The Summer It Came for Us Read online

“Ah,” she said, nodding as if it now made perfect sense. “Cool.”

  Well, Malcolm just explained a whole lot of nothing.

  I let out a sigh. “When you talk, Malcolm, can you, like, use more words? For our benefit?”

  He circled the car, picked at something on the passenger door.

  “Or, no words at all,” I said. “I guess that’s cool, too.”

  Zoe and I shared an exasperated look.

  I wished Vincent was here. Vincent always had a joke ready. He always lightened the mood.

  To my relief, Jace came back with a spiral-bound notebook a moment later, breaking the tension.

  “Alright, listen up,” he said, brushing wavy hair off his forehead. “I didn’t write down every detail of my dream, so there are some things you guys can’t possibly know.”

  “Really? We’re really going to do this?” Malcolm said.

  “Remi,” Jace said, talking over him. “I wrote that when Vincent said he saw lights in the forest, you suggested it might be an animal. But I didn’t write which animal you said.” He slapped his notebook shut and looked up smirking, thinking he’d catch me in a lie. “Which animal?”

  “A deer.”

  His smirk faltered. “Lucky guess.”

  He consulted his notebook again. “Zoe, after Malcolm informed us the lights were in fact part of the supercollider complex, you made a comment, which I didn’t write down. Do you remember what that comment was?”

  Malcolm stared at him like he was stupid. “Seriously, how do you not know the difference between a memory and a dream?”

  “Let her answer.”

  Zoe chewed her lip. “Uh . . .”

  Come on, Zo, you got this.

  “Wait, I remember!” Her eyes brightened. “I said it was closed, or didn’t they close it down, or something like that.”

  Jace’s face paled.

  He threw up his hands, flinging the notebook aside. “You know what, I’m done with this. Screw you guys. Screw all of you.”

  “Wow, I just wasted two minutes of my life,” said Malcolm.

  “I was right, wasn’t I?” said Zoe. “About my comment?”

  “So what?” Jace argued. “What does it matter? The car’s right here, right? Not a scratch. That’s proof, right?” He leaned forward. “It. Never. Happened.”

  “If we didn’t drive to Sean’s party,” Malcolm said, “then what were you doing last night, Jace?”

  Jace opened his mouth, closed it.

  “You don’t remember.”

  “It was a dream,” Jace spat.

  “Guys, guys, clearly something happened last night,” I said. “Either we did get in a crash and we all got brain damage and don’t remember driving back, or we all did mushrooms and had a shared hallucination . . . but something happened.”

  “I think Jace is telling the truth,” Zoe said quietly. “Whatever it was, he had nothing to do with it.”

  “I kind of don’t think any of us did,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think any of us is even capable of this.”

  “Still one person unaccounted for,” Malcolm said, picking at his nails.

  We all stared at him, and a lump formed in my throat. “Have we still not heard from Vincent?”

  In a flurry of movement, we all checked our phones.

  Head shakes all around.

  My heart sank.

  “He is the jokester,” Zoe said. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  “What, faking a car crash? No, Vincent wouldn’t . . . I mean . . . would he? Quick—” I snapped my fingers, “—someone call him.”

  “I already did,” said Zoe. “He’s not picking up.”

  “Call him again. And if he doesn’t answer, we’re going to his house.”

  Jace glanced between us as we talked, a haunted look in his eyes, but said nothing.

  “I’ll call him again.” With maddening slowness, Malcolm took out his phone, navigated to his number, and pressed the phone to his ear.

  We waited, and in the silence, I heard my pounding heart.

  This was so weird.

  No, this was more than weird.

  This was spooky.

  Malcolm’s jaw tightened.

  “What? What is it?” I said.

  With a somber expression, he held out the phone, so we could all hear.

  From the tiny speakers came three shrill tones, and then a prerecorded message:

  “We’re sorry, you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service . . .”

  The woman’s robotic voice made me feel all cold inside.

  Disconnected or no longer in service.

