The Breakers Code (5 page)

     I couldn’t believe it as I went through them; me at the county fair last November, me and my mom decorating our tree last Christmas, me reading a book on the bleachers at school.

     I didn’t even know he took most of these. It was like he had been watching me, like he had been admiring me. I jumped out of the car, leaving it running right there in the parking lot. Forget tomorrow. Forget chicken. Forget all of it. This was all the proof I needed. It was right here in these pictures. Owen liked me back, and I wasn’t wasting another minute.

     Mr. Shue’s eyes lit up when he saw me coming. “Cresta, did I ever tell you about the time I wrestled an alligator in the back of a moving truck?”

     “Not now, Mr. Shue,” I said, and pushed past him into the library. I held Owen’s phone in my hand, like it was Exhibit A in a murder trial. He wasn’t anywhere to be found though.

     There was the FFA. There with their chess squares. There was Mrs. Cleo, stacking books in giant piles on her desk. As I weaved through the aisles looking for him, my resolve began to waver. How was I going to tell him? Should I just show him the phone, present him with the incriminating pictures? Would that make him mad?

     I caught sight of him. He was on the other side of the library, walking out the back door.

     “Owen!” I yelled, but all I got was nasty looks from the FFA and a “Quiet please!” from Mrs. Cleo.

     I rushed toward the back door and pushed it opened. What I saw though, stopped me in my tracks. Owen hadn’t come here to study. He hadn’t even come here to stay. Owen was standing beside the black Sedan from Mrs. Goolsby’s, the one I had seen circling the school all day. He was talking to someone inside. Though, with the angle the car was parked, I couldn’t see just who.

     I thought about saying something, about letting him know I was there. Whatever this was though, whoever he was talking to, he mustn’t have wanted me to know about it. Why else would he have told me he was studying?

     I stood there watching as Owen climbed into the black Sedan and rode away.

Chapter 4

Cardboard Girl

     The day before our house blew up; I woke up clutching the locket my father gave me. I always did that when Mom worked and I had to spend the night by myself. I didn’t mean to, mind you. I’d drift off to sleep just fine, watching Nick At Nite reruns or some old movie on the Hallmark Channel. It never failed though. Sometime during the night, my hand would creep up to my throat and settle on the locket. I guess it made me feel close to him, like he was still around in some small way.

     I half expected to wake up and find that I had pried the thing open in my sleep, but I never did. In fact, I had never been able to get that open, asleep or not. Since the day my father gave it to me, the day he died, I wore it around my neck. I never took it off, even in the shower. But I had never managed to open the golden oval that hung at the end.

     Whatever was in there, probably a picture, was my dad’s secret.

     I crawled out of bed and into the shower, remembering that I’d had the dream again. That was two nights in a row. It had been awhile since that had happened.

     It was always the same. I was being carried somewhere. I couldn’t see by whom, but I felt so safe that it had to be my father. I couldn’t see what was going on around me, but I heard screams and explosions. I smelled smoke and metal and felt rain pounding against my face.

     Whatever was going on, this was the end of it.

     He turned, took seven steps, and carried me up seven stairs. He laid me in the middle of a dark gray room, in the center of a blood red circle. I tried to move, but nothing worked. My hands, my feet, no part of me responded.

     He leaned down. I saw moisture glisten on his shrouded cheeks and, realized the rain I had been feeling wasn’t rain at all. It was his tears.

     His voice cracked as he whispered in my ear. “Seven. It was always seven.”

     I got to school early again, this time breakfast free. For once, Casper hadn’t slept in my backseat. He must have managed an entire day without pissing his dad off because when I picked him up things were quiet and he seemed relatively content.

     It took me all of three seconds to tell him everything; about Owen, the pictures of me on his phone, and black Sedan that picked him up behind the library.

     I didn’t know what to make of it. Who was in that black Sedan? Why were they visiting Mrs. Goolsby in the middle of the night or circling the school all day? What did they have to do with Owen?

     “Oh my God, he’s a gigolo!” Casper said.

     I should have known he’d have the answer.

     “This makes so much sense!”

     “Casper,” I said, picking at my steering wheel.

     “No, it does,” he said, holding his hands out like he had made sense of all of it and was about to lay some serious wisdom on me. “What do we know about the guy really? He comes here from California, all super SoCal surfer boy.”

     “No, he’s not,” I laughed. Owen was a lot of things; cute, considerate, sometimes adorably off-kilter, but he was not some blond chiseled surf god.

     “Whatever Cress,” Casper waved me off. “The fact is, the dude’s weird. He’s always talking about stars, and moons, and Zodiac signs, and stuff. I mean, I don’t even know where he lives.”

     “Yes you do,” I scoffed. “He lives on Abercorn. We were there last weekend.”

     “Okay. Okay.” He was stretched across the seat now, sitting on his knees with his hands wide in front of him. It was very Casper. “But we were only there to pick him up. Let me ask you this; when’s the last time you were inside his house?”

     “Well…” My mind went blank. I didn’t know. Owen had been in my house, and we had both been in Casper’s, but I had no recollection of ever setting foot in Owen’s place. Is it possible that I had known Owen for two years, became his best friend, fell madly in love with him, and never even seen the inside of his house?

     “And what about his parents?” Casper continued. “Who even are those people? I’ve never seen them. I don’t think I’ve ever even met someone who’s seen them.”

     “That’s not fair.” I was almost wrist deep in steering wheel now. “His parents don’t work in town. They’re probably almost never here.”

     “Don’t be so gullible Cresta. What kind of people move here from a big metropolitan city, work outside of town, and never leave their house?”

     “You literally just described my family,” I said.

