Autumn's Kiss (6 page)

I'd look and see who the guy is, but I don't want to get my eyes scratched out by the Pup of Doom. I somehow manage to twist my back to the dog and bend double while I write
Home
on the map. I hear the double-beep of the car unlocking and feel the cool rush of outside air just before I appear back on my bed.

“I am not a superhero,” I say in a quavering voice. “I'm not.”

I bring my phone as I stagger to the bathroom. I wasn't gone long—Mom and Erick are still at the movies—so I FaceTime Jenna while I clean out my scratches.

“Did the dog have its shots?” Jenna wonders.

“I didn't really get the chance to ask,” I say. “It didn't break my skin, though. Not with its teeth.” It scratched my arms like crazy, but nothing too deep. “Maybe this
zemi
isn't my dad's spirit at all,” I say. “Maybe it's some evil spirit trying to mess with me.”

Jenna shakes her head. “You forgot something. With the diary, Eddy said your dad wanted you to bring peace and happiness—”

“To the world,” I finish. “I know. Which clearly I suck at doing.”

“To
your little corner
of the world,” Jenna reminds me. “Saving random people around the universe is great, Autumn, but it has nothing to do with your little corner of the world. It's too much.”

“So how do I use the map to bring peace and harmony to my little corner of the world?” I ask.

“You already started,” she says. “You came to visit me when I was totally stressed out and gave me the best night I've had since we left camp. And what about Ames and Taylor? Didn't you start with the diary because you wanted to help them?”

Jenna's right. That
is
why I'd pulled out the journal. Ames and Taylor are both pining for guys they can't get. Helping them is something I would have tried to do with the diary, so now I'll do it with the map. And I probably won't get clawed in the process.

Now I just have to figure out how.

It takes me a while to figure out how the map can help my friends' love lives. In the meantime I use it to make a couple of trips back to Jenna in Stillwater. She drives us to some stores a few towns over so we don't run into anyone who will recognize me, and she helps me pick out a costume for Reenzie's party on Saturday. I'm still nostalgic for the Halloweens I used to have, but Jenna promises me that if I get really depressed, I can call her. She's going to a party, but it's nothing big and she's happy to slip out if I need her.

Maybe keeping me close to Jenna this time of year
is
why Dad's spirit moved to the map. It's definitely helping me feel more peaceful about something I thought would be brutal.

The costume we pick out for me is nothing as ornate as the kinds of things my mom put together, but I like that. I want it to be simple and easy. I go with zombie bride. The dress is short and ripped, so I won't swelter in the Aventura humidity and I can dance in it. I get fake contacts that look bloodshot, and I buy a little paint-on fake blood and stick-on scars. My skin's already deathly pale, so that part's easy. When I tell my Aventura friends about the costume at lunch on the school lawn, they like it.

“Where'd you get it?” Taylor asks. “I didn't see that when I was looking.”

“I got it online,” I lie. Not a big lie. I could've gotten it online. I just happened to get it in Maryland.

“You know I love talking about my party,” Reenzie says, getting up, “but I have to run. Yearbook meeting.”

“Since when are you on the yearbook?” Sean laughs.

“Today's my first day,” she says, “but it's part of my lifelong passion to be an archivist and record our fleeting young lives for all posterity. At least, that's what I'll say on my college applications.”

“I thought you were telling colleges your lifelong passion was ending the tyranny of football teams with race-offensive names,” I say.

“It was,” Reenzie says, “but Ms. Dorio said this morning the name wasn't changing no matter what, and I can't have my passion be an epic fail.”

“But your passion
can
be something you've never had any interest in until now?” Taylor asks.

“It's a newly discovered passion that made me realize my true calling as a teller of stories and chronicler of lives,” she says grandly…and it's so ridiculous that the rest of us burst out laughing.

Reenzie isn't amused. She stands taller and purses her lips into a single line. “You should all be nice to me,” she huffs. “Stay on my good side and I'll make sure you look good in all the candids. Piss me off and I can't be responsible for your eternal legacy. Jokes are immediate; yearbooks are forever.”

