Cold Kiss (15 page)

I nod, and wipe the tears away with my free hand. Calm. I can do that.

We’re halfway down the block when he glances sideways at me, wincing. “A squirrel, huh?”

He gets an elbow in the ribs in reply, and I don’t feel a bit guilty.

“I really thought he would be here.”

We’re across the street from Danny’s house, and it’s nearly three now. The sky is slowly losing color, beginning to bleed out the black, but the streets are still sleeping.

The Greers’ house is closed up for the night, blinds drawn and doors shut, and in the fading dark it looks sad. As if it’s faded in the last few months, too. Even the yard looks shabby in its bare fall clothes.

Gabriel puts his arm around me, but I shrug it off. I know it’s wrong—it’s the middle of the night and he’s here to help me, but standing across the street from Danny’s house with another boy’s arm around me is wrong, too. Wronger, and I can’t even remember if that’s a word, but it’s still true.

“It’s the first place I would have looked,” Gabriel says, and if his voice sounds a little strained, I’m not going to apologize. Not right now anyway.

“What if he’s inside?” I whisper, squinting across the street. “Or, I don’t know, on the back porch?”

“If he was inside, the whole house would be lit up, don’t you think?” He glances at me. “I mean, your dead son walks in…”

“I know.” I rub my temples in exhaustion. I don’t want to think about the look on his mother’s face if that happens. What would it be? Horror? Relief? Joy? Confusion? All of the above?

“Let’s go look, okay?” Gabriel’s hand in the small of my back is just enough motivation to get me across the street. We start up the driveway with our heads down, and I don’t even know what we’re looking for when Gabriel veers left across the dry grass.

I see it then, though. Scuff marks in the grass, as if something has been dragged through it. And then footprints on the porch steps, which stop at the top before turning around again.

“He was here,” I whisper, and I glance down the block as if I’ll see him walking away.

“He didn’t go in,” Gabriel says, and he sounds worried. “He went … somewhere else. Come on.”

He pulls me off the Greers’ lawn and down the block to the corner. I’m suddenly so exhausted, I sit down abruptly, landing roughly on the curb. The number of places Danny could have gone seems endless. Becker’s, Ryan’s, school, even the café…

“Let me see,” Gabriel says, and grabs my shoulders, shaking me gently until I look up at him.

“See what?”

“Where he might have gone, places that mean something to him,” he says, and stares into my eyes.

I try to relax, to open up and picture the places where Danny and I have been together, places where Danny hung out with his friends, anything. I feel the jolt when Gabriel sees the site of the accident. His fingers tighten on my shoulders as the memory of the tree flashes through my mind, the scarred trunk still scorched, pieces of the hood embedded in the bark.

“I can take you there,” I say when he lets go. “We have to look everywhere, though. He could have gone to Ryan’s house or—”

“Νo.”

I blink. “What do you mean, no? Come on, Gabriel, we can’t just sit here. I can’t just sit here. Whether you want to come or not, I have to find him!”

He takes one hand as I start to stand up, pulling me down again, and I can’t shake free. Power pumps through me, urgent and angry, an unfocused hum that needs to be released, but Gabriel says, “Shhh, listen.”

I take a deep breath and try to relax, so his voice will cut through that awful buzz.

“It’s after three. You need to go home.” I shake my head, ready to argue, but he keeps talking, his strong hand clenched firmly around mine. “This is bad, okay? But I can find him, or at least keep looking. I mean, it’s going to be bad enough if your mom already figured out you’re gone, but if morning rolls around and you’re not there?”

A new wave of nausea rolls through me then.
Mom.
I hadn’t even thought that far ahead, hadn’t thought of anything but finding Danny and getting him back to the loft.

Across the street a dog barks, and I nearly jump out of my skin. In the night silence, it sounds too close, and Gabriel and I stand up at the same time, moving into the shadow of a huge pine. The neighborhood is still asleep, but in the distance on Mountain Avenue I can hear the occasional car passing, and any minute kids with paper routes could start cycling up and down the streets.

“Go home,” Gabriel says, and winds his arms around me, pulling me close. “Go home and pretend to get up for school, and when you leave, call me. I’ll keep looking.”

