Rhythm & Clues: A Young Adult Novel (2 page)

“Huh.” Sabrina pulls out a slip of paper from her pocket the same size and shape as the one in my hands. She flashes it to me like an ID check. “My parents said he spent the weekend with you. I thought that was strange to begin with, I mean, you’re not—” In a show of major restraint, she remembers her manners and bites back the insult.

I tap the note in my hand. “He must be here somewhere because he gave me this.”

“Oh. I’m such an idiot.” Sabrina lets out a strained laugh. “He told me he’s coming to school early to talk to the music teacher.”

Isla gets a determined look on her face. “Great! I have to talk to Mr. Schneider anyway. Charity thing for my dad’s venue.”

“I’ll go with you.” I take a step toward the music room. Why would he ask me to meet him at his locker if he wasn’t going to be there?

“No! Isla should go find him.” Sabrina gives her a light shove on her back. “Alone.”

Sabrina pleads with me with her eyes, and I catch on. This is all a show. I’ve seen her do this before when she tricked her parents. She wants Isla to leave.

“Why? Is he waiting for me?” Isla looks like an overstock of guitars arrived at her address by mistake.

Sabrina nods. Isla gives me a triumphant smile, then jets off to find what I suspect will be an empty room.

“Gavin asked you to meet him here too?” I guess as soon as Isla’s out of earshot. At least Isla didn’t get a note.

“Yeah, the note was there when I opened my locker. Except, I think he meant for you and me to meet, not meet him.”

“Your locker? About that. Uh, you know this isn’t boarding school, right? I know your mom taught you everything you know. Maybe she didn’t focus on geography?”

Sabrina rolls her eyes. “There was a fire there. So I couldn’t go, but luckily, they’d already enrolled me here just in case and I could start today with everyone else.” She shrugs. “They felt really bad about it too. Whisked me upstate to some clothes outlets. I couldn’t argue with a shopping spree.” She smoothes out the wrinkles in her tank top. “Besides, this is way better than homeschool. You seriously haven’t spoken to Gavin? Or did you just lie for Isla’s benefit?”

I laugh. “Why would I try to spare her feelings?”

“I don’t know. Because maybe today seems like opposite day? I find a note from my missing brother in a locker I’m not supposed to have. I see you and Isla speaking to each other without any hair pulling.”

The floor drops out from under me. “Gavin’s missing?”

I don’t wait for an answer. I reach for the generic black padlock on his locker, twirling the dial until it pops open. For a moment, I feel like I’m betraying him. Throughout our entire friendship, he’d been so guarded, almost afraid to open up to me, revealing more of himself in bits and pieces that I worked hard to expose. And now I was violating his privacy.

“It’s just weird that I haven’t seen him since Friday. He took my dad’s car and was supposed to be at your house, but you’re looking for him too.”

I’m not sure what I expect to find inside the locker but it’s not a lone shoebox with a pink post-it note stuck on top, the words, “
Open me,”
written in black permanent marker. I fight back a brief smile. Post-it notes are kind of our thing.

“My brother is so weird.” Sabrina reaches for the box and yanks off the lid.

Random objects skid around inside: a red paper lantern, folded flat, with the words “band audition” inscribed in black marker on one of the sides. A leaf, brittle and veiny. A plastic bag containing what looks like flour, the words “
1 of 2”
written in permanent marker on the front of the bag. A fork with an ornate swirl along the handle, one of the prongs bent back just a few degrees in the wrong direction. A black Sharpie marker. One false eyelash. And the stuffed bunny he won for me Friday night. In my messy exit, I’d forgotten it at his house.

“How strange.” Sabrina picks up the white baggie and twists it so its contents shift like sand in an hourglass. She opens and smells it. “Not drugs.” She almost sounds disappointed, and I wonder how this girl who always seemed so pure and proper would even know what to smell for. “Does any of this look familiar to you?”

“All of it looks familiar. Well, maybe not that one.” I poke the bag of white powder.

