The Deepest Secret

  It’s hard to describe her. “She wants to be an actress.”

  “She must be pretty.”

  “She’s got blond hair and blue eyes.” He’s found her on Facebook and studied her profile pic. She has 487 friends, which is more than he has. She’s liked a bunch of movies he’d never heard of, and he’d written down the titles. Before he knew it, he’d pressed the ADD FRIEND button.

  “What grade is she in?”

  “Ninth,” he lies. “Same as me.”

  “Wow. So what makes her so special?”

  Another hard question. “She’s funny. We can talk about everything.”

  “Have you kissed her?”

  He blushes, hot. “Not yet.”

  “You better hurry. Girls like boys to make the first move.”

  “Okay.”

  “But no tongue. That’s gross.” She sighs and lies back against her pillows. “I have to go. I’m tired.”

  “I really like my mask,” he says, but she’s already turned off her computer. She didn’t even sign off in her usual way.

  Below, he hears the knocking on the front door and, a moment later, his mom’s pleased voice. Then someone’s pounding up the stairs to his room. “Dude! Let me in!”

  “Hold on.” Tyler unlatches his bedroom door and goes into his bathroom. Zach’s the only friend who’s allowed to come into Tyler’s room when it’s still daylight. Tyler had had to beg his mom, and the first few times she’d stood outside the door and watched to make sure.

  “Okay,” Tyler calls out, and he hears his bedroom door open and close. Then Zach raps sharply on the bathroom door and Tyler comes out.

  Zach’s wandering around, looking at Tyler’s pictures. “Did you know Grace Sheridan’s outside your house?”

  Tyler shrugs. Grace Sheridan had to be somewhere, didn’t she? “You got your hair cut,” he says. Shaved short so that it’s only bristles. It looks cool. When they were kids, Zach brought over his brother’s clippers and cut Tyler’s hair for him. Tyler’s mom had come into the bathroom and stared at Tyler’s hair lying all over the floor. She’d looked like she was going to cry, but all she said was Here, Zach. Why don’t you let me even it out? But that was the last time Tyler had short hair.

  “Football,” Zach says with a shrug.

  Zach’s mom is downstairs, talking to Tyler’s mom, their polite voices drifting up, the clip-clop of their shoes going down the hall and into the kitchen.

  “You figure out your locker okay?” This had been a big deal to Zach. He’d freaked about it all summer.

  “Yeah, no problem.” Zach reaches for Tyler’s guitar, tightens the strings. “What about you? How was Drago?”

  “We have to do all the practice problems at the end of the chapter.”

  “Told you she was lame.” Zach plays a few chords. He’s really good at guitar. He can play bass, too, and he’s written songs. When they were in middle school, they thought they’d be in a band together.

  “Who’s in your homeroom?”

  “Brian, Alan P. That dick, Gary.”

  “Sucks.” Tyler’s homeroom teacher never turned on Skype, so he doesn’t know who’s in his homeroom. Maybe it’s not important.

  “I almost missed the bus this morning. It came early. My mom was so pissed. She had to run after it.” Zach laughs. “You should have seen her, waving her arms like a total dweeb.”

  That’s another thing Zach’s been worried about, where to sit on the school bus. Only the dumbasses sit in the front rows and Zach had been worried that by the time he boarded, all the good seats would have been claimed. But Zach sounds okay. In fact, Zach sounds pretty happy.

  Zach strums a few notes, playing a song Tyler doesn’t recognize. “We had a special assembly today about stranger danger.”

  “No one told me about it.”

  “Oh. Probably because you don’t need to know that stuff.” Zach holds out the guitar. “Hey, man, you mind if I borrow this for a little while? Savannah wants to learn to play.”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s cool. Thanks.”

  “Zach?” It’s Mrs. McHugh, calling up the stairs. “You ready, honey?”

  “Dang,” Zach says. “I got to go. I got a ton of homework.”

  Which they used to do together but can’t anymore because they’re in different classes.

