Pretty Sly (5 page)

I mean, my own dad was a blank to me. Not only had I never met him but I had no idea who or where he was. My mom was a champ, raising me all by herself from the early days when she was only a teenager—just a year older than I was now. I didn’t question that but sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder about the life I might have had, with normal, married parents. Brothers and sisters. Grandparents. Aunts and uncles. Big family parties.

A mother who didn’t just disappear one day, for no good reason.

But there had to be a good reason. Didn’t there?

I touched the necklace at my throat. It was my only link to a past I didn’t really understand.

When Tre came back, he handed me his computer in its neoprene sleeve. “There’s a printer downstairs in the library if you need one.” He pronounced the word
library
with a British accent to show me that this whole scene was still new and strange to him. “I’ll be up at six thirty. I’m hauling your ass out of bed, too. So don’t stay up too late zoning out on the net.” He smiled, showing his dimple, and I couldn’t help but find his parental concern cute.

“Six thirty? Jeez.” I yawned just thinking about it. “You don’t mess around.”

“Just trying to stay out of trouble. And I suggest you do the same, Sly Fox.” He saluted me. “See you in the
A.M
.”

I opened the computer and brought up the email from my mom again. I figured that if I read it enough times, I might be able to figure out where she was. Maybe there was a hint in there somewhere.

hardest thing I’ve ever done

I wish I could explain why

no choice

Someone or something else had forced her to leave. That had to be it. I closed my eyes to hold back the tears that were finally coming, spilling out from underneath
my eyelashes no matter how hard I tried to hold them back. My chest was heavy, too, but I would not let myself sob, not in Tre’s house, not with his little brother, Kai, in the room next door. All I could do was ball myself up and hug the pillow close as fatigue and fear swelled through me.

When the tears finally subsided, I sat up again. I was depleted. Might as well try to go to sleep. I reached over to turn off the computer.

Before I could, I saw that a newer email had come in, this time from Aidan. Just seeing the arrangement of the letters of his name gave me a little buzz. He was thinking of me. I clicked it open.

Willa,

I know you’re probably mad. I’m sorry for earlier. I didn’t want to start trouble. I really just wanted to make sure we were safe. Here’s the photo of the painting we took. Write when you have a chance, okay? I want to help you figure this out.

A

I palmed at my damp eyes and gathered a clean breath. This email from Aidan made the world feel a little less bleak. Whatever anger I’d felt seemed small and distant now. How could I possibly be mad at him, after all he’d done for me today? Not to mention this was Aidan Murphy we were talking about. He could
charm the mustache off a military dictator.

I opened up the attachment to look at the painting again. My mom could be anywhere by now, but I felt sure that the painting could at least tell me what was going on in her head before she left, and maybe that would lead me to her.

I zoomed in, magnifying the pixels on the screen. To someone else the picture might have looked like a bunch of blotches. But my mom was always talking about “visual vocabulary,” and I knew that she used broad shapes and strokes of color to build up the energy or feeling of a place.

The paint was thickly applied—it appeared as though she’d spread it on with a palette knife, swirling it like frosting on a cupcake so that the white melded with the blue, and I could see now, looking closer, that the brown wasn’t really brown at all but tiny bleeding patches of amber and yellow and green.

I zoomed out again, way out, and the image started to come together, all the pixels falling into an order. It looked like a beach scene: On the left-hand side were jagged-looking brown-, red-, and cream-streaked cliffs that seemed to meet a wildly crashing ocean.

It was a landscape, there was no question. And the place itself, or at least the general look of it, was starting to seem vaguely familiar. But I had never seen this painting before and I couldn’t conjure up the name of the beach, or how I knew it. Without a title or some
other words or landmarks to place it, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to figure out where it was. What was the significance? Maybe there was no significance.

My in-box jumped with a (1). Another email from Aidan.

Willa,

One more thing: I traced the IP address of your mom’s email. It looks like it came from a hotel in Santa Barbara called the Hadley. Just thought you’d want to know.

