“Okay, little car, you are protesting roads. They are death traps for animals. They are environmentally unsound impervious surfaces that cause runoff. I understand this. But could we protest in the summer?”
I try to back up again.
One of my tires falls into the gutter thing on the side of the road.
My whole body shakes. I try to move the car. It lurches to the side.
Okay. Two of my tires are now in the gutter on the side of the road.
“Yoko! Do not do this to me!”
Wait. I’ve named the car. Why Yoko? I have no idea. Yoko was always there for John, unlike the way the Subaru is here for me.
“Come on, Yoko. Let’s imagine there’s no gutter. It’s easy if you try. No empty air below your tire. Above it only car.”
I put it in reverse. I put it in forward. I try to rock the stupid car back and forth. I shut off the Green Day. Maybe Yoko doesn’t like Green Day?
“I hate Maine!”
I smash my fist against the steering wheel.
The horn blares, probably scaring all the little squirrels in the woods. I don’t care. I hit it again.
“Stupid, stupid Maine,” I mutter and bang the steering wheel another, time and then another until red marks start showing up on the sides of my hands.
Things are so not good. The sun is going down. It’s freezing out. My car is all stuck and tilted like everything in the world is somehow horribly skewed and wrong, which I guess it is.
I mean, I am in Maine in a car stuck on ice.
I am beating up Yoko, which is just so wrong.
And I can’t use my cell phone.
Why? I forgot to charge it.
Could life be worse?
I try to move again. The car lurches but slides right back.
The air screams of burned-rubber smell.
How ridiculous.
“I hate ice!”
I smash my head against the steering wheel and that’s when I start to cry, bawl really. I cry and cry and cry. Because I’m stuck on the ice and my dad is dead and my mom sent me here, without her, where there are people who seem normal but are capable of suddenly believing in pixies, and I miss Charleston and warm air and flowers and roads that have no ice on them.
I used to be the type of person who was always in motion, always doing things, writing letters, running through the streets, laughing with my friends, moving. Always forward. Moving.
Then I got stuck. My dad died and the only words I hear are death, deadly, stillness. To never move. No forward. No backward. Just stuck. Gone forever, like my dad, a blank screen on the computer, an old photograph in the hall with no spirit in it, an ice patch on a road to nowhere, nothing. Just gone.
The sun is setting and it’s only five o’clock.
How do people live here? It should be against the law to live anywhere that the sun sets so early. If I were a dictator I would totally make that law. Since I am not a dictator, I stumble into the cold with one of the flares from Betty’s emergency kit and light it. I check out under the tire. I get back in the car.
Someone knocks on Yoko’s window.
I jump in the seat and scream. I probably would have hit the ceiling but I’m wearing my seat belt. I cover my face with my hands, horrified. Someone raps on the window again. Finally, finally I get enough nerve to look.
Nick Colt stands next to my car, all casual, like standing in the ditch is part of his everyday routine. I put down the window.
Cold air rushes in. I shiver.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, stunned. He saw me scream. He looks like he thinks it’s all funny, his cheek twitching like I’m some big joke.
“Is that any way to greet your rescuer?”
He smiles. His smile is perfect.
“I’m sorry. I’m just— Oh, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I shake my head. “I’m freaked out. I’m sorry.”
“Obviously.” His voice is steady and low.
I wipe at my face. “I’ve never driven on ice before. Back home I’m a perfectly good driver.”
“I’m sure you are.”
“I am. I am a very competent person.”
“I’m sure.” He has a dimple on his left cheek when he smiles.
I force myself to look away from the cute boy, look away from the dimple. “Really. And I don’t usually scream when people knock on my window, either.”
I start to open the door but he puts out both his arms to hold it shut.
He glances at the woods up the road a bit. “Stay in your car, Zara.”
“We’re not going to be able to get it unstuck. You’ll have to give me a ride to my grandmother’s house.”
“It’s better if you stay in the car.”
I glare at him. Things shift inside me. What a bossy jerk. “I can decide if I should stay in my own car or not.”
“Let me try to push you out. It’s better for both of us if you can drive your car home,” he says, looking up the road again.
This time I follow his gaze. My gasp rips through the quiet. A shadow leaps off the road and disappears into the trees. Oh my God. “Was that a man up there jumping into the woods?”
Something flashes in Nick’s brown eyes. Anger? Will? I don’t know. God, I don’t know anything. “It was nothing. Put up your window. Put your car in neutral. I’m going to try to push you out.”
“But the man up there. He could help us?”
“There was no man up there.”
His jaw tightens.
I swallow. “And if he wanted to help he wouldn’t be jumping into the woods, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay,” I say. “Fine. But there was a man.” My voice comes out angry and raw and then I add, “You aren’t strong enough. This is a heavy car. It’s a Subaru.”
“I know it’s a Subaru, Zara. Just let me try.”
He glances up at the woods again. The tension in his shoulders eases a bit and then he reaches into the car and touches my cheek. His voice comes out much softer. “You were crying?”
I jerk my head away, late, just a little too late. His fingers feel like electricity against my cheek, like a magnet I can’t be near.
