Undone

  I couldn’t imagine her rescuing me, like Janelle had, in more ways than one.

  After Eli had been shot and I went to her house, it was pouring rain, late at night. I went through the backyard to see if the back door was unlocked. I needed to talk to someone, which meant I needed her. The kitchen light was on, and she was sitting at the table, crime-scene photos and her father’s paperwork spread out in front of her. She was trying to solve everything. I needed that. I needed her to solve me.

  When she saw me, she pulled me in, and I kissed her. I let everything go and I kissed her.

  In that moment, I felt at home.

  I loved my family, and I didn’t want to leave them again, but no matter how much I tried to pretend this was normal, it wasn’t. This life felt more fake than the one I’d left.

  When I couldn’t take it anymore, I stood up. “I’m not feeling that great. I’m going to head home,” I said.

  I offered Stacee my hand. “Thanks for the drink,” I said.

  She laughed and gave me a hug. My arms didn’t fit around her right. “Anytime,” she said.

  “How are you going to get home?” Derek asked as I started to head out.

  “I’ll walk,” I said over my shoulder. I used to walk home all the time. I never would have thought I’d miss that. Derek called after me. I turned and held up my hands the way we used to do when we were kids and there was something we didn’t understand. It was usually when our parents were doing something stupid, but it applied here. I didn’t understand what I was doing here, and I needed to leave.

  When I turned around again, I bumped into a guy in a Windbreaker. “Sorry,” I said as I moved around him. He said nothing.

  “Hey, Ben, wait up!” Derek called after me.

  I turned and waited for him.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m just tired.”

  It was a lie and he knew it. “Didn’t you like her?”

  “I did.” She just wasn’t Janelle.

  “What is it, then?” Derek asked.

  I didn’t answer, and he punched me in the arm.

  “What was that for?” I asked.

  “You never used to be so quiet,” he said with a laugh. Then he sobered. “Just talk to me, man.”

  “There’s a girl,” I said, getting into the car.

  Derek got in and started the engine. “Back there?”

  I nodded. “She’s just in a different league.”

  “Hot?”

  I smiled. “Yeah. And smart and fearless. Just . . . everything.”

  “I get it,” Derek said. “You need some more time. Don’t worry, though. We’ll find you a girl here.”

  I couldn’t bear to tell him that he didn’t get it. Not even a little.

  I didn’t want another girl. I just wanted Janelle.

  At home, I flung myself on the couch and turned on the TV. Programming was more regulated here, which meant less reality TV, which I didn’t mind, but also just less entertaining TV in general. I watched the news a lot because it made me feel like I knew something about this place. Even if that was just an illusion, it made me feel better.

  Without looking, I reached for my notebook on the coffee table. I wanted to remember to tell Janelle what I’d realized at the bar. Maybe I had known it all along, just subconsciously. That could have been why I stood there when the portal had first been opened and thought that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through it.

  The notebook wasn’t there.

  I sat up and moved the magazines around on Derek’s coffee table. Not there.

  I looked under the couch. Not there.

  I checked the kitchen in case I’d accidentally carried it over there. Not there.

  I checked inside the couch cushions. Not there either.

  Finally I found it on the floor under the TV stand. I must have set it on the floor instead of on the edge of the table like usual.

  “Try not to kick my stuff around!” I called to Derek as I sat back down.

  “What do you mean? I haven’t kicked any of your stuff.” He swatted at my head as he passed the couch.

  “Not on purpose.”

  “Not by accident, either,” he said. “I watch where I’m going.”

  I waved the notebook over the couch. “I wrote in this when I woke up and set it down. Now it’s under the TV stand. How did that happen?”

  “You must have kicked it. I haven’t been over there all day.”

  I sat up and turned around. He was making a sandwich, since we didn’t eat at the bar. What he said made sense. Why would he have been over here? He got up and we went to Mom’s before work.

  Yet it had to be him, because this was important to me. I wouldn’t have kicked it and not noticed.

  I only ever put it on the floor at night before I went to sleep.

  “Someone else must have been here,” I said.

  Derek laughed. “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you the maid comes once a week.”

  I looked at him. He was kidding. “No, I’m serious.” I scanned the room, trying to see if anything else was out of place.

  “So am I,” Derek said. “No one has been in here, kicking your diary around. Relax.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t believe him.

  I didn’t say anything to Derek after that, but I paid more attention to my surroundings. I kept my eye on the cars parked close to the apartment, the garage, and anywhere else we went. I looked at the faces of the people we passed and recognized the ones I saw too often. I memorized where I set things down when I left and noted where they were when I came back. Suddenly it was obvious.

  I was being followed.

  The next three days were the same. The tan sedan showed up and parked across from the garage only three minutes after Derek and I got there, and it sat there all day. Then it had followed me, three cars back, when I left the garage.

  The real question was who was inside.

  “Knock it off, would you?” Eli said.