A

My heart leaped. He’d found her!

I already knew Aidan was supposedly a computer whiz, but I was amazed and touched by his genius nonetheless. I Googled the Hadley and it came up right away, a small boutique hotel. The photo showed a Missionstyle building with white stucco walls and a Spanish tiled roof dripping with hanging vines.

A—

Thanks for sending this info. And I’m not mad at you. I promise. I know you were just trying to help. You did the right thing, asking Tre.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard. How could I convey my sincere thanks, the seriousness of the
situation, and also the
other
feelings I was having—the dizzying, tickly feelings that had nothing to do with my mom’s disappearance and everything to do with Aidan? No, I had to stay focused on what really mattered. This stuff with my mom was more important than my love life right now.

I’ll be at Prep tomorrow, and I’m not sure where I’ll be after that. I will let you know. Thanks for everything today. Might not be until after all of this is resolved, but I will make it up to you. Just let me know how. Sleep well, Aidan.

XO,

Willa

I crept down the hallway to the library and, trying to be as quiet as possible, plugged the laptop into the printer, so I could print out the address of the hotel and the picture Aidan had sent me. Then I took both pieces of paper and stuffed them into my overnight bag, along with the envelope of money from my mom. I had to be prepared. Just in case I had to leave.

I turned off the light and got into bed, resting my head against the now-damp pillow. Everyone else in Tre’s house was asleep—I could hear Kai turning over in his bed, the mattress faintly squeaking, and I envied him for being a little kid with nothing to worry about.
I wished I were that young again, with my mom here to comfort me with one of her made-up fairy tales.

I tried to close my eyes and count backward from eight hundred by sevens, a trick that usually worked when I couldn’t sleep. All I could see, though, was that painting, as if it were right on the backs of my eyelids. And that kept leading me back to my mom, the shock of her leaving, the pain of missing her. It was all too strange.

Should I follow her? The note said not to. I pictured her stern face, the pinched-up expression she made when she was angry with me, and wondered if I should listen, if I should do the right thing. But what was the right thing? Right, wrong. Stay, go. They were just words now. And words meant nothing when you were alone in the darkness.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

FIVE

MY BACK-TO-SCHOOL STRATEGY
was simple: Stay invisible. In the morning, I put on the most unimaginative outfit I could summon out of my overnight bag: jeans and a black T-shirt. Maybe there was no way to blend in after being outed as the mastermind of multiple robberies, but I didn’t want to stand out any more than I had to.

I quickly dried my hair, tied it back in a ponytail, and put on a little bit of lip gloss. The final result was human but blank and nondescript, like a mannequin or a secret shopper. I stared back at myself in the mirror and saw my mother’s blond hair and hazel eyes, all the features we had in common. Then I remembered she was really gone and I still didn’t know what to do about it.

Tre made us bagels and coffee, which we ate, standing up, at the granite-topped kitchen island. His stepmother had already left for her tennis lesson, and Kai was waiting
for us, dressed in his Prep uniform of khaki pants and a little blue blazer with the school crest. With his curly mop of hair and round glasses he looked like a serious second-grade scholar.

He watched over our breakfast impatiently. “Can we go now? You guys are taking for-
ever
.”

He was still at an age where he actually looked forward to school. He was learning how to tell time and count to a thousand. He probably had friends there waiting for him and, I would’ve guessed, the only drama in his life took place on a baseball diamond.

“All right, little man,” Tre said, moving our dishes to the sink. “We’re out.”

I loaded both my bags into Tre’s car. I couldn’t stay at Tre’s house another night. It was nice here, but I didn’t want to take advantage of his generosity. I wasn’t sure where I’d go next—part of me really wanted to hit the road and find my mom, but I kept hearing her voice in my head, telling me off.

Don’t be a hero, Willa. Just go to school like you’re supposed to. Face whatever you have to face. Deal with your problems.

You’re one to talk,
my own voice answered her.
Didn’t you just run away from yours?