“
Mira,
you can't be mad,” Ames says through her last gasps of laughter. “Just listen to yourself! You sound
chiflada
!”

Reenzie doesn't like being called crazy. “
Chiflada
this,” she snaps, which makes no sense. “Yale only accepts ten percent of legacies.
Legacies.
Even second- and third-tier schools are turning away straight-A students because they don't have a passion that makes them stand out. You think you can get away with being Little Miss and Mister Well-Rounded? You can't. And, no, Ames, that's not a fat thing.”

“¡Que te pasa!”
Ames cries. “When you tell
just me
it's not a fat thing, it becomes a fat thing!”

“You're not fat,” Jack says.

“Still talking about it, still a fat thing,” Ames says.
“Callate.”

“I'm just saying, this is the year that counts,” Reenzie points out. “By next fall, we're already filling out early-decision applications and the die is cast. Swallow that with your corn dogs.”

She expertly tosses her hair and strides away.

“She's a real breath of fresh air,” J.J. says.

“I like Reenzie now,” Ames says, “I do…but she can still be a real
pendejo.
”

“I don't have to worry about that stuff,” Taylor says. “The best theater schools only care about your audition.”

“We're all fine,” Amalita says. “You'll go act, Sean will play football, J.J.'s grades will get him anywhere, Autumn will get in with her ‘My Dad Died' essay—”

“Nice,” J.J. says. “Very sensitive.”

“It's true!” she says. “And as a PuertoMecuadorbano Jew, I'm a diversity board's dream come true.”

“What about me?” Jack says.

“Oh, you're screwed. You'll stay here and work at Steak 'n Shake.” Ames doesn't give Jack the chance to object. She turns to Sean. “Did you invite Denny to Reenzie's Halloween party?”

“Yeah,” Sean says, “but he won't go. He doesn't do parties.”

Ames flops dramatically back onto the grass, her bracelets and earrings jangling all the way. “
Ai,
this boy is killing me! Where is he?” She looks around the lawn. “I need to talk to him. I could convince him to go to the party, and by the end of it, he'll be eating out of my hand.”

“Only if you're holding grass-fed beef or a salad,” Sean says. “He only eats lean protein and vegetables.”

“That's why he looks like him and you look like you,” Ames says.

“Weren't you just the one complaining about body-image comments?” I ask.

“I'm round,” she says. “It's different when I say it.”

“I'm just saying,” Sean says, “McNack goes off campus for lunch, he doesn't hang around school except for classes and football, and he's a senior, so you're not going to run into him in class. I'm all for you going after him, Ames. I just don't see how it's going to happen.”

BLING!

Is that the sound of a lightbulb going on above my head?

Why, yes. Yes, it is.

I check my phone. There's still forty minutes left of lunch period.

“I have to go,” I say.

I sling my backpack over my shoulder and bus my tray with lightning speed, then duck around the building and behind a row of bushes where I know I won't be seen. I have the map in my bag—I keep it and a dry-erase pen in a small cloth drawstring purse I dug out of my closet. Looking around one last time to make sure no one's watching, I pull out the map and pen and write across the green landmass,
Denny McNack
.

Next thing I know, I'm toppling off a high stool at a juice bar. There are only three customers: two in line, and one at a counter that faces outside. The workers are busy looking down at their blenders or the cash registers…or at least, I guess they were before I appeared, because no one screams and accuses me of being some kind of ghost or witch for popping into existence out of nowhere. But they are looking at me now, since I'm on the floor in a tangle of chair legs.

“I'm okay,” I tell everyone. “Just slipped. All good.”

No one cares. They go back to what they were doing. Including the guy at the counter, who is
totally
Denny McNack!

“Hey!” I say as if we're old friends.

He doesn't even turn around. Why would he? He's a senior football hero with one foot already in a college stadium. I'm not even on his radar. Maybe if I say I'm his quarterback's girlfriend…

…which would be a lie
and
might get back to Sean, who would wonder how I got here when I was just at lunch.

