CHAPTER 70
The atmosphere in the crowd as we all walked down the street together was amazing, fun and funny and so full of joy. And when we came to the part of the road where everyone was meant to stop and I was meant to step out of the procession and say my few lines and swing my giant stick around, recreating this mystical jackal fight, I was more than happy to do it. Even though I giggled all the way through. But the crowd loved it, everyone burst into applause and then we all started walking again. Faizel’s part was next, when he reenacted the moment when he chased the Ackermans off his land. And within half an hour, we were all at the end of the road, walking towards the spring that the town was named after.
Even though I’d been here for a few weeks, I’d actually never seen it before. And when I did, I finally got why the Ackermans were so thrilled to have found it. It really was like an oasis in the desert. In the middle of all the sand and dust and dryness was a cluster of huge rocks. They looked out of place, as if dropped from the sky. In between the rocks, as if they were holding it all in, was a pool of bright green water. Perhaps the brightest and greenest water I’d ever seen. It was hard to imagine how this little miracle of water had happened out here, but it had.
“And now for the—” Ian’s voice shouted at us, but he stopped abruptly when there came a loud and unfamiliar noise. We all turned our heads: it sounded like cars. Many, many cars.
And it was.Where had all those cars come from?And those vans? I counted five cars and two vans and they were coming towards us. Everyone was watching in utter confused horror as the cars finally came to a stop and people started pouring out of them. I looked at them all, trying to figure out what was going on. And that’s when I saw it. It looked strange and out of place and so furry-mammal-in-the-zoo.People walking towards us with cell phones in the air.
“What the hell?” I heard someone near me say.
“What’s going on?” someone else said.
And then, out of the crowd, a face appeared and I recognized it immediately. I blinked several times, fast, because I wasn’t sure I could believe what I was seeing.
“Oh my God, Jess! What are you doing here?” I said, as my sister came running up to me. But she didn’t say a word, not one, until she got all the way to me and threw her arms around me. Why was she hugging me like this?
“Frankie! Frankie!” she said into my shoulder. Wait, was she crying? And why was she calling me Frankie?
“I’m here,” I mumbled, totally taken aback by this strange show of emotion. She pulled away from me, grabbing onto my shoulders, tears in her eyes.
“We’ve been so worried about you.”
“You have?” I asked, unsure of who the “we” was.
“And I’m so sorry,” she gushed. “I am so, so sorry.”
“For what?” I asked.
“That day you called me, I should have listened to you. You were going through something and I shouldn’t have brushed it off. I’m so sorry. Maybe if I’d listened to you and tried to understand, you wouldn’t have disappeared.”
I smiled at her. “It wasn’t that that made me leave,” I said to her.
“Oh God, I’ve been so worried about you. We filed a missing person report with the police but they said you were an adult and that you’d probably just gone off. We didn’t know where you were or what to do and then Kyle—”
“Kyle?” I cut her off. “What about Kyle?”
“He’s the one who found you. He hired a private investigator who tracked your phone to your last known location and came here and found you.”
“Who came here?” I asked.
“The private investigator. He took photos of you and brought them back. I was so relieved when I saw them. I had started to think that maybe you were . . .” She burst into tears now. “That you were . . .” She sobbed and covered her face. “I was just so happy to see you were alive.”
“Wait, you thought I was dead?”
She nodded, biting her lip. Fighting the tears.
“Kyle hired a private investigator to find me?” I asked, still struggling to take this in.
My sister smiled at me through her tears. “Maybe I was wrong about him,” she said. “He really loves you, it’s not all for show.”
I shook my head. “No, trust me, you’ve been right about him this whole time. Everything he does is for show and I don’t think he ever really . . . uh . . . KYLE?” I exclaimed, when I saw him over my sister’s shoulder walking towards me.
“Frankie!” he said loudly, and then he turned to the person who was walking next to him. “Are you getting this?” he asked. The guy next to him nodded.
What the hell?
And then he started running towards me, dramatically. I looked over at Mark and Samirah and everybody around me and shrugged. They all shrugged back as general confusion fell on all of us.
