“This fucking guy,” Elijah says, and then he looks at me. “Should one of us get out and get a closer look?”
“Are you kidding? He’d see us for sure. How would you explain that away?”
Elijah looks back at Reid, and out of the corner of my eye, I’m sure I see Reid shake his head slightly.
I’m ready to ask them what the heck they’re hiding from me, when another car pulls up in front of the house. A car I recognize.
It’s a TrailBlazer. Specifically, it’s Barclay’s TrailBlazer, and I have a moment to wonder if it was stolen from him before the door opens and he gets out.
“Who the hell is that?” Elijah asks, looking at me.
“Doesn’t he work for the FBI?” Reid asks, sliding farther down in his seat.
“The fucking FBI,” Elijah says, glaring at me, and I know they’re both going to be even more dead against involving Struz now.
Barclay walks slowly but with purpose as he approaches alias Mike Cooper. He must have taken the information I gave him, found alias Mike Cooper, and made the connection himself, and now Barclay is going to arrest him and crack the case. I want to be angry with the arrogant prick for not telling me whatever it is he’s found, but I only feel relief.
“How are we going to get any information from him now?” Elijah says.
“I can probably get info out of Struz,” I say. Or Barclay, even though I don’t say it. Again, he’ll owe me since this bust will make his career. He’ll probably get a promotion in a few months and become a full agent.
“You better not say anything about us,” Reid says. “I don’t want the FBI knocking on my door.”
“How’d this FBI guy even find our Suspect Zero?” Elijah asks. “Did you fucking tell him?”
I feel giddy and light-headed, and I’m sure a smile has just taken up permanent residence on my face. This was actually the perfect solution for me. The FBI knows now. I can go to Struz, confess everything, and they already have the bad guy.
Only as I watch them, it’s as if everything is happening in slow motion. “Wait.”
Elijah and Reid drop whatever argument they were about to launch at me and turn to the windows, and the three of us watch Barclay talk to alias Mike Cooper.
It doesn’t look like an interrogation.
It looks like they’re chatting.
Like they might be friends.
W
hen I get home that night, after we fill Ben in on the meeting alias Mike Cooper had with Barclay and he fills us in on the fact that he found nothing out of the ordinary at the hotel room—
nothing
—I open the front door to find Jared playing video games and eating more pizza and Struz on the phone in the kitchen.
The house is a mess. Struz has actually tried to pick up after himself and Jared. He just hasn’t done a great job, because there are still three people eating and at least pseudo-inhabiting this house, and no one’s actually cleaning it.
I check on Jared first. He’s playing
World of Warcraft
again, not really a game I get in any capacity even though I play with him sometimes, but he’s addicted. “How was polo?” I ask.
Jared shrugs in response.
“Did you get enough to eat?”
He nods, and when I reach down to tousle his hair, he shrugs me off. “I’m fine.”
“Okay, let me know if you need anything,” I say, because I just can’t do another fight today. I’ll have it out with Jared tomorrow. When I have a better idea of what I might say.
I head back into the kitchen, thinking about Ben. He did make a conscious effort to carefully go through the room so alias Mike Cooper wouldn’t know anyone had been there.
“Look, Barclay, did you meet with him today?” Struz says, and I freeze where I am and slowly back out of the kitchen, while Struz’s back is turned. “Good. No, that’s good.”
Struz couldn’t possibly be talking about alias Mike Cooper—unless Barclay
was
there to interrogate him and we just misjudged it. We were far away.
“All right,” Struz says. “Well, get it done. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Get what done?
I want to ask, but I can’t make my body move, I can’t make my lips open, and I certainly can’t make words come out.
I can’t possibly believe Struz is somehow involved—I just can’t.
Except ever since Ben brought me back to life, no one is who I thought they were.
Which means I can’t tell Struz about what’s going on—not yet—because the only thing I know anymore is that I don’t know who to trust.
A
day passes and nothing changes.
