Redemption Prep - Samuel Miller Page 0,41

two, but then I got this message on my door, and . . .” She held something back, behind her teeth. “I just really need to find her. And I figured the fastest way was working together.”

He heard the poster behind him starting to curl against the wall. If he helped Neesha, he risked sharing information, maybe even something he wasn’t supposed to share. She wouldn’t understand his methods.

But Neesha would have information of her own. And no strategy.

“Okay,” he said. “We can do it.”

“Awesome, that’s so—”

He took two steps forward, pushing her toward the door.

“Oh, that’s it?”

“It’s late,” he said.

“Right, I guess we start tomorrow.” Neesha looked around the room, stalling in the doorway for a second.

“What?” he asked.

She looked to her own door across the hall and back. “Do you really think she’s in danger?”

Evan balanced his theories on his tongue. “Probably. Yes.”

“People keep saying she was skittish the night she went missing. Like somebody was following her. Do you think she was being skittish?”

“Do you?”

“I didn’t think so.” She sighed. “But after Yanis asked me, and Zaza asked me . . . I kept remembering things. Like, in the church, when the bells started, she basically jumped out of her skin. I didn’t think it was weird at the time, but . . .”

Evan froze, holding the door in place. “Wait. What bells?”

“The chapel ones. For when the candle person lights the candles—”

“The acolyte.”

“Sure.”

Evan felt like his brain was shaking, fuzzy memories growing clearer. The interaction with Yanis at Emma’s dorm was blurry in his memory. His brain had been so overcome by panic, so clouded by worst-case scenarios, that he’d failed to properly log the information in front of him, but as he played it back in his head, he remembered one thing, distinctly, cutting through his confusion: the bells.

“Okay, well. See you tomorrow,” she said, and she disappeared into her own door across the hall.

Evan stumbled back into the room, a lump forming in his throat as he laid the timelines on top of each other.

If she jumped at the bells, that meant she was still in the chapel, where the entire school could see her. Which meant there was only one explanation—

Yanis was looking for her before she went missing.

Part IV.

Rats in Cages.

Testimonial: Emmalynn Donahue.

Year 1995–1996. Day 32.

I’m not sure what this is supposed to accomplish, but I’ll give it a try—

I can hear Dad humming.

It’s a Hank Williams Jr. song and I think it’s the only song he remembers.

He hums it while he drives, bumping the truck along one of the dozens of roads that no one in the world knows, but they’re the only thing he knows in the world. When I was a kid, he would steer into the bumps to send me flying, and we’d laugh as the suspension of the truck shook. Now I imagine he avoids the bumps as he drives the roads, every day.

I can hear he’s tired; I imagine he spends most of his life tired, looking only for an every-so-often moment when he can relax, and just sit, and watch something that means nothing, like sports. I imagine him drinking a beer, because drinking a beer is the ultimate act of not having anywhere else to be, and I imagine him having several, because some days, he needs help convincing himself that he absolutely doesn’t have anywhere else to be.

I can hear him at 2:00 a.m., shouting about the decision he has to make to people who have no sympathy, the closed door and the smell of fuel from the station next door. A “rambling man,” like the song, a son of the blues. I imagine he has to make this decision often, to drive the roads he knows so well, so his family doesn’t have to be without a father for the night; or to sleep in the truck, even though it’s less than twenty-five degrees in Hayes.

I can hear him humming as he drives, no slower than usual, because to drive slower would be an admission that he’s not himself. I can hear the truck on the other side of the narrow road. I imagine him completely sure of himself, not slowing down or pulling off because these are his roads and to slow down or pull off would be an admission that he doesn’t know these roads and that he’s not himself. But he can’t avoid the bumps.

I feel the car rolling three times. I feel the paralyzing panic of screaming chaos,