We drove to Valley Prep, with Kai in the backseat. The entire car ride, I could feel him studying us, his little forehead creased into a frown.

“Are you guys boyfriend-girlfriend?” he asked finally.

Tre looked at me and smiled sheepishly, apologetically. “No, Kai. Willa’s my friend.”

“Then how come she slept over? You never have girls sleep over.”

Wow. I guess seven-year-olds like to cut to the chase.

“She’s having some issues, man. She just needed a place to crash.”

“Oh.” He seemed to think this over for a moment. “Well, she’s pretty.”

“Thanks, Kai,” I said, flattered by his assessment. I’d never been anyone’s girlfriend—not yet—though my insides shimmied as I thought of those few hours of almost-girlfriendness with Aidan. If I went to California, would he wait for me until I got back?

Tre gave Kai the side-eye. “Don’t you have anything else to think about back there? No homework to do?”

I laughed. I considered Tre just a friend, and I was pretty sure he had a lady love in Detroit. If so, she was a lucky girl.

Tre lived close to school—a little
too
close for my taste. At the sight of the white Valley Prep sign at the end of the school’s driveway, I felt my stomach drop. I was
so
not looking forward to this.

I remembered the first time I’d ever seen the place— the day school started back in September. I’d ridden to Prep on my old Schwinn, feeling a little bit like a freak in the pack of Maybachs and Bentleys, not to mention the lack of bike lanes. And then, in the parking lot, Cherise
almost ran me down in her VW. That’s how we’d met. A classic story, really: I was knocked to the pavement and she helped me up. She felt sorry for almost killing the new girl and so she took me under her wing and introduced me to all of her friends. Which, looking back on it, was something she now probably regretted.

Ugh. Just thinking about my last IM exchange with Cherise, where she basically made it clear that she no longer wanted to speak to me, filled me with the sads. And now I’d have to face her in person.

I checked the clock on Tre’s dash. There was still time to turn around, right?

Tre pulled up behind a line of luxury cars in front of the Lower School entrance. “Okay, buddy, why don’t you get out of the car now and go embarrass someone else, huh?”

Kai shrugged, slipping the straps of his turquoise backpack over his little shoulders. “All right. See you later.”

We watched him walk up the steps and go inside.

“Sorry about that,” Tre said. “Kai’s a little bit of a punk sometimes.”

“He’s cute,” I said. “No worries. And anyway it helped take my mind off the situation.”

“The back-to-school situation?”

“The my-mom-is-missing situation. The my-house-was-wrecked situation. The about-to-get-my-butt-kicked situation.”

“Yeah, that’s a lot of situations,” Tre agreed as he smoothly steered the car around to the Upper School lot. He found a spot in the section reserved for the junior class.

Nearby, Drew Miller was getting out of his Beamer. He was friends with Nikki and Kellie. He was a Grade A douchenozzle. He was also one of the people I’d stolen from.

Oh God. It was starting before we even stepped foot on school property. I wanted to duck behind a car. I wanted to tunnel through the asphalt into my own personal cave. Was this how my mom had felt before she had to leave? This kind of impossible fear?

“You ready, Willa?” Tre asked.

“Not really,” I said, forcing a smile, trying to be brave. “But I guess we have to go in, right?”

“Don’t think they’ll teach us much out here.”

I wanted him to say,
It’s going to be fine, Willa
or
There’s no need to worry, Willa.
But of course he didn’t. For one thing, you couldn’t just write a script in your head and expect someone to follow it. For another, how could he promise me anything? We both knew there were plenty of good reasons to worry. I was screwed. Simple as that.

I grabbed my two bags and we headed toward the front courtyard. I’d only been away five days, but so much had changed in my own life in that time that I half-expected Prep to look totally different.

No way. Prep was exactly as I remembered it: the
modern concrete-and-glass buildings stretching out low and infinite against the red desert earth. Behind them, glimpses of craggy rock formations that looked like an altar to the sun.