“Oh, don’t be. That girl is a riot.”
She was something, all right.
I pushed through the door, unsure of what to expect, but the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves flanking the walls and several huge beanbags were certainly not it. Dark wooden floors and a massive colorful rug covered the expanse of a reading nook. At the end of the room sat a sky-blue desk thoroughly covered in writing, doodles, and stickers. I would’ve guessed it belonged to anyone other than the man sitting behind it with his arms foldedover his chest, hair standing on end, five o’clock shadow graduating into beard territory. He shot to his feet when I walked in.
And across from the desk, debilitating relief in the form of a pink head of hair.
“Phoebe,” I exhaled. The chair spun and there she was, perfect and unharmed, sporting a Front Bottoms T-shirt big enough to hang like a dress, snacking from a small bag of chips.
“Vi!” Her face broke into a grin, the happiest she’d been to see me since the weekends I’d come home from college. “Wanna take a trip?”
Six
“Did you run here?”
My heartbeat in my ears mostly drowned out Dex’s question. I shuffled forward, eyes locked on my sister, and wrapped my arms around her, tucking her head under my chin.
“Ew. Why?” she said, trying to squirm out of my grasp. I held on tighter.
“You can’t do that,” I whispered, voice catching. Phoebe went still. “I have to know where you are. You can’t just disappear.”
I breathed in the smell of her coconut shampoo and the panic started to subside. The stark silence of the room caught me off-guard. No air-conditioning.
“Sorry,” Dex said quietly. I glanced at him as Phoebe resumed her attempts to wiggle out of my hug. His expression was solemn, arms at his sides, his hair slightly less Einstein-ish, as if he’d attempted to tame it since I walked in. “I thought—I assumed you knew she was here. When she mentioned you didn’t, I had Mary call you.”
I mouthed the wordsThank you. I didn’t trust myself not to burst into tears and I wasn’t about to cry in front of this guy again.
“It’s not a big deal,” Phoebe mumbled, successfully extracting herself from my arms. I resisted the urge to brush a pink piece of hair out of her face. “Can we forget about the momentary panic? We have exciting news.”
My eyes shot back to Dex. “?‘We’?”
He shook his head. Phoebe hopped to her feet, her energy vibrating the room. “I found Catalina,” she declared, that bright grin appearing once again. I nearly returned the gesture before her announcement struck me somewhere in the throat.
“You what?”
“Remember when I said I wouldn’t create a burner account to follow her on Insta because it was weird? Well, I did it anyway.” I sank into the seat she’d inhabited moments earlier, my legs on the verge of giving out. I was pretty sure Phoebe’s smile was the only thing keeping me conscious. “And last week, she posted this picture with a friend and tagged the restaurant they were at,” she continued, gesturing wildly, the same way I did mid-rant. “Bend, Oregon. I checked a few more geotags from over the last year, and they’re all there. She moved to Oregon.”
“I told you,” Dex said with a surprising level of patience, “this is not new information.”
“It is tome.”
“What—” The word slipped out unwittingly and I cut myself off, trying to catch up. “What does this have to do with anything? I don’t understand.”
“You said Dex told you he wasn’t gonna send the letter,” Phoebe said. “So, I obviously had to come here and tell him he’s wrong.”
I let out a soft groan, too exhausted to get into this. It wastoo big a conversation to have under the circumstances. A week ago, I might’ve assumed my sister was old enough to respect other people’s business, but hey, I’d been wrong about a lot of things lately.
“It’s fine.” Phoebe’s hands found my shoulders and when I met her electric gaze my own energy seemed to lift from the proximity. “I’m right. He knows I’m right. He said so. But it’s not enough to just send it at this point, right?”
I shook my head and a drop of rain fell from my eyelashes. “I’m not following. This is all going over my head.”
“He needs togiveher the letter,” she explained, no less enthusiastic in the face of my confusion. “And he needs to apologize. In person.”
“What does this have to do with us?”
“Good question,” Dex muttered.
Phoebe spun to face him. “It has everything to do with us and you know it. We spent like an hour talking about it.”
