“By the bench, that’s right! And there’s a path. That’s has to be it.”
“But . . . she couldn’t just leave,” Evan argued.
“What do you mean?”
“People notice her. They would notice if she was gone.”
“Exactly.” Neesha could feel the argument building steam. “So she would need to throw people off the scent. She goes somewhere public, shows up just long enough to be seen—”
“In the only other place with no cameras,” Evan finished her thought. Both of their eyes drifted out the window, across the back lawn, where the top of the chapel and the wooden cross were visible in the distance.
Neesha smiled. “So how do we test that?” she asked, then answered for herself. “We do it ourselves. Tonight. We break out of school.”
Evan was quiet. She could tell he was weighing it by the way his fingers seized at the top of his pants, one of his many ticks. He was a strange-looking kid, kind of like she imagined Marilyn Manson would look if he grew up in the Leave It to Beaver neighborhood. He wore an oversized button-up underneath his hoodie and spent most of his time with the hood drawn over his long brown hair. His mannerisms were strangely damp—from the way he talked to the way he cracked his fingers one by one as he processed information.
Really, he was exactly the kind of person Emma would pretend to care about, so they’d throw their loyalty at her. They’d probably had a few conversations, she’d probably asked him for help on some homework or something, and now he thought they were in love. Which made it impossible for him to believe she would abandon him.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. We’ll do it.”
Neesha stared at him. “Can I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“And will you promise to give me an answer?”
“What?”
“Why do you want to find her so bad?”
Testimonial: Evan Andrews.
Year 1994–1995. Day 322.
Mom taught me to play chess when I was six years old.
She’s told me the story a hundred times: she noticed that instead of building the pirate ship Lego set that I got for Christmas, I was organizing them by size, shape, and color, placing them on a gradient and stacking them into the sky. Our first chess set was carved out of wood and small enough to fit on the TV dinner stand in our living room. She taught me the names of the pieces by inventing characters for them: Ricky Rook sees the world in straight lines, but to Bobby Bishop, everything is slanted. All the Johnny Pawns only know how to march and kill. King Dad can’t see very far ahead, so he moves one square at a time, but Queen Mom sees everything, so she can go wherever she wants.
My first competition was the Spring Hill High School Chess Club fall tournament when I was ten. I won my first three matches but then in the finals, I forgot about controlling the center and Sandra Diver beat me in fifteen moves. I cried afterward but Mom said that I should be proud because they’d never even had a ten-year-old compete in their competition before. She took me to get ice cream and told me part of winning is losing, just like how part of waking up is being asleep in the first place. She said it was the most important pattern of all.
That was the year that I got in my first fight at school and Mom became my teacher for everything. In the morning, we would do classes in the kitchen—first English, then world history, then poetry, then math, because that one was the easiest—then in the afternoons we would watch television and play chess. Sometimes, I could beat her because she was distracted by Days of Our Lives. By the time I was ten, she could only beat me once every two hundred times we played, but she still wanted to play every day.
Some days, Mom would cry. She would tell me about all the places she used to live, and poems she used to write. She said she used to have friends, and go to parties, but now she just had a “split-level house in bumfuck nowhere.” She said her life was different now, but I always made her feel better. Playing chess made her feel better. One Sunday, Pastor Tim said people who didn’t have a true mission were wandering in the desert and would never know true salvation. Mom leaned over and told