Haha whatever.
Everett’s haha was one hundred percent fake. Mikey had been his best friend since second grade, but he’d turned into a stupid gamer since he’d gotten a new computer with a ridiculous graphics card at Christmas. They rarely hung out anywhere except school now, and Everett couldn’t even text him because he didn’t have a phone. He felt like a stupid little punk trying to keep up with the big kids these days. Mostly he just wished Mikey was still a stupid little punk too, and he could get him to come over and build a fort in the field out back like they’d done every other spring.
Listen, he typed, wanna come over tomorrow? He hadn’t told Mikey about the storage lockers because he was afraid his friend might blab during one of his dumb livestreams, but he’d since gotten tired of being wise about it. It was way too cool to keep quiet.
Nah man I can’t.
Everett slumped, sighing so loudly he missed the sound of his mom walking into the apartment. By the time he’d closed the screen, she was on him.
“What was that?” she demanded.
“Nothing.”
“If it was nothing, you wouldn’t have closed it.”
“It’s just Discord.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be doing your homework?”
“I already finished it.” He gestured at the perfectly placed sheet of vocabulary.
“Oh yeah? What if I quiz you?”
“Go ahead.” They stared at each other for a moment until she finally scrubbed a hand over her forehead. “Fine. What’s this Discourse thing?”
“Discord. It’s like online texting. It’s no big deal.”
“Come on, Everett. Online texting? That doesn’t seem safe. You could be talking to anyone. How would you even know if they were dangerous?”
“Oh my God, Mom,” he snapped.
“Seriously. Let me see it.”
“Jesus,” he snarled. “If you really think it’s not safe, you should let me get a phone so I can text my friends like a normal person.”
“Everett—”
“It’s bad enough we live twenty miles from civilization and all the kids think I’m homeless and live in a storage unit! You don’t want me to talk to anyone now? That’s just great.”
As Everett’s words faded he realized he’d accidentally yelled all that. He’d never yelled at his mom before.
An ache began to rise up his throat as her silence sang in his ears. Or maybe the pain was the effect of her glaring daggers at him. Whatever it was, the longer he sat there, the thicker the clog in his throat.
Holding his breath, he waited for her to say something, say anything to break the horrible silence. He couldn’t even hear her breathing.
When he couldn’t take it anymore, he sprang to his feet and walked past her to the office. “Forget it! I’m going for a ride.”
“Everett, don’t walk out. Let’s talk.”
Did she sound like she was crying? Oh God. He’d expected yelling after his outburst, or maybe a lecture, but crying? He bolted through the office and out the door.
“Shit,” he spat as he raced toward his bike. As soon as he reached it, he hopped on and pedaled for the open pedestrian gate. She couldn’t get more mad after that, could she? He may as well get away for a little while. She was always begging him to get out and ride more anyway.
He pedaled hard down the road, but his roiling emotions wore off quickly. Maybe he’d overreacted. Five minutes later he just wanted to go back home.
When a loaded pickup passed him and turned into the storage facility, Everett circled back hopefully, imagining she’d be too busy to notice him.
Sure enough, the pickup was stopped in one of the front spaces. His mom would be occupied with a customer for a while. Perfect.
Everett biked back through the pedestrian gate. His mom might see him, but she couldn’t follow him when she had a customer. He parked his bike against an RV and tugged a flashlight from a small pouch at the back of the seat; then he sprinted toward the locker in question, tugging the sticky note from his pocket before he even got there. He’d checked the camera’s feed yesterday while his mom was working. Only the very edge of this door was visible, and only if you looked closely.
The lock opened with a click, and Everett raised the door a few feet and ducked inside before closing it behind him. His pulse sprang into panic in the second before he fumbled the flashlight switch on, and it wasn’t completely calmed when the circle of light appeared. Flashlights were pretty creepy in his opinion, creating way too many shadows that shifted and writhed with any movement. It was a hell of a lot better than the dark, but he really, really wished he could leave the door open.
He’d had bad nightmares as a kid, and he still sometimes “forgot” to turn off the light after a late-night trip to the bathroom. He liked the comforting glow sneaking under his door.
As he swung the beam of light over the unit, he frowned a little. It looked like most of the others he’d seen. Lots of cardboard boxes stacked up like little condos for spiders and silverfish. A few pieces of old furniture. Some plastic storage bins. It surprised him how many people were willing to spend money on keeping things like these instead of throwing them out.
He walked a little deeper into a narrow pathway between boxes, sliding his light over every surface. When he caught sight of a woman staring at him, he yelped and jerked back, the beam shaking, shifting her face from smile to sneer to mad-eyed grin.
“Aah!” he cried out as he grabbed the flashlight with both hands to hold it steady. It still shook, but he could see that the woman stared flatly from a photograph; it wasn’t a ghost or even a creepy mannequin.
“Oh, thank God,” he whispered, then tried to catch his breath and calm himself down before his heart burst right out of his chest like the Alien monster.
When something tickled his neck, he jumped and slapped at it, anticipating a dangling spider, but finding only sweat. The light shifted, and there was another woman. A girl, actually, smiling weakly against the sickly blue background of a school portrait. There was a third picture too. And a fourth. He couldn’t see the rest of the board they seemed attached to.
He cleared his sticky throat, took a deep breath, and picked his way through the forest of boxes toward the wall. It wasn’t only photos. It looked like a big old-fashioned bulletin board, filled with pictures, notes, and newspaper clippings.
Everett bent closer, squinting to read the small print of one article.
An area woman reported her sister missing after she failed to show up for her scheduled shift at a chicken-processing plant for the second week in a row. Bridget Baumgarter says that her sister, Yolanda Carpenter, told her she was going to catch a ride to visit a friend in Salina. The friend has since reported that she never arrived. Yolanda Carpenter, age 19, was last seen leaving the Baumgarter home on October 2, 1999, at 3:00 p.m. She was wearing jeans, a red T-shirt, and a jean jacket. She is 5’5”, about 120 pounds, and has long blond hair. If anyone has any information, please contact Lieutenant Nord at the Herriman Police Department.
He scanned another thumbtacked article and glanced at a third before stepping back to shine his flashlight in a wider circle.
There were five photographs of five different girls, and all of them were missing.
CHAPTER 3
She’d forgotten to make the cookies. Their first teenage-level fight complete with yelling and storming off, and all Lily could think was it wouldn’t have happened if she’d made cookies.