EPIGRAPH
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
—E. E. Cummings, “maggie and milly and molly and may”
CONTENTS
Epigraph
The Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
The Light
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
The Team
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Trees
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Epilogue
The Wave
Acknowledgments
Back Ad
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
THE NOTE
The last time Emmy sees Oliver is on their forty-third day of second grade.
Oliver is her next-door neighbor and her friend. They were born in the same hospital on the same day: July 7—7/7. She thinks she’s pretty lucky to have a friend who lives next door and shares a birthday with her. She can just visit him any old time she wants, but not all the time because sometimes Oliver goes to his dad’s house on the weekends. They do fun things, Oliver says, pizza and ice cream and things like that. Sometimes movies. Emmy thinks that maybe having divorced parents isn’t so bad, not if it means you get extra ice cream, but then at night, when it’s dark in her room and she hears weird noises in the closet that may or may not be monsters, she’s glad her mom and dad are still together in their bedroom down the hall.
On that forty-third afternoon of second grade, her friend Caroline passes Oliver a note when their teacher’s back is turned. Emmy watches as the paper slips past her and onto the desk of their friend Drew, who gives Caro a sneaky smile and then passes the note to Oliver. Emmy looks over at Caroline, who’s grinning wildly. They are seven years old and this is the first of many, many notes that Caro will pass in class, but this is the first and most special note Caro will ever give to someone.
Oliver is in front of Emmy now, his head down while he carefully does the addition problems in his math workbook. She can see the tag sticking up out of the back of his shirt, and what she doesn’t know now is that she’ll remember that tag for years, that she will dream about going up to him and smoothing the tag back into his shirt before she wakes up, her hand poised in midair, a gossamer dream melting between her fingers.
Instead, Emmy just glares at Caro and watches as Oliver unfolds the note and reads it. They could get in so much trouble for passing notes! Emmy glares at Caro, who just frowns and sticks her tongue out at Emmy, but Emmy knows she’s not really mad. If Caro’s really mad, she ignores you. That’s way worse.
Oliver writes something down on the note and passes it back to Caro while their teacher is explaining how to borrow from the tens, and Emmy feels her skin start to prickle, like the time she got sunburned at the beach. Caro just grins at her, and Emmy puts her head back down and carries the one.
After school, Caro runs up to Emmy and hands her the note. “Look!” she cries. The paper’s been folded so many times that it feels as soft as cotton, and Emmy opens it up. It says, DO YOU LIKE EMMY, YES NO??? And the word yes has been circled three times.
Emmy holds the paper and looks around for Oliver, but their moms and dads are waiting to pick them up; Oliver is already running toward his dad. His dad drives a sports car now. It’s sooo cool. That’s what Oliver says.
“Oliver!” Emmy yells. “I have to ask you something!”
He’s already ahead of her, though, running toward the cool sports car and his dad.
“Oliver!” she cries. “Oliver, wait!”
But it’s too late. Oliver is already in his dad’s car.
And he’s gone.
CHAPTER ONE
Oliver disappeared after school on a Friday afternoon, way back when we were in second grade, and small things seemed really important and important things seemed too small. That afternoon, it wasn’t weird to see him get in his dad’s car, a red convertible whose screeching tires rang out in my mind for years afterward.
Oliver and I had been best friends since the day we were born up until the day his dad picked him up from school and never brought him home. We even lived next door, our bedroom windows reflecting each other.
His window’s been empty for ten years, but sometimes I can still see into his room and it’s exactly how it was when he disappeared. Oliver’s mom, Maureen, she never moved anything. In the past ten years, she remarried and even had two little girls, but Oliver’s bedroom never changed. It’s become a makeshift shrine, dusty and childish, but I get it. If you clean it out, it means he might never come back.
Sometimes I think that all superstitions—crossing your fingers, not stepping on cracks, shrines like the one in Oliver’s room—come from wanting something too much.
Oliver’s dad was pretty smart about the way he took him. It was a three-day weekend and he was supposed to bring Oliver to school on Tuesday morning. By ten a.m., they hadn’t shown up. By eleven, Oliver’s mother was in the school office. By three o’clock that afternoon, there were news cameras scattered across the school parking lot and on Oliver’s lawn at home. They bore down on us like electronic versions of Cyclops, wanting to know how we were holding up, what we children were doing now that our friend was missing.
Caro cried and my mom made us sit at the table and eat a snack—Double Stuf Oreos. That’s how I knew it was really bad.
We all thought Oliver and his dad would come back that night. And then the next day. And then surely by that weekend. But they never did. Oliver and his dad were gone, drifted into nothingness, like clouds in the sky and even more difficult to chase.
