Night Sky (4 page)

I nodded. “Sasha's bear. The white one with the chewed-up nose.”

Calvin looked skeptical. “You saw the state of the bear's nose, but you don't know if you saw a person or an
it
?”

“I don't know, Calvin,” I said, giving in to my annoyance while trying to remember exactly what I'd seen. It had been just the flash of an image, like a low-res YouTube video, playing on an even worse Internet connection. “It was vaguely female. Kind of a she-ish, witchy it.” I started sifting through Sasha's unmade bed, looking for the teddy bear in question. “What I
do
know is that Sasha doesn't let go of that bear for a second when it's dark outside.” I looked under the bed. “It's not here.”

Whoever had taken Sasha had snatched her up quick, stopping only to put the screen back in the window—if that was, in fact, the way they'd taken the little girl from the house. Not only was the bear missing, but her bed was a tangle of purple and pink sheets.

If it were up to Sasha, she wouldn't leave her bed unmade for more than thirty seconds upon awakening.

“And look at her dolls,” I realized.

“Do I have to?” Calvin shuddered as he glanced at the shelves where Sasha kept her collection. “I hate those things,” he said. “I wouldn't sleep with them watching me. I'd spend the whole night making sure they weren't gonna do some evil while my eyes were closed.”

“I'm not asking for your opinion about them,” I said as patiently as I could. “I'm pointing out that everything's out of place. These dolls are all mixed up. Some are upside down…”

Calvin knew that in Sasha's world, this would be unacceptable. I'd told him that one of the things we'd done on Sunday was alphabetize the emergency contact list that her mom kept on the fridge. Whoo-hoo! Par-tay, Sasha style!

I continued, “And yeah, maybe Sasha fought back when whoever grabbed her, grabbed her.” I shook my head as I looked around. “But nothing else in the room is knocked over. It doesn't make sense.”

“Okay, so if Sasha didn't mess up the dolls, who did?” Calvin asked. “For the record, if I'm executing a home invasion with the intent to kidnap a child, I'm
not
gonna take the time to rearrange her freaking freaky dolls.”

I agreed. But those haunting images from my dream popped back into my head. I thought about Sasha's eyes—how they'd looked empty as she'd leaned against the car window.

I rubbed a tired hand over my face and sighed. “Cal, I'm gonna tell you something, and you're going to think I sound crazy.”

“Girl, I thought you were crazy from the jump.”

I gave him the side eye. “I'm serious. I know it's going to sound completely unreal, but I can't
not
tell you.”

Calvin nodded. “Okay.”

“I had a dream this was going to happen.” I frowned. “Sort of.”

Calvin looked amused. “Like a premonition?” he said, and I could tell immediately that he wasn't taking me seriously whatsoever.

“I guess.” I sat down on Sasha's bed, sighing. “It's hard to explain. Right before Carmen came to our door, I was having this nightmare. And Sasha was in it. She was walking down this deserted highway in the rain. I think—no, I
know
that she was in danger.”

Calvin wheeled close and draped an arm over my shoulder, pulling my head playfully into his armpit. “You're like Old Mary One-Eye, the palm reader who lives underneath the highway overpass—but cuter.”

“Dickweed.”

“I love you too.”

“I'm serious,” I said, pulling free and looking up at Calvin. “Why would I have a dream about Sasha right before she disappeared? I feel like maybe I know more than my conscious mind will let on.”

Calvin shook his head. “You had a bad dream. It's a coincidence.”

I didn't quite believe that.

“Tell you what,” Calvin said. “When they find Sasha—after you've gotten some good, uninterrupted sleep—we'll ask
her
if any part of your dream actually came true.”

“Do you really think they'll find her, Cal?”

“I
know
they will,” he said, his voice so rich with conviction that I almost believed it myself.

“I
so
hope you're right,” I said.

The next two days were seriously surreal—and this was
well
before Friday's after-dark run to the Sav'A'Buck in Harrisburg.
That
fabulousness was still to come.

