“She was here,” Alvin said. “She was here, and we missed her.”
He held the little charm bracelet up so Margo could see. It was their mother’s. They had been so close to saving her— How close? Days? Hours? Alvin couldn’t bear to think about it.
Slowly, Margo stood up. She crossed the room. She took the charm bracelet and looked at it for a minute before slipping it into her pocket.
“We’ll find her,” she said.
And she was so sure, so steady, so confident that Alvin almost believed her.
—from Alvin Hatter and the Wild-Goose Chase
22
When my family started filtering into the kitchen in the morning, I was already sitting there, a confusing perfect storm of emotions. Except George Clooney was nowhere to be found.
“Good reference,” Abe said. I turned to find him on the stairs, arms folded, looking at me suspiciously.
“Oh, great,” I said. My internal monologue had momentarily escaped me.
“I always thought they should have sent Diane Lane out with the ship. She’s a legitimate badass. Diane Lane does not get lost at sea.”
“How much did I say?”
“Hmm? Oh, no. I was reading your mind.” Abe made squiggles in the air with his fingers. My phone buzzed. A message from Sam.
Want to get together this weekend? I have a few ideas.
Do you? Do you have a few ideas, Sam? Was one of those ideas explaining to me how you came about your apparent eternal youth?
“You’re doing it again, but you’re whispering this time, so I can’t hear you,” Abe said. “If you’re going to narrate your subconscious, you might be kind enough to do it a little louder.”
“Did you want something?” I asked, spinning around, dropping my phone dramatically in the process. I watched it skid across the kitchen floor, heard that massive shattering and splintering sound as it clearly broke into a thousand pieces. “Shit!”
“I have twenty-seven missed calls from you,” Abe said, crossing the kitchen to pick up the broken bits of my life. “Ouch.” He held it out to me. The entire screen was shattered. It felt like some metaphor I couldn’t quite put into words.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“You couldn’t sleep so you called me twenty-seven times at five in the morning?”
I took the phone from him and pressed the home button. The screen turned on feebly, but the touch screen was broken. I tossed it onto the counter.
“Perfect,” I said.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“What’s the point?” I thought. Or I guess I said it. Things were getting muddy; words were forming without me seeming to have much say over them.
“The point is, I’m your brother, and I care about you a lot, and you can tell me things. I thought we had established that three years ago when you were getting bullied by that guy, that Jeremy guy, and I confronted him, and then he was like, ‘I just have crazy feelings for her, man!’ and I was like, ‘At no age—but especially not at your age—is it acceptable to show a girl you have feelings for her by bullying her. That contributes to a patriarchal society and reinforces archaic gender roles that nobody has time for anymore.’ And then he was like, ‘What does patriarchal mean?’ and I realized I had overestimated my audience. But remember how I had your back then? And I have your back now. So what the hell is going on?”
Two voices battled for position in my brain.
Tell him! yelled one.
Don’t tell him! whispered the other.
The other had a point. My mom hadn’t believed me, so why did I think Abe would be any different? Did I really want to go through the whole thing again, the whole explanation, only to be shot down with Maybe he just looks a lot like his dad? I knew the difference between two people looking like each other and two people actually being the same person who never aged.
I mean, didn’t I?
“Wow,” Abe said.
“What?”
“It’s just that when you think so hard, I can actually see the smoke coming out of your ears.”
“Shut up.”
“Seriously. Like an actual cartoon. With the train noises and everything.”
“Whatever.”
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Okay, fine.” Deep breath. Another deep breath. And one more, for good measure. “I think Sam is immortal.”
Abe’s expression didn’t change in the slightest. He took a tiny sidestep to his left and leaned his elbow on the counter, but other than that he didn’t even act like he’d heard me. Now I could see his brain working, something spinning behind his eyes.
“Huh,” he said. “Is that why Aunt Helen wanted you to have that book?” he said finally.
I almost didn’t remember what he was talking about, but then something clicked in my brain, and I bolted past him for the stairs. I ran into my room, breathless, and grabbed the weird history book my aunt had sent me to pick up from Leonard at Magic Grooves.
The Search for Eternity: A History of Juan Ponce de León.
I opened it, flipping through the pages until I found what she’d written, which hadn’t even really registered with me until now—
The words Fountain of Youth were circled, with a line leading to where she’d written S.W.!!!
This whole time her letters had been spelling it out for me. I’d missed every single hint.
I heard Abe walk into my room behind me. I held the book out to him, and he took it and read what Aunt Helen had written.
“What’s Sam’s last name?” he asked.
“Williams. Sam Williams.”
“And you think he’s . . . I mean, Aunt Helen told you he was immortal?”
“Yeah,” I said to Abe. “She did. Yeah. Wait—do you believe me, then? Or do you believe that he is . . . you know.”
“Do I believe that the Fountain of Youth actually exists and that your boyfriend drank from it and is now immortal?”
“He’s not my boyfriend. But yeah to all the other stuff.”
“Well, not really, no,” Abe said. “But I guess it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing in the world. Have you ever googled a blobfish?”
“No.”
“Well, you should. Just not before bed.”
“You don’t seem that freaked out.”
“Because I don’t really believe it. What’s your proof? Besides Aunt Helen leaving you a book about Ponce de León, I mean. Because that doesn’t mean anything. Aunt Helen did weird stuff all the time.”
“What’s my proof?” I said, grabbing the book back from him, poking the circled word with my forefinger. I took the red journal from my bed and opened it and thrust it into Abe’s hand, showing him picture after picture of Aunt Helen and Sam, turning the pages and jabbing at each one.
And the letters.
All the letters were stacked on my desk; I picked them up and started going through them, reading any relevant passages I found:
“I’ve kept a secret for a very, very long time. And now (in death, as it were) it seems like the perfect time to loosen my grip on it a little bit.”
“But I think if even one immortal boy could identify with Alvin’s struggles, it will have all been worth it.”
“Is Alvin based on a real person? Oh, of course . . .”