“Sooo . . .” Jessa clears her throat. “Are you okay?”
Nodding, I breathe in and out and in. Maybe I shouldn’t be okay. The information is somewhat ominous. But honestly, it explains a lot. It’s like I’ve been driving through fog and rain and now the weather is starting to clear, the road just ahead of me sharpening, coming into focus. Before tonight, I had only my dad’s word to go on, my bedtime story, and of course I trust him. But here’s real evidence that my mother was sick. That she needed saving. And whether or not Lindy wants to believe, I’m starting to get why my dad is searching for her.
“This is good,” I say, to myself and to Jessa. “This helps.”
“Awesome! So where do we start?”
“No offense, but I think I want to just do it by myself. You know? But . . . thanks,” I finish lamely.
She snorts. “Okay. Except maybe you should’ve figured that out before you, like, dragged me to the hospital.”
“I didn’t—” I start to protest.
“Oh, whatever!” She jumps off the bed and plops dramatically down on a nest of leggings in her lips chair, arms slicing the air. “You think I’m an idiot, right? Jeez, sorry I didn’t get 2230 on my SATs. But you’re not as smart as you think, because I know you lied about your dad—you’re lying to the police, and Lindy, and I know you lied to my mom. You lied to me about shopping. And you lied about your car being in the shop all weekend, ’cause I saw it at your house just now when we drove by, oh most brilliant genius. Don’t deny it—I’m a way better liar than you. You could’ve gone to the hospital by yourself. You decided you needed me, but, what, you don’t trust me?”
The rough edges of the stone saw into my fingertips. “So what if I lied? I’m the one that has to find him.”
“By you, you mean the cops, yes?”
“Yeah, right. They don’t know my dad.”
Jessa’s bright blue eyes are so wide, they’re almost floating. “I’m not trying to be a bitch, Im, but he never told you anything about your mom, and he didn’t tell you he was peacing out, and he hasn’t told you where he is. So maybe you don’t know him either.”
“He did tell me!” I say, shoving the file into my bag and tumbling the heart in after it. “He’s looking for my mother. My real mom, I mean. I think he’s trying to help her.”
“But why now, after this long?”
“I haven’t figured that out. But if I can find her, I’ll find him.”
I never should’ve come to the Prices’. I stand to leave, to walk home and slip in the back and sneak to my bedroom, where I can lock myself in alone, like I wanted from the start.
“Okay, okay, okay, wait.” Jessa vaults up and into my path. I start to slink around her and she blocks me. I fake right, but she spreads her arms and beats me to the left. “If you really think that’s where your dad is, I can help. And I am a better liar than you.”
I hover between the bed and the door. “Why do you even want to help?”
“Isn’t that what best friends do?”
I pause, because honestly I don’t know. It seems true. I sigh and drop the bag, if not my doubts. “I guess.”
“Great! And anyway”—she shrugs and twirls a strand of hair—“it’s February break. There’s nothing else to do. Except Mackenzie Winn’s party.”
“Wait, what party?”
“At Mackenzie’s. Next Saturday?”
“No one told me about a party,” I say, a little hurt. I’m in mock trial with Mackenzie.
Jessa purses her lips, has the grace to look guilty. “I was going to.”
SEVEN
I wake the next morning with a shirtless vampire eye-sexing me. Puzzling, when I’m still dragging myself out of my dream by my fingertips. In the dream, I was driving down a road striped with power lines and stippled with leaf-light through the trees. It was peaceful until I came raging through, swerving and clipping the guardrail like I was drunk, that dizzy feeling I remember from the night Lee Jung and I hijacked his parents’ Goldschl?ger. But in the dream I was clear-headed, just unable to control the car, or my foot like a fifty-pound weight on the gas, or the spasming steering wheel. I knew there was somewhere I need to be, something I needed to get to, and might, if only I could drive in a straight line.
Maybe my dreams are trying to tell me something.
It’s a short, muddled moment before the whys and the wheres coming floating back out of the fog. I’m in Jessa’s bed, smashed against the big Vampire Diaries poster tacked to her bedroom wall. I’m here and not in my own bed because Dad is missing, has been missing for four days. As I realize this an ache settles in my chest; not a weight, but an absence. A pocket of nothingness inside me.
Then I roll over and see Jessa drooling on her floral pillowcase, uncharacteristically rumpled. Weirdly I feel shy, remembering the night before, my tantrum, and afterward in the quiet bedroom, the sounds of her breathing so close to me when we’d turned the lights out. It was nice, having a friend there in the dark while I pieced together an imperfect picture of my mother.