Gabriela drove me to the warehouse after school. “So you love him and he loves you, but your families won’t let you be together. Is this a Romeo and Juliet kind of situation? Because that ended badly.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We won’t do anything stupid.”
She snorted. “Famous last words.” But she parked the car and unlocked the doors. I hopped out, and she rolled down the window. “I’ll pick you up in two hours….Are you sure about this?”
“Gabriela…” I leaned on the open car window. “I think you’re a great person. I really do. You’re smart. You’re quirky. You have weird taste in food. You know what it’s like to have an annoying brother. But I need you to quit with the worrying about me and leave so that I can have a clandestine meeting with my ex-boyfriend that will almost certainly result in my getting my heart broken a second time.”
She smiled. “You know what I like best about you? You’re honest.”
“You obviously don’t know me well at all, but we’ll have to fix that another time.”
Laughing, she drove away, and I checked my watch. Two hours. A lot could happen in two hours. Fancy dinners. Love affairs. Bank robberies. Naps.
I scanned the area: vacant parking lot with more weeds than pavement, a shell of an abandoned ski lodge, and several large warehouses that used to house snow-grooming equipment. Hunter Creek Lodge had suffered a series of financial setbacks and then finally a fire. It had been on the market ever since but hadn’t sold. I only knew about it because of the fire. We always paid attention every time anything burned down in a hundred-mile radius, if just so we could be sure to have an alibi.
Silent buildings surrounded me, and the remnants of the chairlift looked like the skeleton of some long-extinct creature. It lay on the hill, a forgotten carcass. A snow groomer was sitting in the corner of the parking lot, casting clawlike shadows on the ground. I shivered. Bits of trash and old leaves blew across the parking lot. I don’t normally have much imagination, but this place fit the definition of “creepy” even in daylight.
I really hoped I was in the right place.
Ryan had slipped a note into my locker after lunch with the name and a time. He hadn’t signed his name, but he’d drawn a tiny picture of a dragon so I’d know it was from him—he used to draw me little doodles, his version of a love note. He was an art geek. It was adorable.
Outside the closest warehouse, I halted. “Ryan?”
The door opened, and my usually inactive imagination provided me with a flurry of horror-movie villains, beginning and ending with a chainsaw-wielding clown, before my brain caught up with my eyes. “Ryan,” I exhaled.
Putting one finger to his lips, he shot furtive glances around and then pulled me inside the pitch-black warehouse. My arm tingled where he touched it, and my breath felt faster. “Please tell me you weren’t just waiting for me in the dark,” I said, trying to keep my voice level, “because that’s just asking to be murdered by a serial killer. Or asking to turn into a serial killer. Either way, not healthy.”
“I turned the lights off when I heard the car. Left them off to open the door so we wouldn’t be seen by anyone on the road.” He flicked the lights on. They buzzed yellow, warming up, and then emitted a sickly orange glow. He looked at me. “I…wasn’t sure you’d come.”
I stared back.
Great, we were back at the awkward-staring stage again.
He swallowed. “Who did you get to drive you?”
“Gabriela Marquez.”
“You’re friends with her?”
“I can’t tell if you’re insulting her or me.”
“Neither. Sorry.” He scooted across the warehouse to an array of laptops. Opening them up, he began pushing buttons. Screens blinked to life.
Okay, straight to work. I could do that. Craning my neck, I looked around at the empty warehouse. Cobwebs coated the rust-pocked ceiling. “Cozy,” I commented.
“My family owns it, through a couple of shell companies. There were plans to turn it into a water park, but Mom was afraid she’d have to pose for photos in a bathing suit. She had an anxiety attack, and that was that.” He flipped a few switches, and red laser beams snapped on, displaying dots on the far wall. “You’re going to want to throw some dust to see the beams, but I think I’ve created an accurate representation of the motion-sensing lasers in our vault.”
Staring at the laser-beam dots, I whispered, “I love you.”
Ryan’s head shot up.
Walking forward, I dipped down to scoop some dust in my hand. I bounced it a few times to loosen the particles. “I was talking to the lasers.” I tossed the dust into the air. It fell, but the dust lingered. Red lines glowed, crisscrossing.
“Oh, right…yeah. They’re great.”
He’d always been bad at saying the words “I love you.” He didn’t have much practice—his parents hadn’t raised him with a lot of warm words. Especially his dad. I thought of the moment in the alley and wondered if I’d imagined what I’d heard. I wondered what he’d say if I said the words to him. “Tell me about the job.” Eyes still on the beams, I kicked off my shoes and stretched my legs by lunging from side to side. “So there are the lasers, and…?”
He nodded. “The jewel is in our family vault, which is beneath our house, buried in the mountain itself. Twelve feet of granite on all sides. You can’t blast through or burn through. You can only go in through the door. The door itself is five feet of reinforced steel.”
