SHE DIDN’T GO TO SCHOOL on Friday, claiming she was sick, and her mom didn’t even bug her about what was wrong—a sure sign she knew Gemma was faking.
Gemma was glad her dad was once again traveling. Glad they were separated by time zones and a big ocean. She couldn’t have faced him. If she had, she thought she would have spit at him, or kicked him in the shins, or finally said some of the things she’d been meaning to say for sixteen years.
The great Geoffrey Ives, cofounder of Fine & Ives Pharmaceuticals, Master of the Universe, total fucking asshole.
April called her during homeroom, a useless fifteen minutes of time between second and third periods when random juniors got shuffled together to suffer through announcements about basketball games, prom, and Tolerance Week.
After the third time Gemma didn’t pick up, April resorted to texting, flooding Gemma’s phone with scowling selfies. What the shit is going on?? Are you okay?
Gemma felt a sudden surge of viciousness, a desire to cause pain, since she had been caused pain. Maybe this was how Chloe and the wolves felt: maybe somewhere deep in their lives, someone was nipping at them, trying to make them bleed. No, she wrote back. Then: not going tomorrow.
There was a five-minute space between messages. Gemma wasn’t sure whether April was stunned or just pretending to pay attention to her homeroom teacher.
Her next message said: This is a joke, right?
She could have written back, explaining. Better yet, she could have called. She could already imagine April shoving the phone deep into her pocket while she hurried into the nearest bathroom stall, then perching, knees to chest, on a toilet seat and pressing the phone to her ear while Gemma sobbed. She could have explained about the broken window, and her father’s terrible words: This was a message for me. . . . It had all come true: her crashing fears, the strange terrors that had always infected her. Her father hated her. She might someday leave, but she would never escape—not him, not that truth, not really.
But she had already cried—had woken, in fact, with her throat raw and the taste of salt on her lips, and realized she’d been crying in her sleep—and today she felt nothing but a strange, bobbing sense of emptiness, as if she was a balloon untethered from the earth, slowly floating away into nothingness. She wondered whether her mom felt this way when she took pills.
So she wrote back: not a joke.
And, after a minute: sorry.
Her phone stayed quiet after that.
For the first two days of spring break, Gemma did nothing. She watched TV on her computer without knowing what she was watching. She slumped from upstairs to downstairs to microwave food her dad wouldn’t have approved of her eating, the Hot Pockets and frozen mac and cheese she’d convinced Bernice, their housekeeper, to buy for her, Chinese takeout that had mysteriously materialized in the fridge. Once she took Rufus to the backyard and stood in her pajamas, blinking in the sun, while he ran circles around Danny, one of the lawn guys (she thought that was his name, anyway; there had been so many), who was moving slowly on the enormous lawn mower like a ship captain through a sea of green.
Her mom, who would normally have peppered Gemma with constant questions, or asked that she come have lunch at the club, or suggested they do mani-pedis—all activities that Gemma hated—largely left her alone. They were like two snowflakes, drifting through the vast white house, encased in their own arrangements of pain and misery.
All, she thought, her father’s fault: her father’s rules. Her father’s house. Her father’s walls, white and oversized, made pretty with ornate picture frames and chandeliers, so pretty they might keep a person from knowing she was trapped. Even, she realized, her father’s pills. She’d never before thought about the fact that her dad’s old company probably manufactured the meds her mother took, day in and day out, to help her sleep or wake or keep her from dreaming.
If she was honest, she realized that some small part of her—okay, maybe a big part of her—had been hoping that because she wasn’t going to Florida, April wouldn’t go. And she knew that if she’d told April the truth, April wouldn’t have gone: she would have gladly spent spring break watching bad TV or trying to learn the choreography of stupid pop videos from YouTube. It was her fault, which made her feel mean and stupid and small. But the fact that April did go made her feel mean and stupid and small—and also abandoned.
She was wallowing, and she was pretty deep.
On the third day of spring break, Gemma woke up and felt a desperate, urgent desire to move, to do something. April had been at her grandparents’ house for a full thirty-six hours. Gemma knew this because, in a moment of true, epic pathetic-ness, she had logged onto April’s iTunes account and used Find My Phone to track April’s progress down the coast—they had traded passwords years ago so they could always find each other if they were ever separated in a zombie apocalypse, assuming Wi-Fi still worked. No doubt April was already working on her tan and trying to scope out cute guys to flirt with who didn’t know she was an alien.
