The Truth of Letting Go Read online

  “Uh, yeah,” he says, swiping at his hair with the back of his hand. “Can you wait at the gazebo for a few minutes while I finish up here?”

  “Sure,” Cece says. He gives her a smile and then turns and jogs back. I don’t think he saw me at all, but that’s probably for the best because my jaw has been on the floorboard this entire time.

  “Whoa,” I say, shaking myself a little to come back to earth. “He…aged well.”

  Cece snorts. “Please try not to make out with him until I’ve finished confirming Thomas’ car.”

  I roll my eyes and drive to the gazebo that’s up ahead. “Not happening. I hate that guy. He was always a jerk to me when we were kids.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says, gripping the notebook in her hands. “We just need to have him confirm Thomas’ dream car and then you never have to see him again.”

  I pull into a parking spot and look over at her. “Did you seriously bring us all the way here just to ask him a simple question? You couldn’t have done that on Facebook?”

  “Yes, but then we’d still be stuck in that house,” she says with a little smart-ass grin. She hops out of the car and skips up to the gazebo, her braid bouncing along behind her. The gazebo is a big white structure with peonies planted all around it; the kind of place people flock to for artistic Instagram photos. I wonder if Ezra takes care of these flowers, too.

  I trudge along behind her, making this big show of stomping up the three stairs and into the gazebo. “Fool me once,” I say as I take a seat across from her so there’s a good ten feet of distance between us, lest I decide to strangle her. “It won’t happen again.”

  Cece doesn’t say anything and if she knows how pissed I am, she doesn’t show it. She just rests her arm on the back of the bench and gazes out at the park behind us, closing her eyes every now and then when a warm breeze dances across her face.

  Telico State Park is pretty big, stretching from our small town out into the surrounding cities. There’s five different playgrounds, an outdoor stage where schools and local bands give performances, and a few horse and hiking trails. Kit and I come here a few times a year for craft fairs and food truck days. I’ve never been here with Cece.

  We sit for twenty minutes, baking in the summer heat that’s only slightly lessened from the gazebo roof. Finally, a golf cart approaches us with Ezra at the wheel. He’s wearing tan cargo pants, boots, and a white T-shirt with the state park logo in the corner. Even from here, I can see his arms and shoulders have filled out nicely since his annoying skinny kid days. I bet he’s still just as annoying though.

  He parks the golf cart and jogs up to us, and so help me God I can’t take my eyes off the way his shirt stretches across his shoulders. It looks sweaty and probably smells disgusting but here I am imagining ripping it off with my hands.

  Jesus, Lilah, get it together.

  Ezra hugs Cece, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her close, like he really means it. I watch his eyes squeeze shut, the sincerity of his gesture giving me this weird pain in my chest. “I’ve missed you,” he says when he pulls way.

  “I don’t recall us being friends,” Cece says, lifting an eyebrow. “But I get the sentiment.”

  He laughs and it’s at this very second that he looks over and notices me, like really recognizes me, for the first time. “Lilah?” He says it like he doesn’t believe it. Like I died too, and now I’m a ghost and I’m the last person he expected to see here with my cousin, who used to be my best friend and has lived with me for half a decade.

  “Is it really that surprising?” I say.

  His lips—long, smooth, and the perfect shade of pink—split into a grin and he rushes over to me. I’ll admit, I’m wanting one of those hugs he gave to Cece, if only to confirm that he does smell like sweat, so I stand up and let him throw his arms around me.

  And yeah, he smells. But beneath the sweat, there’s a hint of summer sunshine and men’s deodorant.

  It’s possibly the best hug ever.

  When he pulls away, he ruffles my hair. “Lilah, Lilah,” he says, that dimpled grin staring at me. “You’re still just as short as ever.”

  I yank out my hair tie and pretend to fix my ponytail, just so I can turn to the side and hopefully he won’t see how hard I’m blushing. At least now I know I was right: he is still annoying.

  “So, what’s up?” he says, taking a seat next to Cece.