I want to refuse, tell him it’s not his responsibility, that I can handle this on my own, but I can’t. I press my cheek to his chest and choke back more stupid, hateful tears. I can’t handle this on my own, and I’ve known it for weeks now.

“I’ll make this up to you.” The words are muffled into his hoodie, but when I lift my head to kiss him, I know he heard me.

When my alarm goes off at six thirty, I haven’t slept for even a minute. I’m so tired I feel sort of drunk, and I’m pretty sure adrenaline is the only reason I can move.

I’m sitting on the edge of my bed when Mom opens my door and sticks her head in, the way she almost always does.

“You up, kiddo?” She’s still in the old flannel shirt she wears to bed, and her pillow left a pink crease in one cheek.

“Sort of,” I manage to say, and study my bare feet until she closes the door behind her.

I rush through my shower—every time I close my eyes I see the empty loft, the confusion in Danny’s eyes when he tells me he can’t think, the horrifying image of him walking toward his mother, arms outstretched…

And now it’s daylight. Anyone could see him, this marble statue of a boy with dead eyes and cold, gray lips. I throw on jeans and my boots and pull on a ragged black hoodie over a dirty T-shirt, and my hands won’t stop shaking. I don’t know what’s adrenaline and what’s the power anymore—there’s too much of both, a constant pulsing hum beneath my skin.

My trig book breaks into a pile of dead leaves when I pull it out of my backpack, and when I try to do my hair, it goes purple and blue by turns until I give up. I have to calm down, but if wishing could make it so, I would already be downstairs drinking coffee and pretending I’m heading off for school.

If wishing could make anything so, Danny would be up in the loft and I would be … I don’t know where. Asleep. In a coma. It sounds pretty good at the moment.

My phone rings just as I’m finally collecting my stuff to head down to the kitchen. I don’t bother to look at the display before I flip it open—it has to be Gabriel.

My hello isn’t even completely out of my mouth when I hear, “I found him.”

I’VE NEVER REALLY BEEN NERVOUS ABOUT THE whole meet-the-parents thing. I may dress sort of weird and have a lot of holes in my ears, but I’m little and polite and most of the moms I’ve met have never even blinked at me hanging out with their kids. Even Danny’s mom, who is sort of disgustingly sitcom normal in her sweater sets and khaki pants, loved me.

I’m terrified to meet Gabriel’s sister, Olivia, though.

Mostly I’m just plain freaked out to start with, since Gabriel had to walk all the way across town to the park to find Danny, which means Danny had to walk all that way, too.

To the place where he died, and from what Gabriel said on the phone, Danny remembers every minute of it now. Gabriel doesn’t want to get too close, and I don’t blame him, but he told me he can hear Danny from behind the storage shed where Gabriel’s waiting for me. He’s sometimes mumbling and sometimes shouting. Stuff about Becker, the car, that night.

Me.

When I stop to think about it, meeting Olivia is actually a lot less scary than seeing Danny is going to be, even though my hand is shaking when I knock on the door to their apartment.

She must have been waiting. The door opens a mere second after I draw my hand away, and the girl standing on the other side looks so much like Gabriel I blink in surprise. She’s older, yes, but her hair is the same cool, ashy blond, her eyes only a slightly deeper gray. She’s not as tall as he is, but she’s taller than I am, and concern has already bled into the tight line of her jaw.

I guess it’s better than suspicion.

“I’m Wren,” I say needlessly, and she nods.

“Come on in.”

Her hair is twisted into a careless knot on top of her head, and she’s still in faded sleep pants and a pink YOGA IS LIFE T-shirt. When the door is closed, she leans up against it and folds her arms over her chest.

“You do know how to drive, right?”

In theory
is probably the right answer to that question, but Gabriel assured me she doesn’t have the same gift he does.

I can’t make my mouth work, though, so I simply nod. She considers me for a long minute, her face pinched with worry. She looks kind, pretty cool, but it has to be a little weird to get a phone call from your kid brother at seven fifteen in the morning saying some girl is coming over to borrow your car.

“I don’t know,” she says finally, and pushes off the door to cross the room toward me. “You look like you’re about to jump out of your skin, he sounds like a truck ran over him, and someone needs to tell me what the hell is really going on here.”

