This Is How I Find Her (9 page)

I almost open my mouth to stop him when he says the word home, remind him that where we're going isn't really my house. My home is the tiny apartment on the other side of town with two names on the mailbox, written in a younger me's capital letters across a peeling piece of tape:
canon, amy and sophie
.

But I don't know how to explain that, so all I do is follow Uncle John out of the office.

Fourteen

In English class the next afternoon, the desks are back in small clusters, and Mr. Jackson has us sit with our groups from yesterday. James, Leila, and I settle silently into our spots. Mr. Jackson looks at each group sternly as he tells the class to quiet down. He doesn't have to look at us.

“This setup is just for a few minutes, so we can iron out some details about the projects. Then we'll get back into the usual rows,” Mr. Jackson says. Leila's sigh of relief is so full I think I actually feel her deflate next to me.

Mr. Jackson answers a few questions about the assignment and then passes out a sign-up sheet with presentation dates. The first one is next week, and suddenly all I can think is
I can't do this
. Actually sit with James and Leila in a room and have a conversation and come up with posters or costumes or
something
by then? No. But when the sheet gets to us, that first slot has already been taken, and Leila writes our names in a messy scrawl, without asking us, next to the very last date.

“Do you really think…” James starts, as if he's about to disagree with the choice. But then he changes his mind, I guess, because he just shrugs and passes the sheet to the next group.

For once, I'm on Leila's side. Good, I think, as I watch her list our names at the bottom of the page.
Let's delay this thing as long as possible
.

—

James catches up to me after class, matching my pace as I head for the art room. It's at the far end of the hallway, so the crowd around us thins out quickly.

I wait for James to turn off into a classroom or say something, but he doesn't do either. So finally, just outside art, I stop and face him.

“What?” I snap.

“What do you mean?” His rumbly voice answers.

I roll my eyes. “I
mean
,” I say, standing straighter and channeling Leila as best I can, “why are you following me?”

James shrugs, his backpack bouncing up and down on his shoulders. “I'm walking to band. You're walking to art. It's in the same direction.”

I give up. I reach for the doorknob and start to turn it before James says, “Wait.” When I look back at him over my shoulder, his hand is stretched toward my arm. He pulls it back.

“I just…you looked kind of out of it in English the other day. And then today you seemed upset. Are you sure you're okay?”

He looks at me steadily, as if he can draw the answer telepathically out of my brain, and all I can do is blink at him. My mind is completely empty. No answer to offer, telepathic or otherwise. And then we're just looking at each other, and I forget I'm even supposed to be thinking of one.

The second bell rings and we both jump.

James finally looks down. “See you in English, I guess,” he says, and I still haven't said anything by the time he turns around and walks away.

—

In the classroom I grab an easel from the cluster at the back of the room and set it up next to my seat. I rapidly paint thick black lines on the page, in no pattern whatsoever. I'm not trying to paint anything in particular. I'm just trying not to think about James watching me and then following me through the hall. Why is he suddenly so intent on talking to me? He didn't really answer my question, and part of me wants to chase after him and ask again. What, what, w
hat?

After a few minutes, I stop the frantic movement of my paintbrush and stare at what I've done, tilting my head. My body is still buzzing, so I close my eyes and force myself to think only about what I can make out of this random jumble of lines. When something comes, I move my brush toward the page and begin to paint.

Which is when Natalie appears next to my table, photos in hand, on her way to talk to Ms. Triste.

“Hey,” she says, stopping in front of my easel. She looks at the lines, crinkling her forehead. After a moment she nods, not saying anything about what a giant mess the painting is right now. I appreciate it.

“Listen,” she says. “My boyfriend is going to be here after school. Can you come out with us? I could use your help with something.”

Me?
Even though we've been hanging out the past few days, my first impulse is still to ask Natalie why. Why me when she could ask one of her other friends, when her boyfriend is coming all the way here from the city?

