Found (4 page)

I sat by my locker. Sweat dripped off me. I could hear my teammates making jokes and enjoying that easy, laughing friendship I had never really known. Emotionally drained, I stayed where I was. I decided that I’d wait it out. I’d let the rest of the team shower and get dressed, and then when everyone was gone, I’d get ready.

I just didn’t have the strength to face them any more today.

Troy was in the middle of some long-winded story when Assistant Coach Stashower stuck his head in the door. “Troy? Coach wants to see you in his office.”

“I’m just finishing up a joke—”

“Now, Troy.”

Everyone made a friendly mocking “oooo” sound as Troy headed out. Then the rest of the guys showered and got dressed. I pretended to check my iPhone for important messages. Ten minutes passed. The guys started to file out with back slaps, figuring out who would ride in whose car, figuring a time to meet up at the Heritage Diner and then hang out at whose house.

I’d thought that the entire team had left when Brandon Foley came around the corner and sat on the bench next to my locker.

“Tough practice,” Brandon said.

I shrugged. “No big deal.”

“Troy isn’t really such a bad guy.”

“Yeah,” I said, “he’s a real prince.”

Brandon smiled at that one. I knew that Brandon Foley was one of the most popular kids in the school. He was president of the student council, president of the Key Club, president of the local chapter of the National Honor Society, and as I mentioned before, co-captain (with Troy) of the basketball team.

You know the type. Good guy, but he wants everyone to like him.

“You need to understand the situation,” Brandon said.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“It’s mild hazing,” Brandon said. “You’re the only sophomore.”

It was a lot more than mild hazing, but I didn’t see much point in continuing with this conversation.

“Mickey?”

“What?”

“You know that this team won the county championship last year, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And that we were within one game of winning the states,” Brandon continued. “Do you know how long it’s been since Kasselton High actually won it?”

I did. The big win was memorialized all over the walls of the gym in the form of banners and retired jerseys. Twenty-five years ago, Uncle Myron, the school’s all-time leading scorer and rebounder, led the Kasselton Camels to their only state championship. One of his teammates—the
second
leading scorer and
second
leading rebounder on that team—was none other than Edward Taylor, Troy’s father. He was now the town sheriff.

Bad blood across two generations.

“What’s your point?” I said.

“The point is, last year our team started five juniors, so we’re all back. The five of us have all played together since we were Biddy All-Stars in fifth grade. Troy, Buck, Alec, Damien, and me—we grew up together. We’ve been the starting five since we were eleven years old. This may not seem like a big deal to you.”

But it did seem like a big deal. I never had anything like that. My parents had lived overseas my entire life. We jumped from place to place, country to country, mostly in the Third World. We lived the life of nomads, backpacking, setting up tents, living in small villages. I had no idea what it was like to have friends like that. As I said before, Ema and Spoon were my best friends ever, and I had only known them a few weeks.

“So now,” Brandon said, in his calm, rational, mature voice, “the five of us are seniors. This will be our last year together. We will go off to college and never be on the same team again. We’ve been waiting for this moment pretty much our whole lives. And now, because of you, one of us won’t be a starter anymore.”

“You don’t know—”

Brandon held up a hand. “Please, Mickey, let’s not play humble. You know how good you are. I know how good you are. Troy has always been our leading scorer and best player. Soon it will be you. So he knows it too. You’ve been at this school, what, a few weeks. In that time, you’ve taken his girlfriend and soon you’ll have his spot on the team.”

He was talking about Rachel. I wanted to correct him—I hadn’t taken her away and she wasn’t my girlfriend—but maybe it was better to just stay quiet.

Brandon stood. “Give him time to get used to that, okay?”

“I didn’t steal his girlfriend,” I said.

So much for staying quiet.

“What?”

“Rachel broke it off with him before I ever got here.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Of course it is. And I can’t help it if I’m a better player than he is.”

“I didn’t say you could,” Brandon replied. “I’m just letting you know what’s going on.”

“I don’t care,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Troy is a jerk. You’re justifying his bullying behavior—not just of me, but of Ema and Spoon too. He’s been on my case since day one—before he ever saw me take a shot—and he just intentionally whipped a basketball at my face. So, sorry, Brandon, I’m not really in the mood to hear someone excuse his bullying.”

“I’m not excusing it.”

I stood up. “Yeah, you are. And you let it happen. You, the big co-captain and president of everything in this stupid school, just stood there today and let it happen.”

Brandon didn’t like that. “Look, Mickey, I came over here to help you.”

“You’re a little late, Brandon. And if your help is to justify why your old best friend hates me, I’m good, thanks. He’s the one you should be talking to, not me.”

Brandon looked down at me another moment or two. I wanted to take it back. He had been the only one to reach out a hand in friendship, and I had slapped it away. But I was also angry and tired and jet-lagged and just sick of all the crap that kept piling on me. I didn’t want to hear about Troy’s problems. I had enough on my own.

