1-800-WHERE-R-YOU
Safe House
Jenny Carroll
With many thanks to Jen Brown, John Henry Dreyfuss, David Walton, and especially Benjamin Egnatz.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
C H A P T E R
1
I didn't know about the dead girl until the first day of school.
It wasn't my fault. I swear it wasn't. I mean, how was I supposed to have known? It wasn't like I'd been home. If I'd been home, of course I would have seen it in the paper, or on the news, or whatever. I would have heard people talking about it.
But I hadn't been home. I'd been stuck four hours north of home, at the Michigan dunes, in my best friend Ruth Abramowitz's summer-house. The Abramowitzes go to the dunes for the last two weeks of August every summer, and this year, they invited me to go along.
I wasn't going to go at first. I mean, who'd want to spend two weeks trapped in a summer-house with Ruth's twin brother Skip? Um, not me. Skip still chews with his mouth open even though he is sixteen and should know better. Plus he is like Grand Dragon Master of our town's Dungeons & Dragons population, in spite of the Trans Am he bought with his bar mitzvah money.
On top of which, Mr. Abramowitz has this thing about cable, and the only telephone he'll allow in his vacation house is his cell, which is reserved for emergency use only, like if one of his clients gets thrown in the clink or whatever. (He's a lawyer.)
So you can see, of course, why I was like, "Thanks, but no thanks," to Ruth's invitation.
But then my parents said that they were spending the last two weeks of August driving my brother Mike and all his stuff up to Harvard, where he was going to be starting his freshman year, and that Great-aunt Rose would be coming to stay with me and my other brother, Douglas, while they were gone.
Never mind that I am sixteen and Douglas is twenty and that we do not need parental supervision, particularly in the form of a seventy-five-year-old lady who is obsessed with solitaire and my sex life (not that I have one). Great-aunt Rose was coming to stay, and I was informed that I could like it or lump it.
I chose neither. Instead of coming home after my stint as a camp counselor at the Lake Wawasee Camp for Gifted Child Musicians, which was how I got to spend my summer vacation, I went with the Abramowitzes to the dunes.
Hey. Even watching Skip eat grilled peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches morning, noon, and night for two weeks beat spending five minutes with Great-aunt Rose, who likes to talk about how in her day, only cheap girls wore dungarees.
Seriously. Dungarees. That's what she calls them.
You can see why I chose the dunes instead.
And truthfully, the two weeks didn't go so badly.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I didn't have a good time or anything. How could I? Because while we'd been slaving away at Camp Wawasee, Ruth had been working very hard on her teen social development, and she'd managed to acquire a boyfriend.
That's right. An actual boyfriend, whose parents—wouldn't you know it—also had a house on the dunes, like ten minutes away from Ruth's.
I tried to be supportive, because Scott was Ruth's first real boyfriend—you know, the first guy she'd liked who actually liked her back, and who didn't seem to mind being seen holding her hand in public, and all of that.
But let's face it, when someone invites you to stay with them for two weeks, and then spends those two weeks basically hanging out with somebody else, it can be a little disappointing. I spent the majority of my daylight hours lying on the beach, reading used paperbacks, and most of my nights trying to beat Skip at Crash Bandicoot on his Sony Playstation.
Oh, yeah. It was a real thrill, my summer vacation.
The good part, Ruth kept pointing out to me, was that by being at the dunes, I was not at my house waiting for my boyfriend—or whatever he is—to call. This, Ruth informed me, was an important part of the courtship ritual . . . you know, the not-being-there-when-he-calls part. Because then, Ruth explained, he'll wonder where you are, and start making up these scenarios in his head about where you could be. Maybe he'll even think you're with another guy!
Somehow, this is supposed to make him like you more.
Which is all good, I guess, but is sort of contingent on one thing:
The guy actually has to call.
See, if he doesn't call, he can't discover that you aren't home. My boyfriend—or should I say, the guy I like, since he is not technically my boyfriend, as we have never been out on an actual date—never calls. This is because he is of the opinion that I am what is commonly referred to in the great state of Indiana as jailbait.
And he's already on probation.
Don't ask me what for. Rob won't tell me.
That's his name. Rob Wilkins. Or the Jerk, as Ruth refers to him.
But I don't think it's fair to call him the Jerk, because it isn't as if he ever led me on. I mean, he made it pretty much clear from the moment he found out I was sixteen that there could never be anything between us. At least, not for a couple more years.
And really, you know, I am fine with that. I mean, there are lots of fish in the sea.
And okay, maybe they don't all have eyes the color of fog as it rolls in over the lake just before sunrise, or a set of washboard abs, or a completely cherried-out Indian motorcycle they've rebuilt from scratch in their barn.
But, you know, they're male. Ostensibly.
Whatever. The point is, I was gone for two weeks: no phone, no TV, no radio, no media resources whatsoever. It was a vacation, all right? A real vacation. Well, except for the having fun part.
So how was I supposed to know that while I was gone, a girl in my class had croaked? No one mentioned a word about it to me.
Not until homeroom, anyway.
That's the problem, really, with living in such a small town. I've been in the same homeroom with the same people since middle school. Oh, sure, occasionally somebody will move out of town, or a new kid will show up. But for the most part, it's the same old faces, year after year.
Which was why, the first day of my junior year at Ernest Pyle High School, I slid into the second seat from the door in homeroom. I always ended up in the second seat from the door in homeroom. That's because, in homeroom, we sit alphabetically, and my last name—Mastriani—puts me second in the Ms for my class, behind Amber Mackey. Amber Mackey always sits in front of me in homeroom. Always.
Except that day. That day, she didn't show up.
Hey, I didn't know why. How was I supposed to know? Amber had never not shown up for the first day of school before. She was no more of an intellectual dynamo than I am, but you never actually do anything the first day of school, so why not show up? Besides, unlike me, Amber had always liked school. She was a cheerleader. She was always all, "We've got spirit, yes, we do, we've got spirit, how ’bout you?"
You know the type.
A type like that, I don't know, you'd expect she'd show up the first day of school, just in order to show off her tan.
So I left the first chair in the row of seats by the door empty. Everyone filed in, looking carefully nonchalant, even though you knew most of them—the girls, anyway—had spent hours putting together exactly the right outfit to show off how much weight they'd lost over their summer … or their new highlights … or their chemically whitened teeth.