I help Jared with homework and clean the house like everything is fine, only this time it isn’t an escape, because Ben is all I can think about no matter where I am. I check my phone for texts from him or Elijah every couple of minutes.
We requested a psych consult, and my mother’s still in the hospital—she’s just been moved to the psychiatric ward.
Jared’s decided the best way to convince me he’s not too young is to give me the silent treatment.
Elijah swears they’ll find out more about alias Mike Cooper next time.
I give him and Ben more time—and then more time. And still more time.
Because I don’t have another plan.
When I tried to apologize, Alex declared himself out until we call Struz and get people who know what they’re doing involved. And he’s not going to speak to me until then either.
I still don’t know how the house fits with everything else.
And I’m still not a single step closer to figuring out what to do to stop this countdown.
Which means I’ve become obsessed with it—as if watching it tick might somehow make it slow down or at least not feel like it’s speeding up.
Which is why at 5:10 p.m. on Sunday evening, I know the exact moment four days to Wave Function Collapse becomes three.
03:23:59:59.
A
fter checking up on my mother, I come home to a quiet house. Jared is still asleep. And still mad at me for the other night, for not telling him anything, for not treating him like an adult, for locking myself in Dad’s home office, for breaking up with Nick of all things—for everything.
I check my phone for a text from Ben, but there’s nothing. I debate texting him to see what’s going on, but I know he’d tell me if there was news.
I clean up the kitchen. We’re almost out of dishes—not that it matters much, since Struz and Jared seem like they’re happy to live out of pizza boxes. I take out the trash and the recyclables before they both start encroaching on our living space, and then I open the fridge to see what’s inside that’s salvageable.
In the back of the fridge, I find a Tupperware of spaghetti with red sauce, obviously a batch my father made and then forgot about. From the way it smells, it might be a month old. He always cooked too much pasta—we usually had enough for at least two more people. He never learned how much was enough. And he always forgot about leftovers.
But holding the cold Tupperware container in my hand, I don’t care about the smell. I just wish I hadn’t always complained so much about the fact that he cooked the same thing over and over again and that I hadn’t yelled at him so much about putting food in the fridge and forgetting about it.
That all seems so insignificant now.
And that makes me think of Jared. If I’m looking at what could be the end of the world, I’m not about to let my brother be mad at me in the middle of it.
It’s not that I’m giving up—not even for a second—but I’m looking at it with a heavy dose of realism. We’re stalled. We don’t know how to stop Wave Function Collapse. And if the world really ends, I need Jared and me to be on good terms.
There’s only one thing left for me to resort to.
Bribery.
From my mother’s email address, I email both of our homeroom teachers and excuse us for the day. I let Jared sleep until nine forty-five, and then I wake him up with waffles and ice cream. I actually wouldn’t have let him sleep so long except our waffle iron is archaic and it totally burned my first attempt.
He doesn’t ask what’s up, because he’s still giving me the silent treatment, but I know he wants to—which is important.
“Here,” I say when he’s finished. I hand him the video game Alex’s dad brought home yesterday. Anything Jared-related has managed to remain unaffected by his whole not-talking-to-me thing. The game is wrapped in funny snowman wrapping paper, because when he was in preschool, Jared had a thing for snowmen.
“What is it?” The first three words he’s said to me in days.
I shrug like I don’t know.
He gives me a skeptical look but rips into it anyway, his whole face lighting up as he realizes what it is. “Shit! How’d you get this? It’s not gonna be released for at least another month!”
“I called in a favor,” I say. “I know people, you know.” More like Alex’s dad knows people, but whatever.
“This is awesome,” Jared whispers. “Seriously, Janelle, so cool.”
“Good, now before you think I’m just going to let you cut school and get you an advance copy of a video game every time you’re mad at me, get dressed. We have things to do.”
He looks crestfallen, and those big puppy eyes almost make me change my mind. “I can’t start playing now?”
“Later tonight.”
Like when I’m absorbed in the case again and you need something to do
. Only I don’t say that, because I know Jared, and being
that
truthful might ruin his excitement about the bribery gift.