  I pulled my eyes away from the window. We were in a diner. I’d chosen the seat in the back corner where I could sit with my eyes on the door and keep watch for the people following me outside at the same time.

  “It’s just some generic town car that belongs to someone who works near the garage,” he said. “They’re not here.”

  I didn’t say anything. I already knew his opinion on the subject.

  “Trust me. No one is following me, and I’m public enemy number one,” he added.

  The papers hadn’t left him alone since we’d been back. Everyone had known about his “abduction.” His father and his position had made sure of that. Reid and I were more like an afterthought. Some people knew, sure, but no one really cared about us. Now that Eli was back, they wanted the details. Who was responsible, what happened, where had he been, how was he back? He told his mother and the military the truth, or at least most of it, and they’d crafted a public statement that was mostly garbage and released it to the public. Everyone wanted more, though. They wanted to hear directly from Eli, and whether it was conscious or not, they wanted to direct some of their hostility at him for what happened when he disappeared.

  No one needed to follow him, though. Photographers were camped outside his house. They took pictures of everything he did. He’d barely left the house in three weeks. Just getting out tonight had apparently been a covert operation.

  “Here, you can have this,” Eli said, pushing a phone across the table.

  It was a prototype of the new Samsung phone that everyone wanted. It was supposed to come out in three weeks, and people were already setting up tents in front of the stores. I didn’t have a phone, so Eli had taken it upon himself to rectify that. Since his stepfather was some big shot at Samsung, this is what I got.

  I put it in the pocket of my hoodie, and I waited. We’d seen each other every day for the past seven years, and now that we were home, we hadn’t seen each other for almost three weeks. When he showed up a
t the garage, he was jittery, unable to stand still. I knew he needed to talk.

  “It’s fucking awful here.” Eli shook his head as he said it. It was ironic to think how hard we had worked to get here, and now we were completely dissatisfied with everything. That whole metaphor about trying to push a square peg through a round hole. That was us. We’d been round when we left, but we’d been over there too long, and somehow that had sharpened our edges.

  “It’ll get better,” I said. I didn’t necessarily believe that, but it was what he needed to hear.

  “I just can’t believe my mother. She’s a completely different person, cleaning the house and cooking every meal. It’s like she’s out of some 1950s sitcom, and those kids . . .” He leaned into me. “I’ve done the math. She must have fallen into bed with this guy days after my father was shot.”

  I’d also done the math. Not just for his mother, but for my father, too. He’d at least waited a little longer, but after losing us and after everything here went to hell, they’d both chosen the same coping mechanism. They started over. They left every bad memory, including us, behind.

  “She wants to send me to some prep school up north and enroll me as a freshman so I can go to Officer School when I graduate. She thinks that my becoming an officer in the city guard would have made my dad happy. Can you believe that shit?”

  I could believe that. His mom was right. It would have made his dad happy. He was all about military service. I was also pretty sure it would make the new prime minister of the Republic of California happy. Society here was stable, but people weren’t exactly prosperous. I doubted it was just Derek musing about what it would be like if it went back to the way things had been before Eli disappeared, and now that he was back, who better to step into the shoes of his father. Eli falling in line like a good soldier would keep him alive.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Eli said. “I didn’t even go to class during my first three years of high school at Eastview. I’m not going to fucking start over and go to some prep school full of dipshits.”

  “So don’t. Talk to her. Tell her what you want to do instead.”

  He shook his head, but then he turned away and looked out the window.

  “What?”

  “I want to go back,” he said, turning to look at me.

  “Go back . . . ?”

  “I know it’s bat-shit crazy,” he added. “But don’t you miss it? It was the three of us against the world.”

  “But there’s only two of us now.”

  Eli shook his head. “There’s Janelle,” he said quietly. “Look, I’ve been meaning to tell you I’m sorry for all the shit I gave you about her. She came through in the end. Don’t you miss her?”

  “Of course I do.” My voice came out harsh, but I didn’t care.

  “I even miss her,” Eli said. “Not like you do, but I miss the normalcy of Eastview and the anonymity of everything. I miss the parties and being able to go wherever we wanted and not having to worry about the city guard or the fucking reporters. I even miss Roxy.”

  That made me laugh. “All you ever did was complain about how clingy she was.”

  “Maybe I don’t miss her exactly,” he said. He frowned and picked at his fries. He didn’t look at me. “Or maybe I do. I don’t know.” He kept talking, trying to puzzle out his feelings, but I was distracted. A lone guy came into the diner. He sat at the table closest to the front door, facing me. He ordered a cup of coffee but didn’t drink it. Something about him looked familiar. Like maybe I’d seen him before somewhere else.

  I purposely dropped my napkin and leaned down to pick it up. Then I leaned into Eli. “They’re here. Directly behind you by the front door.”

  “What are you, some kind of fucking spy?” He laughed, but he looked behind him anyway. He shook his head. “It’s a guy having coffee.”

  “Look at his shoes. They’re military issue.”