Calvin and I both took Tuesday off from school to search for Sasha in the daylight, while the rest of the neighborhood watch rapidly waned. It was creepy, seeing people who had been standing outside with flashlights and umbrellas just hours before as they bustled into their cars and SUVs for a normal workday as if nothing were different. Old Mr. McMahon, two houses down, whistled as he mowed his lawn.

Even the sun was shining again. It seemed, honestly, as though the entire world was giving Sasha the finger.

Wednesday meant it had been long enough since Sasha's disappearance that the police could finally become involved. My mom had delivered an exhausting number of diatribes about
that
. She could still remember the days when a missing nine-year-old got immediate attention from the local police. But it had been decades since anyone gave a crap—or had a fully staffed police force.

She remembered too when a thing called Vurp had been the major way people communicated. Phone calls had video, not just audio the way they did now. She could go a full
hour
on how the infrastructure in Florida had corroded to the point where we were forced to resort again to voice mails and text messages.

But she was the one who'd moved us here from Connecticut. (And I could go and on and on about the injustice of
that
.)

When my alarm went off at six thirty on Wednesday morning, I pressed Snooze once and stared at my ceiling, wondering if I could get away with another day of absence from school. I wasn't done searching for Sasha, even if everyone else was. I knew that even though the police could now be “involved,” they wouldn't find Sasha, either.

“You're going to be late for the bus!” Mom called, rapping briskly on my closed bedroom door.

I exhaled heavily. Guess school was on my schedule. Reaching over to my bedside table, I picked up my old-fashioned alarm clock and pressed the off button on the back. I'd had the alarm set on the loudest ringer. Being a deep sleeper, I needed the equivalent of a fire drill to wake me, and this old clock was
loud
.

Throwing my legs over the edge of my bed, I resolved to continue the hunt for Sasha that afternoon. There would be time after school to keep searching. Calvin and I had at least four hours of decent daylight after our last class.

As I showered, thoughts of Sasha popped into my head.

She had been the only person who was kind enough to bring a welcome basket over to our house when Mom and I moved in.

I quickly towel dried my messy red mane of hair before shoving it into a ponytail.

Then, wrapping a towel around my body, I went back to my room and started the search for an outfit.

The jangling alarm from my clock cut through the air unexpectedly. I jumped, startled, and jogged over to the bedside table to shut it off again—I must have pressed the snooze button twice by accident—and stopped short.

The clock wasn't on my bedside table anymore.

Huh?

The ringing continued. I checked on the floor beneath my bed, and it wasn't there either.

Listening more closely, I realized with ever-growing confusion that the alarm was coming from my walk-in closet.

Heart beating hard, I opened the closet door and stepped inside. In the far left-hand corner were my pairs of sneakers and shoes. Opposite that was where I kept my dirty laundry in a messy heap. The ringing was coming from underneath that.

Scooping up jeans, T-shirts, and mismatched socks, I sifted through the clothes, and I found my alarm clock at the very bottom of the pile.

Turning it off, I crouched there in the silence.

Finally, I stood up, hiking my towel more securely around me.

“Mom?” I called.

Nothing.

I walked over to my bedside table and set the alarm clock down where I had left it earlier. Then I stepped out into the hallway.

I hadn't gone far when, on second thought, I backed up into my room to look, hard, at my bedside table.

The clock was still there.

Just
checking.

“Mom?” I called again.

“Skylar!” Mom exclaimed. “What are you still doing in your towel?” She emerged from her room, clutching a mug of hot coffee in her perfectly manicured hands.

“Were you just in my room?” I asked.

Mom sighed. “No, I wasn't anywhere near your room, Sky.” She fluffed her freshly styled hair anxiously with one hand, keeping a firm grip on her coffee mug with the other. “You're going to be late for school!”

I shook my head. “Why did you move my alarm clock?”