  After Zach leaves, Tyler lies down on his bed. The tiny red light glows from his laptop, swelling and shrinking, swelling and shrinking, like it’s sucking on a straw. One day it will burp right in his face. He rolls onto his back.

  Melissa’s not home yet. He wonders what she’s doing.

  She could come into a room behind Tyler, and he’d know she was there, just by the change in the air. He could be in his room and hear the garage door go up and know she was home by the footsteps going to the refrigerator, to the kitchen table, down the hall to her room. They used to play a game: she’d take a picture with her cell phone, way up close, so that he’d have to work to figure it out. Brittany’s nose? he’d guess. A jar of marshmallow creme? It always made her laugh. She used to laugh all the time.

  But something’s happened to her. She no longer charges into a room. She shields her laptop from him, holds her cell phone close so he can’t read her texts, keeps her bedroom door closed.

  Everyone’s changing but him.

  Tuesday is Albert and Rosemary’s anniversary, his mom had explained, and Albert shouldn’t be alone. So I’ve invited him for dinner. That had been last week, but Tyler can tell by the blank look on his mom’s face when Albert knocks on the door that evening that she’d forgotten all about it. “Oh, Albert,” she says. “I’m so glad you’re here. You can help me interrogate the kids about their first day of school.” She smiles at him, and while he’s opening the bottle of wine he brought, she quickly sets another place mat on the table outside.

  “So,” his mom says, when they’re all seated. “How was your day? Tell us everything.”

  “Fantastic,” Melissa says.

  “No, no,” his mom says. She’s holding the glass of wine that Albert poured for her. It glows ruby red in the candlelight. “We want specifics, don’t we, Albert? Did you like your teachers? Do you like your classes? What are the other kids like?”

  She’s always careful to ask questions like these, the general ones that he can answer, too. But he’s heard her talk to Melissa differently, when it’s just the two of them and she doesn’t know he can hear. Who did you have lunch with? she’d ask. Or, Do you want to try out for band?

  “What do you want me to say?” Melissa says. “That I had a great day? That I learned a lot? Well, I didn’t, okay? My day sucked.” She shoves back her chair so hard she bumps the table and makes the milk in Tyler’s glass slosh. After she’s gone, there’s a small silence.

  “I’m sorry, Albert,” his mom says.

  “Ah, Eve. Don’t you worry about me. I remember what teenagers are like.”

  His mom seems so sad. “My day was okay,” Tyler says, to distract her. Though it took a while for his math teacher to get the visual going. His American history teacher talked to the board as she wrote, and Tyler knows he missed a bunch of things. There had been a sickening moment when his LA teacher called his name during roll and couldn’t hear his response, so Tyler had to shout Here, just as the classroom fell silent. There had been a few giggles.

  “Oh, honey, I’m so glad. What about your photography teacher? Did you like him?”

  “I guess.” The dude didn’t look at Tyler once. Everything jiggled as he carried the laptop around to show everyone the studio and film-developing closet. The darkroom was the worst. All Tyler could see in there was a weird red glow, and people kept turning the water on and off.

  “Rosemary would be happy to know you’re taking photography.” Albert’s smiling. “She always said you had real talent.”

  Rosemary had given Tyler his first camera, an old Polaroid she’d discovered in a drawer. Let’s see if it works, and they’d walke
d all around her house, taking pictures of the most ordinary things—the flowers standing in a glass vase, the cookies laid out to cool on the baking rack. Tyler had watched the white film darken and take on colors and shapes, and he had felt something change inside him.

  His mom’s looking at him. “So everything worked out?”

  What does she want him to say, that this was a big day, a day like no other? It hadn’t been that way. It had been an average day, filled with average things. It had, in fact, been less than that. “He said he’ll show me how to use my film-developing bag,” he offers, and this seems to be the right thing to say. She sits up a little straighter. She turns to Albert.

  “How’s Sugar doing?” she asks, and Albert brightens. “Oh, she’s become a real hunter. You should see what she brings home.”

