And as I read the list over again, I realized these weren’t the random items that had accompanied my travels to California and Austin and Edinburgh. While many of them still didn’t make sense to me—why did she want me to hug someone named Jamie?—I recognized the reasoning behind some of them. They were things I’d backed away from, usually because I was scared. It was like she was giving me the opportunity to do some things over again, and differently this time. This made the list seem less like a tossed-off series of items, and more like a test. Or a challenge.
I turned the paper over, but there was nothing on the other side of it. I picked up the envelope, noted her usual drawing where most people just wrote their addresses—this time she’d drawn a palm tree and a backward moon—and that the postmark was too smudged for me to make out a zip code in it. I looked down at the list again, at Sloane’s careful, unmistakable handwriting, and thought about what was sometimes at the bottom of these—When you finish this list, find me and tell me all about it. I could feel my heart beating hard as I realized that this list—that doing these terrifying things—might be the way I would find her again. I wasn’t sure how, exactly, that was going to happen, but for the first time since I’d called her number and just gotten voice mail, it was like I knew what to do with myself. Sloane had left me a map, and maybe—hopefully—it would lead me to her.
I read through the items, over and over again, trying to find one that wasn’t the most terrifying thing I had ever done, something that I could do right now, today, because I wanted to begin immediately. This list was going to somehow bring me back to Sloane, and I needed to get started.
S. Ave in number seven had to mean Stanwich Avenue, the main commercial street in town. I could show up there and ask for Mona. I could do that. I had no idea what 55 Stanwich Avenue was, but it was the easiest thing on the list, by far. Feeling like I had a plan, some direction, for the first time in two weeks, I pushed myself off my bed and headed for the door.
“Emily?”
“Oh my god!” I yelled this as I jumped involuntarily. My brother was in my doorway—but not just leaning against the doorframe like a normal person. He was at the very top of the frame, his legs pressed against one side of it, his back against the other. It was his newest thing, after he’d seen it done in some ninja movie. He’d terrified us all at first, and now I just habitually looked up before entering a room. To say Beckett had no fear of heights was an understatement. He’d figured out how to scale the roof of our house when he was five, and if we were trying to find him, we all started by looking up.
“Sorry,” Beckett said, not sounding sorry, shrugging down at me.
“How long have you been there?” I asked, realizing that while I’d been absorbed in my letter, my brother had come into my room and climbed to the top of my doorframe, all without me noticing.
He shrugged again. “I thought you saw me,” he said. “Can you drive me somewhere?”
“I’m about to go out,” I said. I glanced back at Sloane’s list, and then realized I had just left it sitting out on my bed. Our cat was only in the house about half the time, but he seemed to have a preternatural ability to know what was important, and he always destroyed those things first. I picked up the letter and placed it carefully back into the envelope, then tucked it into my top dresser drawer, where I kept my most important things—childhood mementos, pictures, notes Sloane had slipped into my hand between classes or through the slats of my locker.
“Where?” Beckett asked, still from above me.
“Stanwich Avenue,” I said. I craned my neck back to see him, and suddenly wondered if that was why he did this—so that we’d all have to look up at him for a change, instead of the other way around.
“Can you take me to IndoorXtreme?” he asked, his voice getting higher, the way it did when he was excited about something. “Annabel told me about it. It’s awesome. Bikes and ropes courses and paintball.”
I was about to tell my brother sorry, that I was busy, but there was something in his expression that stopped me, and I knew that if I went without him, I’d spend the whole time feeling guilty. “Are you going to want to spend a lot of time there?” I asked. “If I drop you off at this Extreme place? Because I have somewhere I need to go.”
Beckett grinned. “Hours,” he said. “Like, all afternoon.” I nodded, and Beckett lifted his foot and did basically a free fall down the doorframe, stopping himself before he hit the ground and jumping to his feet. “Meet you at the car!” He raced out of my room, and I glanced back to my dresser.
I caught my reflection in the mirror above it, and I ran a brush though my hair quickly, hoping that Mona—whoever she was—wouldn’t be someone that I needed to impress. I was wearing a vintage T-shirt Sloane had insisted I buy, and a pair of jean cutoffs. I was tall—I had a good four inches on Sloane, unless she was in one of her heel phases—and the only really interesting thing about me were my eyes, which were two different colors. One was brown, and one was brown and blue, and Sloane had freaked out the first time she’d noticed it, trying out all sorts of different eye shadow combinations, trying to see if she could get them to turn the same color. My hair was brown, pin-straight, and long, hitting halfway down my back, but anytime I’d talked about cutting it, Sloane had protested. “You have such princess hair,” she’d said. “Anyone can have short hair.”
I tucked my hair behind my ears, then pulled open my top drawer to make sure the list and the envelope were still safe. When I was sure they were, I headed downstairs, turning over and over in my head what I was about to do—55 S. Ave. Ask for Mona.
2
APPLE PICKING AT NIGHT
Beckett was already sitting in the passenger seat of my car when I made it outside. I drove an old green Volvo that my dad had bought off a student who was transferring to a school in California. I had never met the student, but I felt like I knew a lot about him despite that, because the car was covered in bumper stickers. Save the Whales, Who Doesn’t Love Purple Martins?, This Car Climbed Mount Washington. Along the back windshield was a deconstructed school sticker that read Unichusetts of Massaversity, but there wasn’t, among all of them, a Stanwich College sticker, which pretty much made it clear why the owner of the car had transferred. I had tried to get them off, but they had proved almost impossible to remove, and so now I was just used to them, and to the occasional honks of anger—or solidarity—I got when other drivers thought they were reading my opinion. The left rear door was jammed, it took a long time for the heat to get going in the winter, and the gas gauge was broken—it was permanently stuck in the center, showing half a tank even when I was running on fumes. I’d learned, over time, just to be aware of when I’d last filled up and how much I’d driven. It was an inexact science, but since I’d never actually run out of gas, it seemed to be working.