Still, I ended up saying, “Brandon, I didn’t mean—”

“See you around.”

He turned and left without another word.

Fine.

I really had nothing to say to him anyway. I was finally alone. I got undressed and headed into the shower. Have you ever been alone in a locker room? Every sound echoes like it’s been miked up. I turned on the water and stepped under the wonderfully harsh spray. I took my time, letting the water pound on my back and head, closing my eyes and breathing deeply.

Calm down, I told myself.

I had just gotten out of the shower when I heard the locker room door burst open. I peeked around the corner.

It was Troy.

He didn’t see me. I stayed where I was. He collapsed onto the bench in front of his locker. His face fell into his hands. I heard a sound, a sound like . . .

Troy was crying!

For a moment I thought that maybe Coach Grady had bawled him out for his behavior today. Maybe Coach had seen how Troy had punked me with that fake meeting and whipped the ball into my face, and that was why he had called him into his office.

But I would soon learn that this had nothing to do with me.

The locker room door opened up again. It was Coach Stashower.

“You got your things, Troy?”

Troy sniffled and wiped the tears off his face with his forearm. “It’s a lie, you know.”

“We heard you.”

“I’m being set up.”

“Either way, I’m supposed to stay with you while you clean out your locker.”

“Now?”

“Now, Troy. It all has to go.”

Troy looked as though he was about to protest and then thought better of it. He opened his locker. He took out his bag and angrily stuffed everything into it. Everything. Sneakers, clothes, loose change. His shampoo. His cologne (cologne?). Even, ugh, an old photograph of Troy with his arm around Rachel in her cheerleading uniform that he’d taped to the inside of the locker door.

He jammed it all into his gym bag.

What the heck was going on?

“I’ll escort you out,” Coach Stashower said in a firm voice when Troy was done.

“No need,” Troy said. He stormed toward the door and flung it open. “It’s a lie. All of it.”

Then Troy was gone.

I should have
felt
elated. My big enemy was apparently off the team. But I didn’t. I felt confused and a little lost. Then again, that seemed to be my permanent status lately. I was at my best when I didn’t have to think too much—either when I was on the court or when I had a specific task.

So what was my next task?

Help Ema find her missing boyfriend, I guess.

I walked up the long driveway and crossed the expansive front grounds. I’d barely put my fingertip on the doorbell in front of Ema’s enormous mansion when the door swung slowly open.

“Master Mickey. Welcome.”

It was Niles, the family butler, speaking with an accent so pronounced, it had to be fake. He wore a tuxedo or tails or something like that. His posture was ramrod straight. He arched one eyebrow.

Ema ran to the door. “Cut that out, Niles.”

“Sorry, madam.”

Ema rolled her eyes. “He’s been watching a lot of British television.”

“Oh,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I got it.

It was funny watching the two of them standing there. Both wore black, but that was where the similarities ended. Niles wore formal wear. Ema was in full goth mode—black clothes, jet-black hair, black lipstick, white makeup. She had silver studs going all the way up her ears, a pierced eyebrow, and one skull ring on each hand.

As we headed down the stairs, I couldn’t help but stare at the movie posters. They all featured films starring the gorgeous Angelica Wyatt. Some were headshots. Some were full body. Sometimes she was alone. Sometimes she was with some guy. On the bottom step, there was one for that romantic comedy she did with Matt Damon last year.

Only a handful of people knew that Angelica Wyatt—yes,
the
Angelica Wyatt—was Ema’s mom.

“So tell me what happened in California,” Ema said.

We sat on oversize beanbag chairs. I told her everything. When I was done, Ema said, “Maybe it was your father’s wish.”

“What? Being cremated?”

“Right, a lot of people choose that,” Ema said. “It’s a possibility, right?”

I thought about it. We had traveled all over the world. Most foreign cultures—most cultures my father admired—preferred cremation to burial. I remembered that my father once bemoaned the “waste” of good land, land that could have been used to grow crops, because it was being used as a graveyard.

Could he have told Mom he wanted to be cremated?

I thought some more. Then I said, “No.”

“You’re sure?”

“If Dad had wanted to be cremated, he wouldn’t then want to be buried too. He’d choose one or the other.”

Ema nodded. “But it was your mother’s signature on the form?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“So I need to ask her about it. The problem is, she’s not allowed visitors in rehab right now. She’s going through withdrawal.”

“How much longer?”

“I don’t know.” I looked at Ema. Yes, she was interested, but I knew what she was doing. For some reason, she was asking all these questions to stall. “So tell me about your missing boyfriend.”

“Before I do,” Ema said, “I wanted to show you something.”

“Okay.”

She started pulling up her shirt.