They could be anywhere and it was that thought that made the world seem so large, so vast. How could people just disappear? Oliver’s mom, in her more lucid moments when she wasn’t crying or taking tiny white pills that just made her look sad, said that she would go to the ends of the earth to find him, but it seemed like Oliver had already reached the end of the world and had fallen off into the abyss. At seven years old, that was the only explanation that made sense to me. The world was round and spun too fast and Oliver was gone, spinning away from us forever.
Before Oliver was kidnapped, my dad used to say, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder!” and give me smacking kisses on both cheeks when I ran to greet him after work. After, he stopped saying it (even though his hugs were tighter than ever before) and I realized that it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all. Oliver’s absence split us wide open, dividing our neighborhood along a fault line strong enough to cause an earthquake.
An earthquake would have been better. At least during an earthquake, you understand why you’re shaking.
The neighbors formed search parties
, holding hands as they walked through wooded areas behind the school. They took up collections, bought officers cups of coffee, and told Caro and Drew and me to go play. Even our playtime had been altered. We didn’t play house anymore. We played “Kidnapping.”
“Okay, I’ll be Oliver’s mom and you be Oliver and, Drew, you be Oliver’s dad,” Caro would instruct us, but we weren’t sure what to do after Drew dragged me away. Caro would pretend to cry and say, “My baby!” which was what Maureen had been screaming that first day before the tranquilizers kicked in, but Drew and I just stood there, holding hands. We didn’t know how to end the game. No one had shown us how and, anyway, my mom told us to stop playing that, that we would upset Oliver’s mom. “But she’s always upset,” I said, and neither of my parents said anything after that.
Sometimes I think that if we had been older, it would have been easier. A lot of conversations stopped when I came near and I learned how to creep down the stairs so I could hear the grown-ups talking. I discovered that if I sat on the ninth step I could see past the kitchen and into the living room, where Maureen spent nights sobbing into her hands, my mom sitting next to her and holding her, rocking her the way she rocked me whenever I woke up dreaming about Oliver, dreaming about the tag on the back of his shirt, my pajamas damp with nightmare sweat. There were always wineglasses on the table, lined with dark resin that looked more like blood than Cabernet. And Maureen’s crying made my skin feel weird, like someone had turned it inside out. I couldn’t always hear what they were saying, but it didn’t matter. I already knew. Maureen was sad because she wanted to hold Oliver the way my mom was holding her.
“I can never leave,” Maureen wept one night as I sat on the stairs, holding my breath in case anyone saw me. “I can never leave here, you know? What would we do if Oliver came back and no one was . . . ? Oh God, oh God.”
“I know,” my mother kept saying to her. “We’ll stay with you. We won’t leave, either.”
It was a promise that she kept, too. We didn’t leave. We stayed in the same house next door. Other neighbors left and new ones moved in, and all of them seemed to know about Oliver. He had become a local celebrity in absentia, famous for not being found, a ghost.
As time went on, it became hard to imagine what he looked like, even as the police age-progressed his second-grade school photo. We all watched an artist’s rendering of Oliver grow up over the years. His nose got bigger, his eyes wider, his forehead higher. His smile wasn’t as pronounced and his baby teeth morphed into adult ones. His eyes never changed, though. That was the strange part. The hopeful part.
We stayed and looked and waited for him to come back, as if our love was a beacon that he could use to light his way home, to crawl up the sides of the earth and back through his front door, his tag still sticking up in the back.
After a while, though, after years passed and pictures changed and false tips fell through, it started to feel like the beacon wasn’t for him anymore. It was for those of us left behind, something to cling to when you realized that scary things could happen, that villains didn’t only exist in books, that Oliver might never come home.
Until one day, he did.
CHAPTER TWO
I remember it was a Thursday because I had gone surfing that afternoon. I always go out on Thursdays because both my parents work late those days, which makes it easier to sneak a surfboard in and out of my car. It had been soft that afternoon, the sky hazy and the waves no bigger than three feet or so, and I was rinsing off in the shower at the edge of the sand when I heard someone screaming my name. “Emmy! Emmy! Where is she? Is she here?!” I looked up from the end of the path and saw my best friend, Caroline, tearing toward me.
Her hair was tangled, as tangled as mine after dousing it in salt water and sea air for a few hours, and she was dashing barefoot toward me, her shoes dangling from her hand. The whole beach stopped and watched as she hurtled down the hill, and I heard one surfer say to his friend, “Dude, she’s fast.”
I stepped away from the water, my heart racing. Was it my parents? An accident? Where was our friend Drew? Oh God, it was Drew. Something had happened to Drew! “Em,” she said, and there was something scary in her eyes, wild and hopeful and terrified all at the same time.
I had never seen her look like that before and I probably never will again.
“Emmy,” she said. “They found Oliver.”
It’s funny. You think about hearing certain phrases and you plan how you’ll react to them. They found Oliver. And yet when you do finally hear the three words you’ve been too frightened to even think about, for fear of jinxing them, for fear that you might never actually hear them, it’s like they aren’t real at all.
