“Perfect,” Ramona said, grabbing the page from him and hurrying them all toward the door.
“Stairs?” Nell started to ask—she knew there was no second set of stairs leading out from their building—and then she understood.
Sure enough, as they all spilled out onto the landing outside the office, there wasn’t just one stairway this time, but two—another on the opposite side of the landing, leading down in the other direction, away from the front door, where the police were currently swarming and about to batter it down.
“What the . . . ,” Swann murmured, his eyes wide with disbelief, as the crush of wood splintering made them all jump.
“Police!” the megaphone blared, and the front door downstairs splintered further under another kick.
“Let’s go!” Ramona shouted, starting down the stairs only they could use.
“You next,” Humphrey said to Nell, gesturing quickly for her to follow. “We’ll cover you from the back.”
Nell lurched down the stairs. “All this time,” she managed to say, “I complained about this office so much, begged you to let us move—”
Even amid the panic, he found a smile for her as they ran. “I told you there was a reason we stayed in this god-awful building, Nelly.”
Bear
Yes, when we found Agloe, we all began keeping secrets. But mine was different, Nell. I’d been lying to everyone since the day we arrived in Rockland. Since even before that—before we’d even graduated and left Wisconsin.
I told everyone the house we were living in belonged to my parents and sat vacant most summers. That it was waiting for us to move in and continue working on our project. But that wasn’t true. The house didn’t belong to my parents. It didn’t belong to anyone in my family at all. It was a rental. Our last semester, I saw a travel agency ad offering vacation cabins and had gotten an idea.
I only wanted to keep all of us together. Tam and Wally were so brilliant, Daniel so driven, Romi and Francis so meticulous, and Eve so well connected in the industry, I was sure that despite our grand plans, if we drifted apart over the break, we’d never come back again. I figured, we just had to get started on our project, and the rest would take care of itself. But I needed to take the first step for us. A harmless lie, I thought.
Because they all knew how broke I was. They never would have agreed if they’d known that the cabin wasn’t free—that in fact, not only had I paid for it, but I’d spent every last penny to do it.
It sounds so stupid now. But I was young, and desperate. My friends felt as much like my family as my real family, except that there was always the chance I could lose them. My relatives all still lived in the same town on Long Island, but Tam, Daniel, Wally, Romi, Francis, and Eve were different. They were from all over, brought together at university, and never intended to stay there forever. They would get offers for prestigious jobs and be gone. We’d try to stay in touch, but the years would grow long, and it wouldn’t be the same.
And, I’d always been poor. Always stretching my budget until I got my next measly paycheck from tutoring or waiting tables. When you have barely any money anyway, having none at all didn’t seem that different.
What was one summer?
I did have a plan, at first. I had just enough for the deposit, and I’d intended to get a side job in Rockland while we finished our project, and use that money to pay the rent. Then once the Dreamer’s Atlas was finished and we’d gone back to Wisconsin to submit it for publication, I could go back to teaching undergraduate geography classes or tutor freshmen, and no one would ever be the wiser.
But then Tam and Wally discovered Agloe, and everything fell apart. We spent all day, every day consumed by it. There was no time for a part-time job, so I couldn’t make any money. What I owed compounded with every payment I missed.