Silent Symmetry (The Embodied trilogy) (14 page)

* * * * *

Waking up next morning, I felt like a jet-setter. Flying to New York in September, touring Manhattan by helicopter last month, and now zipping down to Fort Lauderdale for the holidays in first class, thanks to the seemingly infinite generosity of the Temple of Truth. Maybe they sold a book from their collection to finance Mom’s salary for the year...

I got out of the shower and wrapped a towel around my hair. Zigzagging my hand across the steamed-up mirror, I stared at myself. I felt like a different person from the girl who said goodbye to Lancaster High six months ago. The crazy pace of the city, my adventures with the ToT, meeting Noon and Cruz
... all this had turned me from a boring small-town nerd into a young woman leading an exciting life.

Throwing on a robe, I opened the bathroom door and ran straight into
Mom. She was all a-fluster.

“Bob just called,” she announced breathlessly. “He wants to take me to
Paris! Can you believe it?!!”

I couldn’t. But it seemed to be true.

“He wants to fly us there in his private jet for New Years!”

For half a second I thought that “us” included me.

“You’ll be okay with Gran and Pops, right?”

Nope. Didn’t include me.

“Sure,” I answered, making my way to my room.

“It’s SO exciting! I can hardly believe it.”

She was acting so much like a teenager that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d actually said oh-em-gee a couple of times. One thing was for sure – Bob really knew the way to a woman’s heart. I took the towel off and started rubbing my hair. You know what – good for her! And I could take a big chunk of the credit for introducing them to each other in the first place.

“I thought he was away for the holidays,” I called to her, wincing as I brushed out the tangles.

She appeared at my door. “No, his plans were canceled.”

“It’s great,
Mom,” I said, giving her a big hug.

“Sorry, honey, but I really like him.”

If only things were as simple for me. “Don’t be sorry! You deserve to be wined and dined and taken to the top of the Eiffel Tower. You’re a hottie.”

She blushed a little. It was cute.

“You’re the best,” she said, kissing me on the cheek, then floated away on her own Bob-fueled cloud nine, and I closed my door.

My suitcase was open on the bed. We were leaving for the airport in two hours. Swimsuit? Check.
iPad? Check. Summer clothes? Check. Then I looked over at the French book I’d stolen from the ToT apartment, tucked away under a pile of magazines on my nightstand. I grabbed it and threw it into the case too.

By the time we got to Gran and Pops
’ guarded compound it was almost eleven o’clock and pretty much all the residents had been asleep for hours. Insects whirled in the pools of light created by the ornamental street lamps. The air was muggy and close. Incongruous Christmas decorations glittered around the manicured lawns and golf cart tracks. It was a whole other world compared to New York.

My cheeks had barely recovered from half an hour of obsessive grand-parental pinching by the time I flopped down on my cot in the living room. This arrangement was fun when
I was nine years old, but at sixteen it was kinda invasive on both sides of the equation. Not only for the obvious personal privacy reasons, but because Gran invariably woke up at 5 am and was incapable of just staying in bed and reading a book for a couple hours. Nope, she had to “busy herself”, and that basically meant creating housework and then doing it noisily while I pulled the sheet over my head. Whatevs. They’re the only grandparents I’ve got and I love them. Chill, Kari, it’s Christmas. Chill.

Yeah, like that was gonna happen.

* * * * *

Mom headed back on the 26th to meet up with Bob. I was looking forward to another week of Facebook, beach, TV, and being woken up by Gran before several species of bird were even poking their beaks out of their nests.

I’d had zero contact with Cruz even thought I’d sent him a Merry Christmas text, and it was beginning to really upset me. Then, on the morning of the 26th, all that changed. I was sitting on the grass outside my grandparents’ condo when Cruz texted me back saying he’d seen Aranara. Just reading her name on the screen made my temperature rise. I had to call him.

He answered after one ring: “Hey. Guess you got my text.”

My mouth went dry and it took me a few moments to get my shit together and be able to speak.

“Yeah. Um, so, you’re, like, seeing Aranara?”

“Jeez, Kari! I said I’d seen her.”

“Okay.”

“In Chelsea Market.”

I burst out laughing. Some of the tension between us dissipated.

“What the eff were you doing in Chelsea Market?”

I couldn’t imagine Cruz hanging out among the gourmet bakeries and chic urban boutiques.

“The restaurant sent me to buy some shit at the kitchen supply place. She was in this weird gym with people balancing on surf boards.”

“Okay.”

Great, she was wearing workout clothes. Man, I hated this jealous feeling.

“Yeah, so she saw me and came out. She said she’d been trying to find me.”

“Okay.” Crap. It got worse.

“She said she knew where
Noon was and that he was in trouble.”

I stopped breathing. I moved the phone away from my ear.
Cruz’s distant, tinny voice drifted into my consciousness.

“Kari?”

I snapped out of it and answered, “Yeah, okay, so now she’s worried about Noon? Last time I saw her she wouldn’t even look at him.”

“Kari – ”

I was starting to lose it.

“I mean, she was, like, all over you.”

“Kari, listen.”

“And now she’s pretending to care about
Noon to get on my good side and make me stop wondering, and then she’ll make a move on – ”

“KARI!”

I almost jumped out of my seat.

“What?” I asked faintly.

“She’s Noon’s sister.”

Bombshell.

Cruz gave me a few seconds to let it sink in, then repeated, “She’s his sister.”

“I
... I...” was all that came out of my mouth. Too stunned to speak.

“Crazy, right?” said Cruz.

