He didn’t answer, only drove out of the parking lot and made a turn on West Common Road. I didn’t even know why I’d tried to make conversation. I was invisible to him all over again. He seemed to have forgotten I was there.
I was in a time machine. A hellish, god-awful time machine that sent me back to high school.
I risked a glance at him as he drove. Old jeans, tee, baseball cap pulled low. His belly was starting to thicken in a way I should probably find unattractive. I informed my teenage self that we were driving in a car with Bradley Pine, but she had nothing to say about it for once. We might be over him.
Our route took us past Fell High, and I watched it go by out thewindow. The building was over a century old and had originally been intended as a private hospital. Its Gothic spikes and stonework were modeled on Notre Dame and looked like a terrifying birthday cake. I’d been miserable there. No one at school had cared when my little brother disappeared. I hadn’t graduated, because after Ben, my family had shredded like so much soggy cardboard. No fireworks, no drama, just a mushy end to something that hadn’t been worth much in the first place. We’d moved away two years after Ben vanished, when I was seventeen.
“That’s our high school,” Bradley said.
For God’s sake. “I’m glad you remember something,” I snapped.
He let out a heavy sigh. “Look, I don’t want to do this, okay? Let’s get this over with as quick as possible.”
“Bradley,” I said, “you are divorced, unemployed, and living at home with your father. What else did you have to do today?”
“I need to rake leaves,” he replied, as if I hadn’t insulted him.
I stared at him. “Fine, then. Give me the keys to the storage unit and go rake leaves. You’ll never hear from me again.”
He gave me a look like I was impenetrably stupid. “If I go home and rake leaves, Dad will see me. He’ll know I left.”
“Surely your superior intellect will find a way around this seemingly insurmountable problem.”
He frowned. “What?”
“You’ll figure it out,” I nearly shouted, exasperated.
“You seem mad,” he pointed out. “Why? Did we date in high school or something?”
I felt myself tipping over the edge. It was the sight of Fell High that had done it. The memory of going there every day with the pain of Ben an open wound, infected and blistering. Of no one noticing. The muffled, dark silence of it all, as if I was the ghost and not the people I unwillingly saw.
“You didn’t care,” I said, and I wasn’t talking about my old crush on him. That had burned away like ashes. “You didn’t care about mybrother. No one did. He was six, and something really bad happened to him. He was alone. You didn’t care then, and you don’t care now. And you still think that makes you better than me.” I picked up the baseball glove from the back seat and held it up. “You have children, for fuck’s sake. What if it was this kid who died all alone?” When he was silent, I continued. It felt good to take my anger out on him, like cleansing fire. “You think you’re still a big deal. You’re not. None of us are. I’m going to find my brother, and I’m not apologizing for it. I don’t care that you don’t even know my name. You can either help me or get out of my way. Rake leaves if you want. Or don’t.I don’t need you.”
I smacked the glove against the side of his head, because that felt good, too. Then I tossed it into the back seat again.
Bradley straightened his hat, which had fallen askew when I hit him. He kept his eyes on the road.
“Okay,” he said.
We were silent for the rest of the drive.
—
Bradley produced a ring of keys from his pocket when we parked in the gravel parking lot. Gus had given him the ring, which had a few keys attached to it alongside a yellowed piece of paper fastened with Scotch tape. Bradley thumbed through the keys with painful slowness. I tried to take the ring from him, but he snatched it away from me, closing his big fist over it. “No way,” he said. “Dad’s orders.”
So I waited as he started over and thumbed through the keys again. The storage unit place was a line of ugly concrete sheds with roll-up doors fastened by padlocks. There was a tiny office at one end, dark and empty. The place seemed to have no name, and the only sign displayed a phone number in bright yellow letters. There was no one else here. A few hundred yards away, cars sped by on the two-lane road that fed from the highway.
“Nice spot,” I said, eyeing the rusty, sagging chain-link fence and the half-dead weeds beyond it.
“Dad is paranoid,” Bradley said. “There’s stuff he won’t keep at the house.”
“Why not?”
“His divorce from Mom was ugly. She still owns half the house, so he can’t lock her out. He won’t pay for a lawyer to sort everything out. He says lawyers are crooks. He thinks Mom will snoop through his things and tell on him.”
“How long have they been divorced?” I asked.
“Twenty-six years.” Bradley held up a key. “It’s this one.”