  It sounded so final, so serious . . . the sort of message you got when someone was in really bad trouble.

  I swallowed the growing lump in my throat, fearing the worst.

  Not Vincent.

  Please not Vincent.

  This year, after Trevor’s death, he’d become more than a friend to me, he was like my little brother.

  If something awful had happened to him, I would never forgive myself.

  “Is that what it did for you?” Malcolm asked Zoe. “Or did it go through?”

  She chewed her fingernails. “No, I think . . . I think it rang, but no one picked up.”

  “What is that?” said Jace. “That message? Why would it do that?”

  “If his phone was damaged in the crash?” I guessed, hoping for some explanation.

  “No.” Malcolm shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way. Still would have gone to voicemail. This means his plan’s been canceled, and they didn’t port his number.”

  “They didn’t . . . what?” I said.

  “They didn’t transfer his number to another wireless carrier. They took it out of service. They disconnected it. Jesus, guys, it’s what the fucking message said.”

  “Maybe it was just a fluke,” I said hopefully, trying not to feel snubbed by his comment. “Try him again.”

  “Yeah, I’ve gotten that shit before,” said Jace. “Try it again.”

  Malcolm redialed the number.

  And got the same message.

  Zoe, who’d been awfully quiet, now spoke up. “Guys . . . uh . . . there was something else weird when I called him.”

  We all stared at her.

  She swallowed. “When I called him . . . I couldn’t find his number on my phone. I think someone erased it.”

  I felt my eyebrows narrow. She hadn’t mentioned this before.

  “How’d you call him, then?” Malcolm asked.

  “Well, I remembered his number, so I re-added him into my contact list.”

  “And it rang?”

  “I . . . I think so.”

  “You think Vincent erased his number from your phone?” Malcolm said. “Does he know your passcode?”

  “Everybody knows Zoe’s passcode,” Jace snickered, tugging out his phone again. “It’s three one three four, her birthday and her favorite number—”

  “Don’t tell them!” she shrieked.

  Jace thumbed through his phone, paused, then looked up at me. “Remi, do you still have Vincent’s number on your phone?”

  “I’m pretty sure I do. Why?”

  “Check.”

  I gave him a weird look, then went down my contact list.

  I went down it again.

  My palms turned clammy on the case.

  This morning, I hadn’t actually looked.

  “He’s . . . he’s not on my phone, either.”

  Jace turned to Malcolm. “Then it seems someone erased Vincent’s number from all of our phones . . . except yours.”

  “Locked,” said Jace, rattling Vincent’s front door.

  Malcolm pounded on the door again, jabbed the doorbell. “Vincent!”

  “Does he have a hidden key?” Zoe said.

  I looked back toward the driveway, mind racing.

  After calling Vincent a dozen times and getting the same message, we’d rushed here in Malcolm’s convertible.
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br />   Why in the world would someone erase Vincent’s number from our phones? Who would erase his number? Vincent himself?

  Or Malcolm . . . because he didn’t want us contacting him, for some reason?

  While the others chattered, I fell back and studied him—his dark, brooding eyebrows, his firmly clamped jaw, his severe lips that were pure wicked . . .

  He looked up and caught me staring, delivering an electric jolt to my nerves. I looked away, blushing.

  No, he seemed just as confused as the rest of us.

  Well, not confused. Malcolm was never confused.

  But I trusted Malcolm. I might not like him, but I trusted him.

  Again, my gaze gravitated to the driveway . . . the empty driveway. Only then did I register its significance.

  “I’m breaking it down,” Malcolm growled, backing up. “Everybody move.”

  “Wait!” I grabbed his arm. “I just realized. His mom’s car’s not in the driveway, which means she went to work . . . she wouldn’t have gone to work if Vincent didn’t come home last night, right? She would have called us . . . or called the police.”

  I should have used that logic before.

  Duh, Remi.

  None of our parents had called the police, no one had freaked out, so we must have all come home last night unscathed . . . Malcolm’s injury excepted.

