Chapter Six

Blum family dinners used to be a strict No Phone Zone. If my parents caught us peeking at our screens, we lost them till after cleanup, and we had to spend the rest of the meal answering trivia questions on any subject of their choice. Pop songs of the ‘80s, or state capitals, or the bones of the foot—Dad's pet category, as a podiatrist. Very educational and completely obnoxious.

Not anymore. After we ran down the standard dinnertime questions—How was your afternoon? How are your friends? Anyone know what the weather's like tomorrow?—Mom pulled out her tablet to read an article in The Post and Courier. Dad's thumbing through a catalog of heirloom vegetable seeds while ignoring the homegrown eggplant stir-fry on his plate. At least I'm trying to be sneaky in case either of them looks at me.

Luckily, they don't.

I scroll through Max's Instagram with my phone just below the tabletop. She didn't post often and hasn't posted at all since February. The star of her feed was definitely the R1: dull and dinged up at first, then scattered in pieces across the floor of the shop, then whole and perfect, molten silver in the sunlight. Out of habit, I unlike a photo of Max beaming proudly beside the bike just to like it again. As if my sister ditched her phone and is ignoring her email, but still checks her Instagram notifications.

There's a few pictures from Jolene's garage, too. Max arm-deep in the engine bay of a bubblegum-pink Jeep, or racing a coworker across the shop floor, both on their backs on mechanic's creepers. I took that one. I'm here, too, in a selfie of us at the lake, and another of us on her attic daybed, stuffed together into the wearable blanket she got me for Hanukkah. And there's me on the Husqvarna at the track last summer.

But I've seen all of these already. What I'm looking for is the unseen. Some dude I've never met named Riley who, as JoJo said at the farm this afternoon, gives off "dirtbag" vibes. Like a scraggly mustache and a Confederate-flag neck tattoo? Max's judgment wasn't 10/10 (hence the destruction of the Founder's Fountain), but she would never—

"Pass the hoisin sauce, El?"

I snap my head up to find Dad looking at me. Of course, he can't see my screen or read my mind, so I smile through my suddenly pounding heartbeat and shove the sauce across the table. He smiles, too, splattering sauce onto his cold stir-fry. I shovel half of my plate into my face before he goes back to his catalog, and I can safely return to snooping.

When pictures from the last year turn up nothing, I switch over to the photos she's tagged in. I recognize a few of the accounts, like her friends from the garage, or Devil's Paradise, and there's a post from a motocross blog captioned "Where are they now? Teen track stars who never went pro."

Rude.

There's one photo I've never seen, posted from an account I don't recognize: ShellybeanXOX. Max sits in the bed of a mud-splattered acid-green truck, a small crowd stuffed in beside her, all of them flipping off the camera. Which, whatever, it's nothing my classmates haven't done, even if I would never. Colleges look at your social media accounts, and that's a fact. But the boy with the weirdly shaped, scraggly beard crushed up against Max does look a little extra friendly. His arm is across her shoulders, hand fisted in the fabric of her jacket sleeve. The jacket.

I tap on the account, where ShellybeanXOX is definitely the star of her own feed. But Max is there pretty regularly along with the rest from the truck, sitting on plastic lawn chairs on a strip of dirt in front of an average apartment building. Or in the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour diner, posing beside their bikes—Max with the R1, Bad Beard and some of the guys with GSX-Rs (figures they'd be Gixxer boys). It's hard to find pictures where Max is there and Bad Beard isn't. It's also hard to find pictures where they don't all have a bottle in hand, even though I never saw my sister drink. She was like, this fifteen-year-old kid racing star into "eating clean" whenever she wasn't jogging around town or doing chin-ups in the basement.

I mean, she is twenty-two now, and hell, I've had a beer or two at a party in the woods behind Jenni Lynn's house. No big deal. It's just … surprising.

Though I don't recognize the people, I actually do know the place where my sister seemed to spend a lot of time—the Piney Bend Apartments in Deerfield, not far from Devil's Paradise. It's across from the 7-Eleven where we'd always stop to get Gatorades and trail mix after a track day. Max never told me she had friends who lived there.

I copy the link to the picture of them all stuffed into the clown truck, then pull up JoJo's freshly saved number and send it along.

EL:I think I found something

The dots appear and disappear a few times, long enough for me to anxiously scarf down a whole slab of Mom's garlic bread. Then she replies.

JoJo:What, the guy with the knockoff Iron Man beard? Is that Skeezy Riley?

