“No—she’s crazy about you.”
The waitress approached and placed his tea in front of him. He thanked her, and noticed that Jonas was on edge the whole time, perhaps fearing that Finn was about to say something to her, ask her outright, the kind of social death that only adults could handle flippantly.
Once she’d walked away, he visibly relaxed and said, “It’s quite awkward if she does think like that. Surely she can see that I’m a lot younger than her?”
Finn looked at him, sympathizing with the waitress, because Jonas could probably pass for eighteen, maybe even twenty. And within those shifting sands lay the secret of Hailey’s reinvention. At their age, nearly everyone looked either older or younger than they really were. Briefly, his memory flitted back to Katerina, but he banished it quickly, the attendant thoughts too troubling.
“What about you and Hailey?”
“What about us?”
“Are you a couple?”
“No.” He feigned confusion, as if it were an outlandish suggestion, then sipped at his tea to avoid scrutiny. “We’re just friends.”
“Okay,” said Finn, not wanting to make him uncomfortable, particularly when it wasn’t something that mattered.
“You know . . .” Jonas hesitated and sipped at his tea again. Finn wondered if the kid had decided to share his feelings anyway, a thought that filled him with a certain dread, but Jonas took him by surprise yet again. “I think everyone’s trying to find this point in time where they fit, where everything’s right, where they fit into the universe. Me and Hailey, that girl”—he gestured toward the waitress—“we’re young, so we keep thinking it’s in the future and we’re running toward it. I guess people who are older, like you or like our parents, you keep thinking you missed it and it’s some place back in your past but you can’t pin it down. You know, we’re all looking for this same point of time and it always seems just out of reach—when we were happy, when things felt right, when we’ll fit into the universe, but maybe it’s out of reach because it’s not a point in time at all, it’s something else, something inside us. Like déjà vu.”
“Er, sure, you might be on to something.” Finn had forgotten what it was like to be that age, and even now he wasn’t certain that his thoughts had ever been that far out there. “But, do you have a reason for saying all that? I mean, does it relate to anything that we’ve been discussing?”
Jonas sounded hesitant, testing the question against his thoughts as he said, “I don’t think so. But it could. It’s just an idea I’ve been playing around with—I haven’t worked it out yet.”
Even as he spoke, Finn realized Jonas’s navel-gazing theory was possessed of something relevant. It probably summed up the real reasons for Hailey’s disappearance. She’d reached the apogee of teenage restlessness and had tried to escape into the future she was no longer willing to wait for.
“Jonas, I want to look at your notebook, but let me ask you something first. You said you didn’t know where Hailey had gone, and that’s all people have asked so you haven’t said more. But now I’m asking you—do you have any ideas about where she might have gone?”
“I have ideas about how she got there.” Finn looked at him questioningly and he added, “I think she went by train.”
“Because?”
“One day, a few weeks ago, I walked into her room and we were talking, and then I noticed she had the page up for InterRail on her computer. It’s like a pass you can use to travel anywhere in Europe for a month or something.”
“Yeah, they had them when I was . . . a student.”
“Really? Did you ever go on one?”
“Yeah, I did. It was okay, although kind of like your theory, probably better in the memory than it was in the moment.”
Jonas smiled, liking Finn’s last comment, and said, “She looked pretty embarrassed when I noticed it, but she covered up really well, said she was wondering if we should do it together between school and college, which is years away, but then Hailey’s a dreamer.”
A dreamer.
“Was this before or after you hacked Gibson’s network?”
Jonas thought for a moment. “After, but before all the other things that happened. Yes, in fact, that was also the day we tried and his network had been taken down.”
It backed up what Finn had been thinking more and more. There was no doubt that they’d felt threatened by Gibson, but Hailey had used that fear or concern as an excuse for organizing her own longed-for escape.
“So she went somewhere far away.”