But I catch myself before I ask her. Because I do want to go out with them, to do pretty much anything that isn't sitting in Aunt Cynthia's guest room, pretending to do my homework while I wait for visiting hours at the hospital.

When I look over, Natalie is still staring at my easel, her head tilted to the right. She doesn't look at me, but when I say okay, she smiles, and her fingers squeeze the top corner of my easel as she leaves.

—

This time I stand on the other side of Natalie's locker door, looking at the photos and postcards and notes. There's a theme to the way she decorated her locker, black and white postcards of bridges and beaches, and sepia-toned photos of women in long, cumbersome dresses. I'll have to ask Uncle John to show her the old photos of the Carters' house.

My eyes find one spot of color in the corner, a photo of Natalie with Claire and a tall man who I decide must be her father. He and Claire are standing on either side of Natalie, arms around her shoulders, all three of them smiling and wearing dressy clothes. A younger girl, who must be Natalie's sister, stands on their father's other side, wearing a velvet dress with a bow. But the photo is tucked away behind a postcard, as if Natalie wasn't quite sure what to do with it.

The photo in the center of the locker is black and white, not color, but I recognize Natalie in it. She's sitting on a bed, behind a tall, thin boy in a button-down shirt. She has one arm around his neck, and his head is turned slightly behind him, like he's about to talk to her. I know without asking that he must be her boyfriend, but he doesn't look the way I imagined. No headphones or weird T-shirt.

Natalie shuts the locker and stands up, and I'm staring at air where the pictures were. Natalie's bag looks nearly empty again, but she took her camera out of her locker, and she holds it against her body with one arm.

“Ready?” she asks.

We walk together down the hall, past clusters of other people packing up for the day. We're nearly at the door when Natalie says, “Hey, isn't that—”

I look up. James is standing there.

And he's talking to Leila and a girl with white-blond hair who I assume must be Leila's friend Liz, the one she promised to drive home.

I resist the urge to stomp my foot. Somehow, Leila and James always manage to be where I least want to run into them. And then I have to ignore the swooping thing that happens in my stomach whenever I look over to where James is standing.

I'm trying to think of something to say to Natalie—to remind her that nothing is going on—when I realize she's already walking across the hall, straight to James. Leila and Liz have already turned away, but James sees me before I can get Natalie's attention.

“Hey, Sophie,” he says. I stop walking. I realize after a minute of awkward silence that Natalie's stopped too and that I guess I should introduce them.

“Um,” I start. “This is Natalie.” I wave a hand at her. “Natalie, this is James.”

I don't know whether to use the words
my friend
for either of them, so I leave them out.

“We were just going…” and I trail off, realizing I have no idea where we're going. I'm leaning toward the door, trying to communicate to Natalie how urgently I want to go, but she's not taking the hint.

“Actually,” she says, looking at James, “are you doing anything right now? We could use one more person.” She's totally direct, like this is a normal thing to ask a complete stranger.

I stare at her. What is she doing? I don't even know why she needs my help, let alone the help of a third person she's never even met.

But James gives me a quick look and agrees, and soon he and I are following Natalie out to her car. We're waiting, next to each other and not talking, while Natalie moves her boxes and hanger and tripod out of the backseat. We're climbing in, me in the front seat, which I've pulled up slightly for James's long legs, and James in the back. Then we're lining up behind the other cars for the crawl out of the parking lot, James asking Natalie about how we know each other and what classes she's taking. At first, Natalie hardly answers, but the more questions James asks, the more animated she gets, the same way she did when I asked about her photos. I stay quiet, but I listen, feeling hyper-aware of everything.

—

I had no idea where Natalie was taking us, and I especially wasn't expecting the Carters' plot of land, the rundown house. The building looks the same, droopy and mysterious, but for now the tall table in front of it is empty. There's no one around, from Uncle John's office or otherwise.

James unfolds himself from the backseat, but Natalie waits a moment before turning off the car, so I stay where I am too. She leans over the gearshift and nudges her chin in James's direction.