  Later, Tyler’s on the patio looking through his telescope. His mom and Albert sit in the kitchen behind him. They can’t see him, so he tilts the telescope down. The first time Tyler used his telescope, his dad warned him to keep it focused on the sky. It only made Tyler wonder what would happen if he didn’t. So when his dad went inside, Tyler lowered the telescope and the house all the way behind theirs had leaped into view. There had been a family there eating dinner. Nothing interesting until the mom and dad got up and left the table and the older brother had punched the little brother in the arm. That was the first time that Tyler had realized there were things to see in people’s windows, but only when they didn’t know someone was looking.

  Holly’s house is dark, everything impenetrable, gray on gray. Is she even home? “I miss Rosemary,” Albert says softly.

  “Oh, Albert. I know you do. She was a wonderful person.”

  “I loved her. I loved her so much.”

  “I know you did.”

  “You think I made the wrong choice?”

  “I think you made the brave choice.”

  “I couldn’t say no to her. I’d have done anything for her.”

  “I know.”

  “She was in so much pain.”

  “It was terrible. She wasn’t herself.”

  “I just miss her.”

  “We all do.”

  Is Albert crying? He risks a glance behind him, but Albert has his back to him. All Tyler can see is the wavering line of Albert’s shoulders and the thin hair combed across his head. His mom sees him and her expression changes. He puts a blank look on his face, letting her know that he didn’t hear anything. Her face clears and she stands to put the kettle on.

  He’s up in his room, printing out his pictures, the stiff piece of paper slowly scrolling up, revealing Holly’s face inch by inch, when his mom raps on the doorframe. “Hey, Ty. You brushed up?”

  He yanks the photograph from the printer and slides it into his desk drawer. “Uh huh.”

  “It was nice to see Albert, wasn’t it?”

  The next photographs are sliding up, the ones he took the night before. He can’t stop them now. The paper will get jammed and then his mom will want to help unstick it. She’ll see all his pictures and look at him with a puzzled frown. When did you take these? she’ll say.

  “Maybe we should ask him to come every Tuesday night. What do you think?” She’s looking through his old pictures, the ones he took over the summer. He keeps the secret ones in his bottom desk drawer. “These are wonderful, honey. You should show these to your teacher. I’m sure he’d love to see them.”

  He doesn’t answer. He’s staring at the picture that’s rolling up from the printer.

  “Your dad told me that Detective Watkins talked to you the other day. I don’t want you to worry about anything she said. It doesn’t mean anything, okay? You know your dad and I will protect you.”

  It’s the shot he took leaning out the window of the boathouse, the one aimed down into the water. There’s something there, something that doesn’t belong.

  “Ty?”

  His mom’s right behind him, looking over his shoulder. He moves in front of the printer. He can’t tell her. It would be the end of Holly. “I’m out of sunscreen.” This will make her leave fast.

  “Oh no. Are you sure?” She goes right to the bathroom and he hears the cabinet open. “You’ve got one tube left,” she says, coming back into his room. “I don’t know how I lost track. I’ll order some more right away.”

  “Okay.”

  She reaches up to brush back his hair. “Love you.”

  Go, go, go. “Love you, too.” He shuts his bedroom door behind her, trying not to slam it. She’s standing on the other side, waiting to hear the lock click, and so he does this, grabbing the metal latch and twisting it hard.

  It’s after midnight before he hears the television go silent downstairs.

  A quarter moon hangs above the treetops, precisely cut and glowing, looking like a decal someone had flung up there that had stuck. He pedals hard down the path.

  The headlamp on his handlebars lights up a branch lying across the path, and he swerves to avoid it. His tires hiss against the asphalt. The trees stand tall all around him. The sound of his own hard breathing is the only thing he hears. The trees break apart and there’s the big flat river. The path ends in pebbles.

  Now that he’s here, he’s scared. One o’clock in the morning. The dead of night. The expression had confused him the first time he read it. He’d corrected it aloud to his mother: The alive of night. She had looked at him with such love that he’d felt it shine all the way through his skin and into his bones.