“Uh,” I said, because I’m good with words.

“Relax, perv. I want to show you a tattoo.”

“Uh,” I said again.

“You’ll see why.”

Ema was loaded up with tattoos. This helped cultivate her bad-girl image. She wore them almost like a fence, warning people to stay back. Yes, I know a lot of people have tattoos, but Ema was only a high school freshman. Many of the kids were intimidated that a girl so young could have so many. How did she get her parents’ permission?

I had wondered that myself.

But more recently I learned the simple truth: The tattoos were temporary. She had a friend named Agent at a tattoo parlor called Tattoos While U Wait. Agent liked to try out designs before putting them on someone in a permanent way. He used Ema’s skin as a practice canvas.

Ema turned her back to me. “Look.”

There, in the center of her back, was a familiar image to Ema, Spoon, Rachel, and me.

A butterfly. More specifically, the Tisiphone
Abeona
butterfly.

That image haunted us. I had seen it on a grave behind Bat Lady’s house. I had seen it on Rachel’s hospital room door. I had seen it in an old picture of hippies from the sixties. I had even seen the image of that butterfly in an old photograph of the famous Lizzy Sobek, the young girl who led children to safety during the Holocaust. I saw it atop my father’s “maybe” grave, on the back of a photograph in Bat Lady’s basement, even in a tattoo parlor.

“You told me about that,” I said.

“I know. But I went back to have it redone. You know. Have Agent make it bright or change it. The tattoos usually wear off after a few weeks.”

I felt a small chill ripple across my back. “But?”

“But he couldn’t.”

I knew the answer but I asked anyway. “Why?”

“It’s permanent,” Ema said. “Agent said he doesn’t know how that happened. But the butterfly is there. For good.”

I said nothing.

“What’s going on, Mickey?”

“I don’t know.”

We sat there in silence. I finally broke it. “Tell me about your missing boyfriend.”

For a second or two, she didn’t move. She swallowed, blinked a few times, and then stared at the floor. “
Boyfriend
may be putting it a little too strongly.”

I waited.

“Mickey?”

“What?”

Ema started twisting the skull ring on her right hand. “You have to promise me something.”

Her body language was all wrong. Ema was about confidence. She was big and confident and didn’t care who noticed. She was comfortable in her own skin. Now, all of a sudden, that confidence was gone.

“Okay,” I said.

“You have to promise you won’t make fun of me.”

“Are you serious?”

She just looked at me.

“Okay, okay, I promise. It’s odd, that’s all.”

“What’s odd?” she asked.

“This promise. I thought you didn’t care what people think of you.”

“I don’t,” Ema said. “I care what
you
think of me.”

A second passed. Then another. Then I said, “Oh,” because I’m really, really good with words. It was, of course, a dumb comment on my part—the stuff about her not caring. Everyone cares what people think. Some just hide it better.

“So tell me,” I said.

“I met a guy in a chat room,” Ema said.

I blinked once. Then I said, “You hang out in chat rooms?”

“You promised.”

“I’m not making fun.”

“You’re judging,” she said. “That’s just as bad.”

“I’m not. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”

“It’s not like you think,” Ema said. “See, I’ve been helping my mom with her social networking. She’s clueless. So is her manager and her agent and her personal assistant—whatever. So I set some promotional stuff up for her—Twitter, Facebook, you know the deal. And now I watch it for her.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Anyway, in this chat room, I met this guy.”

I just looked at her.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“You’re judging again.”

“I’m just sitting here,” I said, spreading my hands. “If you see something more on my face, that’s more about you than me.”

“Right, sure.”

“I’m just surprised, okay? What kind of chat room was this anyway?”

“It’s for Angelica Wyatt fans.”

I tried sooo hard to keep my face expressionless.

“There you go again!” she shouted.

“Stop looking at my face and tell me what happened. You’re in an Angelica Wyatt chat room. You start talking to a guy. Am I right so far?”

Ema looked sheepish. “Yeah.”

“Are you using an alias?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why would I? No one knows I’m Angelica Wyatt’s daughter.”

Not even me until I followed her from school last week. In school, Ema was the subject of much speculation. Every school, I’m told, has that one kid who seems to come out of the woods to school every day. No one knows where he or she lives. No one has been to his or her house. Rumors start—as they did about Ema. She lived in a cabin in the woods, some speculated. Her father abused her maybe. He sold drugs. Something.

Ema actually encouraged those rumors to hide the truth: She was the daughter of a world-famous movie star.

“I use my own name in the chat room,” Ema said, “so I can be just another fan.”

“Okay, go on.”

“So anyway, I started chatting with this guy. Then we started e-mailing and texting, that kind of thing.” Her face turned red. “He told me about his life. He told me he used to live in Europe but they had moved to the United States last year. We talked about books and movies and feelings. It . . . it got pretty intimate.”