“Where are we going?” Jared asks.
“Disneyland.”
I leave the room, because we both need a minute to digest why the hell I just decided that.
After all, the last time we went to Disney, Mom had just gotten out of her third stint in a mental hospital and Dad actually took vacation days and left his FBI cell at home.
It’s one of my top five moments. The only top five moment with all of us together.
On the car ride home, Dad held Mom’s hand, Jared fell asleep with the stuffed animal our dad won at one of those shooting games, and at the end of the night when I was almost asleep, my mom came into my room, stroked my hair, and told me how she was proud of me.
I’m sure she’s said it other times.
But that’s the only time I remember.
Despite everything going on, Disney manages to make me feel like I’m ten again.
It feels like we’ve somehow managed to transport ourselves outside of the real world, and it’s easier not to think of real-world problems. The smell of popcorn and funnel cake, the bright colors, the balloons, and little kids on vacation laughing and screaming, it’s happiness, and it’s everywhere.
Jared and I get giggly over everything. We gorge ourselves on chili bread bowls from Golden Horseshoe and then Mickey Mouse ice cream from one of the street carts, and wait in line for Space Mountain and the Tower of Terror twice, though since it’s mid-September and we just had a horrendous earthquake, we don’t have to wait too long. We catch the Jedi Training show and even the end-of-the-night parade and the fireworks at Sleeping Beauty Castle. At one point, after fooling around with all the characters in costume, we almost get thrown out because Jared tackles Goofy to the ground.
It’s the perfect day.
Not because of any one specific thing we do, but because it’s just me and Jared. We’re together, we’re happy and laughing, we’re not thinking about school or our parents or even what’s coming next. We’re not thinking at all. We’re just moving from one ride to the next.
We’re only living for each moment as it happens.
And knowing I might die in less than a week—for real this time—that perfection means everything.
Because Jared is the most important person in my life. Now and always.
And if I died today, my perfect moment wouldn’t be my mother and me at the beach. Not anymore.
It would be this.
O
n the way home, Jared is leaning back in his seat, his eyes closed. I think he’s asleep until he asks, “So what’ll happen to us now, anyway?”
I keep my eyes on the road. “What do you mean?”
Please don’t be what I think
.
“Now that Dad … and with Mom…”
“Try not to worry about it,” I say automatically. Even though it sounds lame. Even though there are a million better things—truer things—I could say. But I can’t.
“Is Mom going to be in the hospital for a while?”
I hope so, but I can’t tell him that. Instead I say, “Maybe,” and hope he changes direction.
But he doesn’t. “We’re not going to get put in foster care or anything, are we?”
“No,” I say, even though I don’t really know. I think between Struz and the money I’ve got in my name, I’ll be old enough that the court will let Jared stay with me. Suing for emancipation is just another thing I’ve been putting off until after…
Jared is still looking at me, but I can’t get anything other than clichés through the lump in my throat. “We’ve still got each other.”
“No, it’s not that,” Jared says. “I guess… I mean, I miss Dad, I do. But sometimes it doesn’t feel real, because he was never around, you know? He was always working, so it doesn’t feel like he’s really gone.”
I have to swallow a few times before I can trust myself to get the words out. “I know,” I say. Because I do. Sometimes I forget Dad isn’t just at work. “I still wake up in the middle of the night thinking he’s going to come home any minute, or I check my phone to make sure he didn’t call to tell me he can’t find his house keys.”
Jared laughs. “I still look for the
X-Files
notes, you know, the Post-its with quotes that he used to put on the fridge sometimes when he was in the middle of a case?”
I nod, trying to ignore the way my eyes are starting to burn.
“How long do you think it will feel like that?”
I would never trade what I have with Jared. Ever. But there are moments—like this one right now—where I feel like I was thrown into parenting him, and I resent my parents, both of them, for dumping this on me. I don’t have all the answers. Not for Jared and not for myself.