Chasing Forever Down (Drenaline Surf Series) (2 page)

He turns his head toward me, and I watch him from the corner of my eye.
“So what do you plan on doing for forever?” he asks.

“
Do you use that line on all the girls?” I keep my face toward the stars.

“
Note to self,” he says. “The forever line is a no-go.”

He’s quiet for a minute
. Then he asks again. “But really, what is your forever plan?”

Summer break just started three days ago, and already I feel like I’m back in school with teachers and counselors and college recruiters asking the same future-oriented questions.

“First I have to survive senior year,” I say. “Then there’s college. Then the real world.”

He sits up just slightly and leans back on his elbows.
“That’s a cop out,” he says. “That’s what your parents and teachers have told you to say because you haven’t decided on a major. My guess is that your parents want you to be like them, and you want anything but that.”

“
It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’m not the one paying for college. They are.”

He drops back onto the slide.
“But you want to chase forever down, right?”

“
Yes,” I admit. “I don’t know anyone else who likes that song.”

I finally look over at him. The reflection of the creamy black sky zaps all color from his eyes. His jaw line moves up and down as he chews a piece of gum that I never saw him put into his mouth.

He looks over and laughs. “So tell me about forever,” he says.

I look back at the sky. Something in me questions whether I should spill my secrets to the guy with too many secrets, but he’s the only person in this vast universe who seems to be on the same page I am in the book of forever. And I need to know how to escape. I’m so sure he knows.

“My grandmother had a framing shop on the beach, about an hour from here,” I say.

I recount the picture frames made from driftwood and our shoreline adventures chasing after that very wood. There was an antique metal pelican perched on the picket fence outside of the shop, like a mascot for
Secrets of The Sea. The store closed down after she went into the nursing home, and my mom stashed every last remnant of those summer memories into our attic after my grandmother’s death.

“
Your parents didn’t want the store?” he asks.

“
No,” I say. “They had bigger and better business deals. It’s not about business deals, though. I always said it’d be mine someday, but they remind me that it’ll be after I’m grown…with a real degree and a real job…on my time, not theirs.”

I hesitate to say any more. I never talk about Secrets of The Sea or the metal pelican or how my grandmother told me stories about where all of the wood came from
– the storms that threw trees into the ocean and wooden planks rescued from pirate shipwrecks on the ocean bottom. The ones like me don’t complain or talk about big dreams. We go to the colleges our parents choose, and we get a degree to decorate our future office walls with. We don’t chase forever down. Our forevers are planned.

He unhooks his C-shaped cufflink and rolls up his sleeve to check the time. I find it odd that he wears a watch. He looks like the
“I keep time with my cell phone” type. He sits up and exhales like he’s forcing ocean winds from his throat and into the night.

“
We better head back,” he says.

He grabs his drumsticks from the ground and walks back to the sidewalk. He pulls a small piece of paper from his pocket, spits his gum into it, and tosses it toward the trash can. It falls short and rolls onto the grass.

“You’re littering on my childhood turf,” I tell him.

“Gonna arrest me now? I can post bail.” He laughs and drums an inconsistent beat against the Bristow Park sign. “C’mon. Let’s go.”

He walks me as far as the front entrance of Town Hall. Goodbyes and well wishes float around inside, and in a matter of minutes, tipsy CEOs will pour out of these same double doors.

“Meet me tomorrow?” he asks. “The park? Twelve noon?”

That’ll be after a long night of internet stalking trying to figure out this guy’s name and why he won’t tell me anything. The serial killer vibes are gone, but there are as many untold stories lingering in him as there are in the old driftwood frames in our attic.

“
I’ll be there,” I say.

“
Great,” he says. “I’ll see you then.”

He descends the concrete steps and disappears amongst the cars in the parking lot. He never even looks back.

It’s 3 AM when I shut down my laptop. Of all the social networking sites, all the search engines, all the information on the internet – there’s nothing that remotely hints at this guy. And it doesn’t help when you don’t have a name to search.

There are only a thousand and one reasons why he doesn’t want to be found. He’s a criminal. He’s wanted by the FBI. He’s homeless and doesn’t want anyone to know. He’s an undercover agent. He’s the lovechild of a corporate genius who was impregnated in high school and gave him up for adoption. At this time of the night, nothing that makes sense. I fall back onto my pillow and wait for morning’s light.

The park is empty as of 11:57 AM. It’s still empty at five after twelve and ten after twelve, and as of
12:30, I realize he’s not coming. Bristow Park feels as sad as it did the night Chris and I took our final voyage across the world of imagination and childhood. I run my hand over the top of the park’s sign, the same spot where Mystery Guy tapped his drumsticks last night, and that’s when I see it. A paper star. It’s lime green and folded origami-style. It wasn’t here last night, and my gut feeling says it’s for me.

I recount pieces of last night for Mom when I get home, leaving out the part where I snuck off with a stranger, and drill her on the families with college-aged sons. She digs out the last edition of the
“corporate yearbook” and wishes me luck on finding him. Even if he’s in this book, it’s five years old and may fail me. Still, this is my only option right now. As I thumb the pages, I realize the A’s are unpromising, full of daughters and much older children. The B’s provide the same results until page twenty-seven.
Burks
.

He’s not the same disheveled emo-boy-wannabe from last night. He’s well dressed. And blonde. But his face
is the same, down to the cheekbones and his jaw line and the way his smile does that crooked thing where it’s a little higher on the left side than the right.

