He could give Josephine a chance, if only because Mikey had become so entranced by the demons of online gaming. Everett uncrossed his arms cautiously. “All right, fine. You wanna come over?”
“Yes, I certainly do,” she answered formally. They didn’t say another word about it. When the bus stopped with a whine of brakes and the door whooshed open, they stepped off and turned down the long road toward the cement block buildings in the distance.
“Walk on the wrong side of the road,” Everett said, nudging her toward the left. “That way you can see trucks coming.”
“My mom always says that too.”
“Does she tell you not to have your earbuds in when you’re outside?”
“Yes.”
They both bit out hard laughs before they settled into quiet. His mom had been acting so weird the night before that he’d convinced himself she’d seen him coming out of that locker. When she hadn’t exploded in anger, he’d spent their whole evening together worried about her quiet disappointment and when she might spring it on him.
The relief he’d felt when she’d kissed him good night and sent him off to bed had lasted one blissful hour. Then he’d been awoken by the sound of his door closing. A quiet sound. Noticeable in its sneakiness.
He’d heard the same sound from the front room then, the purposefully soft closing of a door followed by the distant jingle of keys.
What the hell?
Everett had tiptoed at first; then he’d raced to the living room to look out the window when he heard a car start. His mom drove into the maze of the storage facility, and two minutes later, the gate had opened and she’d sped out into the night.
An emergency trip for milk, maybe. Or eggs. Laundry detergent? But why had she gone deeper into the complex before driving away?
He’d lain in bed for nearly an hour, first just weirded out about his mom’s behavior. But then he’d started thinking about what he’d found that afternoon in the new locker, and he’d clutched his covers over his face and squeezed his eyes shut.
There were innocent explanations for a board papered with information about missing girls. He knew that. Maybe the renter was a cop or a private investigator. Maybe even a reporter. At first he’d been thrilled with the discovery, though he’d only spent a few minutes poking around before he’d worried his mom might come looking for him.
But then, lying in the dark, the only person within one square mile of a pitch-black night, he’d started imagining more dangerous possibilities. What if the renter was obsessed with the missing girls because he’d taken them? What if Everett had been poking around the belongings of a serial killer? What if there were cut-up body parts in those storage bins?
At long last, he’d heard the creak of the gate rolling open, then the rumble of a car, the engine ticking loudly in the familiar way of his mom’s ancient hatchback, and his eyes had actually burned with thankful tears. He’d turned over on his side, ears straining at every sound of her unlocking the door, setting down her keys, then slowly opening his bedroom door to peek inside.
Where had she gone? Was something wrong?
His mind stuttered over the question again and again, because he couldn’t imagine his mom doing anything bad. She’d always been so steady, too steady, too attentive and present and there. She hovered and checked up on him, and said no to sleepovers more often than not.
“Are you taking Spanish next year?” Josephine asked, breaking through his thoughts as though she couldn’t take the silence any longer. “My parents want me to take Spanish, but I want to learn French. That doesn’t start until high school, though, which is stupid. So I may have to take Spanish first.”
“You’ll be trilingual.”
“True. Which would be kind of cool. And it would look good on college applications. I want to go somewhere far away for school. Georgia, maybe. That’s where my folks are from. Where are you from?”
“Here,” he said, though that wasn’t quite true. “Actually, I was born in St. Louis.”
“Oh, cool. A world traveler.”
Everett laughed, the last of his dark thoughts blowing away. “That’s me.”
By the time they made it home, Everett was laughing so hard at Josephine’s stories he forgot to be worried . . . until they walked into the office and his mom’s surprised eyes went wide and locked right on them. Everett always had to make complicated arrangements to get friends dropped off and picked up afterward because no one could just walk over. He’d never shown up with an unexpected guest.