And Then Everything Unraveled (5 page)

My brain seemed to stop working, which meant I couldn’t come up with a witty reply, or even a reply that would prove I was capable of doing anything other than standing frozen in place with my mouth gaping open. But I did manage to memorize the details, especially his eyes, which were the same gray-green as the Pacific on a cloudy morning.

Then he was gone, disappearing up and around the turn of the stairs. I could hear his footsteps above and the stairwell door swinging shut behind him.

I don’t know how long I stood there before my brain started working again, but it was definitely longer than I’d care to admit. And once I’d recovered, I almost wished I hadn’t, because that’s when the embarrassment kicked in.

The good news, I guessed, was that I’d forgotten about crying, and also about that chilling shiver of doubt. And it’s not like my tongue had been hanging out of my open mouth or I’d drooled or anything. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t mortified by my utter lack of cool.

I didn’t have tons of experience on the romantic front—in fact, it would be a stretch to say I had
any
experience—but
that had mostly been by choice. After all, I’d known nearly all of the guys at home since Palo Alto Montessori, so even the ones who weren’t completely obsessed with hacking into top secret computer networks or becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg were hard to cast as romantic leads. Still, I’d always considered myself to be at least semicompetent socially.

But I’d just found out how pathetically wrong I was about that.

I was still a bit dazed as I returned the phone to my bag and went to find the science lab. I followed the registrar’s directions up one corridor and down another, and I eventually reached the right door.

The teacher must have been expecting me, because as soon as he caught a glimpse of my face through the door’s glass window he waved me in with an eagerness that was sort of alarming. He had thinning brown hair and there was chalk dust on his tie and sports coat.

“You must be Cordelia!” he boomed.

“Actually, it’s Delia,” I said. “Just Delia.”

“Well, Just Delia—ha ha ha—I’m Dr. Penske. And I must say, this is a real honor. Class, do you know who our new student is?” He didn’t wait for anyone to answer. “Delia is the daughter of T.K. Truesdale, who was not only a Prescott alumna but the genius behind TrueTech. I’m sure you’ve all heard of TrueTech.”

Rows of blue-blazer-wearing students looked back at him, mostly with indifference. He was undaunted by the lack of response, nor did it seem to occur to him that T.K. might be a sensitive topic just now.

“If Delia has even half of her mother’s talent, she’ll be the star of our class,” Dr. Penske blundered on. “Now, let’s see. Who still needs a lab partner?”

“I do,” volunteered a red-haired girl sitting at a table right up front.

“Perfect,” said Dr. Penske. “Delia, Natalie’s one of our best students, but I’m sure she’ll have plenty to learn from you.”

I doubted that I’d be able to teach her much of anything, especially not without T.K. around to tutor me, and I wasn’t thrilled about the front-and-center placement, but I did my best to match Natalie’s eager smile and slid into the empty seat beside her.

Dr. Penske resumed his lecture, and I even took out a notebook and pen. But I had a hard time concentrating in science under the most ideal circumstances—there was no way I could possibly focus at a time like this.

I mean, it wasn’t like my mind hadn’t already been crowded. Between worrying about T.K. and processing the move and everything that came with it, I’d had plenty to occupy my thoughts.

And now, just in case things hadn’t been bad enough, the
Stairwell God had taken up residence, too. My head would probably explode if I added anything else to the mix.

So what was left of the class period slipped away with me mostly staring into space—even doodling was beyond me at that point. Meanwhile, Natalie took page after page of notes. As far as I could tell, she was writing down what Dr. Penske said verbatim, including the articles and prepositions, and pressing down with such force that the words were practically carved into the paper.

By the time the bell rang, she’d already used up one pen and was well on her way through the ink in a second. My notebook, on the other hand, was as pristine as if it was still on the shelf at Staples.

“What do you have next, Delia?” asked Natalie as we packed up our things. “Lunch?”

“I think so,” I said, checking my schedule.

“Me, too. We can go together if you want.”

“Sure,” I said. “That would be great.” No matter how little a person cares about making new friends—and I fully intended to be back lunching with Erin and Justin in the not-so-distant future—nobody wants to brave a foreign cafeteria alone.

