I could safely say the Alona I’d first met would have chosen disappearing over life as Lily—or even Ally—Turner, and I certainly hadn’t made the prospect of changing her mind any easier by being so hard on her changes to Lily’s appearance and the way she was handling her second chance at “life.”
I wanted her to stay, definitely. But when it came down to it, I didn’t want her to be miserable just because I would miss her if she were gone, because my life was better—although, okay, more complicated and sometimes more stressful, too—with her around.
No.I pushed those negative thoughts away. We couldn’t have come this far together for her to just…not be here anymore. We’d figure it out. We had to.
“Hey.”
I looked up to see Alona leaning out through the still-closed door, her hair hanging forward over her shoulders.
“It’s unlocked already. And you should probably get in here.” Her mouth was curved downward in distaste or worry, or maybe both.
Uh-oh.
Then she pulled back inside the house, leaving me no choice but to follow.
The house had that clean but closed-up smell that I associated with the first day of school after summer break. Floor wax and disuse, I guess.
I was standing in a small foyer, with what was probably the living room to my left—the spacing of dents in the whitish carpet indicating that a sofa and chairs had once lived there. A long, narrow hallway led to a kitchen, and an open stairway to the second floor was to my right.
“Up here,” Alona said from a landing midway up the steps. Her expression did not look any less grim than it had moments before, and I wanted to ask why, but that would have meant giving up any element of surprise, which I didn’t want to do yet. Getting through the door without a racket—the stupid real estate lockbox on the door had rattled with every movement—had been tough enough. If Edmund was still unaware that I was here, I wanted to keep it that way for at least a little while longer.
I followed Alona up the stairs as quietly as possible to an open area at the top that also looked like it had once held furniture. Three more empty rooms branched off from this space—probably bedrooms—but I didn’t have to go any farther to find Edmund…or smell him.
He was sitting on the floor, leaning against a small section of wall between two bedroom doors. The fumes pouring off him, and the whiskey bottle clutched in his hand, made my eyes water even from ten feet away. That explained Alona’s reaction, at least. She was probably experiencing flashbacks of her mom.
“Hey,” Edmund said with a goofy grin, lifting his bottle in greeting. “What are you doing here? It’s me, Ed.” Like I’d somehow managed to forget him in the last eight hours.
Alona rolled her eyes.
“I messed up, man,” he continued before I could respond. “I left because of Erin, and everything went to shit.” He waved the half-empty bottle around, the contents sloshing. “The neighbors said my mom got depressed, my dad lost his job, and now…they’re gone. Kicked out of their ownhouse.” He shook his head glumly. “No one knows where they went. And even if they did, they aren’t going to tell me, the crazy son who caused so much trouble and made everybody’s property values bottom out.”
I shook my head, not sure I’d gotten the gist of what he was saying through his muddled speech. What did property values have to do with anything?
I moved closer and knelt down next to him, breathing through my mouth and forcing myself to be patient, when all I really wanted to do was shake him. “It’s not your fault. You were doing what you had to do to survive, and I’m sure they’d understand that if they knew. And we can help you find them, eventually. But first I need you to tell me—”
“Nah, man, you don’t get it.” His head flopped from side to side in a poor imitation of voluntary movement. “I was there. I could have stopped it.”
Except that made no sense. The whole point was that he hadn’t been here, and that’s why everything had fallen apart. Evidently, he’d already gotten to the part of this drunken excursion where he’d lost his grip on reality. Wonderful.
Alona frowned and knelt next to me. “At the party? On the roof?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked her.
“Ask him,” she insisted and nudged me hard in the ribs when I hesitated.
I glared at her, but repeated after her dutifully, “At the party? On the roof?”
Ed looked up, his gaze glassy, but it was, at least, direct eye contact for the first time in this conversation.
He leaned forward with a sudden intensity in his expression, and I edged back slightly in case that was his I’m-going-to-throw-up-right-here-and-now face. “No,” he whispered, like he was revealing some big secret.
I glanced over at Alona—it was my turn to roll my eyes at her—but she wasn’t paying attention to me. “Where were you?” she asked Ed.
With a sigh, I repeated the question aloud, not waiting for her to jab me with her elbow again. My ribs still ached from the last time.
“On campus. In my dorm room,” he said in that same hushed voice, and tears spilled over from his watering eyes down his cheeks. “She wanted me to go with her to that stupid costume party, expand our social horizons, whatever that means. She was nervous about going alone.”
And then it clicked. He wasn’t talking about his parents;he was talking about his sister and her death.
Alona gave me a triumphant look.
“We fought about it, and she went alone. I was just so tired of doing everything together.” He thumped his head back against the wall, and the bottle in his slack grip tipped. If he hadn’t already drunk more than half, the whiskey would have spilled out onto the carpet. “The same college, the same dorm, the same major in Econ. And she was changing, becoming this person I didn’t know. Contact lenses, different hairstyle—”
“How about just a hairstyle in general?” Alona muttered, eyeing the out-of-control curls on the top of Ed’s head.
“—ditching her jeans and sweatshirts for clothes like the sorority girls were wearing, hanging out with dickhead frat guys…and she wanted me to change, too. Telling me who to talk to, what to wear. Nothing all that different from what she’d always done, but suddenly I was just sick of it. I didn’t like who she was becoming—all fake and plasticky—and I didn’t want to be a part of it. But if she reinvented herself without me, then who was I, you know?” He let go of the bottle to scrub at his face, and liquor flowed out, staining the carpet. “I was…It was confusing. I was trying to work it out, figure out what to do. So I told her no that night, probably for the first time ever. She was pissed, but I thought, It’s only one night—no big deal. Instead, it was everything.” He drew his knees up to his chest and rested his forehead on them. “It was just a stupid party,” he said, his voice muffled.
I’d told Alona that, for the moment, we only had to worry about finding Erin. But I realized now that having Ed tell us where Erin might want to hang out wouldn’t be enough. Not with all of this guilt hanging around, binding the two of them together. Ed’s unfinished business with someone who was essentially the other half of himself was the real problem. Without him, there was no way we were going to reach any kind of resolution, even once we managed to find Erin.
I made an executive decision. “You need to come with us. We need your help with Erin.”
He squinted at me. “You keep saying we.”
“My spirit guide, Alona, is here,” I said.
“Was that really necessary?” she muttered.
“For real? Hey, Alona.” Ed waved at a point well above where she knelt on the floor next to me.
She rolled her eyes.
He wiped his face and sat up straighter. “What do you need my help with? Is Erin okay?”
Alona sighed. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” she said to me. “It’s only going to make things worse.”