EL:Maybe. They definitely hung out, but I never met him

JoJo:I bet she wanted to spare you from suffocating on his body spray. Look at him, you know he smells like patchouli and manstank

EL:He definitely does

JoJo:So …

JoJo:When can you pick me up tomorrow morning?

It's flattering that she's ready to ride at dawn for me (or like, 10:00 a.m.). Though it's also possible—probable, even—that she's a new girl in a small town with no car, and is just incredibly bored. Either way, I hide my smile by stuffing more garlic bread into my mouth until I can get my face under control. Then I ask my parents, who are busy chewing silently, "Can I take the car tomorrow morning?"

"Where to?" Dad asks automatically.

"Um, to hang out with JoJo."

Mom looks up from her plate. "Who?"

"Just a girl. She joined volunteering club, and I want her to feel, you know, welcome or whatever." None of this is a lie, except for maybe the "just" part.

"New in town?"

"Yeah, but you already know her family. She's Jolene Boyd's granddaughter."

Mom frowns, and I start to panic, because that last part might not help my case. Mom has kind of a weird thing about Jolene, who saw so much of Max in the year and a half she was home when my parents saw so little.

Anticipating trouble, I rush to say, "We probably won't get to hang out much outside of the club meetings, since she has a job like me. Did I tell you I picked up an extra shift on Monday? Also, Dad, do you think you could look at the latest draft of my application essay? I know it's not due for months, but I thought since you're in the medical field, you could—"

"Okay, Eliana." Mom cuts me off with a tight smile, but her voice is soft as she adds, "You know it's not that we don't trust you, right?"

Possibly she kicks Dad under the table, because a second later, he echoes, "It's not that we don't trust you."

"Yeah, I know."

"We see how hard you're working," says Dad.

"We know you're not … you've never given us a reason not to trust you," says Mom.

Mission accomplished, then, and it should feel good, even if I have to ignore the almost-spoken We know you're not your sister, all while I hide the evidence of my plans to follow in Max's footsteps beneath the dinner table.

The Piney Bend Apartments haven't changed since my last track day with Max. Same cluster of squat, plain brick buildings on the corner across from the 7-Eleven, with stained AC units hanging out the windows. Same thin strip of dirt and crabgrass around each unit. But I swear I would've noticed this green abomination in the parking lot if it had been here back then.

"Target fucking acquired." JoJo grins at me.

"I don't know." I eye the truck, two spots up from us, while keeping low behind the steering wheel of the Oatmobile. There's a covered bike beside it, a thick chain snaking under the tarp and winding around a NO PARKING signpost. "That could be anybody's, not just Riley's. And we don't even know if Bad Beard is Riley."

"But whoever that truck belongs to, they definitely know Max, right?"

"Right." Deep breath. "Now what? We could … What if we throw a rock at the truck? Not at the windshield, you know, just at a wheel or something, and it sets off a car alarm. Then we run back here to watch who comes out of what door when they hear the—"

"Oh my God, criminal mastermind. What if we knocked on doors instead of getting ourselves jumped in a parking lot?" JoJo asks, aghast. "Look, just pull up those pictures, and we'll check for the apartment number."

I didn't think she'd be the voice of reason today, but yeah, that makes more sense.

I have to scroll past some text notifications from Zaynah to get to Instagram; I'll answer when we're not on a stakeout. In one of ShellybeanXOX's photos, a shot of the truck-bed crowd sitting on a stairwell with Max in Bad Beard's lap, there's an apartment 26B in the background, the party spilling out through the open door. I tip the screen toward JoJo, and when she leans across the console to look, the AC vent blows a strand of pink, citrus-smelling hair into my face. How does she work in a garage all day yet smell much better than me?

For the fiftieth time this morning, I doubt myself. I'm staking out the apartment of a stranger, somebody Jolene said was the worst, with another somebody who, as of a few days ago, was a total stranger to me. Maybe back in Charleston, JoJo was considered the worst. What do I really know about her? Aside from her family's horrible tragedy, and her hopes and dreams, and the smell of her hair …

Well, I know she hasn't once judged my sister, no matter what I've said about her, or judged me for wanting to bring her home. And I know I feel a little braver just sitting beside somebody fearless, the same way I used to on the back of the R1, fully believing that Max was strong enough to steer us around any hairpin turn no matter how scary it looked peering out from behind her shoulder. I guess that's enough for me.

Climbing out of the minivan, we cross the heat-hazed parking lot and follow the signs to apartments 15–30 in the second building back from the road. 26B is up a three-flight staircase. We stand on the familiar landing to face the peeling green door.

"Ready?" JoJo asks.

I'm not, but I knock anyway.

When a full minute goes by, I knock again.