     He shook his head. “Don’t try to play it off just ‘cause you’ve got a thing for him. You’re boy’s a prostitute, plain and simple; a prostitute who caters to sickly old widows. Not that I’m judging. I’m sure there’s good money in it.”

     “You’re insane,” I said as we pulled into DeSoto High.

     “Probably,” he conceded.

     I wrapped my hand around Owen’s cell phone, still in my pocket. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to him. I didn’t take Casper seriously. Owen might be a little mysterious. He might ever be ‘weird’, like Casper said. I admit, there had been more than one time where I caught him talking to himself. But he was definitely, absolutely not a prostitute.

     Was he?

     No. No. He wasn’t. Definitely not.

     Still, Casper did make a good point. I had never been in Owen’s house. I had seen it. I had picked him up there a hundred times, but he always met me outside. We never hung out there. I had never seen the inside of his bedroom, or even his parents’ faces. They were never at any of his football games. Bake sales, car washes, school plays; they were no shows. I’m not sure I could even tell you their names.

     “Oh!” I said as a thought came to me. “Maybe his parents are in the black car. Maybe that’s why he was getting in there.”

     Casper kicked a pebble toward the school, looking at me over his glasses and blowing red bangs out of his eyes. “And his parents are hitting up Mrs. Goolsby at four o’clock in the morning for what, sugar?” I blinked. I guess I didn’t have all the answers.

     “That’s what I thought,” he smiled, kicking at another pebble. It went sailing down the sidewalk and hit the school’s glass door. “Nice try though. He’s definitely a hooker. Maybe whoever’s in the black car is his pimp. That makes sense. Look on the bright side though.”

     I had one hand on Owen’s phone and the other wrapped around my father’s locket as I answered. “And what would that be?”

     “Maybe he can get you a discount. You know, like a red light special or something.”

     It was stupid and disgusting, but Casper’s joke wrenched a smile out of me.

     “I gotta hit up the little boys’ room,” Casper nudged me with his shoulder. “I’ll see you in English.”

     I waved him goodbye, took a seat next to Hernando, and waited for Owen to arrive. I was pretty much ignored by the other students as they poured into school. Every now and again, someone would break away from discussing their weekend plans or complaining about the likelihood of once again getting homework for the weekend, and shoot Hernando a glance. Me though, I might as well have been invisible.

     Owen never came. I waited until literally a minute before the bell rang, sitting at Hernando’s weathered gold feet, looking for him. I thought maybe he was running late again, maybe the moon was still in Capricorn, and he would come running up at the last minute, all disheveled and adorable. But he didn’t.

     Walking into homeroom, I started to wonder if anyone had seen him since he got into that black Sedan yesterday. Certainly he was okay. If he hadn’t come home last night, his mystery parents would have called the police or went looking for him or something. I’d have heard about it by now. They’d have called his phone.

     I wrapped my hand around his phone again. This time, I squeezed it tight. I was being stupid. He was fine. There was a reasonable explanation for everything, and he would tell me tonight, over chicken.

     School inched by. Not like the way it always did on Fridays, squeezing every ounce of torture out of the day before releasing you into the weekend. Today was even worse than that. My mind hopscotched between points of stress. Where was Owen? Why did he get into that black car? Why did he lie to me about it? And, assuming everything was okay, how was I going to tell him I was crazy about him?

     By the time school finally ended, I felt like limping home and collapsing in a heap on my bed. But I couldn’t. My mind wouldn’t let me off the hook that easily. I jumped in my Jetta and drove down to Abercorn. I needed to see Owen, to make sure he was okay.

     Dust blew up behind me as I pulled to a stop in front of Owen’s house. I pulled down the sun visor and checked myself out in the mirror. Just because I was showing up at Owen’s house unannounced and horning in on his privacy didn’t mean I couldn’t look presentable doing it.

     I straightened my hair up, wiped my face with a moist towelette, and took a hit of my inhaler. I was used to the breathlessness that came with being around Owen, and I was ready to combat it.

     Owen’s house was one of the newer ones in Crestview. A two-story white thing with blue shutters and a front porch, I realized that, even though I had sat out in front of this place a thousand times, I had never really looked at it. I guess I was always just too captivated by Owen. Even in the early days, before I was so into him that it was hard to breathe, there was something about him.

     I could never take my eyes off him. And it wasn’t just that he was cute. Even though he was cute. Really cute. But so were a lot of guys. For a town that didn’t even have a post office, Crestview had no shortage of man meat. Even Casper, who was like my brother, had a sort of ginger-hued ruffled charm about him.

     Had I managed to pull my gaze off Owen even one of those times and checked out his house, I would have noticed…absolutely nothing.

     There was nothing about the house that stood out at all. In Chicago, that would have been normal. Back home, there was nothing but row after row of identical looking apartments. But here in Crestview, where people actually had things like front yards, people liked to use the space to express themselves.

     Some people put up political signs (always Republican) out by the road. Others stuck religious statues (mostly the Virgin Mary) by the front door. Mrs. Ratcliffe cut her bushes to look like swans. Even my mom who, in Chicago, barely took the time make her bed, let alone fancy up the apartment, decorated our yard a little.

     Sure, they were those stupid cardboard cutouts; a little boy peeing the horrified little girl who catches him, but Mom seemed to think they were cute. And at least she was trying. Which was more than I could say for Owen’s family.

     The yard, the porch- all of it was empty. Other than Owen’s car (which must have gotten that fuel pump ‘cause sitting in the driveway), there was no evidence that anyone lived here at all. Maybe that wasn’t so weird though. Owen’s parents did work constantly. Maybe they didn’t have time for stuff like that. Yeah. That was it. It had to be. I was just letting Casper’s ridiculousness get the better of me.