At West Palo Alto High, the cafeteria was in its own wing of the school, and when the weather was good, which was almost always, we’d take our trays out to the picnic tables in the adjacent courtyard. In Manhattan, space was scarce, which meant that the Prescott cafeteria was crammed into the school’s
basement. Windows set high in the walls offered the occasional glimpse of feet walking by on the sidewalk above.

Natalie and I collected our food—there was sushi and lamb ragout and beet risotto but we both got grilled cheese—and found places at one of the long wooden tables. Based on the way she’d been sitting alone in class and Dr. Penske raving about what a good student she was, I’d assumed Natalie was the shy, bookish type.

But it turned out that Natalie was about as shy and bookish as an untrained puppy. And it also turned out that her interest in me was more than basic kindness or the need for a lab partner—she was fascinated by T.K. and pretty much anything else that had to do with Silicon Valley, and she questioned me with the same fierce intensity she’d used to take notes in class.

“Is it true your mom started TrueTech out of her dorm room in college?” she asked. “I’m dying to go to Stanford. MIT’s my backup. What do people think of MIT on the West Coast? I heard the venture capitalists like Stanford grads better. The Google guys went to Stanford, didn’t they? Do you know them? Have you been on their plane?”

On the drive uptown and without a hint of sarcasm, Patience had informed me that Prescott was the “preparatory institution of choice for the offspring of New York’s power and social elite.” So I’d expected kids at Prescott to be more into things like politics and fashion—or at least sneaking into clubs.

But sitting with Natalie was exactly like hanging out at home, though Erin and Justin already knew how many other things I’d rather talk about than the Google guys and their plane. Natalie even started telling me her start-up ideas and asking about how to attract investors.

“Are there a lot of people here who are interested in that sort of thing?” I asked.

“What sort of thing?”

“Start-ups and technology and stuff like that.”

“I wish,” she said mournfully. “Most of the kids here couldn’t care less about accomplishing something. In fact, most of the kids here couldn’t care less about anything. There’s the drama crowd, and the jocks, and the stoners, like at any other school, but the popular kids or the in crowd, or whatever you want to call them, don’t think it’s cool to be into anything, except maybe acting bored and spending their parents’ money.” She lowered her voice. “I have my own name for them.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

She glanced around to make sure nobody else was listening. “I call them the Apathy Alliance.” Then she did a double take, startled by something she glimpsed over my shoulder. “Speaking of which, guess who’s heading this way. I wonder what they want.” Disdain mixed with apprehension in her tone.

I twisted around in my seat and saw a tall, slender girl strolling toward us with a matching tall, slender guy. They
both had nearly white-blond hair, and there was something familiar about the cool blue gazes that looked me up and down.

“Cordelia?” said the girl. Her voice sounded hoarse, like it was rusty from lack of use.

“Delia,” I said with a bright California smile. “I go by Delia.”

“I’m Gwyneth. Your cousin. This is Grey. With an
E.
He’s also your cousin. We’re both seniors here.” She spoke in a languorous monotone, completely stripped of inflection, and she managed to get the words out with the barest minimum of facial movement. Grey didn’t speak at all.

I kept the smile going, trying to make up for their lack of enthusiasm with my own. “Hi. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Our mother wanted us to introduce ourselves and make sure you feel welcome,” said Gwyneth as Grey stifled a yawn.

I said I did, but mostly I was busy trying to remember which movie had the villain whose superpower was putting people to sleep.

“Good. Then I suppose we’ll see you this weekend in Southampton. Come on, Grey.”

“Are they really your cousins?” asked Natalie as Gwyneth and Grey strolled out of the lunchroom.

“I guess so,” I said. Inwardly, I was busy wondering how the same gene pool had produced T.K., Charley, Patience, the ennui twins, and me. There must have been some major mutations along the way.

“Well,” she said, “Gwyneth is a charter member of the Apathy Alliance. So is Grey.”

“Then who’s the president? Or whatever an alliance has?” I asked.

“He’s more than the president,” said Natalie. “He’s like the founder and the king and the Grand Pooh-Bah all rolled into one. If the Apathy Alliance were a galaxy, he’d be its sun. Your cousins would be orbiting around him.”

“Who is he?” I asked again.