  “We don’t know that,” said Malcolm. “She’s got an early shift, maybe she thought he was sleeping in.”

  Darn, he was right.

  The truth was, we didn’t know that much about Vincent’s mom, or what she would do. He always seemed kind of ashamed of her, and never wanted us to hang out at his house when she was there—we always hung out at Jace’s house or my house.

  “Let’s just peek in through his window.”

  I led the way around the side to his bedroom window.

  The five of us had only started hanging out midway through senior year, anyway. Zoe, Vincent, and I, of course, had been best friends forever, and so had Malcolm and Jace, so when Jace asked Zoe to homecoming dance and Malcolm asked me—as friends—we dragged Vincent along and all went as a group, which ended up being so outrageously fun we broke off from our original friend group to form a new one.

  Besides, it was senior year.

  We were all going to scatter about the country at the end of summer, anyway. Why not venture out of our comfort zones?

  I reached Vincent’s window and stopped dead.

  Not only was it shut and locked, but blackout curtains had been drawn on the other side.

  Malcolm stepped around me and rapped the glass with his knuckles.

  No one stirred inside.

  “No, we’re not breaking the window, Malcolm,” I said, preempting what would surely be his next suggestion.

  “He’s not in his room. If he was in there, he would answer.” Malcolm straightened up, squeezed his jaw. “Still think last night was a dream, Jace?”

  “Kind of playing catch-up here, to be honest.”

  “So the car, and the four of us, made it back,” said Malcolm.

  “But not Vincent,” Zoe whispered.

  But not Vincent. I was seized by a sudden thought. “Guys, you don’t think he’s still . . .”

  “Still out there?” Malcolm finished.

  “I mean, if the four of us made it back, and he didn’t . . .”

  I gulped down a painful swallow.

  I pictured Vincent clutching a broken leg at the bottom of the ravine, his face contorted in a grimace, screaming for help.

  Had we left him out there to die?

  Had we been so shaken up after the crash, we’d driven home without him?

  It was a horrible thought.

  “Guys,” I said, feeling faintly queasy, “we need to go back to where we crashed on Ridgeview Drive . . . we need to look for him.”

  The others shared uneasy glances, mirroring how I felt about revisiting those spooky woods.

  “And if he’s not there?” said Jace. “If nothing’s there?”

  “No, she’s right. There’s bound to be evidence of the crash.” Malcolm tossed his car keys and caught them. “Everybody back in my car. Want to drive, Jacey-boy?”

  “Screw you.”

  “Then you navigate.”

  Gray Pine, where we lived, was a little mountain town in Northern California—population twelve thousand—about an hour east of Redding and right on the edge of the Shasta-Trinity River Valley, a huge expanse of dry lakebed that stretched to the distant mountains, but it was an exaggeration to call it a town.

  True, technically we had a downtown, with a jenky movie theater, our high school, a grocery store, and a few restaurants, but most of the homes were scattered throughout the forest and only loosely connected with a maze of backcountry roads.

  Although I was totally loving summer, especially with our cool new badboy friends, what I really loved was the countdown to UCLA’s September 15 move-in day, which literally could not come soon enough.

  Winding along the perimeter of the river valley, Ridgeview Drive carved around boulders and slipped in and out of dense pine forest, and every once in a while, the trees fell away, giving me a bird’s-eye view of the dry lakebed from the backseat of Malcolm’s convertible.

  When the supercollider complex came into view, I craned my neck and could just make out the accelerator ring—the metal tube through which subatomic particles were accelerated—arcing toward the shimmering horizon, spanning its astonishing fifty-four-mile circumference.

  Our biggest claim to fame was that we lived next door to a particle accelerator.

  I was so ready to get out of this Podunk town.

  Malcolm downshifted and revved the engine around a switchback, and the complex slid out of view again.

  In the backseat with Zoe, the summer wind blasting our cheeks, it almost felt like every other endless summer day.

  Except our best friend was missing.

  “We’re getting close.” Jace studied the map on his phone.

