Signs Point to Yes (5 page)

Jane threw open the basement door at the top of the stairs and felt it crash into someone.

“Ah!” Teo's voice came from behind the door.

The girls slipped around Jane and out of the basement while Teo stood there rubbing his exposed toes in his flip-flops.

“I'm so sorry!” Jane said. “I thought you'd already left for work.”

“It's cool. It's not a big deal. I didn't need those particular toes,” he said. “Crap, I never cleaned up the basement, did I?”

Jane shook her head, and Teo glanced at the time on his phone.

“It's cool,” Jane said. “I'll clean it up. It's the least I can do, since I just hobbled you. The girls will help. Right, girls?”

They looked blankly at Jane.

“Don't you want to help Teo out?” she asked them.

They looked at her, and then at Teo, and then at one another before they started dancing around and yelling, “Yes! We love to help!”

“Yeah, we'll take care of it for you. After we play hide-and-seek.”

Teo grinned and squeezed her shoulder. “Good luck with hide-and-seek, and I totally owe you one. Thanks.”

Jane smiled as she stood in the living room with her eyes closed and counted to fifty, as the girls had instructed her. If Teo was going to be a nice guy this summer, it would definitely help balance out the pain of Ravi.

When Jane got to fifty, she yelled, “Ready or not, here I come!”

Checking upstairs first seemed like a good idea, since she hadn't heard the door to the basement open.

Buck had done a lot of work on the house over the years, putting on an addition and reconfiguring the layout. It was like a completely different home. Jane was met with a long hallway of closed doors when she got upstairs, and she tried to listen for giggles, but there was complete, eerie silence.

Maybe the girls hadn't gone upstairs; maybe they went outside to hide, even though Jane had told them outside was off-limits. Or maybe they had left completely and were on their way to Acapulco, for all Jane knew.

She tried to imagine breaking the news to Connie and Buck that somehow she had lost all three children while playing hide-and-seek on her first day. After the court trial, there would be a made-for-TV movie about the girls:
Hide-and-Seek Gone Horribly Wrong: The Story of the Buchanan Sisters
.

After prowling the hallway, listening for any sound of the girls behind the closed doors, she decided she needed to be more systematic in her approach. She would open each door and check under the beds and in the closets. After that she would check the basement.

The first door she opened was obviously the twins' room. Two beds to check under and just a tiny closet. Next was Connie and Buck's room. She scanned it fast because it felt totally wrong to be in there. Unfortunately, they had a rather large walk-in closet that required extra effort.

After that there was the bathroom, where she looked behind the shower curtain and then in the linen closet. Unless the girls had climbed onto a shelf and perfectly replaced all the folded towels and sheets in front of them, she could definitely cross off the linen closet with one quick look.

The next room was Teo's. She really didn't want to be in Teo's room, but she had to check for the girls, because now she was getting a little nervous.

She bumped her hip on his computer desk, and the screen came alive. She didn't mean to look at the search bar, but her eye was drawn to it.

How to find your biological father
, it said.

Jane gasped and put her hand over her mouth. This was not information that she should be privy to. Immediately she x-ed out the window, and a second one was open behind it.
Consuela Garcia and Jose Rodriguez
, the search said in that window. She closed that one, too, and backed out of the room, shutting the door and fleeing back downstairs, trying not to think about what she'd just seen.

The girls were all sitting at the kitchen table, eating grapes.

“You didn't come find us,” Keegan said.

“I was looking for you everywhere upstairs,” Jane explained, taking a grape for herself and sitting across from the girls.

“We were in the basement.”

“I thought for sure you would have hidden under a bed or in a closet.”

Rory looked terrified. “That's where the monsters live.”

Jane laughed. “Good to know,” she said. “How did you get downstairs without the door making any noise as you opened and closed it?”

“You have to do it really slow,” Keegan said.

“Also good to know,” Jane said as she focused on the kids, determined to forget that she had ever been in Teo's room.