“Uh-huh. Noon is her brother?”

Sometimes my IQ just shoots right off the scale.

“Yeah,” chuckled Cruz.

“So what else? What did she say about him?”

“She said he needs you.”

My stomach was doing cartwheels. It was bad enough that things had turned awkward with Cruz, now all those feelings I had around
Noon were flooding back. But this time something was different. Now he needed me.

My voice was quavering. “So
... what does that mean?”

“Aranara said you should come back to
New York right away. Before it’s too late.”

“Too late!” I yelled, attracting disapproving looks from a sun-visored, white-haired woman walking nearby.

“She wouldn’t tell me anything else and I had to get back to work.”

“Did you get her number?” I asked frantically.

“Yeah, yeah,” answered Cruz. “Chill, Kari.”

My heart was in my mouth. Definitely not chill.

“Can you text it to me?”

“Sure. Are you okay?”

“Oh yeah. Apart from feeling like my brain is gonna implode I’m fine.”

Cruz laughed. “Well, at least you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”

“But what am I gonna do? Mom flew off to Europe last night and I’m in, like, Snoozeville, Florida.”

“I don’t know. Talk to Aranara?”

He was right. That was step one.

“Okay, I’ll call her right now.”

“Yeah, do that. I gotta bounce,” he said.

There was a pause.
Crap. What was he thinking? He’d have to be stupid not to know that I had feelings for Noon. God only knows what those feelings were, but neither of us could deny that they existed.

“You too, Cruz.”

I hung up. A few seconds later my phone buzzed. I stared at Aranara’s number in the text message. A seagull screeched loudly, right overhead, making me jump. An older man was practicing his golf swing across the way, the swoosh of the club making a random beat among the swish of the lawn sprinklers. He looked familiar. Must be one of Pop’s friends.

As I hit the text message link and the phone started to dial I couldn’t help but think that my life was about to take another turn toward the unpredictable.

She answered immediately. “Aranara speaking.”

I took a big gulp. “Hey, Aranara. It’s Kari.”

“Oh, I’m so happy you called,” she said, but her voice was missing its usual sparkle.

“Cruz gave me your number.”

“I know.” she said, as though she’d been standing over my shoulder for the last five minutes.

“Right, so – ”

“You’ve got to come back,” she interrupted. “Noon is in trouble and I can’t explain over the phone, but you can help.”

“What kind of trouble?” I asked.

“Come back and I’ll tell you while we’re on the way to meet up with him.”

“How? Steal a golf cart and drive it up the I-95?”

“It’s great you can laugh about this,” she said, “but it’s serious. I’m really worried about him and I can’t talk to our parents about it.”

“I don’t understand,” I admitted.

“I know, but you will. Cilic will come pick you up in the limo tonight.”

That wasn’t as sim
ple as she was making it sound.

“Pick me up where? Gran and Pops will freak. They might even have a stroke. One big, communal stroke.”

“Calm down, Kari. Just leave them a note telling them that you’re taking the Greyhound to meet your boyfriend in New York and that they can call you on your cell. Draw them a smiley face, some flowers and kisses. Be cute. But make sure they’ll see the note. Tape it to the medicine cabinet. When they call, tell them that you sent your mom an email and that she thinks Cruz is a hottie and finds the whole thing very romantic.”

“I don’t know
...”

“There are plenty of other sixteen
-year-olds who do worse than this, and you should tell your mom that in the email. Pre-apologize.”

“
Wow, Aranara, that’s easy for you to say.”

“Don’t you care about
Noon?”

I sighed and lay back in the grass.

“Of course I do!”

“Don’t you want to know about the
Temple of Truth?”

And this was where she got me. The mystery. Not just my feelings for
Noon, but my questions. What was he all about? How could I get through to him?

“Fine.”

I could almost feel her smiling on the other end.

“Perfect. Cilic will be at the gate from
1 pm. Sneak out when your grandparents have their afternoon nap and I’ll be waiting when you get here.”

She hung up. I stared at the seagull hovering and swooping above me
, and started to float away from my increasingly bizarre reality. I guess I needed to escape it, if only for a minute, because a bunch of crazy questions came to me. Why do seagulls fly over land, I wondered? Don’t they eat fish? Do you ever see a seagull eating anything other than fish? Maybe they just like flying out of their comfort zone. Heading off to adventure...

What I should have been wondering was how Aranara knew where my grandparents lived.

I closed my eyes. I was only certain of one thing: I had to take the leap.

Cha
pter 7

Dream #20 (while in Cilic’s limo): Mom has gotten us a puppy. A black lab. But it’s in a kind of cube inside a weird cylindrical fish tank. It looks like it can’t breathe so I let it out, but when I open the cube it runs around like crazy inside the apartment then returns to the cube and curls up inside it. I close the cube and put the puppy back in the aquarium.

Aranara’s plan worked perfectly. My grandparents disappeared into their bedroom after lunch, right on cue. I shoved my stuff in my bag and crept out. Cilic was sitting in the limo with the engine running right outside the gate. He took my bag without a word and opened the back door for me. The journey was going to be long and I tried to make conversation with him.

“Excuse me, Sir, but is Cilic your first name or last name?”

“My name,” he said with a heavy Eastern-European accent.

Silence for two minutes.

“Have you lived here for a long time?”

“Long time,” was the guttural answer.

Over the next few minutes I realized that something was bothering me. I didn’t know Noon’s surname! I had never thought to ask. And if Cilic was Aranara’s father, he must be Noon’s father too, right?