’t good at school yet. I guess I made my tummy sound worse than it really was and got sent to the school nurse. So they called my mom to come get me.

I couldn’t smell her breath, but I could tell she was feeling pretty good. She joked with the school secretary. I do remember she wasn’t wearing a coat for some reason, even though it was winter. And she forgot to wait for me to buckle my seat belt, because I was still fiddling around with it when the car went spinning all crazy.

The memory of it still makes me dizzy.

I hear the front door downstairs open and close and I sit up in my bed, listening for Dylan. Must be Casey, though, because everyone would be real happy if Dylan was down there. I can only hear some quiet talking.

I turn over to face the other wall, where my “vision board” is, which I read about in a book that the librarian said had too many big words for me, but she’s new and doesn’t know that I’m a very good reader. Everyone says so. I have a certificate and everything.

When the car stopped spinning that day I ended up on the floor of the backseat, and I think something bopped my head because I touched my head and I was bleeding. This scared me, but what scared me worse was that Mom was leaning back on the seat like dead people do on the TV shows she likes to watch. The air bag was all empty in front of her like a pillowcase. People were already running up, though, and pretty soon there were sirens and Mom was sitting up in the front seat and talking and holding me in her lap. She called my grandpa because my dad didn’t answer his phone.

Then the police officer and my mom had an argument. Then she blew into a little machine and by then Grandpa Turner was there and he’s a doctor so he looked at my head and told me it wasn’t deep and I’d be fine, but I didn’t care about that.

On my bed, I wrap my arms around my stomach and curl up tighter. I kinda wish I’d been hurt bad in the crash so that I’d been at the hospital and not there to see the next part. It’s the part I keep thinking of when I can’t sleep.

I saw the policeman put handcuffs on my mom, and put her in the back of the police car. She was cussing him. She didn’t even look back at me. My grandpa said the police just had to talk to my mom, but I’ve watched enough shows to know that she got arrested. I shouted “Mommy!” but she didn’t hear me, and my grandpa told me it would be okay and not to worry.

But every time grown-ups say that, there’s always reason to worry. Always.

My grandpa took me back to his house, where Grandma made me cookies and let me watch all the SpongeBob I wanted until Daddy got there, and he looked like a zombie, he was so greeny-white.

And there were lots of grown-ups whispering. And I learned what “drunk” meant.

And then Mommy moved out, and we don’t see her very much.

I used to wish really hard to rewind time back to that kindergarten day. And in the movie that plays in my head, this time I just write my numbers backward, and maybe the teacher frowns at me but my mom is still home and everyone’s together.

But I know that can’t really happen. So instead I put our family picture on the vision board and maybe if I hope really hard, “put it out to the universe” like the book says, then my mom will come home.

She didn’t smell like drunk today, so that’s good. That’s really good.

But if Dylan doesn’t come home, it doesn’t count.

I stretch out my hand and touch his face in the picture, and think of him giving me a horsey ride, so I go ahead and cry on my pillow.


Someone’s shaking my arm.

I open my eyes, and it’s dark in my room and it feels like night. But it can’t be. I’m not in pajamas. My dad is there, and the hallway light is on. He’s still wearing his work clothes. I must have been napping.

“Hey, babe. Come down and get something to eat.”

“Where’s Dylan?” I stretch. My neck is all kinked up because I slept weird. “And what time is it?”

“It’s six o’clock. He’s not home yet.”

“Why isn’t he home?”

“I don’t know, baby. Did he . . . Did he say anything to you? About school, or anything?”

I shake my head. I know Dylan loves me and stuff because he’s my brother, but it’s not like he tells me secrets. He’s way older than me.

I put my hand on Dad’s arm before he gets off the bed. “Are you worried about him?”

He stops, and he’s got his thinking face on for when he’s trying to think how to answer me. I hate that. But then he drops that face and he sighs. “Yeah,” he says, and he pulls me in for a hug. “Yeah. I am.”

He stands up and takes my hand and I let him hold it even though I’m a big girl and I don’t need his hand to get down the steps. “We got pizza,” he says. “No one wanted to cook.”

“Do you have any leads?”