Mom looked absolutely exasperated. “Skylar Reid! I wasn't in your room! Stop with the crazy questions. Go get dressed! The bus is going to be here in”—she checked her silver watch—“three and a half minutes!”

I frowned. If Mom hadn't moved my alarm clock, then who had?

“Come on!” she prompted me. “Mush, mush! Let's go, let's go, let's go!”

—

I got outside just in time to give my mom the impression that I'd caught the school bus. Then I rounded the corner and hopped into Calvin's car.

“Question of the day,” Calvin said, adjusting his rearview mirror and making a sharp right down Main Street toward Coconut Key Academy. “Would you rather have one giant pimple on your face or a trillion tiny ones?”

I rolled my eyes. “Really?”

“It's the question of the day,” he said insistently. “What would you prefer? Saying
neither
is not an option.”

Calvin did this thing called “question of the day” whenever he knew I was bummed out or upset. It was a game that consisted of him asking a question starting with “Would you rather” and ending with two equally sucky scenarios.

I peered out the window, watching the trees filter by, and thought about the dream I'd had two nights ago.

“One big pimple,” I said, sighing.

“Girl, you're
nasty
!”

“What?” I said, exasperated. “Why is that nasty?”

Calvin turned his radio down a notch. “Here's how I see it,” he started, sounding as though he were about to discuss quantum physics with me. “If you've got a trillion tiny pimples, then you can probably just use cover-up and the world would barely ever know. There'd be a lot of them, but they'd be tiny as hell. Now, one big one on the other hand…” He shrugged. “Then you're basically a freak of nature.”

I bit my nail and thought. “Maybe so, but one big pimple would disappear a lot faster than a trillion small ones.”

“Not necessarily,” Calvin said, wagging a finger. “This thing is, like, headlight sized. Basically, you gave birth to a second head.”

“My lord, Calvin!”

He grinned. “You love me so much.”

I looked at him and couldn't hide my smile. “I do.”

We drove in silence for a moment.

“We're gonna keep looking for Sasha this afternoon,” I finally told him. When he didn't answer, I glanced over to look at him. “Aren't we?”

“Uh-huh,” Calvin said, but his expression was uncomfortable. He chewed on his lower lip.

“I'm not going to give up,” I said. “She's out there somewhere.”

Calvin nodded. “At least today the cops can get involved. Although it feels like a whole lot of
too
little, too late
,” he added.

I agreed. The system was screwy, but apparently things were so bad these days that even the wealthy town of Coconut Key didn't have enough money to pay for more than what my mom called a “skeleton crew” down at the police station. Because of that, now when a child went missing, there was a mandatory two-day waiting period. And even after that, a missing kid was more likely to be found by a neighborhood group or something called “citizen detectives.”

Mom had muttered pretty darkly about that, saying that those citizen detectives probably took Sasha in the first place. When you earned your living finding lost children, the children had to go missing in order for you to find them.

I hoped that was the case—that Sasha would be brought home by someone demanding a reward. But I couldn't help but feel that was an unlikely scenario.

Calvin pulled into the Coconut Key Academy parking lot. All the handicapped spaces were empty. Lucky us.

“Do you think Amanda Green would go for me?” Calvin asked, as a group of girls walked by on their way to first-period class.

I glimpsed Amanda in the crowd. She looked scary, as usual. Rocking the faux-hawk hairstyle and piercings galore, she was the epitome of retro punk.

“I think she would eat you alive,” I replied. “Anyway, you only like her because she's got your hairstyle.”

“She's sexy,” Calvin said, grinning. “I think she'd go for me.”

I undid my seat belt and opened the passenger-side door. “Good luck with that,” I said. “If you take her out on a date, just make sure to pack condoms and mace.”

“You're stupid,” Calvin replied affectionately. He opened his door and pressed the ramp to his car. He slid out sideways, the ramp depositing him, wheelchair and all, gently onto the sidewalk. Just as quickly, the ramp unhitched from his chair and slid back into the car.

