I wanted to work with Dustin. Aside from being the smartest person I knew, we were already friends, and we could work without the initial awkwardness of getting to know each other.
Surprisingly, Dustin spoke up. “Don’t you think that’s unfair? I mean, no offense to those at the bottom, but why should I suffer because they don’t study?”
Ms. Fuentes clapped her hands twice. The crack cut through the noise and silenced us. “This isn’t up for debate, Mr. Smeltzer.”
While Ms. Fuentes opened her notebook, the students around me quietly grumbled and shook their heads. No one seemed thrilled with Fuentes’s idea; not even those at the bottom of the grade curve who clearly had the most to gain.
“In addition to working together on your final projects, these will also be your new lab partner assignments for the remainder of the year.” Fuentes flashed a warning look, daring us to complain. No one did. Not out loud anyway.
“Dustin Smeltzer,” Fuentes said. “You’re working with Jake Ortiz.” It surprised no one that Dustin held the highest test average and Jake the lowest.
“That’s so wrong,” Dustin said. “Jake’s not even here. He’s never here.”
Ms. Fuentes shrugged. “Then you’d better make certain he starts attending class regularly.” She smiled before moving on. “Tameka Lourdes, your partner is Martin Burlingame. Ella Boggs, you’re with Caitlin Morrow. Oswald Pinkerton, your partner is Calvin Frye.”
“Ouch,” Dustin whispered. “Sorry about your luck, Pinks.” He clapped me on the back.
Calvin Frye? Really? I glanced over my shoulder at the lab table in the farthest corner where Calvin Frye slept on his desk with his hoodie pulled over his head. Last year he’d captained the school wrestling team and been Coach Reevey’s state-level superstar. He’d also skipped eighth grade, so he was a year younger than the rest of us, had started taking college classes in tenth grade, and was voted class president three years in a row. He’d been popular, athletic, and Dustin’s only serious valedictory rival.
But something had changed between junior and senior year. He’d quit wrestling, had dropped out of student government, his grades had taken a kamikaze dive, and he’d stopped speaking to his friends. The only time anyone saw his face anymore was in the halls, because he spent class time sleeping. No one knew why, but loads of people had theories.
And Ms. Fuentes had just assigned me and Calvin to work together on a project that could destroy my grade.
Fuentes finished reading off the teams, and informed us she expected us to sit with our new partners next class. Then she launched into a lecture about the dynamics of roller coasters, and how she participated in a club that built them for fun, which was both sad and not unexpected.
I stopped paying attention and began trying to figure out how Calvin Frye fit into the puzzle. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that Fuentes had paired us together, but I didn’t understand what role Calvin could possibly have to play in the mysterious shrinking of the universe and Tommy’s disappearance. If Flight 1184 had exploded to send me a message to stay in Cloud Lake, what message was I being sent by having to work with Calvin Frye?
12,066,011,000 LY
MRS. PETRIDIS WOULD’VE BURNED THE BOOKSTORE to the ground if not for her justifiable fear of prison. Mr. Petridis had been the one who’d loved books. When he sank their retirement fund into opening Petridis Books and More, which everyone in Cloud Lake simply called “the bookstore,” he’d promised his wife he would run the store and she could spend her days in the studio he’d constructed for her in the stockroom working on her true passion: building taxidermy dioramas depicting scenes from Alfred Hitchcock movies.
Morbid, yes, but no one could transform a dead squirrel into Norman Bates like Mrs. Petridis.
Except Mr. Petridis had died. He’d suffered a stroke while arranging the books he’d planned to display for National Pizza Month, and had left Mrs. Petridis as the sole owner of a shop she’d never wanted but couldn’t bring herself to burn down.
I worked at the bookstore a couple of nights a week and most weekends, giving Mrs. Petridis the opportunity to plug away on her latest project, which at the moment was a scene from Spellbound, created using small birds. Her only rule was that I not bother her, and I never did. She often joked that I ran the bookstore better than Mr. Petridis ever had.
As far as jobs went, I didn’t hate it. Mrs. Petridis paid minimum wage, but so long as I completed my duties—which mostly consisted of shelving books, helping customers, and ringing up sales—I could spend my free time reading or studying. She also let me “borrow” books on the condition that I return them in sellable shape. The bookstore functioned as my research center for Operation Find Tommy and was where I’d formulated many of my ideas about what had happened to him.
The bookstore itself was cozy but not crowded, with posters of classic novels framed and hung on the walls. And it was filled with that wonderful book smell that anyone who’s ever been near a book will recognize. It’s more than the smell of paper; it’s the smell of the high seas and adventure and far-off worlds. It’s the smell of a billion billion words, each a portal to somewhere new.
In a corner of the store, Mr. Petridis had set off a section and decorated it with tables and chairs and comfy single-seater sofas to encourage customers to hang out. Customers like Skip, one of our regulars. To my knowledge, he’d never purchased a single book, but he lugged a Royal Quiet De Luxe typewriter—which, in defiance of its name, wasn’t particularly quiet—into the store most evenings and spent hours pecking at the keys, amassing a stack of pages for his book, which he called The Countless Lives of August J. Ostermeyer: A Secret History of the Immortal Who Ruled the World. Mrs. Petridis frequently complained about the noise of Skip’s typewriter, but I didn’t mind. He was Cloud Lake’s own Henry Darger.