There was a small shrug of his shoulders and another kiss at my scalp. “We don’t know yet,” he said. “Right now, we’re intervening with the lawyer she keeps trying to get in touch with. Luckily, the two she called were out of the office on vacation. An Academy lawyer will get in touch with her as an alternative. Hopefully she’ll go with him. That’ll prevent some trouble.”
I hadn’t thought they could use a special Academy lawyer. I imagined it would cost something to utilize one in this unique situation. Would it cost favors?
And did it apply to the boys, or to me?
North used his elbow to prop himself up and nudged me to move. “Jimmy’s wrapped up his shower,” he said quietly.
I didn’t know how he’d noticed, because he was still monitoring Carol. I assumed he could hear the shower somehow. He had excellent hearing. But wasn’t this space soundproofed?
He moved around until he was at the platform, near the beanbag chair. He turned around at the foot of the cot, sitting cross-legged.
He kept the tablet, looking at it again. His brow furrowed, he frowned and then pulled a pair of earbuds from his pocket. He plugged them into the tablet, putting one in his ear. “Listen for Jimmy. He’s still in the bathroom, but he’s tinkering around. If I don’t hear him because of the earbuds, just shove me. I’ll move.”
“What’s going on?”
“She’s talking to your father, but she’s really just telling him what meals she’s planning for the week. I’ll tell you if it’s anything interesting.”
I sat on the cot, watching him, listening for sounds like Jimmy coming into the bedroom, and held my breath as long as I could. Every moment needed to be captured in order to collect any information. No more surprises. No more being caught off guard.
He motioned to the book bag. “You’ve got an empty journal or notebook?”
“I think so.”
“Get two if you have them. She wanted a schedule. Let’s make one.”
The book bag was perfectly organized by class, with folders and notebooks. Gabriel or North had been busy up here, not just watching out for me. I held up a spiral-bound book.
North shook his head and pointed to the duffle. “Isn’t there a better one?”
Better? I checked the duffle. It had an overnight kit like I’d had at camp, and things like the DS games and the compass and a pink tool kit. This one was moderately organized, but it still seemed a mishmash. I didn’t have anywhere to store them other than under the cot.
There were a couple of different smaller notebooks. One had thick spirals with a pink cover, the other was stitch-bound and black. He motioned for me to bring both over. I grabbed a few pens, too.
He pulled the earbud out, listened, and then put it back in. He positioned himself to sit cross-legged on the floor, using the cot and sleeping bag on top as a makeshift desk. He handed me the pink book, and he used the black one for himself. We had similar plain ballpoint pens.
“Do what I do,” he said. “It’ll be better if you do this in your own handwriting.”
I sat nearer to him. He wrote in the notebook, putting his name on the front page, marking it for the year. I put my name on mine, and most everything else, I copied exactly how he did it.
He skipped a couple of pages. He made a calendar on the next page, creating the month of January, and wrote out the dates on the left-side page. He marked off holidays and when school started, even noted a couple of birthdays for girls, but I knew the dates were really for Kota and Victor, not Katy and Victoria.
“It’d look weird if you only ever wrote in boy birthdays,” he whispered.
On the right page, he wrote out a to-do list, marked off sections for remembering to drink water, take a vitamin pill and exercise. He added bogus tests and threw in dates for study group, the last two weeks of work at the diner, the dinner with Dr. Green, Sunday with Jessica. He went back a page, marking down my old class schedule.
Quietly, I worked alongside him. He paused occasionally, watching how Carol organized and reorganized the laundry room. I kept an ear out for Jimmy.
He showed me how to create this planner. Other girls at school sometimes had one, but I’d never used one. In my old life, I hadn’t had dates to schedule, or birthdays to remember, or a job to work around. Looking at the calendar now, it made it look like all I would do was come home and sleep.
“How did you know to do this?” I whispered when he slowed down to think of what else to add. “I mean to make your own planner?”
“I prefer the paper ones,” he said, his dark eyes focusing on the page. He flexed his hand, rolling the pen in his fingers as he was thinking. “Probably better to make your own, so you can put in it what you need. I needed a new one for the new year anyway. I’ll keep this one for myself. I’ll add my own things later. Do me a favor if you make changes, and take a picture and send it to me. I’ll want to keep a copy for the rest of us anyway.”
It made sense. If I was going to get a schedule, they’d need to know it. I wondered if Carol would be impressed with this level of organization.
He picked up his head, refocusing on the tablet and bringing it around to show me. Jimmy walked out into the hallway from the bathroom, hair combed, and wearing clean pajama bottoms and a tank shirt. He thundered down the stairs. North followed him with the cameras.
When Jimmy found his mother, she was in the master bedroom with a pile of clothing she had brought in. She went to the closet, pulling out hangers.
North handed me an earbud. He listened through the other one. The audio was a second delayed from the video.
Jimmy waited until his mother turned around. “Yes?” she asked him.
“She organized her space,” he said. “Clothes are put away in that little closet. She’s about as crazy as you with sorting. Looked like she had them designated by day.”
It was unsettling to hear him saying this. He’d been in the closet and looked through my things. I supposed she wasn’t going to come up here if Jimmy would report everything to her. Gabriel must have hidden pretty well at least.
Carol held a wire hanger in her hands, straightening a small bend. “She hung up dirty clothes from camp?”
North tightened his lips, and his shoulders dropped. We shared the concern between us. Dirty clothing was something we’d overlooked.
Jimmy shrugged, sitting on a corner of the bed. His eyes wandered around the room, looking at the small TV on a side table and the brown wallpaper. “Maybe they had laundry machines at the camp? She wasn’t dirty at all when she came in.”
He’d invaded my privacy, but at least he seemed supportive of me. It still hurt that I felt I couldn’t trust him.
But who was I to think little of him for doing so? Here I was listening to his conversation with his mother. Despite our reasons, we were eavesdropping.
“Hmm,” Carol said. “Her father said she was a troublemaker. Her sister says she’s got a bunch of boyfriends, has been away from home the last couple of months living with one.”