“No, I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did.” Roughly he pops the hood to the car and attaches the clips to the dead battery. Then he hands the other two to Kendall. “Don’t let them touch,” he says.
“I know that. I’m not stupid.” Kendall clips the black and red pincers to the proper spots on the truck battery. “You want me to start up the truck?”
“Yeah.” Jacián gets into Mrs. Fletcher’s car.
Kendall starts it up, and when it’s running strong, Jacián tries starting the car. It turns over on the second try.
He smiles to himself, satisfied. And then he gets out and retrieves the cables, disconnecting them in reverse order. “Okay, you’re set. Let it run for a few.” He winds up the cables and puts them back into the toolbox. “Take it for a drive, even.”
“I can’t. Remember?”
“Right,” he says. “Forgot already. Must be a big pain in the ass.”
Kendall gets out of the truck, leaving it running. “Yeah. Pretty much,” she says and pauses. “Thanks for the ride, and for jumping my mom’s car. She’ll really appreciate that. I’ll. . see you in the morning, then.”
He slides into the seat and closes the door. Leans his elbow out the window. “Bring your soccer gear if you want. If you’re coming over after.” He puts the truck in gear.
Kendall feels her face get warm. “Maybe,” she says lightly. “And hey,” she remembers out loud, “your girlfriend called while you were in the shower. Marlena forgot to tell you.”
Jacián’s face doesn’t change. “Oh. All right,” he says. “Thanks.” He pulls his arm inside and backs up, turning around. Drives off without another word.
Achingly close. We sense the warmth but We can’t reach it. Want. Need! Thirty-five, one hundred.
Thirty-five, one hundred. We cry out to be touched, fear gripping Our scratchy voices. Fifty cold years in the darkness, boiling in regret. Come closer! We want you, more than We wanted the last.
Torturously.
Please.
Save me.
He’s early.
Kendall’s ready, sitting by the picture window, thinking about Nico, and her heart almost breaks, wishing he were here. Wishing she could talk to him. When she sees the cloud of dust at the end of the driveway, she thinks it’s him, before reality bashes her in the head yet again.
By the time Jacián’s truck reaches the house, she’s already kissed her mother good-bye and is waiting. She hops into the truck. Wants to thank him for coming early, but feels suddenly embarrassed about bringing it up again. She wonders, briefly, why she allows herself to get flustered by him. He’s just so. . unreadable.
At school she passes old Mr. Greenwood on his way out, and she rushes to take care of as many things as possible before Jacián catches up to her. She gets the wastebasket, markers, window locks, and drapes aligned before she hears his footsteps. Then she straightens the desks one by one. Feeling relief as she passes her fingers over each one, reading the graffiti like it’s comfort food for her brain. Not even caring that he’s staring at her.
When she gets to the senior section, Jacián is already sitting at his desk, reading. His desk is slightly crooked. Not enough for the average person to notice, but for Kendall it’s like a musical note that is slightly off pitch, playing constantly. She itches to ask him to move but knows how weird that would be.
She knows people without OCD have a really hard time understanding it. And she’s okay with that. Still.
She’ll wait until he gets up. She finishes the desks around her — Eli’s, Travis’s, Brandon’s, and she can’t bear to look at Nico’s quite yet. She glances at Jacián’s desk, and she’s bothered beyond ordinary by it today. But people are starting to stream into the room.
Without a word, and still reading his book, he stands and steps out of the way. “Go on, then,” he says.
She gives him a look of surprise, but he doesn’t notice. Hesitates and pinches her lips together, debating. Then she swiftly adjusts his desk so it’s perfectly aligned. Slides into her own desk chair and takes a deep breath, letting it out slowly. Almost done. “Thank you,” she says.
His mouth twitches, but he keeps reading.
She turns to Nico’s desk, more prepared today for him to not be there. It still feels awful. She moves the desk slightly, lovingly, to line it up with hers. Runs her fingers across it, tentatively. Lifts the lid and looks inside, but there’s nothing in there anymore, so she closes it again. It’s so cold and stark. Empty.
She reads the graffiti, but it all means something different this time with him gone. It’s Nico’s desk, but there’s something unusual, something niggling at the back of her mind that she can’t quite figure out.
And then she realizes what it is. A new phrase etched into the top of the desk, but it doesn’t look new. It looks ten or twenty or fifty years old, like all the other graffiti. Kendall leans to the right to get a closer look.
Definitely not a fresh one. If Nico had done it, it wouldn’t look so smooth.
Ms. Hinkler begins class by passing out papers. Kendall glances around to make sure she’s not acting too weird, and then she leans over again. It’s near the center of his desk, and it says, without a doubt:
Please.
Save me.
How strange that she hasn’t noticed it before. How could she have missed it?
All day, she doesn’t hear a thing that Ms. Hinkler is saying. She can’t concentrate, wondering about the desk, the graffiti. She studies it, focuses all her attention on it. Remembers that this desk isn’t one of the desks that has been in this classroom forever. It is just as old as all the others, but it had been kept in storage until it was needed. Old Mr. Greenwood brought it upstairs last spring when another one broke.
She knows who used to have this desk. Tiffany Quinn.
And then, after the schoolroom had a cleaning over the summer, the desk ended up as Nico’s.
Kendall draws in a sharp breath, loud enough to make Jacián look over. He raises his eyebrows in a silent question.
Kendall looks at him for a moment, and then smiles shakily and waves him off. “Nothing,” she says.
And really, when she thinks about it rationally, it truly is nothing. Nothing more than a strange coincidence.
At lunch she stays inside and studies the desk, wanting to be sure, but she’s not entirely certain what she wants to be sure of. Finally she takes out a piece of notebook paper. Writes down the things she’s sure of, and what she’s almost sure of. In the “sure of” column:
• Tiffany Quinn and Nico Cruz each were using this desk when they disappeared
• The desk in question has new graffiti on it that looks old
She erases the second point and puts it in the “almost sure” category.
Then she erases the first point, accidentally ripping the paper with her eraser in her haste, and puts that in the “almost sure” category too. Because now she’s not entirely sure about anything.
All afternoon her brain buzzes with thoughts she can’t control. She wants to yell, wants to make them stop. But they whip around in an endless loop. After a while she just puts her head down on her desk and gives up.
“Kendall.”
“Yeah?”