He stops on the steps and gives me this funny half-smile. “Leads? Where did you pick that up? You’re not reading murder mysteries, are you?”

“Not yet. I saw it on CSI.”

“CSI? Your mother lets you watch—”

He interrupts himself and bites his lip, looking away, and my stomach pinches up because I did it again, tattled on Mom, but I didn’t mean to. He starts back down the steps. “Anyway. No, not yet.”

My mom rushes up to hug me when I get downstairs. She tries to smooth down my hair. “Baby, are you okay? Are you feeling sick?”

I shake my head. I’ve learned my lesson about admitting to stomachaches.

“Hi, kiddo,” says Casey.

I almost didn’t see her because she’s sitting on a high barstool in the corner of the kitchen, balancing a paper plate on her knees. She looks like she could be as young as Angel, especially with her hair in a ponytail. And I’m not sure exactly why, but that really makes my mom mad, and Angel, too.

Well, I do know why it bugs Angel. She’s told me before that Casey tries to be her friend and she doesn’t want to be Casey’s friend. That just because she wears high-top Converse doesn’t make her “cool,” and it’s embarrassing to think that Casey might be our stepmom when she looks like a kid instead of like the other moms. One time at the mall a lady thought Casey was our big sister, and I thought Angel was going to barf.

I sneak Casey a little smile, then look quick at my mom, who was talking to my dad and didn’t see it.

The adults are talking again, so I pretend to be invisible so maybe they’ll forget I’m here and stop changing what they say around me.

My dad is talking about how he must have some other friends they don’t know about, someone who knows what’s going on, maybe he’s sneaking around with a bad crowd or something, since none of his band friends know anything, and since his best friend Jacob isn’t his friend anymore. That’s news to me, and it’s a bummer. I liked Jacob.

They all look at Angel, and she goes, What? Stop looking at me, I told you I don’t know anything about it. Angel is ripping apart the pizza with her fingers, pretending to eat it. She’ll throw it away, later, when none of the adults are looking.

My mom starts talking to my dad about why he doesn’t know all his friends and we need to break into his Facebook account and they turn to Casey and she just looks down at her pizza and starts picking at it.

“I made him give me the password when he started Facebook,” Dad says, “just so I’d know, but that was a long time ago and he changed it.”

“Girl Genius can figure it out, though. Right?” says Mom, pointing at Casey, her hand making like a gun, like she’s playing cops and robbers.

They don’t allow that at my school, not even pretend-finger guns.

“I can try,” Casey says, still picking at the pizza. “But it’s not like the movies where anyone who knows a little code can punch buttons and break into anything. It would be just me, guessing the password. Anyway, didn’t you make him take you as a Facebook friend? Look at his profile. You might not have to break into anything.”

My dad looks down at his feet. “I tried that already, at work. I think he put me on restricted view of his profile because there’s pretty much nothing on it. Angel, what about you?”

She tosses her hair behind her shoulder. “No. Not since he wrote on this guy’s wall and told him he was being a jerk to me. I defriended him.”

My dad stands up straight, his eyes wide all of a sudden. “Wait! Casey, you set up a network backup. It automatically backs up our computers over the network, right? Even e-mail.”

All the grown-ups and Angel start looking at each other, and they all stare at Casey.

“Well, that’s true—”

“Why didn’t you say something?” my dad shouts, slapping his hand so hard on the table it rattles his water glass. Everyone jumps at this, and Casey gasps out loud. “It’s dark out, and he’s been missing for almost twelve hours! Jesus, Casey!”

Her hands fly up to her face. “I just . . . I didn’t think of it right away . . .”

“Yeah, right,” my mom whispers loudly. I can tell by the look on Casey’s face that she heard.

My dad goes over to Casey immediately, saying, “I didn’t mean to shout . . . I just . . . I’m getting desperate, here.” He tries to reach out to her shoulder, tries to pull her in for a hug, but she’s all rigid, like a flagpole.

Then Casey nods, and whispers something like “fine” or “okay” but I can’t tell. She walks around the table and away from Dad, out of the room, down the hall to the basement steps, where all her computer stuff is.

I could see the look on her face when she went by. I bet Casey has a stomachache, too.