“Take it easy, Tarzan,” said Brooke.
Ajay knelt beside Will to look at the bird. “May I examine this later, Will?”
Will nodded. Ajay folded the bird into the towel and picked it up.
“I need to talk to Elise,” Will whispered to Ajay.
“Brooke, come to my room, please,” said Ajay. “I want to show you something. You, too, Nick.”
“What?” snapped Nick, still pacing.
“I need your help,” said Ajay. “In here.”
Will caught Ajay’s eye and nodded thanks. As soon as they left, Will sat in front of Elise.
“Tell me,” said Will gently. “What did Ronnie know?”
Elise’s eyes widened. “How did you …?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I’m right, aren’t I? Ronnie knew something about this and he told you.”
Elise put her hands on her temples and rubbed hard, like she was fighting off a migraine. Her fine black hair hung down over her eyes.
“They picked on him relentlessly,” she said. “Todd and Lyle and the rest of them. He was so shy, whining about how homesick he was all the time. We’d decided he was hopeless, V for ‘victim’ stamped on his forehead like a license plate. Then he started crushing on me. Way beyond awkward. He played the flute. He wrote poems, for crying out loud.”
“He wrote them to you?”
She put on a tough face. “ ‘How do you measure the distance traveled by a smile?’ Gag me with a deer rifle, do I seem like the kind of girl who likes poems?”
He saw the answer behind the protest in her troubled eyes. “Yeah, you must have hated that.”
“Please. We knew he was brilliant, in a dorkus malorkus sort of way. And funny and self-deprecating, and that was … unexpected. He didn’t find his confidence until he started his project in the labs. They even stopped picking on him then. But he never told us what he was working on.”
“Not even you?”
“Why would he tell me? It wasn’t like we were seriously hooked up. I mean, we spent some time together, and I—” She saw he wasn’t buying it. “Okay, so we got tight. Then something changed a month before end of term. He just cut me off.”
“Why?”
Her jade eyes blazed with pain and anger. “I don’t know. I tried to find out. About him or me or what was wrong or any of it. And I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this or not, but I’m kind of skilled at finding out what people are feeling.”
Will gulped. “I can see that.”
“But I couldn’t read the faintest signal from Ronnie. Instead of this cute warm goof, an iron curtain came down. And I had told him things about myself … stuff I’d never told anybody. I trusted him, and I couldn’t get a hello.”
Will had to tread carefully. One wrong word might shut her down again. “So what did Ronnie know, Elise?”
Elise shot a fierce, penetrating stare at him. Will tried to open his mind, let her look inside him if she needed to, show her that he trusted her.
“The last day of term,” she said, “we’re packing to leave for the summer. Ronnie stops me in the quad with this … sweet, openhearted look he used to have for me, so I know it’s him and his guard is down and … I caught a glimpse inside.”
She looked away. Will tried to keep eye contact. “What did you see?”
“Something that scared him. Something he’d seen in the labs. Something deep and dark and terrifying that he couldn’t handle.”
“Did he tell you what it was?”
Elise shook her head. “He just hugged me and said that if anything ever happened to him, he’d find a way to tell me … so I’d understand. And then he whispered a question in my ear: ‘Are you awake?’ ”
“Awake?” The word sent a shock through Will; he’d been hearing it a lot lately. “What did he mean?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. That was the last time I ever saw him.”
She looked away, deeply wounded but too proud to cry. Will racked his brain, trying to think what to do. But this wasn’t a thinking problem. Then he remembered: #87: MEN WANT COMPANY. WOMEN WANT EMPATHY.
“Did you ever tell Ronnie how you really felt about him?” he asked quietly.
“Of course I didn’t,” she said, twisting her hair.
“And that’s what you’re mad at yourself about.”
“Isn’t that painfully obvious?”
“Kind of.”
“Well it’s kind of a stupid question.”
“I guess we all have a game face, don’t we?” asked Will.
Elise’s eyes went soft. She mimed pulling out a knife, then stabbed herself and fell over. Will laughed. A moment later, so did she. Will stood and held out a hand. When he pulled her up, they came face to face.
And suddenly Will couldn’t move. A prism of light from her dazzling eyes shot through him as if he were made of glass. She could have told him, in that moment, to rob a bank or jump off a building and he’d have done it without thinking. He couldn’t break away, and in that moment he didn’t want to.
“I think I might know how Ronnie planned to tell you,” he said. “Come on.”
He took her by the hand and led her to Ajay’s room. When they entered, Brooke looked up from the desk and saw them holding hands. Elise didn’t notice, but Will felt like he’d been caught pickpocketing. He let go. Brooke quickly looked away.
Nick had set up chairs for everyone. Elise sat beside Ajay in front of the animated mountain image on the enlarged screen. In the half hour since they’d started, the syn-apps had climbed all the way to the top of the rocks onto a narrow ledge above the tallest waterfall. The figures waved to Will and Elise as they came closer.
“What is this?” asked Elise.
“This image was on a flash drive Ronnie hid in his room,” said Will. “I found it this morning.”
“I hacked our syn-apps into it,” said Ajay. “We think Ronnie hid something in the file; the syn-apps have been trying to uncover it. Zoom in.”
The point of view zoomed in on the ledge where the two figures stood.
“Go on now,” said Ajay to the figures. “Follow the path.”
The two syn-apps worked around the corner. As they made the turn, the image opened into a peaceful green glade. Sprays of colorful wildflowers dotted long grass swaying in the breeze. A still pond sat in front of a pagoda-like structure built into the face of a sheer rock wall.
“What is this place supposed to be?” asked Elise.
“I’ve been telling ’em all along,” said Nick. “They’re in Shangri-la.”
The figures walked across a bamboo bridge that spanned the pond, where sparkling, jewel-like white and golden koi swam lazily. They climbed the stairs toward the pagoda’s imposing double doors. The doors opened and two human figures in long white coats stepped out before them. The doors closed.
“Who are those guys?” asked Will.
“They look like doctors,” said Brooke.
“So go inside,” said Elise.
“Let’s try,” said Will. Then, to their doubles, “Enter.”
But as the syn-apps advanced, the doctors locked arms and blocked the doors. Each time they moved, the doctors moved in their way.
“Losers,” said Nick. “Do I need to jump in there and kick their butts for you? Let me get my munchkin—”
“Sit down and shut up,” said Brooke.
“Read his passage from the yearbook again,” said Ajay.
Will picked up the book from the desk: “ ‘Embrace paradox. Look for patterns. Beethoven holds the key but doesn’t know it yet. Hiding inside your Shangri-la you might find the Gates of Hell.’ ”
“Ronnie wrote that,” said Elise.