My mother bonded with me at birth.
My mother was once an assistant to the curator of prints and drawings at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
My mother wasn’t even twenty-one when she gave birth to me.
My mother was taking pills for major depression. My mother has a cousin.
I remember our project for the day and sit up with a start. I catapult off the mattress, careful not to catch a foot on my friend.
She curls into the sheets. “Ugh,” she groans. “What are you doing?”
“We have an emergency contact to find.”
“It’s Sunday. It’s seven o’clock. On a Sunday.”
“I can’t sleep anymore.”
“You could if you tried. I even gave you the Damon Salvatore side of the bed. What a waste.” She jabs her finger at the fanged blond on the poster. Rolling, she reaches out and caresses his pale paper face. “Good morning, lover.”
“What does Jeremy think of the Damon Salvatore side of the bed?”
She sits up and half smiles, arches her back, catlike. “He wouldn’t give a shit if it was a Yankees poster. I have a bed and a door that locks.”
“What a prince.” I squat and dig through her pants drawer, hoping for something, anything, in a size bigger than two. Taking Jessa’s help? It’s . . . difficult. Taking her pants? Not a problem.
“Oh, whatever. I’m, like, seventeen.”
I choose not to ponder the fact that although I’m also seventeen, the “highlight” of my sex life has been a few heavy-breathing-and-pants-rubbing sessions in Lee Jung’s TV room, while Reservoir Dogs played and shouted and bled on the big screen and my head fizzed with the Goldschl?ger.
Jessa watches me root through her pants. “I take it you’re not going home.”
I stiffen. “I can go home. If you’re busy or something—”
“You know that’s not what I’m saying. Here.” She takes mercy on me and tosses me a pair of black leggings with zippered ankles draped across the headboard.
I lift them tentatively.
“They’re totally clean! And slimming!”
“Oh gosh, thanks.”
“With this, with this!” Jessa leaps up and plunges into her vaulted closet, emerging with a slouchy red sweaterdress, a big black heart glittering across the back. “And this!” She thrusts a necklace at me, a long black chain with little gold charms and red beads and doodly-bobs jingling on the end. I have to admit it’s a cool ensemble, but this seems like a strange day for dress-up. Maybe sensing this, she shrugs. “If you think you look good, you’ll be more confident and stuff.”
Who am I to argue? It works for Jessa.
I take my bounty and my purse and leave Jessa alone with Damon Salvatore. Darting down the hall so I won’t be caught by Chad with happy cupcakes on my breasts, I shut myself in the bathroom. Strange day for dress-up though it may be, I pull and clasp and stuff myself into Jessa’s outfit like it’s armor. I brush my hair into a careful sleek ponytail, swipe on some not particularly daring brown eyeliner I found rolling around my purse bottom, and stare myself down in the mirror. Embarrassed by last night’s cowardice, I tell myself that for the next twenty-four hours I am an unstoppably brilliant badass detective. I’m Emily Pollifax, Lisbeth Salander, Annika Bengtzon.
I’m Miles fucking Faye.
When I get back to the bedroom, Jessa’s still under the covers, but zipping a finger across her iPad screen like the professional she is. Neither of us could find a Sidonie Faye online, because of course it wouldn’t be so easy so soon. But hers isn’t the only name I’ve got. Officer Griffin and the police will be talking to Dad’s limited family—a fistful of cousins scattered across the West Coast, an uncle in Chicago, Grandpa Scott in a nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients, for what that’s worth.
But I have my mother’s family.
“Okay, so there’re a few Lillian Wards on Facebook,” Jessa says. “But I don’t think they’re the right ages.”
“Huh. What’s that 978 area code?”
Tap, tap, swipe. “Shrewsbury. That’s like half an hour southwest, right?” Swipe, tap, tap, type. While she works she chews the inside of her lip, a familiar and (almost) unattractive tic that only escapes when she’s concentrating too hard to worry about looking unattractive. “Okay, nothing about her in the White Pages. But here’s something else for Lillian Eugene, maiden name Lillian Ward.” She tilts the screen toward me.
“What’s ‘Intellux’?”
“It’s one of those professional background-check sites Mrs. Ginsberg told us about in Global Communications class. Companies can pay to look up the dirt on employees before hiring them—property records, criminal history, social media search. This is just the stuff we can see without paying.”
“Wow. Can you try Sidonie Faye?”