“Bastard.” I bit my lip and wrinkled my nose.
Owen dropped onto his desk chair, leaving the cup of coffee with me. “Not quite the thank-you I was expecting,” he said, interlocking his fingers behind his head.
“Not you.” I breathed in the steam. I felt as though I’d been punched in the nose. “Knox. Knox Hoyle is a bastard of the highest order.”
“Is this just your standard Saturday fare or did He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named do something particularly heinous in the last twenty-four hours.”
The hot liquid scalded my tongue. “He slipped something in my drink.” Owen’s hands separated and he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I had sworn myself to carbonated beverages only. Knox got me a refill. Next thing I know, I can’t see straight.”
“That explains the ‘Queen of the Sloppy Drunks’ comment.”
“Whose comment?”
“Don’t get mad.” Owen slid a Wolverine comic book from his desk and flipped through the pages without stopping to study any of the illustrations. “Cassidy called me. She … had some choice words to share about you.” He idly returned the comic book to its stack. “But, uh, she thought someone should come get you, so she tried me.”
Something snagged in my stomach. She did that? For me. My chest felt warm and melty right before the deep, sickening regret sank in.
“They saw his scars,” I said. “And … they think we hooked up.”
“What does ‘hooked up’ mean, anyway?” Owen asked.
“I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s not good.” I sighed and launched into the whole story. Or at least I tried to make it the whole story. I wasn’t sure whether parts of it made sense. Bits of my memory were holes, like a rat had come and chewed through parts of the night. Now I knew how Adam felt. “I’m pretty sure Knox’s arm is broken,” I finished. “His parents will destroy Adam.”
But then again, there wasn’t really any Adam to destroy. Adam Smith was a thing we’d made up—invented—and once they punched through that facade, I worried that the person they’d find hiding behind it would be me.
*
ADAM WAS MISSING. Again. Only this time he wasn’t at school and he wasn’t in the cellar and he wasn’t in my car. He’d vanished. Owen and I had been searching for him for hours, ever since I woke up cursing Knox Hoyle’s name in Owen’s bed. I hadn’t even brushed my hair, let alone my teeth, and this solitary stick of gum in my mouth was starting to have the consistency of wet cement.
“This is useless.” Owen drove slowly down the side roads while I hung my elbows out the open passenger-side window and scanned the blocks for a sign. “We should go home. You should take a shower.”
“We’re not giving up. Either we find him first or Knox’s parents do. Which of those sounds better to you?” Owen propped his elbow on the window and kept driving. “That’s what I thought.”
I probably should have been more panicked than I was. I probably should have been freaking out. And I was, but it was a dull kind of freaking out. Like a blade that had been used too often. I was thinking about the shell-boy that I’d created and what would happen if that shell stopped being such a good hiding place. What would happen to me then?
But this could all be fixed. One tweak in the formula. One change in the variables and—presto—all would be well. The contents of my stomach felt swampy, and the drugs in my system wouldn’t let go. I felt hot and listless. Beads of sweat gathered on my upper lip. I wiped them away.
“Does it look overcast to you?” I asked. A dingy blanket of clouds hovered over the cotton fields, absorbing the puffs of smoke from the city’s factories.
“Yeah, why?” Owen kept licking his lips and leaning over the steering wheel to see better, I guessed.
I rested my chin on my arm and stared out. “The weather report said a storm was coming in five days,” I said. “Doesn’t look like it’ll hold that long to me.”
Owen drove us into town, and the landscape stretched into a curved pyramid in the side view mirror, where I knew the three lightning generators waited, hidden from view, coursing with a power so strong it could stand your hair on end.
Once in town, the wooden train tracks we’d been running beside disappeared between brick buildings. Owen drove around the deserted parking lot of the old red Movies 8 Theater with the black-and-white checkered ticket booth, then into a strip mall.
“Try the square,” I said. “Town’s not that big.” Last I checked, there weren’t even twenty-five thousand people in Hollow Pines. Sure, Adam was a needle, but the haystack wasn’t all that large.
At a stoplight, Owen turned left onto Grand Avenue. Flat, front buildings with block-letter signs lined the street. A large clock on an iron lamppost marked the time as a quarter past six. It was already getting late.