At last, we hear low muttering behind the door, and the rattle of various chain locks. When it opens, a guy in frayed pajama pants leans against the frame, blinking in the daylight. No wonder. The living room behind him is still dark, the dingy-looking vertical blinds drawn, even though we got off to a later start leaving Dell's Hollow than we'd planned. Squinting into the gloom, I see bare walls, a collection of mismatched beanbags and chairs, and a shallow sea of trash—mostly fast-food containers, and an overfull cereal bowl being used as an ashtray. A skinny cat picks its way through the debris, poor thing.

"Help you?" the guy asks, not sounding all that eager to help.

If JoJo weren't right behind me, I'd take a step back. Instead, I paste on my "good kid" smile: The one that wears down grumpy senior citizens when I'm volunteering at the nursing home, or coaxes a recommendation letter out of a teacher with way too much on their plate. "Hi, good morning!" I chirp. "You don't know me, but I think you might know my sister, Maxine Blum. Or maybe somebody who lives here does?"

Scratching his hairy jaw, he looks me up and down. "You're Max's sister?" He snorts.

"I—yes, her younger sister."

"Obviously."

"And … are you Riley?"

The guy shakes his head. "That's my roommate."

"Oh, great. Could you go get him?"

"He's still in bed. Want to come in and wait?"

As he shifts position in the doorway, I catch sight of a dully glowing fish tank on a TV stand in the corner behind him. The water's only half full, green, and furred with algae. I don't see anything living in the depths. I briefly imagine my parents peering into the water when the cops (no doubt watching the apartment as we stand here) call them to come and collect me, after raiding this place for God knows what. Mom and Dad realizing that I not only lied to them but willingly walked into the home of a man with a tank like that …

"We're good out here," JoJo answers for both of us.

"Might be a minute."

She shrugs, leaning against the staircase railing until at last, he shrugs back and turns to go inside.

When the door shuts behind him, I let my smile slip away. "They can't be Max's friends," I insist, keeping my voice low. "She had local bike friends, sure, but that guy? He's like the dudes with mohawk helmets who wheelie through traffic. And did you see the fish tank?"

JoJo frowns. "She wouldn't be the first girl to fall for a loser. Thank God we both dodged that heterosexual bullet, right?"

Suddenly I'm smiling again, against my will. "I've dated boys, you know. Well, one boy. I went to the winter fling with Aaron Fuller in ninth grade. He was sweet. His mom drove us to Shake Shack after."

"Ah, young love."

"So you've never? Dated a boy, I mean. Or have you, um, ever dated?" I scuff my sneaker over the concrete of the landing, where it catches in a slick of something long dried, but still sticky.

Before she can answer, we both jump as the door swings open again, revealing a bleary-eyed Bad Beard. He's wearing a T-shirt, at least, and a pair of baggy jeans with the knees permanently pinched outward. "You're Max Jr., huh?" he croaks at me, clearly freshly woken.

"Max is her sister," JoJo says defensively, stepping up beside me. "And we're looking for her."

"We're looking for her riding jacket," I hedge. "Brown leather, with a hood, and a zipper that goes like this?" I trace a diagonal line across my chest with one finger, though he isn't really looking at me.

"So, what? You want Max's address, or you want the jacket?"

My heart stutters, then speeds up. "Both, if you have them."

"Do you?" JoJo asks, eyes sharpening.

"Maybe I do. What will you give me for them?" Riley's mean little smirk feels like a challenge.

"Um." Stupidly, I pat my shorts pockets, like I'm carrying a thick stack of cash to hand over instead of a hair elastic and the keys to the minivan. "I get paid next Friday—"

"What about her bike?"

I imagine the R1 tucked safely inside our backyard shed—Max's favorite thing in the whole world, which she charged me with keeping safe for her in her very first postcard. "No."

Riley scratches his beard. "I'll make it fair. I'll race you—you win, you get the jacket and the info. I win, I get the bike. Not like it's yours anyway."

"I can't. That's … I just can't."

"Then how about you come back here when you grow up a little and you're ready to take a risk, huh? I'll AirDrop my Instagram and you let me know when you're ready to race." Riley swipes something on his phone, and mine chimes with a notification. He purses his lips to blow a grotesque little kiss through the snarls of his strange beard, and then, snickering, shuts the door in our faces. The bolt clicks, and the chain locks rattle into place.

I stand there feeling lower than dirt—lower than the downward-creeping roots of my dad's vegetable garden—until JoJo takes my hand in hers and tugs me gently back down the stairs into the sunlight, so bright that it hurts.