Page 26 of Finders Keepers
“I always wondered, why did you decide to search there instead of meeting me?”
“You didn’t have to wonder. Nothing was stopping you from asking.” I immediately kick myself for the waspish tone of my voice.
He responds steadily, “I’m asking now.”
My eyes wander back toward the cenotaph, over the gentle crest of a hill. If I’d met Quentin there as we’d agreed, would we still have gotten caught? Would he have still declared it all—our friendship, the time we spent together—a mistake? Everything that happened that night may very well have been all my fault. Guilt feels like a pile of worms wriggling inside the pit of my stomach.
Quentin leans casually against a portion of the Castle’s wall not guarded by the rosebushes, examining his thumb as he bends and straightens it a few times, as if my answer to his question isn’t that important, really. As if he hasn’t actually been waiting for me to give him this information for nearly two decades. Then again, maybe his “I always wondered” was less like “I frequently lie awake at night pondering why you did what you did” and more the kind of idle curiosity that accompanies that thing you want to look up on Wikipedia but can never seem to remember at a convenient time.
Clean slate, I remind myself.Clean slate. These thoughts are the opposite of that. In fact, my slate has all of the ghostlike chalk impressions of the past, smeared all around to make the black surface more of a smoke color. I take a deep breath and close my eyes to recalibrate—what I hope will be the mental equivalent of taking a wet paper towel to the whole thing and trying again.
As I breathe in through my nose, the faint rose smell becomesthicker. My eyes open again to find Quentin crouched in front of me, his face inches from mine. He slides a large, fluffy pink rose into my hair, above my left ear. His fingertips brush against my cheek as he lowers his hand again, and it takes all of my strength not to lean into the touch.
“I hope that doesn’t have any bugs hiding in it,” I say, my words coming out a little breathless.
“I shook it out first.”
Even so, I slip it from my own hair and tuck it into his, which has just enough length and body to hold it. “It looks better on you,” I say. He smiles slowly and lets out a little hum of satisfaction that I don’t remember ever hearing before but decide deserves a place in the catalog of his laughs, forever filed under this moment: him looking unfairly delicious, smelling of soap and flowers and the light musk of exertion, staring back at me with a confidence that’s entirely proprietary to this grown-up version of him.
“So are you going to tell me why you thought it could be there?” he asks.
Oh. Right. Focus, Nina. No, no, not on his lips. On words.
I swallow before continuing. “We thought we might find Cetus among the constellations on the cenotaph. But I’d also seen another collection of stars in one of the rooms inside the Castle.” Glancing back at the external wall of the mansion, I fold my hands in my lap and speed through the rest of my words when I land on the right ones. “I came here one day without you…sometime at the end of July, I think. You were at your grandparents’ for the week, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to poke around a bit. See what I could find. It had stormed pretty bad overnight, and the wind forced a side door ajar just enough for me to slip through. I knew it was illegal, and probably noteven safe, but…I couldn’t pass up that kind of opportunity, could I? To see what it was like inside Fountain’s Castle?”
I can’t say what gave me the courage to be so uncharacteristically bold, so brave. But it felt like something I had to do. For Quentin. Forus.
That deep line in his forehead reappears. “You never told me that you came out here by yourself.”
I flap my hands and say, “Clean slate.” I’m grateful that seems to work as a get-out-of-jail-free card, Quentin simply rolling his eyes. “I only did a quick walk-through, since I was pretty anxious about getting caught or running into a ghost. But one of the rooms upstairs had this…I don’t know if it was wallpaper or painted directly on the plaster, but the walls were covered in stars. Really faded and dirty, but they were definitely stars. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but then you told me about Cetus when we were in your backyard and my very first thought was that room. How the stars hadn’t been positioned willy-nilly, but like, arranged in specific patterns. Constellations. I was going to go along with your plan to check the cenotaph again, because therearea lot of stars on the back of it, and you could’ve been right.”
“But you didn’t,” he says flatly. “Go along with it.”
“No. I didn’t.”
He simply waves this away, as if this recounting of my betrayal is a minor flub that can be edited out later. Quentin is way better at the clean slate thing than I am, it seems. Unsurprising, considering how good he is at forgetting things. And people.
“So. You thought you’d find it in that room. That you’d cracked it,” Quentin says, staring off into the distance, looking deep in thought.
“Yeah,” I admit. “I thought I had.”
He blinks a few times before looking at me again. His lips curve into a small smile. “That’s really brilliant, Neen. Amazing work.” There isn’t any sarcasm in the statement. Just the same admiring tone I heard him use when we were kids and I managed to best him at something. That’s what made competing with Quentin so addicting, come to think of it. Don’t get me wrong—the boy loved to win. But he also never seemed to mind too much when he didn’t. In fact, he often looked…proud of me. The way he’s looking at me right now.
And I know deep down that’s why I tried to find the treasure on my own. Because I thought he would be so impressed that that pride would transform into something else. Something that might survive the upcoming distance between us. Not love, maybe, because when he didn’t kiss me that night in his backyard I figured he must not return my feelings. But I still thought that his admiration, his respect for my mind (and the hustle) might leave a lasting impression. That it would only strengthen what we had.
Then again, I’m realizing that maybe what we had wasn’t as strong as I believed it was. Maybe the outcome wouldn’t have changed, regardless of what I did or didn’t do that night.
“I was wrong, though,” I say. “The treasure wasn’t there.”
“Are we sure about that?” he asks after a short pause.
“All I found was the skeleton of some small, unfortunate animal beneath a newspaper, and an empty Bubble Tape container.”
“No chance you missed something?”
“I mean…I was as thorough as I could be, but it was dark and the walls were too damaged for me to figure out if Cetus was actually there. I didn’t get to check every single floorboard or anything. Honestly, after finding the skeleton I was a bit lessenthusiastic in my search. And then…you know…” I wiggle my finger in the air and say, “Wee-woo, wee-woo.”
He lets out a responding laugh that I recognize as the earliest entry in the catalog. It’s the same one from the very first conversation we ever had, in front of our houses while the movers were lugging the last few boxes into 304 and one full of his sister’s underwear dropped and split open on the sidewalk. I still find it tucked inside a subfolder labeledReluctant favorites.