 

Chapter 5

Barely ten minutes into his shift, Teo had a sinking feeling in his gut like he forgot to turn off the stove. But it was worse than potentially setting the house on fire, because he was pretty sure that what he'd forgotten to do was clear his search history. He paced around the pool, trying to remember exactly how the morning had played out.

He'd been so humiliated by Buck's mention of his workout regime that the second Ravi left for SAT prep, Teo ran upstairs to his room to do more dad searching, this time starting with something broader. Obviously, other people had searched for their biological fathers, and maybe Teo was trying too hard to reinvent the wheel.

It wasn't long before he'd looked at the clock and found that he was going to be late for work if he didn't get his crap together. He'd left as quickly as humanly possible, and he really couldn't remember if he'd closed out his search or not.

He was so desperate for his mom or the girls not to see it that he almost considered calling Jane and asking her to close up the tabs for him. But then Jane would ask questions—questions Teo didn't want to answer. He was starting to sweat just thinking about it. He ran a hand through his hair and tried to rationalize the situation.

No one really went in his room all day. It could happen, though. But his computer would probably go to sleep after a while, and unless someone purposely woke it up, he would be fine. He didn't think Keegan really had it in her to be that nosy, and the twins couldn't read that well yet.

The good news was that Jane and his sisters would arrive at the pool in mere minutes for swim class. Surely he would know right off the bat whether Jane had found out his secret. Or, worse, whether Keegan had fulfilled his nightmarish prophecy of reading his search results. Wouldn't he?

When Jane came through the pool gate, she waved at him and didn't seem particularly fussed, or like she had learned his secret that morning. At least he hadn't been looking at porn, he told himself. But he found little comfort in that thought.

The pit in his stomach grew.

Teo watched Jane walk over to the covered seating after having made sure the girls joined the right groups. Rory was still in a state of distress because she was in a lower group than Piper and Keegan were, but she needed to learn that swimming wasn't something to fool around with.

Jane sat down next to a girl Teo knew from school but wasn't really friends with.
Claudia Lee, that's her name
, he thought. Teo tried to read Jane's lips as she was talking to Claudia. Not that he expected her to gossip with Claudia Lee about his personal dad-searching business, even if she
had
snooped on his computer, but still, he didn't really know Jane all that well.

He couldn't figure out how Jane knew Claudia. Jane ran in a crowd of dorky, less smart girls. She was like a band geek who wasn't in the band. Unless maybe she
was
in the band. Teo honestly wasn't sure. He couldn't even remember the last time he had talked to Jane at school, or even really noticed her there. Maybe when they'd ended up sitting next to each other at the drunk-driving assembly the year before.

He really didn't want Ravi's crazy anti-Jane propaganda to get to him. While he and Ravi were playing video games last night, Ravi wouldn't shut up about how terrible Jane was.

“I swear to God, she is the stupidest girl I've ever met,” Ravi had said out of nowhere.

“Who now?” Teo had asked, mostly to annoy Ravi. He'd known exactly who Ravi had been talking about, but he sort of got tired of listening to the same old, same old from him. Sometimes he liked to mix it up and ask all the wrong questions.

“Jane Connelly. She's dumb.”

“How do you figure?” Teo asked.

“‘Uh, really, Ravi,'” Ravi said in a voice that Teo assumed was supposed to be Jane's. “‘I don't get it. How do the ducks know where to cross?'”

“She never asked that.”

“Sure she did.”

“It was probably meant to be a joke, but you have no sense of humor whatsoever.”

“I swear she asked it in driver's ed last year.”

“So is this really how we're celebrating the end of school?” Teo asked. “Sitting in my basement, bitching about Jane Connelly?”

They had changed subjects after that, thank God, because Teo couldn't handle much more of Ravi's Jane-bashing.

The thing was, there wasn't anything wrong with Jane. And he actually had a newfound respect for her after this morning. Not only had she totally ignored how ridiculously embarrassing Buck was, but she'd also offered to clean up the mess in the basement. In his book, that made her a decent person.

