Page 139 of What You Wish For

“Like, completely split. Vanished. Disappeared.”

Alice studied me like I was a sudoku puzzle. Then she said, “Kinda like your dad.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling a sting of anger at the connection. “And I tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen, and now the exact thing I predicted would happen has happened—except it feels so much worse than I imagined. Maybe if he’d just listened to me, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Except there is no ‘we’ in this mess. There’s just me. Alone. Like, apparently, I will always be.”

“Um. You are hardly alone. You are hanging out with your BFF.”

“I mean—romantically alone.”

Alice’s voice went high and squeaky with manufactured hopefulness. “Maybe there’s some other explanation?”

“Yeah, I can’t come up with one.”

But Alice was forever finding the upside of things. “Well,” she said. “If you are right—and I’m not convinced that you are, but just for argument’s sake: probably better to know now. Right?”

“Right,” I answered, defeated.

“I mean, at some point, he was bound to witness you”—and here,she searched for a euphemism, which struck me as very kindhearted, given my fragile state—“not at your most graceful.”

True.

“Better he disappear now than after you’d had, like, ten kids.”

“Ten kids?”

She nodded, all deadpan. “Two sets of twins, and two sets of triplets.”

“That’s a lot of kids,” I said.

“See that? You’ve averted disaster. How could you ever reach your potential with all those kids? He did you a favor, really. And the kids, too.”

“Sounds like it,” I said, giving her a thanks-for-trying smile.

She gave me the exact smile back.Thanks for letting me.

Then she shook her head, as if to clear the whole subject away, turned her attention to the now-perked decaf, and said, “We should take a line-dancing class.”

And just as she said that, as if to punctuate, our cell phones dinged at the exact same time.

My phone was in my bedroom, but hers was in her pocket.

She pulled it out, checked, and then looked up. “It’s from the school. A kid has gone missing. They’re calling us in for a search party.”

twenty-six

It was Clay Buckley.

When we got there, we found Tina in tears, Babette drained and anxious, and Kent Buckley prowling around like an angry animal, growling at people.

The school was awash with cops and detectives. They were setting up a makeshift headquarters for the search in the cafeteria. Mrs. Kline was already there, at a folding table, organizing search packets and working from a clipboard.

Alice and I asked her what happened.

“It was Clay’s birthday,” Mrs. Kline said. “His dad was supposed to pick him up after school and take him to some pirate ship museum down toward Matagorda Bay. But his dad never showed up. From security tapes, it looks like Clay went to visit with Babette—and she confirms that he told her he was going to the library to read—but, instead, at four thirty-seven, he let himself out of the back gate.”

“But those gates are locked!” I said.

“He had the code,” Mrs. Kline said. “Or he figured it out. The video shows him pressing the keypad and then swinging it open.”

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