  She’s still holding her notebook and she stares at it but doesn’t open it. She takes a deep breath but her shoulders stay slumped and I get the feeling she’s even more nervous talking to him about her stupid idea than she was when she brought it up to me.

  “So, I wanted to talk about Thomas,” she begins.

  Ezra slides his hands down to his knees, the muscles in his forearms tightening and twisting into delicious curves. Oh my God, what the hell is wrong with me?

  I shove my hands under my thighs and focus on Cece so all these thoughts of how freaking hot Ezra got in the last few years will go away.

  “Do you remember my brother’s dream car?” she asks.

  He brushes his hair out of his eyes. “Yeah, a Jeep Wrangler, right?”

  Cece’s pointed gaze hits me and it’s almost like I can read her mind. I told you so.

  “Yeah, that’s what I remember too,” she says. “What color was his favorite?”

  He scratches the back of his neck. “Red. He was saving up money to get one because he didn’t want to ask his uncle to spend the money.”

  Again, Cece looks at me. Ezra says, “What made you think about that? Are you looking to get a car?”

  She shakes her head. Cece doesn’t have her driver’s license but I don’t think he knows that. “I want to tell you something, but you have to promise not to laugh.”

  “I promise.” The way Ezra is focusing on my cousin, like she’s not just the crazy kid from school, but someone who’s important and worthy of attention, makes me feel all kinds of things inside. Like for one, I don’t think I hate him anymore.

  Cece clears her throat. “I think Thomas is still alive. Lilah thinks I’m being stupid, but I need someone else to believe me so maybe I can convince her.”

  Ezra shifts his gaze to me and smirks. “Well, Lilah was always stubborn like that.”

  Okay, never mind. I still hate him.

  Cece grins, happy that her unusual ideas have found a home in him. “They never did find his body, and yesterday we went to our old house and stuff in his room had been moved. I’ve never thought he was dead, and that just confirmed it. Then last night I looked up our house on Google maps and there’s a red Jeep Wrangler in our driveway. The photo was taken a month ago.”

  She stops talking and we’re all silent for a minute. Ezra stares at his thumbnail. Cece fiddles with her notebook and finally breaks the silence. “I think he’s alive. I think he bought himself a car because he’d be twenty years old now so he’d have money for a car, and I have this theory that he probably had amnesia until recently—”

  “Let me stop you,” Ezra says. He leans back against the bench and looks Cece dead in the eyes. “I don’t think he has amnesia.”

  I am very aware that he just used the word has instead of had.

  Ezra swallows and gazes out at the park before looking right at me. “I guess I’ve always wondered if maybe he wasn’t really dead.”

  Chills soar down my spine at his confession. Cece bursts into a smile and throws her arms around his neck. “Finally!” she says, covering her mouth with her hands. “I knew it.”

  When my voice comes back to me, I can’t help the sarcasm. “You don’t seriously believe that.”

  Ezra’s tongue flicks across his bottom lip. He sighs, squeezing his hands together. “It’s just—they never found a body. And if you remember back then, Thomas wasn’t very happy. He hated the media attention. He used to always hide behind me when we were on the quad at school because he was afraid someone from the news would show up and film him. It makes
sense that if he didn’t really die when he got shot that he wouldn’t come back. He wouldn’t want the attention.”

  “Oh please,” I say, massaging my forehead with my thumb and forefinger. He is not playing into Cece’s deluded fantasy. “You’re saying a sixteen-year-old successfully faked his death? He survived getting shot on a bridge by vandals and ran off to live happily ever after? You realize how insane that sounds?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Ezra says, nodding. “It’s crazy. But right after he died, I kept remembering this conversation we had one night. He said he wished he could disappear to where no one could find him. He was sick of the media attention and he hated having so many people talk to him all the time. I guess he didn’t like being in the spotlight after his parents died.”

  “Makes sense.” Cece nods. “He ran away.”

  Ezra sighs. “It’s probably not true.”

  “But it could be,” Cece says, more like a statement than a question.

  He glances at me. “It could be.”

