I had done and been through a lot of crazy things that summer, but driving into New York City for the first time ranked among the most intense. It was a stressful blur of honking cars and changing lanes and suffocating tunnels and vertiginous bridges. My friends were shouting at me to watch out for this or that hazard while I white-knuckled the wheel and sweat pooled in the small of my back. Somehow, after countless near-collisions and missed turns, the directions provided by the unflappably bland robot voice from my phone got us to within a block of our destination: J. Edgar Hoover High School. I didn’t know New York geography well at all—I had only been there once, as a young kid, on a trip with my parents—but Hoover High wasn’t near any landmarks I recognized from TV or the movies. This was Brooklyn, not Manhattan, and not even one of the “hipster” neighborhoods of Brooklyn I’d heard about. This was like a dingier, more crowded version of suburbia, with smaller, older houses packed tight together and cars jamming the sides of the streets.
We found the school easily enough. It was an imposing, block-long edifice of brick punctuated now and then by windows, the kind of place that could have been a minimum-security prison or a wastewater treatment plant or any number of institutions, but in this case housed a few thousand impressionable young minds. In other words, it looked a lot like the high school I attended in Florida, and the thought of going in gave me pit sweats.
It was the middle of the afternoon. We parked across the street and sat watching the building from the car, debating our first move.
“So, how’s that detailed plan of ours shaping up?” asked Enoch.
“Perhaps we just go inside and have a look round,” said Millard. “See if anyone catches our eye.”
“Thousands of kids go to this school,” I said. “I don’t think we’re going to find the peculiar one just by looking.”
“We don’t know until we’ve tired,” Millard said, and then he yawned. “I mean, tried.”
“I’m tired, too,” said Bronwyn. “My brain feels like mush.”
“Mine too,” I said.
Bronwyn offered me the thermos of coffee Paul had given us—still half full but long since cold—but I couldn’t stomach it. I was both wired and tired, and coffee was just making me jittery. We’d been going nonstop for over twenty-four hours, and I was starting to come apart at the seams.
We heard the school bell ring. Thirty seconds later its front doors flung open and students began to flood outside. In seconds the courtyard was filled with teenagers.
“Here’s our chance,” said Bronwyn. “Any of them look peculiar?”
A boy with a purple mohawk walked by us on the sidewalk, followed by a girl in drop-crotch pants and paisley combat boots and a hundred other kids with their own quirks of style and dress.
“Yeah,” Emma said. “All of them.”
“It’s useless anyway,” said Enoch. “If the person we’re looking for is in danger, then they’re scared, and if they’re scared, they’re going to try and blend in, not stand out.”
“Ah, so we’re looking for someone who seems suspiciously normal,” said Bronwyn. “Too normal.”
“No, you idiot, I meant we’re not going to find them by looking at all. Any other ideas?”
We scanned the masses as they streamed past for another minute, but it was clear that Enoch was right. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.
“Maybe we should, I don’t know, ask people,” said Emma.
Enoch laughed. “Yes, excuse me, we were looking for someone with strange powers or abilities? Or perhaps an extra mouth in the back of their head?”
“You know who would know?” I said. “Abe.”
Enoch rolled his eyes. “He’s dead, remember?”
“But he left us a how-to guide. Or the closest thing we’re going to get to one.” I reached under Emma’s legs and pulled Abe’s operations log from the footwell.
“Perhaps you’re onto something,” said Millard. “That’s every mission he and H ran for thirty-five years. They had to have been in situations like this. We’ll just find out what they did.”
“And we’ll come back tomorrow, when we’ve had some rest,” I said. Forget the needle—at that moment I wouldn’t have been able to find the haystack.
“Excellent plan,” said Emma. “If I don’t get some sleep soon, I may start hallucinating.”
“Someone’s coming!” hissed Bronwyn.
I looked out my window to see a trim white man walking toward the car. He wore a black polo shirt tucked into khaki pants, plastic mirrored sunglasses, and held a walkie-talkie in one hand. He was a classic vice-principal type.
“Names!” he barked.
“Hi there,” I said, calm and friendly.
“What are your names?” he repeated, humorless. “Let me see your driver’s license.”
“We don’t go to school here, so we don’t have to tell you,” said Bronwyn.
Enoch’s face fell into his hands. “You idiot.”
The man bent to peer inside the car and raised his walkie-talkie. “Base, this is perimeter, I’ve got some unknown youths here,” and then he walked around the back of the car and started reading off the license plate number.
I started the car and gave it a little gas at the same time, which made the engine bark loudly enough that the man jumped and stumbled backward. (It was a trick I was coming to depend on.) Before he could regain his footing, I pulled away from the curb.
“He gave me a bad feeling,” said Emma.
“Most vice principals do,” I said.
But then I got a sudden, sharp pain in my stomach. As I turned the corner and drove down the long side of the school, I clenched my jaw and hunched forward, trying to hide it from the others.
I wondered, could it have been a hollowgast? Was that the danger this uncontacted peculiar was in?
Then the pain subsided, vanishing just as quickly as it had come, and I decided, for the time being, to keep those thoughts to myself.
We found a place to rest our heads by looking through the stack of postcards I’d brought from home—the ones Abe had sent me during his later-life travels. I remembered having seen one from the New York area, and when we’d put a few miles between us and the school, I parked the car and looked through the stack to find it. On the picture side was a very dated, exceedingly bland photo of a hotel room, and on the back was the hotel’s name, address, and a short note from Abe to me, postmarked nine years ago.
Looks like I’ll be staying here a few days, just
Outside of NYC. Nice, quiet place, great amenities. I’m seeing
Old friends. If you ever come to New York, I recommend this
Particular hotel. Ask for room 203. Much love, Grandpa