Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (16 page)

“I think there are certain people who change the way time moves. Cornelia and Teo are people like that. I’ve only known them for two years, but really, in reality, I’ve known them for a long, long time.” Clare paused. “What do you think?”

“I think Einstein couldn’t have said it better himself.” Dev took a breath. “But you might want to consider another possibility.”

“Did I say you could poke holes in my theory?” Clare folded her arms. “Okay, what? What’s the other possibility?”

“Maybe it isn’t Teo and Cornelia who change the way time moves.” Dev bought himself a couple of seconds by squinting down at the chessboard, pretending to consider his next move. Then he looked up into Clare’s expectant face and shrugged. “Maybe it’s you.”

He ended up telling her everything. All of it: Mr. Tripp, the Berkeley psychologist, their sudden cross-country journey and seemingly random relocation, the genius-kid school applications, his mother’s current craziness (although he took care not to use the words “crazy” or “clinically insane”), and finally, most importantly, most surprisingly, his theory about his father.

Except that Dev wasn’t really surprised, even though he’d absolutely decided to keep that theory a secret and even though, under ordinary circumstances, Dev was an ace secret keeper. It hadn’t just slipped out, the theory; he had set his sights on it from the second he started to tell Clare about himself and then had talked deliberately toward it, and when he said the words “I think my dad’s here. Someplace nearby. I think he’s why we came,” Dev didn’t follow up with so much as an “oops,” not even a silent one.

Later, as he tried to put into words how this had happened, the phrase that popped into Dev’s head first was “truth serum.” Being with Clare was like drinking truth serum. But as soon as he thought this, he recalled that all the truth serums he’d ever heard of, maybe even including the Harry Potter potion Veritaserum, were sedatives. They depressed the central nervous system and interfered with judgment. As Dev talked to Clare, he felt the total opposite of depressed (he didn’t feel all that sedate either), and, if a person could be a fair and objective judge of his own judgment (which Dev had to admit was a biggish “if”), he believed his judgment had been just fine. In any case, he’d stand by it until hell froze over.

So then the next word that came to Dev was “trust.” Probably trust serum did not exist, but if it did, Dev knew that it wouldn’t depress your central nervous system or anything else. A single sip of trust serum would zip around your brain flipping switches (maybe in your cerebral cortex? your limbic system? Dev was a little fuzzy on neuroscience) until you felt so flooded with lucidity and certainty that you would happily roll your most carefully guarded secrets into a ball small enough to place in someone’s palm, and then you’d do it: you’d give it away.

Telling Clare was right. It just was.

Three seconds after he finished telling her, though, Cornelia walked into the room and said, “Your mom called, Dev, to say it was time to come home. I’ll only agree to release you, though, if you solemnly vow to come back soon.”

“How soon?” demanded Clare. “Tomorrow soon?”

Dev looked at the floor and smiled. “Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”

“Right,” said Cornelia. “And Dev and Lake have dinner plans.”

“Do they have dessert plans?” asked Clare.

Cornelia looked carefully from Clare to Dev, then said, smiling, “I most sincerely hope not.”

For a second, no one said anything, and then Cornelia said to Dev, “Toby’ll take you. He’s outside right now popping your front wheel off.” At Dev’s look of alarm, she added, “Which is one of the few things the boy knows how to do. When it comes to bikes, snowboards, skis, surfboards, my baby brother’s your man. That’s about it, though. So, do we have your solemn vow? You’ll come back soon?”

Dev raised his right hand and slapped his left onto an invisible stack of Bibles.

After Cornelia left, Clare turned to Dev, took hold of his forearm, and whispered, “I bet your theory about your dad is right. But you need to come back so we can figure it out.”

Dev focused on the sensation of her hand on his arm, memorizing the pressure of each finger individually. “I’ll come back. But what do we need to figure out? I mean, as a theory, it’s pretty figured out, right?”

Clare gave her head a small, impatient toss. “Not the theory. The theory’s solid. Your dad’s here, somewhere.” She squeezed his arm. Her face was inches from his and so smooth it looked like someone had polished it. “The question is: what are we going to do about it?”