“Emmy!” Caroline grabbed me by the shoulders and bent down so she could look me in the eyes, her grip so hard I could feel her fingertips through my wet suit. “They found Oliver. He’s okay.”
“Caroline,” I said slowly. “You’re hurting me.”
“Oh, sorry! Sorry!” She let go of my shoulders but stayed close. “Are you in shock? Are you okay? Do you need something with electrolytes?”
I shook my head. “They found him? How—?”
Caroline grinned. “Your mom just called me. You weren’t answering your phone so she sent me to find you.” My mom knew what she was doing. Caroline is definitely the sort of person that you want to deliver news. Good or bad, she will rip that Band-Aid clean off.
“He’s in New York,” she continued. “He’s coming home.”
My knees were shaking. Maybe I needed something with electrolytes after all. “Who’s in New York?”
“Oliver, Emmy! God, focus!”
“Can I—? Where’s my phone? I need my phone!”
Caro was still jumping up and down as I ran up to my towel, digging around underneath it for my bag and finding my phone at the bottom. Seven missed calls and three texts from my mom: CALL HOME NOW, they all said.
“Did you tell my mom where I was?” I asked Caro, shoving my phone back into my bag and trying to get my wet suit off as fast as possible without taking my bathing suit along with it.
“No, of course not,” she said, then added “Here,” and offered me her shoulder for balance as I peeled off the lower half of the suit. “I said I thought you might be at the library and that’s why your phone was off.”
“Good.” My parents would never approve of me surfing, which is why they could never know. I love them, but if they had their way, they would have constructed a suit for me made entirely of Bubble Wrap and cotton balls. I didn’t want to be the kind of kid that snuck around and did things behind her parents’ back, but I loved surfing too much to stop. So I just lied to them instead, which, yeah. Not exactly the best solution to the problem, but it was all I had.
“They might wonder why your hair’s wet, though,” Caro said, interrupting my thoughts.
“We’ll think up a reason in the car,” I said, finally yanking a dress over my bathing suit. Caroline grabbed my towel and my hand and we took off up the hill toward the car. It sounded like there were jets flying overhead, but when I looked up and saw nothing but a few low clouds, I realized that the sound was just the blood rushing in my head, pulsing to keep me upright and alive.
“They found him,” Caro whispered, and when she squeezed my hand, I squeezed back harder and came down from the clouds once again.
I quickly dumped my surfboard into the back of Drew’s van before throwing myself in the backseat. Drew was waiting behind the steering wheel, frantically texting someone. His cheeks were flushed and he was wearing his soccer uniform. Drew used to be my best surfing buddy until soccer began taking up more of his time. Now he’s on track to get a full scholarship to Berkeley, just like his older brother, Kane.
“Oh my God,” he said without looking up. “Can you even believe it?”
“Not really,” I said. “Can you?”
“Nope,” he said, his thumbs flying over the mini keyboard. “How are you going to explain yo
ur hair to your mom?”
“Think something up for me,” I said, realizing too late that my feet were covered in sand and silt and gravel. Now all that mess was smeared over Drew’s floor mats.
Drew loves his van. It’s actually not a van, but a restored 1971 tomato-red VW camper bus. People actually take pictures with it, it’s so beautiful, and it has lots of room for surfboards in the back. The van used to be his brother’s, but after Kane went to college three years ago, he gifted it to Drew, like he knew that Drew was going to need it as a means of escape.
“Oh no!” I said once I saw the sand. “I’m sorry, Drew, I should’ve—”
“Who cares?” Caro screeched. “It’s sand, not acid. Just drive, okay?”
“Wait,” I said. “My car. My backpack’s in there, my homework. I have a quiz tomorrow!”
“Are you kidding me?” Drew backed the car up and the force of his acceleration smashed me into the seat. “Buckle up,” he said. “No one’s doing any homework tonight.” When we were finally cruising down the road, he glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “Em, seriously, are you sure you’re not going into shock? You look pale.”
“I already offered her electrolytes,” Caroline said.
“I’m fine,” I told them. Only it came out sort of high and squeaky and any moron with average vision could probably tell that I was not fine.
Caro reached over the backseat and grabbed my seat belt. “Here,” she said. “Drew’s driving. It’s a requirement.” She snapped it into place and then squeezed my shoulders. “Is this really happening?”
Caro and I have known Drew since kindergarten. Actually, half our school has known one another since kindergarten. It’s one of those Southern California suburbs where few people move away from their pink stucco houses.
Here’s something you must know about Drew before becoming his friend: he drives as if he’s being chased by a carful of depraved, evil clowns. I took driver’s ed with him in sophomore year, so I can tell you that he’s always been like this. (I can also tell you that our driver’s ed instructor had to renew his Xanax prescription after Drew’s first on-the-road lesson.)