I fold the corner of the page and slam the book shut. I can’t get downstairs fast enough to ask my mom. She’s standing at the stove when I burst into the kitchen.

“What do you know about the Burks family?” I ask.

I drop the book onto the table and flip back to their page, hoping the visual aid may help Mom with details other than what company the family owns or how big their house is. She
doesn’t walk over to the table, though. A reminiscent gaze sweeps her face, and she says, “Oh, they’re nice people.”

That tells me nothing.
“What about their son, Spencer?”

She turns toward me, sad-eyed and nostalgic.
“Spence,” she says. “They always called him Spence.”

“
It’s him,” I say, pointing at his picture. “This is the guy from last night.”

This gets her to the table. She stares at the picture for what feels like too long, and I wait for her to say something, anything.

“Sweetie, there’s no way the guy you met was Spence Burks,” she finally says.

I shake my head.
“I’m a thousand percent sure it was him.”

Mom shakes her head back.
“It’s impossible, Haley. He died three years ago.”

CHAPTER 2

“
You tried hooking up with a ghost?” Linzi’s voice is completely serious coming through the earpiece of my cell phone.

“
No!” I fall back onto my bed, preparing to explain it to my best friend one more time. “He was very much alive,” I assure her. “And I was not hooking up with him.”

But now the mystery around Spence Burks has spread outside of my little galaxy and into the universe.

I roll over so I’ll stop forming pictures of drumsticks and stars out of the texture on my ceiling. At this rate, I’ll end up drawing myself into a padded room, and I know I’m not crazy. “Can you just come over? You’re the only one who actually believes me.”

Linzi makes it to my house in record time and manages to get past my parents without discussing the undead. She grabs the book of corporate families as soon as she gets into my bedroom and flips it directly to page twenty-seven.

“He’s cute,” she says. She stretches out on my bed and looks at me with that same sympathetic face Mom gave me in the kitchen. “You’re positive it’s him?”

“
For the millionth time, yes. I’m completely sure. It was him, and he’s not dead, and I’m tired of saying that,” I tell her again. My frustration is about to erupt like a massive volcano.

“
No twin brother?” she asks.

“
Only child,” I remind her.

“
Damn. Guys that cute should come in twos,” Linzi says. She traces his face on the page with her index finger.

It’s not about his looks
, though. Yes, he was cute, and he was fun, and any girl my age would probably fall to pieces over him, but that’s not why I have to find him. He understood everything I’m feeling, everything I want in life that I can’t ever imagine being within my reach. And for once, I felt like it was there, that it was close enough to grab. I’m so sure he’s done it, and I need to know every secret of the trade from a mastermind like him.

“
I know! Separated at birth! These things happen, you know. I’ve seen it on talk shows,” Linzi says.

She twists her hair around her finger while she thinks. Her eyes glow with excitement as the thoughts rush through her brain like paper stars realigning across a beautiful galaxy.
I already dread hearing her next theory.

“What if,” she begins again, “he went somewhere and something bad happened to him? Like he has amnesia and doesn’t know who he is but somehow he found his way back here, like he’s trying to find his past?”

I shake my head.
“He knew his past. He knows what it’s like to feel…” I stop before I say the word ‘trapped.’

Linzi stares at me waiting for the rest of the sentence.

I inhale and attempt to come up with something other than how he totally came back here for a reason and understands me in a way that even my BFF doesn’t.

“
He didn’t want to be found,” I say. “He was too secretive. He knows exactly who he is, and he didn’t want anyone else to know he’s alive.”

“So he faked his death! Ohmygosh, this is so exciting,” Linzi says, her voice changing from a CSI who just cracked the case to a squealing girl in .02 seconds. “So how do we find him?”

I rack my brain for any tiny piece of info he may have slipped last night, but his bases were covered well. He always had a comeback.

“I don’t know. Everything was so off about him. At least we know who he is now, even if he’s supposed to be dead. We can figure out who he was before he died, but I don’t know how to figure out who he is now. And all I have to go on is a stupid paper star,” I say.

“
Let’s backtrack the present, not the past,” Linzi says. She stands up and grabs her keys. “C’mon. We’re reliving last night.”

Before we make it to Town Hall, I ask Linzi to stop at the library. It’s foreign land to us, but they have an archive of newspapers, and old newspapers reveal old news. We trace back three years, to the month of April. It’s not hard to find him. He’s all over the front page for a week and a half.
SPENCER BURKS STILL MISSING AFTER THREE DAYS.
This headline catches my eye first. I skim the details of the article.

Florida
. Spring break vacation. Storm. Tides. Lost at sea. Possible drowning. Helicopters. Search crews. Body not found.

“This is unreal,” Linzi whispers.

She puts her newspaper down and scatters the others across the table. The headlines tell the story along the way, from notification that he was missing up to the day
that the search and rescue mission became a recovery mission that was eventually called off.

Linzi snaps a few pictures of the newspapers with her cell phone then places them back into the archives. She waits until we’re back in her car before she says anything.

“So he went on vacation with his family, took a swim in the ocean against the weather channel’s warnings, and disappeared, pretending he drowned and was entombed in the ocean’s bottom for the rest of eternity,” she says to her steering wheel.

I close the curtain on all the questions screaming from the theat
er in my mind. I can’t even begin comprehending how someone who was about to graduate high school could pull off his own death and escape like that. It’d take months of planning and preparation.