“I don’t cry,” I lie, and start to put up my window.
His voice stops me. “It’s okay to cry. It’s frustrating getting stuck, and you’re probably not used to ice.”
“I wasn’t crying.”
He shakes his head, obviously not believing me, and then walks around to the back of the car and yells, “Now. Put it in forward.”
“Okay, just don’t hurt Yoko.”
“Yoko?”
“My car.”
“You named your car Yoko? As in Ono?”
“You have a better name?”
“How about Subaru?”
“I’m shifting!” I shift the gear and the entire car lurches up and onto the road. I press the brake, amazed. The car is not tilted anymore. I’m not stuck. Yay!
Nick trots up to the car, wiping his hands on his jeans. He bends down and smiles all cocky. “Told you I could do it.”
His eyes aren’t so hard.
“Thank you,” I say. I bite my lip and look away and then look back. The center of my palms tingle. Why does he have to be so handsome? “You didn’t get hurt or anything, right?”
“Do I look hurt?”
He looks good but I’m not about to say that.
I keep my foot pressed down on the brake and put the car in park.
I manage to pull myself together. I pivot as best I can, putting my hands on the windowsill, and face him. He’s so cute. He helped me. I have to try to be nice.
“Thank you,” I say. “I wouldn’t have wanted to abandon Yoko and walk home.”
His eyes shift again.
“Zara,” he says. “You ever need a ride you can call me, or Issie. Okay?”
His hands move so they are on top of mine, completely covering them. They’re really huge and warm but they make me shiver somehow. I
don’t move away, though. I don’t want to.
“I don’t have your number.” My words come out slow, stunned.
“I’ll give it to you. It’s my cell.”
He writes it out on an old gas receipt and hands it to me with a flourish. I take it.
“What are you? Mr. Protector of New Students?” I laugh when I say it so it doesn’t come out sounding mean.
“Not all new students.”
I try not to melt inside. “Just me?”
He cocks his head.
“Maybe?” His voice trails off. He’s searching up the road. “You really saw someone go into the woods up there?”
I nod. “Didn’t you?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he wipes his hand through his hair.
I suddenly remember how to be polite, like the semi-Southern lady I am. He did move my car, after all.
“Thank you,” I say, “for moving my car and everything.”
He smiles at me again and out of the corner of my eye I think I see something up the road. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand not knowing. I smash open the door and dash up the side of the road, toward where I saw the man.
“What are you doing?” Nick yells after me. “Zara!”
“I saw him again.” I keep running, looking along the ground. Nick flies after me.
“What are you doing?” he says again.
“Looking for evidence,” I say and stop. I point at the ground. There, on top of dried-up mud and ice and twigs, are tiny specks of gold powder, like glitter, but even smaller. I stagger backward into Nick. “Oh my God.”
He squeezes my shoulders and then lets go to bend down and touch the powder. “It’s like dust, but gold.”
“Pixie dust,” I say. “How can it be pixie dust?”
“Pixie dust? What do you mean?”
“Devyn and Issie, they have a theory about some stuff that’s been happening to me. There’s this guy who keeps showing up. They think he’s a pixie. I know it sounds stupid. Pixie kings are supposed to leave dust like this.”
He brings his glittering finger closer to our faces. My face warms from his breath. It’s minty. His finger trembles, just the tiniest tremble. “Like this.”
“Yeah.” I step back and search his face to see if he thinks I’m ridiculous. “The whole pixie aspect of it is kind of whacked, but it could be a serial killer or someone who is completely mental. It could be his calling card or something. I don’t know. I don’t like it.”
“Me either.” He tugs on my sleeve. “Let’s go back to the car.”
“You don’t want to go see if he’s in there?” I gesture toward the woods.
“You don’t have boots on.”
“Oh. Right.” We walk back to the car and that’s when I see it on the back of his jacket, little gold flakes . . . like dust.
He follows me home to make sure I’m safe. In the driveway, I park Yoko and tell it, “John would be proud.”
I turn off the ignition and check out the scene. I did not make it in to register the car, but I think under the circumstances this is totally acceptable. It’s not every day you start believing in pixies or psych yourself out about opening the door and walking twenty feet to your grandmother’s house.
“Paranoid, Zara. You are being paranoid.” Telling myself this does not make it feel any better.
The sun has almost completely set. I open the door and start across the ice toward the front door. Grandma Betty has left on the porch light and has spread some grains of blue chemical stuff across the ground so the ice dissolves in little clumps, which was very nice of her. I should do that tomorrow, help out, you know?
Something cracks a twig in the woods just beyond the driveway.
I squeal and fast-walk to the porch, lunging up the steps in a totally ungraceful and wimpy way.
I slam the door open and lock it behind me.
I check the lock.
Okay, let’s face it, Maine is creepy. That’s all there is to it. Creepy, creepy, creepy and too damn cold.
For a second I wish that Nick Colt had followed me all the way up the driveway. He’s cute and he has that whole I’m-going-to- keep-you-safe thing going on. Not like there’s anything to be scared of. What do pixies do? They frolic in flower gardens, right?