“I wish I had a cool contraption like that,” I said.

“Grass is always greener,” Calvin mumbled.

—

School pretty much sucked.

With our rotating schedule, Chinese culture was my first class of the day, and I found myself in a new level of hell as I sat there listening to what was basically a fifty-minute infomercial. China was Coconut Key Academy's biggest corporate sponsor, and the class was mandatory for all juniors, with the idea that most of us would someday find ourselves employed by the former nation.

Of course, the number one job for American women was pregnancy surrogate, since the Chinese's one-child policy, combined with genetic manipulation, had yielded a population of pretty much all dudes. Yeah, they didn't think that one through.

Added to that was their complete lack of industrial regulation, which had turned corporate China into an environmental wasteland. It was much worse there than it was here, but Ms. Morton, the teacher, tried to bright-side it by pointing out that when we went to live in one of China's big cities—when, not if—we'd be amazed by the high quality of the Internet. And if we mostly stayed indoors, our risk of cancer wouldn't be
too
high.

Yay?

Yeah, no thanks—even though moving to Florida from Connecticut had been like time-traveling back to 2005 in terms of the reliability of the Internet. I mean, cell phone service was so sketchy here in the South that we often had to resort to texting. Talk about old-fashioned…

I got out of Chinese culture just barely alive and staggered through math and then stumbled into a popquiz in science class. I felt like I was dragging my brain cells through mud, and I must've failed the test. It was just too hard to concentrate when all I could think about was Sasha, missing and scared.

If she was even still alive.

That thought was horrible, and I quickly buried it. Sasha was alive. She had to be. I refused to believe otherwise.

Calvin met me in the hallway outside the music room. We both had fourth-period band practice.

“Where's your clarinet?” he asked, nodding at my empty hands as we trudged into Mr. Jenkins's class.

“Ask Mr. Jenkins,” I replied darkly.

Calvin whacked me in the butt with his trumpet case as he wheeled through the open doorway. I flicked him on the ear and followed.

The bell rang, a final warning for us to find our seats. Calvin hurried toward the front of the U-shaped seating arrangement and parked himself next to the school's star quarterback, Garrett Hathaway, who was first chair for trumpet.

I moved all the way to the back, where Mr. Jenkins had assigned me for the rest of the school year. Grimly, I pulled a tambourine, cymbals, and a triangle out of a huge plastic bin. Kim Riley, master of the bass drum, nodded her hello. I nodded back.

“Okay, people,” Mr. Jenkins said, tapping a pencil on the side of his music stand. “Let's get to work.”

No one bothered to respond. Instead, the din of students became a tiny bit quieter as kids shifted their conversations into whispers.

“Let's have some quiet in here,” Mr. Jenkins said, his voice only slightly louder. He tapped his pencil again. Today, his comb-over was especially horrendous, sticking up haphazardly as though a strong wind had managed to rearrange his follicles into some unique bird's nest.

I would have felt sorry for him if he hadn't taken me off clarinet and assigned me to the unbelievably super-duper lame task of playing percussion, comma, other.

“Quiet down, people!” Mr. Jenkins said again, his tone now insistent. Unfortunately, his big-boy voice carried quite an easily imitated whine. Calvin could do a mean Mr. J. I looked across the room at him, but he was busy listening to something Garrett was whispering in his ear.

As I watched, Calvin frowned and clenched his jaw before turning pointedly away from Garrett and rearranging the sheet music on his music stand.

“Okay, guys,” Mr. Jenkins said, patting at his cumulonimbus hair. “I want to start off today with a new number: excerpts from Mozart's
Clarinet
Concerto
.”

Of course he did. It was my favorite piece—provided I was playing the clarinet solo.

“It's an arrangement I found, perfect for the instruments in our band. So, let's take it from the top. A one, two, three, four!”

The class started to play, and I laughed out loud because the tempo Mr. Jenkins had set was that of a Sousa march.