  “Maybe it’s one of the city guards on his day off,” Eli said, leaning back. “Who would want to follow you? Tell me that and I’ll stop thinking you’re a paranoid freak.”

  “What if it’s IA?” That was the only thing I could come up with.

  “They’d be following me, too,” Eli said. “Besides, what would they want with you? They got their man.”

  I didn’t know. That was the problem. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Eli stood up. “Will you think about what I said? About going back?”

  I nodded. I didn’t need to think about it, not really. I wanted to go back. I just needed to figure out how to tell Derek and my mother that I wasn’t going to stay. “You should give it some time,” I said. The last thing we needed was to go back and have him change his mind.

  “I’ve had three fucking weeks inside a house with my mother and her new family to contemplate it,” he said. “I want to go back.”

  “Then we’ll go back,” I said, and I meant it. “I just need some more time.”

  We walked out. As we passed the guy with his untouched coffee, I recognized him. He’d been at the bar where Derek had taken me. I’d bumped into him on my way out.

  I made a split-second decision and pitched my weight forward and stumbled. I had to reach out and grab the corner of his table to keep from falling.

  “Sorry about that,” I said.

  “What the hell was that?” Eli said.

  “I tripped,” I said as I stood up.

  I followed my best friend outside. I didn’t tell him about the way the guy’s hand had reached into his jacket almost instinctively as I’d fallen toward him. Probably for some kind of weapon.

  I had to figure out who was following me and what they wanted.

  And if they were a danger to the people I would leave behind.

  We went a week before I saw the man again. I wasn’t any closer to figuring out who was following me. At least not with any kind of concrete evidence.

  The phone Eli gave me buzzed against the coffee table, waking me up. It was 3:47.

  I grabbed it. There was a message from him.

  MEET ME?

  I though about saying no or even just not answering and pretending I slept through it. I was tired, and I had to work in a few hours. But I knew it could be important. I texted back: WHERE?

  His reply was instantaneous: PLAYGROUND.

  I knew what he meant. There was an old playground behind the elementary school we went to as kids. We used to all go there all the time: me, Eli, Reid, and Ian. Sometimes our moms would take us and stand around and talk. Sometimes we would go by ourselves. It wasn’t far. I told him I’d be there in about fifteen minutes.

  I kept my head down when I left the apartment building. I pulled my jacket tightly around my body even though it wasn’t that cold. The night was eerily quiet. The street was empty. Buildings I passed were dark.

  I made it four blocks before I heard them.

  A set of footsteps behind me.

  I didn’t look back. They were a distant echo, the kind of thing I could only hear because everything else was so quiet. But when I reached the intersection, I stayed straight instead of turning left toward Eli and the playground.

  I kept walking. I didn’t change my pace, and judging by the sound of the footsteps, neither did whoever was following me.

  I walked for two more blocks until I saw the gas station in front of me. It was lit up like some kind of beacon, and there were a few cars parked in the lot. I wasn’t sure exactly what my plan was, but I headed toward it.

  Filling up his car with gas was a guy from the city guard, still in uniform. He’d probably just gotten off duty.

  I went inside. My first thought had been maybe there was a back door I could leave through. Maybe I could sprint down a side street or something, cut through some yards and backtrack to the playground. But after I walked down an aisle to the rear of the store, I realized there wasn’t another exit.

  There was, however, a kid leaning up against the cash register reading a book. He was probably a year
younger than me, but he was about my height.

  “Hey, you work here?” I asked.

  He looked up at me like I was some kind of idiot because of course he worked there.

  I leaned over the counter. He had a red baseball hat and a jean jacket back there. I made my offer.

  He stared at me. “You’ll give me fifty dollars if I walk around back to the bathroom and lock myself inside for five minutes?”

  “And we switch jackets,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  I moved around the counter, away from the window, and took off my jacket. He put it on.

  “Just keep your head down,” I said.

  He held out his hand, and I gave him the money.

  When he was gone, I put on the jean jacket and his hat. I bent the rim so that it curled around my face and shaded my eyes, then I went outside. I walked right to the guy from the city guard.

  “You like your job?” I asked.

  He stood up straight, like he was sizing me up. He was blond and probably Derek’s age. His arms were as thick as my head.

  I tried my best to stand in a way that said nonthreatening. “I’ve been thinking about enlisting,” I added, remembering what Stacee had said about Ian.

  The guy relaxed. “The six to three shift isn’t the best one, but the job has nice perks.”

  “Oh yeah, like what?” I said.

  I didn’t listen to his answer. A tan sedan pulled into the lot, and a guy stepped out of the shade and got into the passenger seat. The car idled there.

  They weren’t watching me, though. They were facing the bathroom.

  “Thanks, man,” I said to the guard, cutting him off. “I’ll definitely look into it.”

  Then I left. I didn’t walk back the way I had come. I took the long way, cutting down several different side streets to make sure I was alone.

  When I finally got to the playground, Eli was waiting. He was sitting on one of the swings. “What took you so long?”