Gemma knew by now April would have heard about the Frankenstein mask, or at least some version of the story filtered through their parents, and Gemma wished they could talk about it. Why had the mask freaked her father out so badly? She wished she’d been listening more carefully to her parents’ midnight conversation. Already, the conversation seemed like a dream. She couldn’t remember details, just a place called Haven, a word she thought she remembered vaguely from childhood. A hospital, maybe? One of the boards her father sat on? He consulted for dozens of companies, all with names like NeoTech and Amalgam and Complete Solutions.
Missing April was like having a hole in the very bottom of her stomach. Like period cramps, as if she was puffy and swollen and bruised but on the inside. Gemma wasn’t gay, she didn’t think (although she didn’t know, having never kissed anything but a practice pillow—and in a moment of complete, delirious silliness, given one practice blow job on a cucumber), but that didn’t stop her from being stupid in love with her best friend.
She sent a picture of one of her oldest stuffed animals, an octopus missing two legs thanks to Rufus’s rabid appetite for anything stuffed. He was April’s favorite. I miss you! Hope you’re having fun! she’d written, and then left her phone in her bed, buried under a pillow, in case April was still mad and didn’t write back. Besides, she didn’t want her mom calling her every five seconds.
Leaving the house wasn’t a problem. It was early, and her mom was probably at her spin class. Leaving the property was a slightly bigger problem, since she a) had no car, and b) had never even learned to drive. She leashed up Rufus. It was a shortish walk down the drive, past Danny, who was pruning the hedges today, out the gates, and to the bus that ran past the university down to Franklin Street, with its pretty clutter of bars and cafés and the college bookstore selling UNC gear. Rufus loved the bus and sat the whole time on the seat next to Gemma, like a person, with his nose pressed against the window.
It was a beautiful day. She wandered down Franklin, looking in shop windows, debating whether to buy something. The town felt emptier than usual: UNC students were on spring break, too, until Monday. She kept picturing the phantoms of all her classmates, flitting by her on empty streets, while their real selves were four hundred miles away, lathering on sunscreen or taking tequila shots at breakfast.
She had just turned onto Rosemary Street, half thinking she would stop in at Mama Dip’s for hush puppies even though she wasn’t hungry, when she got a sudden nervous feeling in her stomach, as if she’d approached the edge of a cliff unexpectedly.
Watched. She was being watched.
If she’d been alone, in the dark, she might have been too afraid to turn around. But she was standing between the orthodontist’s office where she’d had her braces tightened for three years and a small Mobil station that sold postcards touting North Carolina’s many beauties. So she turned, even as the sense of dread yawned open wider, like a mouth lodged beneath her ribs.
She relaxed. No one. An older guy muttering about a parking ticket wedged under his windshield, a group of women—two of them she recognized as her mom’s yoga friends—standing outside Mama Dip’s. Patti Winters, the mother of a hideous girl in Gemma’s grade whose endless bids for popularity meant she treated Gemma like the weakling who had to be eaten so the tribe could flourish, looked up and caught sight of Gemma. She waved and started to cross the street to come over.
Quickly, Gemma turned around, pretending not to have seen, and hurried across the gas station parking lot. She tied Rufus up to the sign that indicated a handicapped parking space and slipped inside the Quick-Mart, darting behind a display of cheap plastic sunglasses. Pete Rogers, aka Perv Rogers (a nickname assigned to him in third grade, when on a class trip he’d been caught stealing a pair of underwear from Chloe’s overnight bag), eyed her from behind the register.
After fifteen seconds, Gemma felt like an idiot, and once again, missed April badly. She was still in school mode, prey mode. A rabbit on the run. But her mom’s friends weren’t going to track her and pin her down with conversation about why she was home on spring break and where-were-all-her-friends. She bought a heart-shaped pair of red sunglasses, because she didn’t want to seem like she was hiding, which of course she was.
“I like your style,” Perv said, in a pervy way. Gemma frowned at him.
No one was waiting for her in the parking lot. Patti Winters was long gone. Rufus was lying on the pavement, tongue out in the heat.
Still, as she began crossing with him back toward the street, she got that nervous, alert feeling again, as if someone were whispering something mean just a little too softly for her to hear. The guy who’d gotten the parking ticket was now refueling, his shitty old Chevrolet pulled haphazardly up to the pump. Their eyes met briefly, and he opened his mouth, as if to say something to her.
She was almost passing him, and that was when her brain click-clicked into motion, and gears slotted together, and she realized all at once that he wasn’t getting gas—his car wasn’t even connected to the pump—and he hadn’t just randomly looked at her. He’d been watching her.
He was following her.
But by the time she understood this, they had drawn level. He grabbed her wrist and pulled, a motion seamless and small and effective, so she dropped Rufus’s leash. Rufus just stood there patiently, wagging his tail. Gemma was too shocked to cry out, but then she was pinned to the man, temporarily so close she could see the wide black expanse of pores freckled across his nose, the sweat beading on his upper lip.
