Page 12 of Finders Keepers
“Okay, fine, I was a tiny bit sad, but it wasn’t…It wasn’t all about Quentin. I was fifteen. A lot was happening, like, hormonally and life-wise.” I’ve always believed that it wasn’t losing Quentin himself that made that fall and winter so awful so much as losing the steadiness of having him around. Especially with my father’s accident at the quarry; his long, painful recovery; our resulting financial struggles; and the court case that took a decade to settle. There was a lot going on, and I found myself in a dark place. Without Quentin to talk to and to compete against, I had all of this nervous energy and nowhere tofocus it except into catastrophizing. It was the perfect breeding ground for my burgeoning anxiety disorder. Until I realized I could make myself so busy and future oriented that I wouldn’t have to think about the present outside of what I needed to do to achieve my goals. If my academic success also made my parents proud, gave them something to talk about other than my dad’s chronic pain and overdue bills, and took some of the weight off their shoulders when it came to paying for college, all the better. “Regardless,” I add, “it doesn’t justify you not telling me he was back.”
“I was only trying to look out for you, baby. I didn’t want to upset you when you have so much going on,” she says.
“So much going on?” My laugh is small and filled with a probably unfair amount of bitterness. “I don’t haveanythinggoing on anymore. That’s kind of the whole reason I’m here, remember?”
“I am sorry for not telling you.” She folds her hands together in her lap, then unfolds them again. “But I…Never mind.” The intensity with which she’s keeping her mouth closed is visible at the corners of her thin lips.
I groan. “Mom. Whatever you’re thinking, just say it.”
“The biggest reason I didn’t want to bring him up was that I was afraid it would embarrass you.”
“Why would Quentin being back in town embarrass me?”
“I know kids like to believe their parents are stupid, but you think I didn’t notice how you were inseparable for months only for him to leave you and never mention him again? It’s obvious something went wrong between you two, and I’ve always figured it had to do with your crush on him.”
My eyes go wide at Mom’s words, and all I can do is let out an unconvincingha. Sure, I may have developedsomeno-longer-strictly-platonic feelings for Quentin over those three months we spent treasure hunting. And the night before everything went wrong, when we were lying side by side on a blanket in his backyard, looking up at the stars as we finalized our plans to search Sprangbur one last time, I can’t say I didn’t want him to lean over and gently press his lips against mine. For a split second, I even thought he was going to.
But it’s not like I filled pages of a notebook with hearts or practiced signing my name as Nina Bell or anything like that. I wasn’t, like,piningafter the kid.
She tilts her head, as if saying,Really, Nina?“It was clear you were gone for him.”
I scoff, not very convincingly. “I was absolutely notgonefor Quentin.” In fact, I’d be willing to bet that those feelings were nothing but the product of my aforementioned teenage hormones and forced proximity. A crush I will admit to. But there’s no world in which I wasin lovewith Quentin. Any thoughts I had about us becoming more than close friends were simply the inevitable outcome of being young and having spent so much time together—nothing more, nothing less.
Like, if I had hung out with Francesca O’Brien from down the street as much as I hung out with Quentin, I’m sure I would have had recurring dreams about making out with her too.
“You and he were together nearly every single day that last summer, from dawn to dusk…” Mom continues.
“Yeah, because we were hunting for treasure.”
She flaps a hand, waving away what I’ve said. “Whatever you want to call it, it was none of my business. I made sure you knew about safe sex well before that, and I trust that you took precautions—”
“Ahh! Stop!” I cover my ears and close my eyes. “That is nota euphemism for anything! Quentin and I spent that summerliterallyhunting for the Fountain treasure at Sprangbur.” My mother has become much more sex-positive in recent years after joining a local romance book club, but I am still not mature enough to find the ease with which she now attempts to talk to me about it anything but mortifying. Maybe when I’m thirty-five.
Three deep breaths later, I explain, “We agreed to look for it after reading about Fountain’s will in social studies that spring.”
“Oh, I remember hearing about that,” she says. “When they were renovating that mansion, people were joking about what they might find in the walls.”
In my mind, Sprangbur Castle is still shuttered and dotted withDo Not Enter Under Penalty of Lawwarnings. But I suppose the renovations they started right before I left for college must be done by now. Is it open to the public? I wonder what it’s like inside.
“Anyway,” I say, returning my focus to explaining to my mother what happened in 2008, “even though we were supposed to be looking together, I went rogue and started doing some solo research to find the treasure on my own. Quentin found out the night we went—uh, the night before he left for Ann Arbor, and I never heard from him again. He wouldn’t respond to my emails or texts. Not even a peep from him until the other night when I got here and he’s just—surprise!—next door.”Also, we got caught trespassing and taken to the police station, which I have never told you and will not be telling you now. And also I sort of thought maybe he was interested in me the same way I was interested in him, which he wasn’t, so my ego was pretty bruised on top of everything else.
Mom’s mouth falls open with a shocked gasp, and she bringsa hand up to cover it politely. But is she taken aback that I hurt Quentin, or that he hurt me? “I can’t believe hegoblinedyou,” she says from behind her palm.
“Goblined? What does—Oh, geez, Mom. Do you mean ghosted?”
“It’s ‘ghosted’? Really? Hm, I suppose that does make more sense. What is a goblin, again?” Her gaze drifts off to the side as she mines her mental bank of imaginary creatures, trying to recall. Then she remembers the point of our conversation and her eyes meet mine. “Well, that was very rude of him.”
“Yes, it was. I agree.”
“But…”
I sigh. “But what?”
“You were both very young, Nina. And fifteen-year-old boys aren’t known for their emotional intelligence.”
“We haven’t been ‘very young’ for a while now, though. He could have tried to reconnect with me at any time. The internet would have made it pretty easy if he cared to bother.” Part of me always expected it to happen. But at some point it became less of a “when” and more of an “if.” Then each passing year of silence nudged it closer and closer to the “if” side until it seemed on par with pigs flying. So that’s why I was so flabbergasted to find Quentin here, ready to pick up where we left off. It was like looking into the sky and finding Babe and Wilbur waving to me from the cockpit of a 747.
“Well, maybe it’s time to think of it as water under the bridge. He seems to want to, considering how eager he was to see you this morning. Kept asking when you’d be down.” She smiles slyly, like his impatience to talk to me is the equivalent of asking for my hand in marriage. “Besides, holding a grudge never helps you get where you’re going. It only holds you back.”