“Quinn,” breathed Natalie. And while she might not be a fan of the Apathy Alliance, she did say his name with a certain amount of awe. “Quinn Riley.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be on the lookout for Quinn Riley.”

“Oh—” said Natalie, startled by something else over my shoulder.

And at the same moment, a teasing male voice spoke close to my ear.

“No need to be on the lookout,” the voice said. “Quinn Riley, at your service.”

I didn’t even have to turn around. I knew exactly whose gray-green eyes I’d see.

Sure enough, Quinn Riley and the Stairwell God were one and the same.

I did myself proud all over again, paralyzed brain and partially open mouth included. But this time I did manage to cough up some words. Well, one word. Here’s what I said:

“Thanks.”

Like he actually meant he was at my service, and like I was actually thanking him for it.

Then the bell rang, and Quinn Riley was gone, strolling away in what I soon learned was the signature gait of all Alliance members, though he did do it particularly well. The other kids parted before him like he was Moses and they were the Red Sea.

Left to my own devices, I probably would’ve sat there, staring at the door he’d walked through, until school shut down for the night. But Natalie was in my next class, too, and somehow she got me up and to the right classroom. At least, physically she did. My mind was in a different place entirely. I just kept replaying the same two scenes in my head on a continuous mental loop: first, Quinn and me in the stairwell, and
second, Quinn and me in the lunchroom. And with each new playback, I had to mentally kick myself all over again.

There I’d been, practically face-to-face with the perfect guy—and I’d blown it, not just once but twice. It was like seeing that perfect wave rolling in, the type of wave most surfers only dream about. But instead of owning it, I’d let it wipe me out completely.

So I continued to obsess all the way through Modern Western Civilizations, and then some more as I drifted through precalculus. And the strangest part was that I don’t usually obsess. I mean, nothing in Palo Alto had prepared me for such an immediate crush, much less for anybody like Quinn, but I’m mostly pretty good about picking myself up and moving on.

Either way, it wasn’t until precalculus was nearly over and the mental playback/kicking myself count had reached double digits that the obsessing screeched to a halt and I finally had an epiphany. Suddenly, it all became perfectly clear.

The problem was much bigger than my pathetic reaction to an almost total stranger—it was my reaction to
everything
that had happened in the last week that was so wrong.

The cold ugly truth was that I’d been letting circumstances and chance own me. Which was the opposite of what my dad had taught me, and what my mother had taught me, too, though in a non-surfing way.

Ever since Thad and Nora told me the news, I’d been allowing other people to make my decisions. And the whole time, all
I’d been doing was feebly trying to explain that T.K. wasn’t dead and waiting for something to change, or someone to come to the rescue.

When what I should have been doing was taking my destiny into my own hands. There was absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t find my mother myself.

Last period was drama, but since it didn’t start until the following week I had the hour free. And for the first time in days I knew exactly what I should do.

The Prescott library was on the top floor, stretching across both of the buildings that housed the school. I bypassed the shelves of books and rows of study carrels and made for a bank of computers along one wall.

I hadn’t fully formulated a plan of attack, but I figured if I gathered as much information as I could about my mother’s trip, I was bound to come up with some ideas. And it didn’t take long to realize how little I knew about where she’d been going and what she’d intended to do. Patience wasn’t the only sister whose name didn’t fit—T.K. was involved in so many causes that it was hard to keep track, and she was pretty zealous about them all.

The obvious move would be to get in touch with Thad. He’d always insisted on knowing where T.K. was, in case anything urgent came up—he’d definitely have the itinerary for this last trip. He’d also probably have a good sense of what she was
trying to accomplish, since T.K. had funded the excursion through TrueTech.org, the company’s philanthropic arm.

But I was hoping that if I kept a low profile where Thad was concerned, he’d forget about the whole training-me-to-take-over-the-business thing. And given that he was the first person to insist that T.K. was dead, reaching out to him was far more likely to result in another lecture about denial than anything remotely helpful.

No, Thad was a nonstarter. But T.K. was enough of a public figure that there would be lots of information about her on the Internet, and some of it would have to be about recent events. So I pulled up a browser window and Googled T.K.’s name.

And while I knew my mother was pretty famous, at least in tech circles, nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.

On the screen was a long list of blue links, and each link led to an obituary.