  I’ve never seen Cece smile so big. She’s bouncing up and down on the bench, radiating a positivity that even I can feel wrapping around me. “So you’ll help us find him?”

  He gives her a sad look. “I don’t think you get it,” he says. Even from ten feet away, I can see the pain in his eyes. “If somehow Thomas really is still alive, he doesn’t want to be found.”

  In the afternoon, I heat up one of Mom’s frozen dinners according to the menu on the calendar (veggie lasagna), but Cece claims she’s not hungry. She also didn’t eat lunch. I tell myself this isn’t a sign of trouble, and I try not to care when she spends all evening in her bedroom. She probably does that normally but I wouldn’t know since I never pay attention. Usually my parents are home to take care of her and I’ve got my own life to worry about, like binge-watching Netflix shows at Kit’s house.

  There’s no loud tinny grunge music playing from her room tonight, but I don’t question it. As long as she’s home, I don’t have to worry about her. These last forty-eight hours are the most I’ve even talked with my cousin in months.

  Our visit with Ezra didn’t last very long because he had to get back to work. But they exchanged phone numbers and promised to keep in touch. I hope Ezra knows what he’s getting into by giving his number to Cece. She can be a bit much, especially when she’s obsessing over something. And Thomas is her biggest obsession.

  By ten o’clock, Cece still hasn’t emerged from her room. Not to eat, not to pee, not for anything. Normally I wouldn’t care because checking on her is my mom’s job, but as the minutes turn into hours and I haven’t heard a peep from her, I start to get nervous.

  With a sigh, I turn off the TV in the living room. I knock on her bedroom door; soft and polite, not jackhammer hard like she does. I wait a beat, hoping she’ll answer and all my nervous worrying will be for nothing.

  “Cece?”

  “Only come in if you have an open mind,” she calls back.

  I seriously think about turning around and going to my room. With a sigh, I open her door and gaze around. The whole room smells like cheap vanilla body spray. Cece’s on the floor, still wearing the clothes she had on earlier today. She sits cross-legged with her laptop in front of her. It looks terribly uncomfortable to be bent over the keyboard like that.

  “I just wanted to uh—” Check on you are the words that come to mind but I stop myself before saying them since that would surely be a mistake and might set her off. “—see if you wanted any dinner? I’m thinking of heating up some more for seconds.”

  She shakes her head, never taking her eyes off the computer screen. “Is that why you really came in here?”

  “Uh,” I say as my cheeks flush. I can’t exactly tell her I was afraid I might find her tying a noose made of bedsheets. “Yeah.”

  “Liar.” She touches her screen with both index fingers, then spreads them out to zoom in on whatever she’s looking at. I can’t see it from my place at her door. Cece glances up, her eyes bloodshot. “You came to see if I had more evidence.”

  She waits a beat and then says, “I do, but not enough to mean anything to you so if you don’t mind…” She pushes her hand through the air, shooing me away. “Close the door on your way out.”

  I step further inside and cross my arms. “What new evidence do you have?” Anything short of a Facebook page with current pictures of my cousin and the words “Hi, my name is Thomas Novak and I’m not really dead” won’t convince me. And honestly, even that probably won’t. Nothing but a real, live, flesh-and-blood twenty-year-old who looks like the boy I remember and can pass a DNA test will convince me. I can guarantee Cece won’t find that in her computer screen.

  Cece’s lips slide to the side of her mouth, like she’s considering if I’m worthy of knowing her new evidence. I try not to look so damn skeptical, in case it helps at all. I don’t even know why I care, but screw it, I’m curious.

  Finally, she sits back on her heels and nods for me to come over. I join her on the floor. Her old house is pulled up on Google maps again. She taps the road to make it travel down a little, and we see the house and the Jeep from an angle. She zooms in on the mysterious car. “You see that?”

  “It’s been repaired?” I say. The driver’s side front panel that goes over the wheel is primer gray while the rest of the vehicle is red. It’s an older Jeep now that I look at it; maybe ten to fifteen years old. It’s not nearly as updated and fancy as the new one Kit’s mom drives. I hate that I’m even considering this, but if Thomas was magically alive and had a Jeep…he’d theoretically afford an older beat up version easier than a new one. Not that I’m considering this.

