I suddenly understood something and glanced up at my bedroom window, picturing the list in my drawer. I got now what Sloane meant by number twelve. It wasn’t just a bizarre fruit-gathering mission. She wanted me to go to the Orchard.
I waited until ten before I left. By this point, Beckett was in bed and my parents had retreated to their study at the top of the house. All their patterns from a few years ago were coming back, and this was how they had worked then: they would write all day in the dining room, usually forgetting about dinner, and then head upstairs, where they would go over that day’s pages and plan out the next day.
When I was thirteen, the last time this had happened, it wasn’t like I’d had much of a social life, or anywhere at all to go at night, so I’d never explored the possibilities their writing afforded. But now, things were different. During the school year, I had a pretty strict midnight curfew that Sloane—who had no curfew whatsoever—had figured all kinds of techniques for getting around. Now that my parents were otherwise occupied, I had a feeling my curfew had become more theoretical than something that would be enforced. But just in case, I scrawled a note and left it up against the TV in the kitchen, so if they found me gone, they wouldn’t call the police.
As I’d gotten ready in my room—this basically just meant putting on jeans instead of shorts, grabbing a sweatshirt, and adding a swipe of lip gloss—I’d stared down at the list. While I still didn’t understand a few of the others, I reallydidn’t get this one. It didn’t seem like it was going to be a challenge, since it wasn’t like I’d never been to the Orchard before. We’d gone there one afternoon a week before I went upstate and Sloane disappeared. We’d had milkshakes—vanilla for me, coffee for her—and lain out on the picnic tables for hours in the sun, just talking. We’d been a number of times this past spring, usually at night, but occasionally during the day, when Sloane wanted a place where we could hang out in peace, working on our tans or just walking up and down the rows of trees, talking about anything that came to our minds.
I kept the Volvo’s lights off until I reached the street, even though the curtains in my parents’ study were drawn. And once I’d made it down the street without my cell lighting up with calls and texts asking me where I thought I was going, I figured that I was in the clear.
I turned my lights on and my music up, a Luke Bryan album I’d downloaded last month but not listened to until now, and headed in the direction of the Orchard. I was halfway through the album when I turned off the main road and on to the side street that would lead me there. Out here, the houses got farther and farther apart until there was nothing but empty land and, tucked away on an almost-hidden drive, the Orchard. I slowed as I got closer. The entrance was always, by design I was sure, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it. I was contemplating turning around and backtracking when I saw the fading sign and the narrow gravel driveway. I put on my blinker, even though I hadn’t seen any other cars on the road, and turned in, pausing for a moment to look at the sign.
It was almost lost in the overgrown bushes on the side of the road, and so faded with weather and time that whole parts of it could barely be seen. Without meaning to, I glanced down at the underside of my wrist before looking away and driving on.
MARCH
Three months earlier
“It’s just up here,” Sloane said as she turned around in the car to face me, pointing. “See the driveway?”
“I can’t believe you’ve never been to the Orchard,” Sam said from the driver’s seat, and I heard the capital letter in his tone.
“No, remember?” Sloane asked, and I could hear a laugh tucked somewhere in the edges of her words. “Because I’d never been before we came here last month.”
“That doesn’t mean Emily couldn’t have gone on her own,” Sam said, shaking his head. Sloane turned her head back to look at me again and we exchanged the tiniest of smiles—probably not even perceptible to anyone but us. I didn’t want to contradict Sam, or argue with him, but of courseI wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t been here with Sloane, and we both knew it.
She raised her eyebrows at me with a bigger smile, and I understood her meaning perfectly—she was asking something like You’re having fun, right? Isn’t this great? Are you okay?
I smiled back at her, a real smile and not an I need a rescuesmile. The last thing I wanted was to upset the evening that she’d worked so hard to arrange. Her smile widened, and she turned back to Sam, moving as close to him as her seatbelt would let her, reaching over and running her hand through his curly hair.
Gideon and I were sitting on opposite ends of the backseat, in contrast to the snuggling that was going on in the front. I was half on the seat and half pressed against the door handle, which probably wasn’t really necessary, as we were riding in an enormous SUV and it looked like there was probably room for several people in the space between us. I looked across the expanse of the dark backseat at Gideon, who I had met just a few hours before.
Sloane had been talking up Gideon Baker for weeks, ever since she and Sam had become whatever they were now. “We don’t need a label,” Sloane had said, when I’d tentatively asked what, exactly, they were doing. She’d smiled at me and straightened her vintage cardigan. “You know I hate those.” But when whatever they were doing had become more serious, suddenly I had started hearing a lot about Gideon, Sam’s best friend, who was also single. And wouldn’t it be so great if . . . ?
That sentence had always trailed off, never really stating what exactly she was asking, but always with a hopeful question mark at the end. Somewhere along the line, I’d agreed that it wouldbe so great, which was how I now found myself wearing more makeup than usual, sharing a backseat with Gideon, going to someplace called the Orchard.
Gideon took up a lot of space in the car—he was tall, with broad shoulders and big hands and feet, and when we’d been sitting across from each other in the diner booth an hour before, and Sloane had been stealing fries off Sam’s plate, I’d asked him if he played any sports. He looked like an athlete—I could practically see him featured on the Stanwich Academy website, a lacrosse stick slung over one shoulder. But he’d just taken a bite of his burger as I asked this. He’d chewed, swallowed, taken a sip of Coke, wiped his mouth, then said, “No.” And that had pretty much been the extent of our conversation so far.
“What is this?” Sam asked, letting out a sigh as he slammed on the brakes. I leaned forward and saw that we were now behind a long line of cars, and that there was a bottleneck around the entrance to a gravel driveway.
“It just means that this is clearlythe place to be,” Sloane said, and I could hear in her voice how happy she was. Happy we were going there, happy to be with Sam, happy that I was there in the back, with a boy of my own, not a third wheel.
We edged closer to the turnoff, Sam sighing loudly and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. I glanced across the car at Gideon again, trying to think of something to say, when I saw the sign. It was out his window, and I edged a little away from my door handle, trying to get a better look. It was dark out, but the SUV’s headlights—which were sci-fi bright, and also clearly made out of something expensive and fancy, unlike my Volvo’s regular old lights—were right on it, illuminating it.
“Do you guys see that?” I asked, pointing at the sign, aware as I did so that my voice felt a little scratchy—it was the first thing I’d said during the car ride. Everyone turned to look, but Sam just shrugged.