He reached for it, somehow knowing what it would be before his fingers even wrapped around it. He picked it up gently, cupping it in his hands, standing slowly to see it in better light.
“What do you have?” Margo asked.
“She was here,” Alvin said. “She was here, and we missed her.”
He held the little charm bracelet up so Margo could see. It was their mother’s. They had been so close to saving her—
How close? Days? Hours? Alvin couldn’t bear to think about it.
Slowly, Margo stood up. She crossed the room. She took the charm bracelet and looked at it for a minute before slipping it into her pocket.
“We’ll find her,” she said.
And she was so sure, so steady, so confident that Alvin almost believed her.
—fromAlvin Hatter and the Wild-Goose Chase
22
When my family started filtering into the kitchen in the morning, I was already sitting there, a confusing perfect storm of emotions. Except George Clooney was nowhere to be found.
“Good reference,” Abe said. I turned to find him on the stairs, arms folded, looking at me suspiciously.
“Oh, great,” I said. My internal monologue had momentarily escaped me.
“I always thought they should have sent Diane Lane out with the ship. She’s a legitimate badass. Diane Lane does not get lost at sea.”
“How much did I say?”
“Hmm? Oh, no. I was reading your mind.” Abe made squiggles in the air with his fingers. My phone buzzed. A message from Sam.
Want to get together this weekend? I have a few ideas.
Do you? Do you havea few ideas, Sam? Was one of those ideas explaining to me how you came about your apparent eternal youth?
“You’re doing it again, but you’re whispering this time, so I can’t hear you,” Abe said. “If you’re going to narrate your subconscious, you might be kind enough to do it a little louder.”
“Did you want something?” I asked, spinning around, dropping my phone dramatically in the process. I watched it skid across the kitchen floor, heard that massive shattering and splintering sound as it clearly broke into a thousand pieces. “Shit!”
“I have twenty-seven missed calls from you,” Abe said, crossing the kitchen to pick up the broken bits of my life. “Ouch.” He held it out to me. The entire screen was shattered. It felt like some metaphor I couldn’t quite put into words.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“You couldn’t sleep so you called me twenty-seven times at five in the morning?”
I took the phone from him and pressed the home button. The screen turned on feebly, but the touch screen was broken. I tossed it onto the counter.
“Perfect,” I said.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“What’s the point?” I thought. Or I guess I said it. Things were getting muddy; words were forming withoutme seeming to have much say over them.
“The point is, I’m your brother, and I care about you a lot, and you can tell me things. I thought we had established that three years ago when you were getting bullied by that guy, that Jeremy guy, and I confronted him, and then he was like, ‘I just have crazy feelings for her, man!’ and I was like, ‘At no age—but especially not at your age—is it acceptable to show a girl you have feelings for her by bullying her. That contributes to a patriarchal society and reinforces archaic gender roles that nobody has time for anymore.’ And then he was like, ‘What does patriarchal mean?’ and I realized I had overestimated my audience. But remember how I had your back then? And I have your back now. So what the hell is going on?”
Two voices battled for position in my brain.
Tell him!yelled one.