These trinkets tell the story of everything important between Gavin and me. I feel like I’m punched in the gut because he wants Sabrina to know about them. He sent her the same note. But that also doesn’t explain where he is. Maybe he’s somehow making a statement. That these items don’t matter anymore. They’re junk now.

Around us, students close their lockers. Groups of people gather in clusters, discussing their summer vacations as they wander to their new homerooms. My heart thumps. Why hasn’t Gavin shown up yet?

Sabrina crosses her arms and taps her foot, creating a beat I know even Gavin could write a song to. “What are they?”

Although I’m beginning to fear all I really know about Gavin could fit in this box with room to spare, I’m positive he never does anything without a specific reason in mind. And though I may fear the worst, he’s never been vindictive. I decide to trust him, something I promised myself I would do, after doubting him in the past. “They’re all sentimental items, marking important events in our…” I was going to say relationship, but that isn’t the right word. Couldn’t be. “Friendship.” I pick up the bunny, the furry surface soft under my fingers. “I had no idea he saved this stuff.” My voice cracks.

Does this mean he cares for me like
that
? Or…what?

Sabrina groans. “I knew it. You’re secretly dating. God, I told Isla. But she swore you weren’t. So did he, actually.”

“We’re not dating,” I say fast. It’s not a lie. We never declared anything. I kissed him and he disappeared, leaving me a box of sentimental trinkets. That’s as far from dating as possible.

When I drop the bunny back in the box, the contents bounce, revealing a flash of pink underneath the leaf. Another post-it sticks to the underside, tiny handwriting covering both sides.

M. and S.,

I ran away from home. Sort of. At least until I can unravel this mystery I stumbled on the other day. A family secret thing. Sorry, trying to be vague. I’m leaving these clues behind as backup. So you either know where to find me, or can pick up where I left off. One of you knows where this stuff leads and the other has the knowledge to decipher the information I left you. Be careful. And don’t trust anyone else, including M+D. Destroy the notes after you’ve read them.

Love, G.

There’s so much to baffle me in the letter, but my mind immediately jumps to his closing.
Love
. To Sabrina or me? Or both?

She gasps. “He ran away! My parents not letting me go to boarding school must have set him off. And who are M+D?”

“Um, Mom and Dad?” I tear the note into confetti scraps and cup them in my palm.

She looks like I just killed her puppy.

I sigh. “But I could be wrong. He was acting really strange with me on Friday. And then I…” I glance at the floor. “Well, he might have ran away because of me.” After all, I convinced him to rebel against his strict parents. “Or this could have something to do with the weird phone call he received. It’s all very strange and he wasn’t exactly vocal about anything.”

“What did he mean by clues?” Sabrina glances at the box. She picks up the fork, twirling it in her fingers, examining the ornate design. “This looks familiar. I remember the engraving.”

“It’s from the Dante’s Ristorante. The night you and I met.”

Sabrina’s eyes grow wide. “We have to leave.” She says each word slowly, punctuating the silence that now engulfs the hallway. She throws the fork into the box with a clank, slams the lid on top, and tucks the box under her arm.

Despite my reputation as a bad girl, I’ve never cut school before. I earned my bad-girl rep through gossip alone. Whoever said actions speak louder than words doesn’t go to Milford Brook. “But school—Your first day!”

“If we don’t find Gavin soon, it’ll probably be my last.”

“We don’t even know what he means by clues.”

She grunts. “I know where he is.”

I can’t argue with that. We race through the hallways, and I pray teachers will think we’re just late for homeroom. I’m trying to keep up, but my heart thrashes against my chest. Pain shoots, making me bend over for a moment as I clutch my stomach.

Sabrina stops short several paces ahead of me. “Moxie, keep up.” She taps her foot impatiently. “Don’t you care about my brother?”

I’m so not going to tell Sabrina about my heart problems. Forcing myself into motion, I catch up to her, ready to mouth off my defense, but she takes off again before I can. She rounds a corner I know we should avoid. “Wait! Not that way.”

She pauses, crossing her arms. My lungs pump desperately as I put all my strength into catching up with her.