Wherever here is.

“Denny!” I try again. This time he turns. And while my heart is completely owned by Sean, and to a more long-term extent by Kyler Leeds, my knees go a little weak. I completely get why Amalita is obsessed with this guy, and I am in awe that she thinks she can snag him just by hanging out with him for a few minutes. Dark hair, dark eyes, chiseled face, every muscle in sight cut and sleek and…

I have a job to do. It's my second attempt at being a superhero—granted, a different kind of superhero—and this time I'm not going to mess it up.

“Great game last Friday,” I say. “I'm a big fan.”

He gives me a half-smile and a nod.

“Thanks.”

Wow, even his voice is hot. Ames will love me forever when this works out. Of course, I can't tell her how I was secretly behind it, but that's how we superheroes roll.

“Yeah!” I enthuse. “It's so funny seeing you here…at this place…” I scan the room for logos, see one on the wall. “Loosey Juicey!”

This place is far too healthy for me to have heard of it. It smells like a meadow. I have no earthly clue where we are.

“Is this the one on…Melville? Down the street from the school?”

Denny looks less sexy when he stares at you like you're insane. “You're here,” he says. “You're telling me you don't know where you are?”

“The fall,” I say. “Tumbled off that stool. Little mixed up. Can you just tell me…?”

He scrunches his face like he smells something bad. This from a guy who eats in a meadow. “Fourth and Avalon.”

“Right! Of course! And, uh…” I lean over to check out his plate. It's piled in ground cover, and his glass is full of something green enough to be nuclear waste. “You're still eating, clearly, so I'll leave you to it…'cause you'll probably be here for at least another…what…half hour?”

“Something like that,” he says. “You take care now.”

With that he turns his back on me, which is great because I don't need him to think I'm cool; I just need his location. Oh, sure, it'll be awkward when he's in love with Ames and hanging out with all of us, but by then I'll have come up with an ingenious cover story that everyone will find endlessly charming.

I run outside and duck behind a mailbox, then pull out the map and write
Amalita
on it.

I pop into place at the edge of the lunch field. Again, no one sees me actually burst into existence, and since that's way too coincidental, I'm thinking it's part of the map's magic. It'll put me someplace awkward and possibly inexplicable, but it won't look to anyone that I've been playing with a
Star Trek
transporter, a reference I swear I only know because of Jack.

Ames and the gang—except go-getter Reenzie—are all right where I left them. I don't have a lot of time. I run over. “Ames! Tee! I just saw on Twitter that Kyler Leeds was seen in Aventura!”

“What! Where?”

“Are you kidding me?!”

“Around Fourth and Avalon, but we have to go
now
!”

“Do we have time?” Amalita checks her watch.

“Just enough,” I say, “but we have to hurry.”

“I'll drive,” Ames says.

I shake my head. “Taylor. Your car's faster.”

I have no idea if Taylor's car is faster, but I'm hoping Amalita has a different ride back to school than we do. Ames and Taylor go along with it, and we run to the parking lot and pile into the car. I sit in the backseat and fervently hope we don't
actually
find Kyler Leeds, since I promised I wouldn't say he's in town.

It takes five minutes to get to Fourth and Avalon, which is way longer than when I just burst over there.

“Slow down, slow down!” I say when we get close to the juice place. “Look in the windows—maybe he's in one of the stores.”

I'm prepared to make the “discovery” if Ames doesn't notice Denny in the window, but it turns out I don't have to.

“¡Dios mio!”
she gasps. “Stop the car!”

Taylor does and Ames leaps out. She leans back only long enough to say, “You can keep looking—I'll text if I need a ride.”

As Taylor slowly drives on, I watch Ames shake out her hair, shimmy her dress into place, and sashay into Loosey Juicey. Mission accomplished.

“Did the tweet say anything else about him?” Taylor asks anxiously.

“Who?”

“
Kyler Leeds!
Did it say where exactly they saw him?”