“I know.” It’s a cracked whisper, and if she needed any more proof of my nerves, it’s right there.

“But he talks about you.” Her face softens then, on the way to a smile, and she reaches up to push hair out of my eyes and correct the slant of the green knit cap I pulled on over it. “And I trust him. I have to. He said it would be better if it was just you, so…”

I let out a shaky breath when she walks past me and digs into a big brown leather bag, coming up with the keys. She dangles them in front of me and shrugs. “Don’t crash it, okay? I hate riding a bike.”

I’ve driven a car—like, actually driven it on a street, not just started it or moved it five feet in the driveway—exactly twice. On a quiet Sunday afternoon early in the summer, and a Tuesday at dinnertime a few days later. Months ago, with my mom in the passenger seat, calmly reminding me to look in the rearview mirror and apply the brakes gently.

It’s Friday morning now, one of the busiest times of day in town as everyone heads to school or work. And I have to steer the little blue rust bucket Olivia owns all the way across town, on my own. Just starting the engine is enough to startle me, since the car growls like I kicked it and shudders into gear.

Perfect.

But I can’t let myself be nervous. I definitely can’t let my power drive me off the road, either, even though it’s a close call as I pull into the street and the car practically leaps forward like a bad dog on a leash. The whole thing seems to be vibrating, and I don’t know whether that’s normal, for this car anyway, or if it’s because my head is about to explode with nerves and power.

I don’t even turn the radio on as I steer toward town and then through it, trying not to go too fast or too slow, and once waiting so long at a stop sign that the man in the car behind me lays on his horn. I jolt forward into the intersection and realize I’m chanting, “Just breathe, just breathe,” like some demented broken record.

In the end, it takes about nineteen minutes longer than it should have to pull up to the entry to the park, plus two near misses with parked cars, a hellishly confusing traffic circle that actually makes me cry when an old woman in a Subaru gives me the finger, and one time slamming on the brakes so hard I nearly hit my head on the windshield. When I finally get out, I want to drop to the ground and pass out.

But I still have to find Danny, and I pull my phone out to call Gabriel as I break into a run on the wide, paved bicycle path.

“I’m here,” I pant as I jog farther into the park. It’s empty, too late for most runners and too far away from the playground for moms with little kids. The tree where Becker’s car hit is down behind the pond.

“Slow down.” Gabriel’s voice is tight and low. “He’s calm now, but you probably shouldn’t startle him. Right now he’s sitting against the base of the tree, and I’m behind that shed to your left. Shit, your right. Whichever.”

There’s only one shed, but Gabriel’s beginning to sound as strung out on exhaustion as I feel, so I just click off the phone and wind down into a fast walk. When I make my way around the sharp bend in the path, the road following along beside me, I notice the tree before I see Danny. It’s hard to miss, pointing up like a giant splinter, jagged now at the base.

Danny’s sitting with his back against it, but he’s facing mostly away from me, looking at the road. His long legs are splayed carelessly in the dirt, and his hands rest on the ground beside them, palms up as if he’s waiting to be given something.

An explanation,
I think, and shudder a little as I creep through the grass toward the storage shed twenty-five feet away.

Gabriel sags back against the thick vinyl siding when I come around the corner on the far side. “Hey. You in one piece?”

“More or less,” I say, and crawl around him to watch Danny, who hasn’t moved.

There are a thousand things I could say, probably should say, but as I sit back on my heels and stare at Danny’s sculpted, motionless profile, I can’t think of any of them. Relief is a hot, thick taste in my mouth, but dread coats it. If I can’t think of what to say to Gabriel, I have no idea how to even approach Danny.

But I have to. I have to lead him away from here and into that car and then … well, I haven’t gotten that far yet, but it doesn’t matter. The point is, he can’t stay here, even if I’m only now realizing that getting him into Mrs. Petrelli’s garage is going to be impossible without being seen. She lives on a busy block with lots of young moms and toddlers who are outside a lot, running around the yards in tiny little jackets while their moms drink coffee on porch steps. I can’t risk walking him down my street to cut through the yards, either—I have no idea if Mom would have gone home when she got the call from school that I wasn’t there.