“Dee, are you okay?”
The stupid lump was still there. I talked around it. “James—”
“Delia told us.”
Of course she did. Probably smiling the whole time. I wondered if she had a soul. “I want to go look for him.”
Dad set down his coffee cup and looked at me. I realized I must look crazy, standing there with my wild eyes and the crumpled Thornking-Ash envelope held tightly in my hand. His voice was gentle as he tapped his cell phone on the table. “Dee, I talked to his parents while you were upstairs. They said he was dead.”
“They haven’t found his body.” I knew I sounded like a stubborn kid, but I couldn’t stop myself. “I want to look for him.”
“Dee.”
“Please take me. Just let me see the car.”
Dad’s eyes were full of pity. “Dee, you don’t really want to see that. Trust me. Just let the police do their work.”
“Peter told me they’d already started looking in the river! They aren’t looking for him anymore, not really! He’s my best friend, Dad! I don’t need protecting!”
Dad just looked at me and shook his head.
I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been refused anything before—because I’d never asked. If I’d had my own car, if I’d had my own license, I could’ve been gone already. “I hate being treated like a kid! I hate it!”
It felt so weak. Not at all what I needed to scream to make myself feel better, but it was all I could think of. I stormed outside and sat on the back step, picking at a thread at the bottom of my jeans. It seemed wrong for the sky to be so blue, for the summer sun to feel so good on my skin, like I could be fooled into thinking this day was just like any other summer day. It wasn’t. They would never be the same.
I couldn’t just sit here.
I took out my cell phone and scrolled down through the calls I’d received until I found Sara’s number. I only hesitated a second before I hit send.
“Yeah?” That one word, said in Sara’s usual voice, pulled me back to the ground.
“This is Dee.”
“Ohmygod, Dee, I heard about him. James Morgan, I mean. God, he was on the news! I am so sorry.”
Weirdly, her emphatic words brought me closer to tears than any I’d heard that day. I swallowed them. “I don’t think it was an accident.”
“Oh—whoa—what? You think he was drinking?”
“No. I think the faeries did it.”
There was a pause, and I was afraid she had decided that Freckle Freak was just a sketchy boy. Then: “Shit. No way. Seriously?”
Relief surged through me. “Seriously. They haven’t found the body yet, so he could still be alive. I want to go look for him, but my parents are being all—”
“—crappy about it. Yeah. Sure. I can see that. Parents suck.”
I gathered courage. “I was wondering if, maybe, since you have your license, if—”
Sara surprised me and finished my sentence. “Give me, like, two seconds. Where do you live? Yeah. I gotta get out of the house anyway, I’m going crazy. Gimme two seconds. Promise.”
Two seconds actually meant twenty minutes, but Sara did come. She stopped at the end of the driveway like I’d told her to, and I ran out to her old Ford Taurus before my parents could realize she was there. We stopped a few miles away and consulted a stained map book from the back seat, tracing the crooked back roads we’d have to take to get to the scene of the accident.
“That’s the middle of super-nowhere. What the crap was he doing back there?” Sara asked, but I didn’t have an answer. In awkward silence we headed out of town and drove down endless identical Virginia back roads: narrow, twisting paths dappled by the hidden sun. What short glimpses of the sky I saw revealed brilliant blue, broken by perfectly white clouds. I couldn’t believe anything bad could happen on such a beautiful day.
I hunched in the passenger seat, scrolling through every option on my phone. Received calls, missed calls, dialed calls. Voice mail, text messages. The letters blurred in front of my eyes, meaningless strings of words to my churning mind. Then my fingers stopped and I gazed dully at the message I’d unconsciously surfed to.
d. i love you.
I blinked my eyes dry. I had to keep my cool.
“Thanks for taking me,” I said finally, breaking the silence.
Sara seemed relieved that I had spoken. “Oh, yeah, no problem. I mean, seriously, what was your parents’ problem anyway?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess … my grandmother died last night, too.”
“Wow. That’s crap timing.” Sara stopped at a stop sign and craned her neck to look both ways.
I swallowed, the lump still stuck in my throat. I didn’t know what to say.
“I think it’s nice that you’re sad about her,” Sara said.
I looked at her, eyebrow raised, quizzical. I wasn’t offended, but it seemed like such a stupid thing to say.
“My grandmother—the one I have left, I mean—she’s invisible.” Sara shrugged. “It’s like she’s from another planet. She doesn’t watch movies, she doesn’t know any of the music I listen to. We talk about the weather and stupid shit like that, ’cause I can’t think of anything else she notices. The other day I thought about her and I realized I couldn’t remember a single thing she’d ever worn. How awful is that? I feel bad that I don’t feel anything about her, but it’s just like she’s—like she’s already dead. The world changed and left her behind.”
It was the most personal exchange we’d ever had, and it was weird. I felt like I ought to say something to clinch the moment, to forever lock us in the bond of friendship. But I couldn’t think of anything. Too late, I said, “Makes you afraid to get old, doesn’t it?”
“And ugly. Like, when I get too ugly to wear a mini-skirt, just shoot me.”
I sort of laughed. She sort of did, too.
Then I saw a sign up ahead and said, “I think this is it.” Sara blew past the street and had to make a U-turn to drive down a narrow, dark road marked Dun Lane.
We drove out of the dappled sun into complete darkness, the tight-knit tree canopy looming high overhead like a massive green temple. I didn’t know where James’ gig had been, but I couldn’t think of any reason why he would have been on such an out-of-the-way road.
“I guess they’ll have towed the car. We’ll have to look for the place where the wreck was.”