Maybe he should just talk to Jane, see if she acted like she knew his secret.

The problem was that Claudia Lee was a friend of this other girl Megan. Teo had gone out with her a few times last year. They were in a lot of the same classes and were both on the forensics team. She was on the girls' soccer team and he was on the boys'. It made sense for them to go out. But things had fizzled between them, and Megan had been bitter, and now having to approach Claudia could definitely be awkward. He got enough of that at home these days.

But unless he wanted to spend the rest of the day panicking, he didn't have much choice.

“Hey,” he said, approaching Jane and Claudia when swim class was over.

“Hey,” Jane said, squinting up at him.

“Yo,” Claudia said.

“How are you guys?” Teo asked, looking at each of them in turn.

“Peachy,” Claudia said.

“Good. Nothing has really changed in my life in the past couple of hours,” Jane said.

Teo looked at her intently in an attempt to decipher if she seemed sort of shifty or like she was trying to hide something.

“I was telling Jane that my dad and stepmother are basically blackmailing me to bring Dinah and Job to swim class all summer.”

“Oh yeah?” Teo asked, half listening, half examining Jane's body language.

“Yeah, I want to go to this superexpensive art school in Chicago, so they said that if I could save them money by being Dinah and Job's nanny this summer, they would put all that toward school.”

“Sounds like a good deal,” Teo said. At this point, Jane was staring back at him with a confused expression. She couldn't know. But what if she knew? The little voice in the back of Teo's head wouldn't let it go.

Claudia was barely containing her laughter. “You guys should just kiss already.”

“Um,” he said, looking from Claudia to Jane. “What?”

“What? Oh my God,” Jane said, covering her face.

Teo's eyes went wide. “Us?” he asked.

“Yeah, you've been staring at each other this whole time.”

“Uh, no.” Teo backed away a step.

“Uh,
yes
,” Claudia said.

Jane stared at the pavement, and Teo felt terrible.

“Hey, Jane,” Teo said, hoping to break the tension. She looked up at him through her eyelashes. “Any chance you know how to sink through concrete?”

She started laughing.

Just then the girls came skipping over with several of their friends, including a little girl who Teo realized was probably Claudia's stepsister.

“Look at what Dinah made!” Keegan said, showing Jane and Teo a folded-up piece of paper.

“Claudia taught me,” Dinah said proudly.

“Oh, that's a cootie catcher,” Jane said.

“Yes! A cootie catcher,” Rory said. “It catches all the cooties and locks 'em up and throws away the key.”

Jane nodded seriously at this description. “It's for telling fortunes,” she explained.

“Yeah, it's the funnest. We like telling fortunes,” Piper said.

“You know,” Teo interjected, leaning into the little crowd, “Jane used to be awesome at this stuff. She was really into Magic 8 Balls and tarot cards. And she used to make the best cootie catchers.”

Jane blushed a little, Teo thought, but it could have been the sun getting to her.

“Really?” Keegan asked. “Can you make one for each of us?”

“Of course,” Jane said.

“Jane knows all sorts of stuff like that. About superstitions and cool myths.”

“I do?” Jane asked.

“Yeah, you were always telling me to hold my breath when we drove past graveyards and not to step on any cracks in the sidewalk.”

“Really? I don't remember.”

Teo shrugged. “You made an impression. I have never opened an umbrella in the house, nor will I ever.”

Jane laughed again.

Piper pulled on the hem of Teo's shirt, so he knelt down to talk to her.

“How do you know Jane?” she asked.

“When we were kids, her mom used to babysit me sometimes while our mom went to work.”

“Really?”

“Yup.”

“You were friends?”

“Sure,” Teo said.

“Are you still friends?” Keegan asked. She had a talent for making things awkward, much like her father.

“Um, yes,” Teo said, smiling over at Jane, hoping she would play along. In kid world, their passing acquaintance would probably be called friendship, even if they never talked to each other, spent zero time together, and mostly avoided each other at school. Although Teo knew that it was partially his fault for always being around Ravi.