“They monitor the exits,” I say. I know we can try and play the lost sheep on the first day card, but I doubt anything we say will grant us permission to the school parking lot. I pull Sabrina in the opposite direction until we reach the empty wood shop. “Electives aren’t used for home rooms.”

Inside the wood shop, I step up on the radiator—I’m too short to reach the window locks otherwise—and flip them open. “Where’s Gavin?” I glide the window open, a cool breeze sneaking in through the crack.

Sabrina laughs. “You really must not be dating my brother. Because you obviously don’t know him at all.”

I slip my legs through the opening and slide like dough in a pasta maker onto the soft grass. With his back to us, a security guard places bright cones by the exit across the parking lot. Because cones prevent students from ditching school. I guess the security guards rival the maintenance crew in terms of incompetency.

Students still trail in, checking the time on their phones. A teacher ticks off names as the students enter the doorway we just avoided.

Sabrina follows me out the window and lands on her feet like a cat.

My lungs burn and my chest aches but I force myself to keep going. We beeline to my car, so dilapidated, the only way the bumper will stay attached is with a long rope tied with boy scout knots. It’s parked at the back of the lot, surrounded by two empty spaces. Even the other cars don’t want to be near me.

“Girls! You can’t leave.” The security guard drops his cones and rushes toward us.

The passenger door always sticks. I yank it open as hard as I can and then circle around to my own side. The engine putters to a start, and instead of shifting into reverse, I put the car in drive. Toward the copse of trees beyond the field.

Sabrina checks her seatbelt to make sure it’s tight and clutches the door handles. “What are you doing?!”

“Getting us out of here.” I gun the pedal and the car crashes into the curb. The wheels get caught, and I smell burning rubber. We’re stuck. In the rear-view mirror, I see the security guard waving a few feet behind me.

I take a deep breath. I want to close my eyes for this part, but that would be kind of irresponsible. I back up from the curb a few inches, as much as I can without getting booked for manslaughter, and then slam my foot on the gas. The car lurches forward and the front wheels clear the curb this time. The car wobbles as the back wheels bump onto the grass, and I steer in the direction of the sparse trees that surround our school like anorexic bouncers. A toothpick fence.

“You’re going to hit one!”

I shrug. My car’s made it through worse.

Sabrina hyperventilates as the security guard screams warnings at us, trying to catch up. I squeeze my car into the widest distance between the trees and continue to weave through them. They scrape against the sides, and we’re moving at such a slow pace that the security guard bangs on the trunk.

I see the road between two poplars so I don’t look back. I spin the wheel when trees get in my way and try to hit as few of them as possible. Sabrina’s face is whiter than her old well-pressed shirts. Cars rush by us on the road. The security guard tries to wrench open Sabrina’s faulty passenger door. I pause one, two, three seconds, the entire time my heart beating faster than a techno backbeat.
This is it,
I think. My car and I will go out the same way. But then the road clears and I smash the pedal. The security guard remains behind on the grass, probably memorizing my license plate.

Once on the road, I start to relax. “So where am I going?”

Sabrina leans back in her seat and lets out a breath, her knuckles white on the door handle. “No idea.”

I pound the brake, and she lurches forward. “You said you knew where Gavin was.” A car behind me honks, and I slowly accelerate.

“I will. Eventually. He said these are clues. You’re the one who knows where they lead. We have to visit whatever places these trinkets refer to, a bread crumb trail to his whereabouts.” She spins around and settles the shoebox into the backseat.

“That doesn’t make sense. What are we supposed to look for when we get to these places?”

“See? You don’t trust him. I bet he realized you wouldn’t figure it out on your own.” She smirks at me. “That’s why he included me. I’m supposed to decipher whatever info we find at these places.”

Ouch. Gavin really doesn’t think I know him well enough. I swallow hard.

I raise a brow at Miss Know-it-all. “So which one do we go to first?”

Without missing a beat, Sabrina says, “Chronologically. We have to think like Gavin.”

“Paper lantern it is then.” And I drive off in the direction of the abandoned warehouse that changed my life. And Gavin’s too.