“Undergrad,” Riley clarified.
Shelby waggled her eyebrows as she yanked her tablet from her purse. “Your dad is borderline hot now, Ry. I bet he was smokin’ in college.”
“That’s disgusting on so many levels, Shelbs.”
Shelby ignored her, swiping until the Hudson University Alumni Association home page popped up.
“So, JD, if you already got into Berkeley, what are you doing on this trip?” Riley asked.
JD kicked his boots up on the empty bus seat next to him and knotted his hands behind his head. “Let’s just say this bus will get me where I need to go.”
Riley snaked her arms in front of her chest. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Shelby broke away from her tablet. “He’s probably planning a bank heist. Hey! Maybe he can help you with your new life of crime!”
JD’s eyebrows went up, disappearing into a shock of his dark hair. “Sweet little Riley Spencer is engulfed in a life of crime? What an interesting development.”
“It’s nothing,” Riley said, glaring at Shelby.
Shelby went back to her tablet, wrinkling her nose and frowning. “Did your dad take your mother’s last name by any chance?”
“Of course not. So, JD—”
Shelby nudged her. “I’m serious, Ry.”
Riley straightened. “What are you talking about?”
Shelby sucked in a deep breath and turned the tablet to face Riley. “Because according to the alumni association, the student registry, and the yearbook, Glen Spencer never existed at Hudson.”
“You probably spelled his name wrong. Or got the dates wrong. His class probably isn’t even online anyway.”
“It goes all the way back to class of 1980.”
Riley took the tablet and began a new search. “Why would my dad lie about being an undergrad at a stupid university?”
“Right,” JD laughed from his seat. “If I was going to lie about school, I’d tell everyone I went to Harvard or Oxford.”
Shelby cocked an eyebrow. “Or Berkeley?”
“What’s your problem, Shelby?”
Riley heard JD snapping and Shelby quipping back, but she couldn’t concentrate on the words. Her fingers were moving, constantly typing and retyping her father’s name until the string of letters looked like gobbledygook before her eyes. But the search result was always the same: Your search for Glen Morgan Spencer yielded 0 results.
She handed Shelby the tablet, unease settling in her gut. Shelby’s eyes were soft, questioning, and Riley shrugged, feeling the need to explain.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Probably just a mix-up at the registrar’s office or something.”
“Yeah, totally.” Shelby nodded emphatically and slid the tablet into her bag, popping in her ear buds instead.
Riley glanced around the dimly lit bus as her classmates’ voices started to fade. Kids started to settle in, the rhythmic whir of the engine lulling most to sleep, but Riley’s eyes were wide open, her thoughts buzzing like hornets in her mind.
My dad wasn’t at Hudson?
“Hey,” JD said, pulling Riley out of her thoughts. “So you’re planning on going to Hudson, then?”
Riley paused, biting the inside of her cheek. “Where is the bus taking you?”
“Um, OK.” JD leaned forward and dropped his voice. “I’m going to take the train to Rosemont.” He flipped his iPad around so the screen faced Riley. “Going to see my favorite band.”
“Oh my God! That’s right! You love Death to Sea Monkeys too! How far is Rosemont?”
“It’s a forty-minute train ride from Boone.”
Out of nowhere, a thought popped into Riley’s head. Rosemont was a forty-minute ride from Boone. Boone was a two-hour ride to the California-Oregon border.
And Granite Cay, Jane Elizabeth O’Leary’s birth town, was just across that border.
Suddenly, Riley’s palms itched. The birth certificate burned in her bag where she—on a whim—had stashed it.
That morning, Riley piled her bag with vintage tees and her usual cache of jeans, a Mom-approved stash of in-case-of-hospital clean underwear and bras, and, for some reason, the birth certificate. She had sat at her desk and rubbed her finger over the onionskin sheet, over the names typed in more than a decade ago. Who was baby Jane Elizabeth and where was she now? The question pulled at her. She had traced her tiny footprints and handprints and felt a weird sense of longing, of connection to the baby—and the baby’s parents—who had come into her world, floating around like balloons without strings.