My face twisted into a grimace.

“Ew, gross,” Ema snapped. “Not that kind of intimate!”

“I didn’t say—”

“Stop, okay? And never play poker, Mickey. You’d be terrible at it. I mean, we
talked.
We really talked and opened up. At first, okay, I figured that maybe this guy was a fake, you know? Like I was being played.”

“A prank,” I said. “Catfished.”

“Right. I mean, you know me. I don’t trust easily. But as time went on . . .” Ema’s eyes lit up. “It was weird, but we both changed. Especially him. He might have started out playing some kind of game, but he became real. I can’t explain it.”

I nodded, trying to move her along. “So you two got close.”

“Yes.”

“You felt like he was starting to open up to you.”

“Yes. A few days ago, he said that he had something really important to tell me. That he had to confess something. I figured, uh-oh, here we go. He’s really an eleven-year-old girl or he’s married and thirty-eight. Something like that.”

“But that wasn’t it?”

Ema shook her head. “No.”

“So what was his big secret?”

“He ended up saying, forget it, it’s no big deal,” Ema said. She slid a little closer to me. “Don’t you see? He chickened out. I can’t explain this well. I’m summing up hundreds of texts and conversations. It was like something scared him from telling me the truth.”

“You’re right,” I said.

“I am?”

I nodded. “You’re not explaining this well.”

Ema punched me in the arm. “Just listen, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Jared and I finally set up a meet.”

“Jared? His name is Jared?”

“Oh, now you’re going to make fun of his name?”

I held up both hands.

“He lives in Connecticut. About two hours from here. So we agreed to meet at the Kasselton Mall. Jared had just gotten his license and could drive down. He said that he had to tell me something really important, something he could only tell me in person. He said that once we met, I’d understand everything.”

“Understand everything about what?”

“About him. About us.”

I was lost, but I just said, “Okay. So then what?”

“Then . . .” Ema stopped, shrugged. “Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“What do you think I mean?” she snapped. “That’s it. I went to the Kasselton Mall. I waited exactly where we said we’d meet—in that back corner of Ruby Tuesday’s. But he never showed. I waited one hour. Then two. Then . . . all day, okay? I sat there all day.”

“Jared never showed?”

“You got it.”

“So what did you do then?” I asked.

“I texted him. But he didn’t answer. I e-mailed him. Same thing. I went into our chat room, but he didn’t come back. I even checked his Facebook page, but there was nothing there. It was like he had suddenly vanished into thin air.”

Ema typed something onto her laptop and then turned it to me. It was a Facebook profile for a boy named Jared Lowell. I took one look at his profile picture and without thinking said, “You were catfished.”

“What?”

The guy in the profile picture was ridiculously good-looking. I don’t mean everyday-high-school-quarterback good-looking. I mean TV-hunk, fronting-a-hot-boy-band good-looking.

“Forget it,” I said.

Ema was angry now. “Why did you say that?”

“Forget it, okay?”

“No, why did you say that I was catfished when you saw his picture? It’s because he’s cute, right?”

“What? No.” But my words sounded weak even in my own ears.

“You don’t think a guy who looks like that could ever go for a girl who looks like me, right?”

“That’s not it at all,” I sorta-lied.

“If I were Rachel Caldwell, you’d have no trouble believing it—”

“It isn’t that, Ema. But, I mean, look at him. Come on. If I told you I was having an online relationship with a girl I met in a chat room and, when you saw her picture, she looked like a famous swimsuit model, what would you think?”

“I’d believe you,” she said. But now it was her voice that sounded weak.

“Right,” I said. “Sure. And then when I was supposed to meet Miss Swimsuit Model in person, she suddenly vanished—would you still believe it?”

“Yes,” she said a little too firmly.

I put my hands on her shoulders. “You’re my best friend, Ema. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

She looked down, her face reddening in embarrassment.

“I could lie to you and tell you that this all sounds on the up-and-up,” I said. “But what kind of friend does that? I’m not saying your relationship with Jared isn’t real. But if I don’t have the courage to tell you how it looks, who will?”

That stopped her. Ema kept her face down. “So you think, what, it’s a prank?”

“Maybe,” I said. “That’s all. Maybe it’s just a joke.”

She looked up at me. “A joke?”

“A cruel one, but yeah, maybe.”

“Well, ha-ha.” Ema shook her head. “Mickey, think about it. Let’s say it was a prank. Let’s say it was the mean kids in school. Like Troy or Buck, right? Let’s say they set this whole thing up.”

I waited.

Ema spread her arms. “Where’s the payoff?”

I had no answer to that.

“They would have let me know, right? They would have mocked me. They would have rubbed it in my face or put the intimate conversations online. They’d let the world know what a fool I was, wouldn’t they?”