  “And we’re sure this is safe?” said Zoe. “Like, it’s not going to happen again, is it? The flash and everything?”

  “Doesn’t matter, my car doesn’t have power brakes,” said Malcolm.

  As if that would somehow reassure us.

  I squeezed Zoe’s hand, and she squeezed back.

  “Whoa, you guys feel that?” Jace held up his arm. “Check that out.”

  All his forearm hair had stood on end, making it poof out.

  Not creepy or anything.

  Then I felt it, too. A prickly sensation all over my skin, on my scalp. Like we’d driven into a bath of static electricity. My mouth tasted metallic, tangy.

  I tensed up and scanned the surrounding forest. “Malcolm, slow down.”

  He swiveled around. “You see something?”

  “No, just . . . slow down. Please.”

  He slowed down.

  Something here felt . . . off.

  There was no other way to describe it.

  “Here.” Jace consulted his phone. “It was right here.”

  Malcolm pulled onto the narrow shoulder, his wheels kissing the ravine’s edge.

  We didn’t have to worry about blocking traffic, since so few cars ever drove this way.

  The moment we stopped, the dry, dusty heat drew out droplets of sweat from my sunbaked skin. Zoe and I caught each other’s eyes, exchanging a look of silent camaraderie before we released hands.

  No matter what, we’re in this together.

  “Car went off right here,” Malcolm said, kneeling at the edge of the pavement. “I remember the spot.”

  Heart thudding, I stood next to him and peered down into the ravine.

  “Seriously, how are there so many bugs?” Behind us, Zoe swatted the air around her, slapped her shoulders.

  The mountain dropped away steeply, plunging into shadowy forest crossed with beams of murky sunlight. Out of thick patches of ivy jutted the trunks of gnarled, moss-covered oak trees, th
eir knobby limbs resembling fists frozen mid-swing. My gaze was drawn all the way to a sliver of light at the bottom, where sunlight glittered off water.

  No sign of Vincent. Or of the crash, for that matter.

  “Didn’t that girl vanish somewhere around here?” said Jace.

  “That’s an urban legend,” I said, irritated he’d brought that up considering Vincent was still missing.

  “Just saying, I’m pretty sure that was around here.”

  I’d heard the story too. Apparently, a few years ago, a twelve-year-old girl had gotten lost in these woods and had never been seen again.

  No remains had ever been found.

  “Am I the only one getting eaten alive here?” Zoe was now flailing around, fighting off the considerable cloud of gnats she had pulled into orbit.

  “I see something,” said Malcolm.

  “What? Where?” I tried to follow his gaze. “Where are you looking?

  He merely chewed his lip.

  “Is it Vincent? Do you see Vincent?”

  “He doesn’t see anything,” said Jace. “He’s just trying to be melodramatic.”

  “I see something.” Malcolm stood, dusted off his hands. “There’s binoculars in my trunk.”

  He left to retrieve them, leaving me with a nervous lump in my throat and a racing pulse as I searched the ravine for what he’d seen.

  He came back and raised the binoculars to his eyes.

  I waited. He adjusted the focus.

  “Well?”

  “Shh,” he said.

  “Malcolm,” I whined, “stop being such a tease. What do you see?”

  Slowly, he lowered the binoculars, his expression blank.

  “I see the car.”

  Chapter 4

  “Guys, uh, what’s going on?” Zoe emerged from the forest ahead of me, after we’d bushwhacked our way down the mountainside, and stepped up to the bashed-in Subaru Forrester.

  “It’s really here,” I whispered, staring at the wrecked vehicle with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  It didn’t quite register at first.

  It had come to rest on the muddy bank of a river, wheels half-submerged. The sides were dented in, paint scraped off to expose bare, deformed metal. Where it had slid down, the tires had left deep tracks in the hillside.

  We’d seen other evidence of its descent on our climb down—a trail of flattened ferns, broken branches, gouged-out tree trunks, as if an elephant had charged down the ravine.