Emmy & Oliver (2 page)

“I can never leave,” Maureen wept one night as I sat on the stairs, holding my breath in case anyone saw me. “I can never leave here, you know? What would we do if Oliver came back and no one was . . . ? Oh God, oh God.”

“I know,” my mother kept saying to her. “We'll stay with you. We won't leave, either.”

It was a promise that she kept, too. We didn't leave. We stayed in the same house
next door. Other neighbors left and new ones moved in, and all of them seemed to know about Oliver. He had become a local celebrity in absentia, famous for not being found, a ghost.

As time went on, it became hard to imagine what he looked like, even as the police age-progressed his second-grade school photo. We all watched an artist's rendering of Oliver grow up over the years. His nose got bigger, his eyes wider, his forehead higher. His smile wasn't as pronounced and his baby teeth morphed into adult ones. His eyes never changed, though. That was the strange part. The hopeful part.

We stayed and looked and waited for him to come back, as if our love was a beacon that he could use to light his way home, to crawl up the sides of the earth and back through his front door, his tag still sticking up in the back.

After a while, though, after years passed and pictures changed and false tips fell through, it started to feel like the beacon wasn't for him anymore. It was for those of us left behind, something to cling to when you realized that scary things could happen, that villains didn't only exist in books, that Oliver might never come home.

Until one day, he did.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I
remember it was a Thursday because I had gone surfing that afternoon. I always go out on Thursdays because both my parents work late those days, which makes it easier to sneak a surfboard in and out of my car. It had been soft that afternoon, the sky hazy and the waves no bigger than three feet or so, and I was rinsing off in the shower at the edge of the sand when I heard someone screaming my name. “Emmy! Emmy! Where is
she? Is she here?!” I looked up from the end of the path and saw my best friend Caroline tearing toward me.

Her hair was tangled, as tangled as mine after dousing it in salt water and sea air for a few hours, and she was dashing barefoot toward me, her shoes dangling from her hand. The whole beach stopped and watched as she hurtled down the hill, and I heard one surfer say to his friend, “Dude, she's
fast
.”

I stepped away from the water, my heart racing. Was it my parents? An accident? Where was our friend Drew? Oh God, it was Drew. Something had happened to Drew! “Em,” she said, and there was something scary in her eyes, wild and hopeful and terrified all at the same time.

I had never seen her look like that before and I probably never will again.

“Emmy,” she said. “They found Oliver.”

It's funny. You think about hearing certain phrases and you plan how you'll react to them.
They found Oliver.
And yet when you do finally hear the three words you've been too frightened to even think about, for fear of jinxing them, for fear that you might never actually hear them, it's like they aren't real at all.

“Emmy!” Caroline grabbed me by the shoulders and bent down so she could look me in the eyes, her grip so hard I could feel her fingertips through my wet suit. “
They found Oliver
. He's okay.”

“Caroline,” I said slowly. “You're hurting me.”

“Oh, sorry! Sorry!” She let go of my shoulders but stayed close. “Are you in shock? Are you okay? Do you need something with electrolytes?”

I shook my head. “They found him? How—?”

Caroline grinned. “Your mom just called me. You weren't answering your phone so she sent me to find you.” My mom knew what she was doing. Caroline is definitely the sort of person that you want to deliver news. Good or bad, she will rip that Band-Aid clean off.

“He's in New York,” she continued. “He's coming home.”

My knees were shaking. Maybe I needed something with electrolytes after all. “Who's in New York?”

“Oliver, Emmy! God, focus!”

“Can I—? Where's my phone? I need my phone!”

Caro was still jumping up and down as I ran up to my towel, digging around underneath it for my bag and finding my phone at the bottom. Seven missed calls and three texts from my mom:
CALL HOME NOW
, they all said.

“Did you tell my mom where I was?” I asked Caro, shoving my phone back into my bag and trying to get my wet suit off as fast as possible without taking my bathing suit along with it.

“No, of course not,” she said, then added “Here,” and offered me her shoulder for balance as I peeled off the lower half of the suit. “I said I thought you might be at the library and that's why your phone was off.”

“Good.” My parents would never approve of me surfing, which is why they could never know. I love them, but if they had their way, they would have constructed a suit for me made entirely of Bubble Wrap and cotton balls. I didn't want to be the kind of kid that snuck around and did things behind her parents' back, but I loved surfing too much to stop. So I just lied to them instead, which, yeah. Not exactly the best solution to the problem, but it was all I had.

“They might wonder why your hair's wet, though,” Caro said, interrupting my thoughts.

“We'll think up a reason in the car,” I said, finally yanking a dress over my bathing suit. Caroline grabbed my towel and my hand and we took off up the hill toward the car. It sounded like there were jets flying overhead, but when I looked up and saw nothing but a few low clouds, I realized that the sound was just the blood rushing in my head, pulsing to keep me upright and alive.

“They
found
him,” Caro whispered, and when she squeezed my hand, I squeezed back harder and came down from the clouds once again.

I quickly dumped my surfboard into the back of Drew's van before throwing myself in the backseat. Drew was waiting behind the steering wheel, frantically texting someone. His cheeks were flushed and he was wearing his soccer uniform. Drew used to be my best surfing buddy until soccer began taking up more of his time. Now he's on track to get a full scholarship to Berkeley, just like his older brother, Kane.

“Oh my God,” he said without looking up. “Can you even believe it?”

“Not really,” I said. “Can you?”

“Nope,” he said, his thumbs flying over the mini keyboard. “How are you going to explain your hair to your mom?”

“Think something up for me,” I said, realizing too late that my feet were covered in sand and silt and gravel. Now all that mess was smeared over Drew's floor mats.