Only this guy points.
I walk over to the window that looks out at the driveway, the woods, the lawn. “I’m being ridiculous.”
I stare out into the dusky lawn. The woods at the edge of it seem full of secrets, full of unexplained things.
I never should have read all those scary books when I was little. What was my dad thinking keeping them in the house? Pain wells up in my heart and then the ache comes.
My dad. It is so hard to just think of him.
I turn away from the door and sit on the couch where he used to sit. I put my face in my hands and rock back and forth a little, but I do not cry.
No more.
Betty crashes out of the kitchen, bringing the smell of burned meat with her.
“I murdered the pork chops, just fried them to death,” she says.
“That’s okay.”
“I have Campbell’s soup . . . chicken noodle.”
“Cool.”
She eyes me. “Okay. What’s going on?”
“Tell me about the boy who went missing last week. What happened?”
Betty turns to glance out the windows. “It’s almost dark. You should be back before dark. You don’t know these roads. They’re dangerous.”
“I was at Issie’s.”
“Oh, that’s good. She’s a sweet girl. Jumpy. Her parents work at the bank.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah . . . I kind of sort of went off the road a little bit. I didn’t hurt the car! I swear. Nick pushed me out.”
“Nick?” She wipes at her face with the moose dish towel and motions for me to follow her into the kitchen. “Nick Colt?”
I nod.
“You didn’t get hurt? Were you speeding?”
“It was ice.”
She takes it all in. “He’s a good boy. Cute. Don’t sigh at me. He is.”
“Tell me about the boy. Please?”
“He was out alone at night. He was an eighth grader. He didn’t show up in the morning.”
“So what? Everything is all business as usual?”
“No. We had search parties. The state police came in.” Her shoes slap against the wood floor. “You’re getting all motivated again. Maybe Maine has already been good for you.”
I decide to ignore her psychoanalysis. “Do the police have any leads?”
She opens the cabinet and pulls out two microwavable soup containers. “No.”
“And what do you think?”
She pops the plastic top off the containers and starts prying off the metal lids. I wait while she puts it all into two bowls and plops them in the microwave for sixty seconds.
Finally she says, “I think he ran away.”
I wait. She turns around and leans against the counter, like it’s too hard to keep standing up. “Okay . . . a long time ago this happened. Almost a couple decades ago. Boys turned up missing. No girls. Just boys. One a week. Always at night. It was in the national news.”
The timer on the microwave counts down the seconds, getting closer and closer to zero.
“Mom and Dad never told me that.”
“They wouldn’t. It’s not something anyone around here wants to remember.”
“And now you think it’s happening again.”
“I hope to God not.”
“But it might be.”
The microwave beeps. She chucks the pork chops into the trash can. “It might be, but he may have just run away.”
“Seriously, why did Mom send me here? A boy went missing.”
“People don’t go missing in Charleston? I bet the murder rate’s a lot higher there.” She swallows. She pulls in air through her nose like she expects she’ll never breathe again. “She thought she was doing the right thing. It
wasn’t easy for her, Zara. You weren’t acting alive anymore. She thought a change of scenery would help.”
“Was I that bad? Really?”
She stares out the window above the sink, past the old glass insulators she collects. “Yes.”
Right after dinner my cell phone goes off while it’s charging and I rush over to the counter to get it, even though it’s probably just my mother, but the display says it’s a Maine number.
I flick it open. “Hello?”
“Hey, Zara. It’s me, Ian.” His voice sounds all happy.
“Hi, Ian.” I lean against the counter. Betty makes bug eyes at me like she’s all excited that a boy is calling me. I refuse to look at her.
“Hey. Sorry to bother you. I hope you aren’t eating.”
“Nope. We’re done.”
“Good. I was just thinking about how hard it must be for you to be in a new town and everything . . .”
I bump my butt against the counter because it’s hard to be still.
“It’s not that bad,” I lie.
“Well, anyway, I was thinking maybe I could show you around after cross-country tomorrow? You know, give you a grand tour of the excitement that is Bedford, Maine.”
“Oh. Tomorrow?”
Betty perks up and starts hustling around, taking dishes off the table.
“Say yes,” she whispers.
“I have to go register my car tomorrow,” I say, which I do.
“Oh,” Ian says.
“I’m sorry.”
Betty yanks the faucet to turn on the hot water and groans.
“I could come with you,” Ian says.
“To the DMV?” I am stunned.
“Yeah. It’s boring as hell in there, but it’s better with someone else.”
“Sure. Okay.” I don’t know what to say. “If you don’t mind.”
We hang up and Betty asks me who it was.
“This guy named Ian that I met at school. He wants to go to the DMV with me.”
She hands me a plate to dry. “Well, there’s true love.”
I snort.
She says, “He’s the Ian who is a runner, right? The point guard of the basketball team?”
“I don’t know. I know he runs and he’s in a ton of clubs.”
“Classic overachiever. He comes from an old Bedford family. His father lobsters. His grandfather logged. They have hardly anything; live in a glorified shack, basically. It’s amazing to see what that boy has done.”