I felt like all of the air had been sucked out of the room. The text went blurry, and there was a ringing noise in my ears. Without conscious direction, my hand reached out to the mouse, and the browser closed, but the images still seemed to linger on the screen.

No matter how confident a person is that she’s right and everyone else is wrong, Google returning several hundred links that seem to agree with all the people who are wrong isn’t the
most comforting experience. If anything, it’s the sort of experience that can make a person hyperventilate.

Which meant it was several minutes before I felt like I could breathe normally and face the computer again. But this time around I was more careful. I opened up a fresh browser window and went directly to TrueTech.org.

T.K. believes in keeping overhead low, and this was particularly true for the company’s philanthropic activities—she always said she’d rather spend money on causes than fancy offices and staff. As a result, things like updating the Web site sometimes fell through the cracks, since nobody was paid to do it. And I was in luck—it looked like the site hadn’t been touched since my mother left. There was a link right off the home page to a page that was all about the Antarctica excursion, like it hadn’t even begun yet.

The stated objectives were to “Document the impact of global warming on Antarctic ice shelves and explore other environmental occurrences in the area,” and the schedule called for the participants to meet up in Buenos Aires and catch a flight to Ushuaia, a port in Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of Argentina. From there, they would board a small ship called the
Polar Star,
which was supposed to sail down and around the western side of the Antarctic continent, stopping every so often to do whatever tests they had planned and returning via New Zealand. The entire trip was scheduled to take nineteen days.

This was all still sort of vague, but at least I had more to work with. I made some notes in my otherwise-empty notebook, and then I went back to Google and typed in
Polar Star.
And that’s when things got seriously weird.

According to the articles I found, the ship had sent its SOS signals on the morning of its seventh day out, from a point in the Amundsen Sea roughly between Thurston Island and Cape Dart. After that, it went radio silent. Meanwhile, the first rescuers arrived at the spot only an hour later and there was nothing at all to be seen, just like Thad said. The ship had vanished into thin air.

But it turned out that it wasn’t easy for a ship to simply vanish, and especially not that quickly.

The general consensus was that the
Polar Star
must have hit submerged ice, which is what happened to a cruise ship called the
Explorer
in 2007. But the
Explorer
took nearly twenty hours to sink, which gave everyone on it plenty of time to evacuate by lifeboat. Even the
Titanic
had taken three hours to go down, which had been more than long enough to escape—there just weren’t enough lifeboats for people like the guy played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

And I knew there was no way T.K. would’ve set foot on a boat without enough lifeboats. She wouldn’t even release the parking brake on the Prius until everybody’s seat belt was buckled.

So, given the lack of an actual sinking ship or lifeboats or anything, the hitting-ice-and-sinking theory seemed pretty weak.

I also found a lot of blog posts from people who had theories of their own. There was one guy who was convinced that T.K.’s ship had fallen prey to a band of marauding polar pirates. Another must have been watching too many old episodes of
The X-Files,
because he chalked it up to an alien abduction, an Antarctic version of the Bermuda Triangle, or some combination of the two.

These people might not be all that reliable, but a couple did point out something interesting. There are hundreds of satellites orbiting the earth, not just for beaming down TV to places that can’t get cable but for taking pictures and measurements, too. Some of these satellites are dedicated to scientific research—observing changes in the earth’s climate, for example. Others are used for less aboveboard activities, like spying on rogue nations’ nuclear facilities and stalking celebrities.

Anyhow, according to the bloggers, there was a set of satellite images of the Amundsen Sea right before the
Polar Star
sent out its SOS signal, and the ship could be seen clearly, perfectly fine and sailing along without any problems. The next set of available satellite images for the area was from only a few minutes later, and the ship should still have been visible.

But the
Polar Star
was completely gone—like it really had
vanished into thin air. There wasn’t any disturbance in the water to indicate a sinking ship, nor was there any smoke or debris from an explosion.

The bloggers used this as evidence to justify their random theories. Of course, they also believed in things like polar pirates and the Bermuda Triangle.

Still, I wanted to see those satellite images for myself, from the original sources. After all, ships don’t just evaporate, complete with their crew and passengers and equipment and everything. Especially not when one of those passengers was my mother.

And I couldn’t be the only person who thought there had to be more to this story than we’d been told.