Drew loves his van. It's actually not a van, but a restored 1971 tomato-red VW
camper bus. People actually take pictures with it, it's so beautiful, and it has lots of room for surfboards in the back. The van used to be his brother's, but after Kane went to college two years ago, he gifted it to Drew, like he knew that Drew was going to need it as a means of escape.

“Oh no!” I said once I saw the sand. “I'm sorry, Drew, I should've—”

“Who cares?” Caro screeched. “It's sand, not acid. Just drive, okay?”

“Wait,” I said. “
My
car. My backpack's in there, my homework. I have a quiz tomorrow!”

“Are you kidding me?” Drew backed the car up and the force of his acceleration smashed me into the seat. “Buckle up,” he said. “No one's doing any homework tonight.” When we were finally cruising down the road, he glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “Em, seriously, are you sure you're not going into shock? You look pale.”

“I already offered her electrolytes,” Caroline said.

“I'm fine,” I told them. Only it came out sort of high and squeaky and any moron with average vision could probably tell that I was not fine.

Caro reached over the backseat and grabbed my seat belt. “Here,” she said. “Drew's driving. It's a requirement.” She snapped it into place and then squeezed my shoulders. “Is this really happening?”

Caro and I have known Drew since kindergarten. Actually, half our school has known one another since kindergarten. It's one of those Southern California suburbs where few people move away from their pink stucco houses.

Here's something you must know about Drew before becoming his friend: he drives as if he's being chased by a carful of depraved, evil clowns. I took driver's ed with him in sophomore year, so I can tell you that he's always been like this. (I can also tell you that our driver's ed instructor had to renew his Xanax prescription after Drew's first on-the-road lesson.)

But when Drew's upset or nervous or excited, that's when he really lets it fly, and the day Oliver was found was probably the craziest driving I've ever seen from him. Caro kept one hand on her seat belt as he flew through a yellow light and when he hit a pothole, she yelped. “Drew, this van isn't exactly built to break the sound barrier!”

“Oh, relax, Caroline,” he said, and I knew he was using her full name just to annoy her. No one ever calls her Caroline. It's just too many syllables.

“I'd like to
see
Oliver before suffering from debilitating whiplash,” I told him, trying to loosen my iron grip on my seat belt.

“So how real do we think this is?” Drew asked.

He had a point. This wasn't the first time that Oliver had been “found.” The sightings had been intense at first, hundreds of calls pouring in to the hotline saying that they had seen a sandy-haired, freckle-faced seven-year-old in Omaha, Atlanta, Los Angeles, even Puerto Rico. The calls died down over the years, but every year or so, there was a ray of hope. A short-lived ray, but hope nonetheless, enough to live on for another year.

“Maybe real?” I said. “I don't know, I . . .” I trailed off, not really sure what to say.

Caro took over.

“Emmy's mom called me because Em wasn't answering her phone,” she said. “Something about a fingerprint. He was in a police station for a school field trip? I'm not sure. Anyway, it matched the one in his file and they went to arrest Oliver's dad at home. He wasn't there, but Oliver was.”

“New York?” Drew asked. “Really?”

“New York
City
,” Caro emphasized. “But here's the part that's bonkers: they still haven't found his dad. Apparently, he's on the lam.” Caro always liked the police lingo. I don't think she's ever missed an episode of
Law & Order: SVU
.

“Wow,” Drew murmured. “New York.” I didn't have to look at Drew's face to know what he was thinking. He would pretty much like to be anywhere else but our town. New York must've sounded like a dream.

We live in a tolerant community, so long as there's nothing to tolerate. So when Drew came out and announced he was gay last year, it caused a bit of what he called the “muffled kerfuffle.” Caro and I already knew, of course, but Drew's parents were a little . . . different. They were accepting at first, lots of “we love you just the way you ares” and all that, but to hear Drew tell it, the mood was heavier at his house. The silences longer, the words shorter. “They look at me sometimes,” he said one night when we were sleeping over at Caro's, his voice quiet in the dark. “And I can't tell if they like what they see.”

I could understand why Drew sounded wistful about New York.

“So Oliver's flying home, like, right now,” Caro continued. “He'll be here tonight.”

I glanced out the window as Drew turned right, all of us quiet for a moment. In our second-grade class picture, we were lined up by height in the middle row: Caro on the end, then Drew, then Oliver, then me. And then Oliver went away and there were just three of us, with no idea of how to make sense of our loss. And to make it worse, every adult was super nice in the months after Oliver disappeared:
“Ran your bike into my car? It's just a tiny scratch.” “Threw a ball through my window? Be more careful next time.”
It was unsettling. When the adults are full of indulgence, you know things are
really bad.

Drew swung a left and pulled onto our street. His normal routine is to careen until the last possible second and then spin a U-turn in our cul-de-sac before zooming into my driveway. You can imagine how exciting that is in a top-heavy VW bus. The first time my mom saw Drew zipping toward us, she said, “He
does
know that the street dead-ends, right?”

It was a fair question.

I have to admit, though, Drew knows what he's doing, and ten seconds later, he was pulling the parking brake as we eyed a caravan of news trucks and cameras. “Hello, hello, old friends,” Drew drawled when we saw them. “How long has it been?”

“Two years,” I replied, glaring out my window. After Oliver didn't show up to school that Tuesday ten years ago, the news cameras became a noisy cavalry for a few months. At first, everyone thought it was great. They were bringing attention to the case! Surely, someone would see Oliver and call the police and he'd come home in time for Drew's seventh birthday party. Caro and Drew and I used to draw pictures of Oliver and try to get the newscasters to film them, but mostly they just stood in front of Oliver's home and said things like
“This tragic disappearance has left a community shaken . . .
[dramatic pause] . . .
to its core.”