“Gem,” he said. His breath smelled like coffee and like old, moldy closets. His hair was long and looked unwashed. “Listen to me. I don’t want any trouble.”
Her mind moved in short, explosive bursts, sending up disconnected images and ideas. She must know him. How else would he know her name? She searched his face, lean and cavernous, pitted with old acne scars and covered all over with stubble, and the taste of acid burned her throat as her brain made a final winding click-click.
Abducted. She was being abducted.
More lightning flashes in her brain: ransom demands; a cold, wet basement fitted with chains and old torture devices.
He fumbled the door open with one hand, keeping a grip on her wrist with the other. “I’m not going to hurt you, okay?” He was panting hard. “You gotta trust me. We’re gonna be okay.” As if they were on the same side.
She got a quick glimpse of a backseat littered with empty soda cans and crumpled receipts, a baseball hat, plastic bags from Party City, a dark thatch of something that looked like a huge, furry spider, and at that moment she found her voice and screamed. Or she tried to scream. What came out was more of a hoarse shout. Even her vocal cords were shaking, petrified. Only then did Rufus begin to bark.
The man instantly released her, springing backward, pressing himself against the car as if she’d just whipped out a weapon.
“Jesus.” He was shouting now too, angrily. “Jesus. Why’d you go and do that, huh?”
She turned, snatched up Rufus’s leash, and ran. It had been so long since she’d run—since she was allowed to run—she was worried her legs wouldn’t work. But they did. She careened back toward the Quick-Mart, her heart exploding through her ribs, nearly toppling an old woman who’d just emerged, holding a fistful of lottery tickets. She didn’t bother tying Rufus up. She wanted him next to her, anyway, even though he was evidently the world’s worst guard dog.
“What do you know about heaven?” the man shouted to her, or at least she thought he did. By the time she was inside, taking deep, hiccuping breaths of air standing beside the windows papered over with flyers advertising deals on milk and Bud Light and cigarettes, he was gone.
“You’re not supposed to have dogs in here,” Perv said. “Sorry. State law.”
Gemma ignored that. “Can I borrow your phone?” No way was she getting back on the bus. She had an itchy, exposed feeling, even standing in the warm, familiar must of the Quick-Mart. She wanted to go to the bathroom and scrub off her wrist, where the man had grabbed her.
“Are you okay?” he asked, squinting at her. “You look really—”
She glared at him. Fortunately, he shut up. She punched in her mother’s number, her fingers shaking so badly she fumbled it the first time.
“Gemma? Gemma, what’s the matter?” she said, as soon as Gemma choked out a hello. “Where are you? Whose number is this?”
She almost lost it and started to cry. But Perv was still watching her—he wasn’t actually bad-looking, with very clear skin and straight teeth and messy blond hair that looked as if he’d just had his head out the window of a moving car—so she kept it together.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I—I missed the bus. And I’m not feeling well.”
She’d said the magic words: not feeling well. Her mom’s tone instantly changed. She became brisk, businesslike, as she always was about her daughter’s health.
“I’m coming,” she said. “Where?”
Gemma explained and hung up, passing the phone back to Perv and scowling at him so he would know not to ask questions. As soon as her mom came, she would tell her everything. She wished now she’d paid more attention to the car—it was a white Chevrolet, she knew, and old, but she hadn’t caught even one digit of the license plate. Jesus. She’d always thought she would be good in a crisis: cool, ironic, detached. But her knees were shaking. She hadn’t picked up even one good detail they could tell the police, except that the guy liked McDonald’s. That narrowed it down to a bazillion people.
It took her mom fifteen minutes to get there, and Gemma spent the whole time ignoring Perv’s looks of concern, trying to keep Rufus from going after the display of beef jerky, and doing her best to recall every single detail of the man’s interaction with her. And by the time her mom pulled up—leaving the BMW door open as she jogged out of the car, still in yoga pants, scanning the parking lot for Gemma as though she expected her to be curled up in a fetal position on the ground—and then gripped both of Gemma’s shoulders and demanded to know what was wrong, what had happened, Gemma only smiled tightly.
“I got tired,” she said. She knew she probably looked like shit and wouldn’t have to fake it. “I did too much walking, I think.”
Because by then her mind, grinding slowly through its memory spool, had glitched on a few small details that in retrospect became huge, all-important: the shopping bags from Party City, which sold Halloween masks—like Frankenstein’s—year-round. The fact that he’d called her Gem.
More importantly, the last thing he’d said to her, which in memory became clarified, distilled, amplified. Not: What do you know about heaven?
But: What do you know about Haven?
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. to read Chapter 4 of Lyra’s story.