He huffed. “Sorry, I’m fresh out of those. And anyway, that’s not why I’m here.” He glanced between Adam and me. “I’m here because I was listening to the radio this morning.” Owen’s penchant for tinkering left him with an alarming number of radios of all sorts and variations, which he kept in his room and his car and a few he’d left for the laboratory. There were foxhole, utility, weather, and battery-less radios, all makes and models that he’d fixed up into working order.
“Okay…” I gave a halfhearted shrug as if to say So what? “And that became newsworthy when?”
“It became newsworthy when I heard…” He cleared his throat and leaned in closer to my ear. “When I heard a broadcast that a boy’s been reported missing.”
FOURTEEN
Stage 2 of the experiment continues. The subject is blending into life at Hollow Pines High, which means we not only managed to resurrect a body from the dead, but have also made him a functioning member of society, passable enough that no one has questioned his postmortem state. Certain improvements could be made. The most pressing concerns remain memory and emotional functioning as well as pain receptivity.
*
The word missing rattled around in the space between my ears all morning.
Missing.
Missing.
Missing.
It played on repeat as I trudged through my early classes and I could concentrate on nothing other than those two syllables as I walked down the hallway to PE, there but not really there. Students streamed past me, a blur of movement. I kept my head down and weaved my way through the crowd.
It wasn’t necessarily Adam, I had to remind myself. Boys went missing all the time. But it was hard to make myself believe it. If someone had reported Adam missing, or the boy that Adam used to be, then that meant somebody was looking for him, that somebody wanted to find him. It also meant that there was somebody who wanted to take Adam away from me. He had parents. He had—
There was a tap on my shoulder.
I jumped and yelped, “Meg!”
Owen popped up alongside me, and I squeezed my eyes shut, mentally chiding myself. So, yeah, there were a few things I had neglected to share with Owen.
“Meg?” Owen echoed my thoughts aloud. His shirt read World’s Most Complicated Equation, followed by an illustrated version of 2 + 2 = 4. “Um, no, just me. You okay? You look a little…” He widened his eyes behind his glasses and waggled his fingers next to his face. “You know, like you just saw Michael Jackson or something.”
We passed the trophy case in the school’s east wing, filled with ribbons and pennants and two state football championship trophies from a decade before. “Michael Jackson’s dead,” I replied.
“My point exactly. Now, who’s Meg?”
“What?” My eyes cut to him and then back at my beat-up high-tops. “Oh, nobody. It’s just”—I glanced over my shoulder—“the whole missing thing.” A shiver ran through me when I said it.
He adjusted his glasses. “Yes, I got that. You may as well have a billboard attached to your forehead that says as much. You’re acting weird. Maybe you should try acting a little, I don’t know, less guilty. That or try to find the people that are looking for Adam.”
“Are you kidding me?” I snapped. Two passing freshmen gave me a wide berth as they disappeared in the opposite direction. “Do we look like we’re running a lost and found, Owen?” I felt my face go hot. I squeezed my hands into fists, and my knuckles turned a stark white. I wanted nothing to do with the missing boy, nothing to do with anyone who might have a stake in Adam.
And that was the whole problem with the idea of Meg. Right now, I was Adam’s world, but there was another girl out there and she must be important to be a dying boy’s last word.
Owen pinched his shoulders to his ears. “I’m just saying that they must be worried about him, that’s all.”
“Well, stop saying,” I said. “It’s not as if we can return him in the same condition as we found him.”
Owen held on to his words but gave me a long look that I knew was supposed to jump-start my conscience. He was always overestimating my conscience. “Come on,” he said. “Don’t you want to know anything about him? Don’t you want to know if it’s really him?” I plugged my ears and kept walking. Owen fell behind. “His name’s Trent Jackson Westover!” I could hear his muffled call. “He’s a sophomore from Lamar High School!”
I whipped around. Hair flew into my eyes and I peeled it away. “Will you stop it?” I marched over to him, grabbed him by the elbow, and, spotting the library’s pale wooden doors, dragged him through them and away from the busy hallway. “What are you thinking?” I snapped. Glancing around, I shoved him between two stacks of books in the nonfiction section where nobody ever went. “I can’t believe you’d say his name in public like that. Are you insane?”
“Are you?” Owen said, rubbing his elbow. On either side of us, hardbacks dressed in shiny plastic covers squeezed one another for space on crowded shelves. The smell of crisp paper and pencil shavings drifted from the pages.