Caro raised her eyebrow right back at me. “Would you want to be holed up with Maureen, day and night?”
Caro had a point. Maureen was not an easygoing person. It seemed mean to make fun of her for it, though. “She went through a horrible trauma ten years ago,” I chided Caro. “No one would be mellow after that.”
“I know, I know,” Caro said. “She just makes me nervous.”
“This from someone whose pencils are all sharpened to equal lengths.”
Caro paused, then threw a Post-it pad at me, giggling when I ducked. “You’re lucky,” she said. “It could have been a pencil.”
“Space,” Drew said thoughtfully when I told him what my parents had said. “Didn’t he have enough space for ten years?”
“Not if he was in New York,” I said. “They tend to pack ’em in there.”
“I heard that he lived all over,” Drew said. “I read it online.”
“Yeah, I saw that,” I grumbled.
Apparently, some cousin of Maureen’s who lived one town over had leaked Maureen’s email to the press. Oliver’s news story wasn’t as exciting as it had been the week before, but new information was new information.
“They called him Colin.” Drew went on like I hadn’t said anything. We were sitting on the sand after surfing together, perched on our boards. The sun was an hour or so away from dropping into the ocean, which meant I had thirty minutes before we had to leave and get back before my parents became suspicious.
“Colin?” I repeated, and Drew nodded sagely. “Wow. Okay. Why Colin?”
“No clue. I read it online. But I don’t know what staying inside with Maureen and her husband, Ray—”
“Rick.”
“Whatever. I don’t see how that’s going to help Oliver. They can’t keep him hidden the same way his dad did and call it progress.” Drew brushed his hair out of his eyes. The wind always picked up at sunset and we were both suffering for it.
“He needs to reassimilate,” Drew continued. “Jump into the deep end of high school and get it over with.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Do you think he wants to see us, though?”
Drew glanced at me. “Why? Don’t you want to see him?”
“Well, of course I want to see him!” I scoffed. “He was gone for ten years, it’d be nice to get to know him again.”
But the truth was that I had seen Oliver. The night before, after Caro left and my parents went to bed (“Lights out soon!” my mom had said, which meant I had an hour or so before she checked on me again), I snuck into my closet, stood on a rickety old step stool, and felt around on the shelf for an old shoe box. It was shoved so far back that I could barely touch it, but as soon as my fingers grazed the top, I managed to pull it down.
I have things hidden all around my room. I don’t think I would describe myself as a sneaky person, but if I count off all of the secret hiding spaces I have, well, you might describe me that way. The more something needs to be hidden, the sneakier I become. My babysitting cash lives in the back of the closet, in the pocket of a winter coat that I have worn exactly once. My old surfing magazines that I got at the used-book store are stashed in my third desk-drawer down, covered up by piles of printer paper and used-up ballpoint pens.
The shoe box is my oldest hiding spot and it holds just two things, things that no one knows about, not even Drew or Caro, not even my parents.
The first is a copy of my application to UC San Diego.
I had been thinking about applying for a while, ever since junior year when someone mentioned that they had one of the best surfing teams in the nation. San Diego was only about ninety minutes south from where we lived, so it wasn’t like I would be leaving my parents for the other side of the country. It was just far away enough, where I could have some space.
The same space, in fact, that I was giving to Oliver.
I pulled out the application once more, feeling the paper’s crispness in my hands. I had printed it out at the public library just so it would feel real, a reminder that I had actually applied to college. It felt more real that way, more possible. Caro and I had talked about going to community college together, then transferring to a university after two years, but I wanted out now. I didn’t want to wait anymore.
The second secret was at the bottom of the shoe box, a piece of paper folded and refolded so many times that it was starting to tear a little at the creases. Unlike the application, the paper was as soft as bedsheets, and I ran my thumb over the edge before carefully opening it up.
DO YOU LIKE EMMY, YES NO??? it said. Caro’s handwriting was precise and exact, just like it is now, and the word yes was circled. It was the only thing I had left of Oliver after the kidnapping, the only thing that was truly mine, and I had kept it that way for ten years. I used to look at it for hours at a time, holding it in my pocket and pulling it out when I was alone in my room. I had thought that if I kept it close, it would bring Oliver back home, and now was the first time in ten years that I held it while knowing where Oliver was in the world.
The idea took my breath away.
After I put the shoe box back up on the shelf and went to get ready for bed, I realized that I could see into Oliver’s room. The blinds had been blown askew by the wind, leaving a part of the window bare, and I could see him sitting in his desk chair, his profile illuminated by a light coming from across the room. He was holding his lip between his fingers, toying with it absently, and I suddenly remembered him doing that in second grade whenever he was nervous, usually while we were dividing up for kickball teams. (He hadn’t been the best athlete.)