“Yeah,” Dev nodded, “I’ll come back.” Dev was nodding, he was answering her, but all the while, Clare’s last sentence was bouncing around the inside of his head and his heart was pounding in his chest and he was thinking how weird it was—good weird, miracle weird, even—that one word, one puny pronoun could be the single best sound he’d ever heard in his life.

If it hadn’t been for Clare’s phone call, Thanksgiving would have been a complete bust. Thanksgiving and the day after that and the day after that, a line of busted days stretching who knows how far into Dev’s future. Because Lake said no. What was more infuriating was that she didn’t just say no, that they couldn’t go to Cornelia’s for dessert on Thanksgiving Day, she said they couldn’t go because she’d
invited
someone to have dessert with
them
. Mr. Pleat from next door, a regular-looking man who’d said hi to Dev a few times, talked to him about stuff like his bike, the weather. After Lake’s headache had faded, she’d ended up having a long conversation with Mr. Pleat over the low rail that separated their back deck from his. He’d always struck Dev as a nice enough man, but suddenly Dev and every atom of Dev’s being wished he’d spontaneously combust. His name was Rafferty.

“Rafferty Pleat?” Dev had practically spat. “That name’s totally fake. The guy’s probably in witness protection.”

“If he is, he didn’t mention it,” replied Lake, coolly. “He’s a contractor. He rehabs old houses, and his wife threw him out six months ago and they’re currently embroiled in a hideous legal battle because she wants to move to Florida with their four-year-old daughter, so you might consider directing a little compassion his way.”

Man, his mom could fast-talk when she wanted to.

“Besides,” she added, “some would say that a person named Deveroux Tremain doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to calling other people’s names outlandish.”

Dev could have pointed out that (a) he hadn’t exactly named himself, and (b) at no time had he ever used the word “outlandish,” but instead he said, in his most self-satisfied voice, even though he wasn’t feeling satisfied at all, “So now you have to explain to Cornelia that you can’t come to her house for dessert because you’re inviting someone else for dessert when you already told her that you wanted the two of us to spend Thanksgiving alone. Have you thought about that, Mom?”

Apparently, Lake had thought about it because the next thing she did was dial Cornelia’s number and tell her precisely that in a warm, friendly voice and with a heavy emphasis on Mr. Fake-Name’s sad aloneness that made Dev want to throw up.

If five minutes after Lake had hung up with Cornelia, the phone hadn’t rung, Thanksgiving would have sucked. If Dev had come out of his room to eat dinner at all (and he probably would have, since the image of his mother eating turkey and stuffing all by herself would have been impossible for him to swallow, no matter how furious he was at her), the relentless grimness of the meal would have been eclipsed only by the relentless grimness of dessert with Rafferty Pleat. But the phone did ring, and while no phone call could have erased the Molotov cocktail of maternal craziness and outrageous injustice Lake had thrown at Dev, this one came pretty freaking close. It was Clare.

She said, “Two questions. First, can you come over Saturday?”

“Yes,” Dev said without hesitation. Lake and ten herds of wild horses could not stop him from going. He waited for the second question, thinking please please please let her say something like, “Have you been thinking about me as much as I’ve been thinking about you?” which would have embarrassed the hell out of Dev, but in the best possible way.

“Second, do you know how the buses work around here?”

“Uh, no,” admitted Dev. “But I can find out. Why?”

“I looked in the phone book,” said Clare, “and I have two words for you.”

“What are they?”

Her voice rose and rippled with excitement. “Dev, I really think this could be it!”

“You do?”

“I do. I truly, truly do.”

“Tell me.” In the short silence that followed, Dev held his breath, wanting to hear her breathe or cough, not wanting to miss anything.

Then, slowly, with a pause between the words, Clare told him: “Tremain Cycles.”

“What will you do if it’s him?”

The bus was smotheringly hot, and the driver had obviously skipped the day they’d covered gradual stops and starts in driving school, but Dev didn’t mind. If he and Clare had been racing over the plains in a covered wagon, pursued by ravenous wolves, he wouldn’t have minded either. But the bus was nice, sun falling across them, the world outside a long blur of brown, green, and blue. Clare sat next to him, so close that a piece of her hair, like a shining ribbon, rested on his shoulder, and Dev held as still as he could, as though the hair were a dragonfly, some small, light thing he didn’t want to startle away.