  He leans his bike against a tree and crunches across the shore toward the boathouse. The boards creak beneath his shoes. He won’t think about what’s waiting for him. He’ll just do it. He switches on the flashlight. Cobwebs leap out at him, the brown-gray planks. An insect swoops out of nowhere and he rears back. Then it’s gone. He leans out the window to aim the flashlight beam into the yellow-brown water. The light jitters over a cloud of small insects hovering above the water, shines on the dark shape of a moving fish. So it had been a shadowy trick, the light slanting in a certain way and making things seem real that aren’t.

  Then something thin and pale drifts out into the water below, curls a little, then retracts, vanishing from view.

  He stares, not wanting to see it, but seeing it nonetheless. He waits, and it reappears. Strands of long golden hair, Amy’s hair, sweeping back and forth with the rolling current of the river.

  Miles away, but really only two, there’s a gas station. He knows what these are. He’s seen them on TV. He’s been in the car when his mom’s refueled, huddled under his blanket, heard the clatter of the gas cap being twisted off, smelled the pungent reek of gas. He tells himself he’ll recognize the line of pumps and the building standing behind them. It will all feel familiar. He follows the pulsing dot on Google Maps that represents his halting progress as he pedals to the second dot. When the two dots merge, he looks up.

  It’s a big building, all glass and light. Structures arch beside it, underneath a bright blue roof. Cars whiz past. This is a big road. He’s never crossed a road this big before.

  He stands back among the trees, well back. He’s clammy with sweat. Nothing about this feels familiar. Nothing about this is right. So many cars, their headlights carving out tunnels of light. He wants to turn around and go home, wake his mom up and tell her everything. But he’s not a little kid anymore.

  The phone booth is tucked along the side of the building. But there are cars everywhere. The building has big windows. It glows with light. It throbs with it. He doesn’t have his meter with him. He can’t get near it. This is what happened to Yoshi. She knocked her mask aside as she reached up for something and now she’s sick.

  Everything has a rhythm, a rise and fall. The sun, the moon, the tides, the school bus, even the reporters on his street. So he counts, cars coming from one direction, cars coming from the other. He loses track and counts again, sticking out his fingers one by one. All he needs is one Tyler-size space.

  He finds one and marks it. He tells him
self to be patient, that it will come again. The second time it shows up, he’s across the street, running hard and not stopping to look. He’s on the grassy stretch and around the side of the building when headlights bounce on the wall in front of him. He feels the heat sweep across his shoulder blades. The door opens, releasing a blast of music. The door slams. Will the driver come over to investigate? No, the footsteps crunch away.

  He fumbles the receiver off the hook and presses 911 with his gloved fingers.

  “Nine-one-one. Please state your emergency.”

  Maybe he’s wrong about what he’d seen. Maybe it had been pale grass growing in the mud.

  “Please speak up, sir.”

  “Amy.” He mumbles, pitches his voice low. He’ll growl the words to this stranger on the other end. “That girl who’s missing? She’s in the Scioto. She’s trapped under the boathouse.”

  He bangs the receiver onto the hook. His heart is an animal.

  Amy hadn’t been afraid of the wolf, but the wolf had gotten her anyway.

  EVE

  Tyler’s quiet, his head bowed as he stares at the laptop opened in front of him on the cool, dark patio. No, he mumbles when she asks if he needs her to pick anything up for his photography class. No, when she offers to stop by the library and pick him up some more books. I don’t care, when she suggests switching sunscreen brands to one that Dante’s mom recommended. He just shakes his head when she suggests taking a walk. His toast sits untouched on the plate, his hot chocolate cooling in the mug. Her misery seeps through this house, infecting everyone in its path.

  The chairs are damp with dew. Mosquitoes hover. “We should get a screened tent.” Eve swats away an insect, searching for a bright jewel, something to make her son smile or look intrigued.

  Melissa’s not talking, either. She’d closeted herself in her room with Brittany the afternoon before, where they’d talked in low voices and stopped when Eve rapped on the door to offer them a snack. No, thanks, Mrs. Lattimore, Brittany had called out, leaving Eve to wonder what was keeping her own daughter from replying.

  “Did you do your homework?” Eve asks.