“Just go for it,” she says. “Seriously.”

“I don't—” I start to protest, but Natalie just looks at me and shakes her head, like I shouldn't even bother trying to pretend I don't think James is cute. It's the kind of conversation I was imagining this morning, a version of the conversations eleven-year-old Leila and I used to have.

I follow Natalie around to the back of the car. There's an even more random sampling of things in her trunk than in her backseat. I spot a few cans of paint, a single boot, and at least five cardboard boxes.

She hands two of them to James and me and nods toward the house. Whatever's inside rattles and clanks as we carry the cartons.

“Chain mail?” James guesses.

“Tambourines?” I suggest. We shake our boxes in unison, and James does a silly jumping dance move with his. I laugh.

We keep thinking of possible items in Natalie's boxes until we get back to where Natalie's standing with the boy I saw in her locker photo, who's holding the handlebars of his bicycle. He leans down to kiss her, and I look away, but not before I see how comfortable they are together.

“This is Zach,” Natalie says, and we all start talking over ourselves as we introduce one another.

We take the last of the boxes from the trunk and Natalie, now with her camera around her neck, leads the way to the house again. But instead of stopping at the doorway, where James and I left the other two boxes, she steps up onto the rickety porch. She takes another step and another, and then she's inside the house. The wood dips and creaks in the places she's walked.

“Are you sure we should go in there?” I call. “It doesn't seem totally stable.”
And Uncle John and Claire would never want us to be in here
.

“Don't worry,” Natalie shouts back from somewhere in the house. “It's fine in here.”

And I realize she must have gone inside before, maybe the other day after I left.

No one else objects, so I follow James and Zach into the house, shushing the mental voice that tells me this is the kind of thing my mother would do.

Natalie's right, mostly. There are some broken beams and piles of shattered window glass, but as we tiptoe in, the floor stays solid under us.

Natalie tells us how she wants it all set up, and we move through the house, still testing the floorboards in each new room. I end up in the living room with Zach, unfolding a rug and laying out a toy train track while he sets out a photo in a frame and tapes a curtain-like piece of cream-colored fabric to the window frame. The fake curtain flutters when a breeze blows through the broken window, and the effect is spooky.

As we work, Zach tells me how he and Natalie met: at a summer arts program, where he was writing and she was taking photos.

“He asked me to illustrate one of his stories,” Natalie says, walking into the room. “I didn't realize no one else had their stories illustrated, and it was just a ploy to hang out.”

Zach laughs. “You did fall for it.”

James, standing in the doorway behind Natalie, looks at me over the top of her head, a faint smile on his face, and my stomach goes weird again, like I lost a breath between my nose and my lungs. I wonder if Natalie said anything to him about our conversation in the car.

Before I can come up with something, anything, to say, Natalie starts directing us around the room. We stand just on the other side of the doorway while she snaps pictures of the props. Then she adds us to the scene: Zach in the kitchen, holding a frying pan and spatula over the rusted stove; James and me in the living room, driving the wooden train around the track on the rug. I feel eight years old again as we crouch there, attaching the train cars with magnets.

“This feels like what we used to do when we were little,” James says.

“That's what I was thinking,” I tell him. Natalie's camera clicks just as I look up at him. I want to grab it and look at the picture so I can know the expression on my own face.

“If Leila were here, she would have made up a whole story about what the trains are doing,” James adds.

“And told us exactly how we should be moving them around,” I finish. We smile ruefully at each other, and again I feel like James is on my side, two against one.

“Keep talking!” Natalie calls to us as she moves around the room, getting each of us from every possible angle. She seems happier here, and I think of how good her photos of the house were once she remembered that she cared. Right now she's totally focused on how she wants this to work.

And somehow James and I do keep talking, as he tells me about the band that he and Leila are in with some friends and the songs they're prepping for a battle of the bands next month, about the summer he spent working at his mom and Aunt Cynthia's law office.