Her question caught him off guard, and he realized he’d almost forgotten where they were going.

“I mean,” she continued, “I was wondering what you want to happen. Or if you want anything to happen.” Her voice sounded worried, so Dev turned and looked at her. She was fiddling with the zipper of her jacket.

“I guess I’m not sure what I want,” he said.

When her eyes met his, they were worried, too. “But you want to be here, right?”

“Right.” He smiled, but she didn’t smile back.

“I mean, you want to do this, don’t you? Because that bike shop, it was right there in the phone book, in the business white pages, and you didn’t find it. After I got off the phone with you on Thursday, I thought about that, how if you didn’t find it, it could only have been because you didn’t look for it.”

“Oh,” said Dev, “I see what you mean.” He saw what she meant, and what he wondered was why he hadn’t thought about that before. For days and days, he’d walked around with his theory, not doing anything, but as soon as Clare had told him about the bike store, he’d wanted to go. He’d wanted to look for his father.

“I started to worry that”—Clare broke off, blushing—“that maybe you only came because you wanted to see, or you wanted to be with…” She stopped talking.

“With you.” Dev just said it. He knew it would change everything, but he said it anyway.

“Because we could have done something else,” Clare said, quickly. “We still could.”

Dev considered this for a while. Then he said, “Here’s what I think.”

“What?”

“I think I always wanted to look for him, and maybe if I hadn’t met you, I would have told Aidan everything. I thought about telling him, but I never did. Maybe I would have, though, whenever it felt like the right time, and he would have gone with me. I don’t know.” Dev ran his hand through his hair impatiently.
Just talk,
he thought,
just say what you have to say.

“I wanted to find him,” Dev said, slowly and quietly, “I just didn’t want to do it by myself.”

Suddenly, Clare smiled and said, teasingly, “Maybe you were waiting for me to show up.”

Dev found himself looking down, then, and there was Clare’s hand, her long fingers and short nails. First he was looking at it, then he was holding it, such a natural transition that a full four seconds passed before he comprehended what he’d done, but then his heart started ticking like a time bomb, and a giant black wrecking ball of panic came swinging toward him fast. He felt like the kid in the museum who doesn’t even realize he’s reached out and touched the painting until he hears the alarm and feels the guard’s big hands on his shoulders.

But before he could pull his hand away and go shooting down a bottomless pit of apologies and humiliation, Clare’s hand was shifting inside his, and then their palms were pressed together, their fingers interlocked—Clare, Dev, Clare, Dev, Clare, Dev, et cetera—and nothing, not one thing was wrong with that.

Out of the corner of his eye, Dev saw that Clare was looking straight ahead with a small, thoughtful smile on her face. He didn’t turn to her. He didn’t speak. For the rest of the ride, Dev sat there holding Clare’s hand and thinking,
Clare’s hand is connected to the rest of Clare,
which felt like a revelation, like the best news he’d ever heard.

The bike was a beauty. Fifteen pounds of aerodynamics and carbon fiber, a composite so unimaginably light and strong that they made satellites out of it. Dev traced the lean, seamless silver tubing with his eyes, thinking of all the science, all the work and imagination that had gone into making this single perfect object. Dev didn’t want to own the bike; he had no use for it, but as he looked at it, he felt a piercing, nameless longing filling him, and suddenly he thought about Plato, whom Ms. Enright had just had them read. Maybe Dev’s soul remembered this bike from the realm of pure forms; maybe this bike made his soul homesick.
Oh, shut up,
Dev told himself.
Could you be normal for, like, two seconds?
But the longing didn’t go away.

With effort, Dev shifted his gaze off the bike and swept it slowly over the bike shop. Bikes stood in rows and hung gleaming from the walls and ceiling. It was hard to tell the employees from the customers, but eventually, Dev figured out that the guys wearing oversized, long-sleeved white polo shirts were salespeople. Saleskids.

“Let’s go,” he whispered to Clare, “they’re all about eleven years old.”

Clare drew in her breath and nodded toward the back of the store. A tall, brown-haired man was lifting bikes onto one of the wall racks. He wore a white shirt, too, but he was older, maybe forty, and he moved like a person in charge.