  Cece’s staring a hole into the side of my head so I look over at her. “How is this evidence?”

  She frowns and makes this little shrug before turning back to her computer. “I don’t know yet. But I’m guessing tracking down a Jeep with an unpainted panel is easier than tracking down one that’s all one color.”

  You have to admire her tenacity.

  I stand up. “Well, good luck. Let me know if you find him.”

  “I appreciate the sarcasm,” she says as I walk away. “It’s right on point, as always.”

  With no parents in this house, I make three trips from my room to the front and back doors, making sure everything is locked up for the night. I set the house alarm and check to make sure I turned off the oven. Then I check again after I brush my teeth. The responsibility of taking care of an entire house for a week is a little more than daunting. I can’t even imagine how much my mother would freak out if I accidently let the place burn to the ground.

  It’s almost midnight by the time I finally crawl into bed. My eyes are heavy but I can’t fall asleep—not when my curiosity has been awakened by a brute force known as Unexpected Hot Guy.

  I glance across my room to make sure my door is closed and then I search for Ezra Flores on Facebook. There are a ton of results, but none of the profile pictures are of the guy I know. We’re not even friends, but I want to know what Ezra’s profile is like, what option is selected under the all-important Relationship Status box. Are there pictures of other girls on his page?

  Are they prettier than me?

  Discouraged and feeling like a complete loser, I gnaw on my bottom lip and search for Cece. She only has sixteen friends, and Ezra is one of them. His profile picture is grainy and cropped close from what looks like a group picture. He’s smiling, and his hair is short. I scroll down, my eyes landing on the exact part that’s been bugging me since we saw him at the park.

  Ezra Flores is in a relationship.

  At the start of my junior year, Kit announced that she and her older sisters were taking a sabbatical from social media and deleting all their profiles so they could be more open to the world around them and live in the moment. I was on board immediately, mostly because I was quite aware that I had a teensy (okay huge) problem with looking up profiles of failed love interests and comparing myself to the girls in their
photos.

  I didn’t regret the decision at all, and now I remember why.

  I hate this. Clenching my jaw, I close the tab on my phone. Then I delete the history and clear the cache. Then I put my phone on the nightstand and shove it as far away as it’ll go without falling off. Why am I letting this guy get in my head? We’re not even friends.

  Maybe I need a boyfriend. Maybe I need any friend. Anyone but Cece. She’s already driving me bat-shit crazy and it’s been just two days.

  I’m mostly, if not all the way, asleep when I’m jarred awake by Cece yelling my name in a cloud of vanilla scented air. Then she drops onto my bed so hard I nearly pop right off, flying through the room like a cartoon character. Maybe it’s not that bad, but I’m fuzzy from dreams of Thomas and the stabbing anxiety of dealing with Cece until my parents return.

  I sit up on my elbows and rub my eyes with my palms. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I found a lead for my brother. A serious one, Lilah. Like, legit.”

  I blink a few times and then untangle myself from the sheets so I can see what she’s looking at on her computer. She turns it toward me, but the screen is so bright I squint to let my eyes adjust.

  “Here it is,” she says, pointing to a photo of a red Jeep with a gray panel. I hate to admit that it definitely looks like the same car. She’s vibrating with excitement, so much that I fear she might start flying through the air ala Peter Pan. I resist the urge to grab her hand to keep her from floating away.

  “So what is this?” I ask.

  “Big Al’s Used Cars in El Campo, Texas.” She taps the screen, talking as if she’s memorized the entire website, which I’m sure she has. “They had a 2001 Jeep Wrangler for sale four years ago. Right about the time Thomas went missing. And as you can see in the pictures here, it’s totally the same Jeep.”

  She presses the arrow on the screen, scrolling through the images of the Jeep. I have to admit, that gray panel looks a lot like the one on Google maps. Freakishly alike.