Kari is shaking her head now. “No. Not unless you mean Vic?” She nods to a tall, muscly guy with long blond hair who’s tearing tickets. It’s like she missed my entire description.
“Then sorry,” Kari says completely unapologetically when I tell her no. “I’ve been here a year and that doesn’t sound like anyone who works here.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, desperate. “He’s not working today? He’s not working right now?”
Kari looks at me, seems to follow my gaze to the exact spot where Bus Boy should be standing, where he is in plain sight, then frowns. “I’m sure.”
“She would know; she’s the assistant manager,” Katy says as we back away from the counter.
“I know,” I snap, because my head is buzzing, filling with questions and absurdities. What scares me, what terrifies me, is that I think they are right. Katy. Kari. The problem is me.
Suddenly I’m back on the bus, talking to Bus Boy for the first time, and Goth Guy and the mother with her two children are giving me weird looks.Who are you talking to?their looks say now. I didn’t know that at the time.
Caleb, yesterday, in the driveway.I wasn’t even that close,he’d said. And he wasn’t—not to me. He nearly ran Bus Boy over because he didn’t see him.
On Monday at this theater—the Indian kid who bumped into me and couldn’t stop staring, and then Katy dragging me away without seeing Bus Boy. Neither of them saw him then, either?
Oh God.
Katy is speaking. “My mom, she can…”
Go to my parents, make them pull my reins in even tighter. Have me admitted into a psychiatric facility? Make sure I never, ever leave Lyndale?
“No, no,” I say. “It’s just from hitting my head.”
“Addie.”
“Promise me,” I demand. “On my life. You can’t tell anyone. I just need more sleep. Let me just try that.”
Katy is shaking her head. “I can’t take more secrets.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I don’t know—my, my friends,” she stammers. “From Act! Out! and school and stuff. I just feel like I’m keeping everybody’s secrets.”
I narrow my eyes at her; she looks away.
“Please,” I say.
“What if something happens to you?” she asks now, glaring at me. “What do I say then?”
“Nothing will happen,” I answer, even as I cut my gaze from her to Bus Boy. “Promise me.”
“Okay,” she promises, but she looks like she hates herself after she does. “Please let’s go home. Please.”
He’ll go away,I tell myself, watching him as we head toward the exit. I don’t know if I’m expecting him to disappear before my very eyes, to turn watery and pale like a ghost. He doesn’t.
We leave.
He stays.
BEFORE
Mid-July
I can usually find him in the exact same position—behind the counter of the movie store, sorting DVDs or working on the computer. But today he’s nowhere in sight.
Having watched nine Ciano movies—and having made nine visits to the movie store—I was dragging my feet going in to return the last one. Trying to think of ways to extend this—this friendship? Discussion group?
