I lost Kai when we were nine. He went missing when we were seventeen.
He was my best friend and brother and half my heart. It’s funny, how
those feelings don’t go away. He was practically a stranger, by the time he
disappeared, but he was still all those other things, too.
(Manda’s still half convinced I’m in love with him. But Manda’s favorite
game is seven minutes in heaven, and I’d rather get a root canal than go on a
date, so there tends to be a fundamental breakdown in communication when we
talk about that kind of thing.)
Kai never came home Saturday night. His grandma reported him missing
Sunday morning. By Monday—
Monday was a snow day. It had been going on and off since Friday night,
nonstop since Sunday afternoon. My parents were at work, and I wanted to keep
Grandma company, but she was busy, with the police, and the—and I didn’t want
to be in the way. So I heard it from the news, not from her.
Local teen, missing two days. Last seen snowboarding at 3pm on Saturday.
Snowboard washed up on the far side of the river. A glove and a boot found on
the hilltop. Local teen missing, presumed dead.
Kai missing, presumed dead.
Manda called me right after it aired. “I know he was—I’m sorry.”
“Kai’s not an idiot,” I said.
“No one said he was.”
“They did. They just did, on channel six—you think Kai would go down
like that? Into the river? Everyone knows you don’t take the hill at that
angle, because the Mississippi doesn’t always freeze.”
“Okay, but Gerda, if it was already dark when he—”
“He’s not stupid enough to be out in the dark alone, that close to the
river. He’s not, he wouldn’t, Manda. He wouldn’t.”
“Okay,” she said again, humoring me. “So what do you think happened?”
“I don’t know. I just know he’s
not dead. He—he can’t be. Not Kai.”
Kai in the dark, squinting at me behind fogged up glasses. Kai laughing
as he packed a snowball, Kai biking in the sun the day the training wheels came
off, Kai in braces and glowers, Kai calling me names, Kai waiting at the back
door with the snow falling at his back. Not Kai. Not Kai.
He wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be. And that meant I had to find him.
Boots—the heavy black ones that laced in the front. Snow pants—shiny,
black, puffy, ugly, warm. The heaviest coat, the thickest mittens, with thin
gloves beneath. My ice skating socks. Two scarves. That hat Grandma knitted for
me for Christmas. Six granola bars in my pocket.
Kai was a missing person, presumed dead. He was probably more than six
granola bars away.
He wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be. I grabbed a seventh granola bar.
I had walked across town, down the hill,
along the river, and into the woods, deep and deep and deeper, before the cold
seeped into my shoes, before I realized what I was doing.
I sat abruptly on the snowy ground. I was going to search for my
likely-dead evil neighbor, alone, on a Monday afternoon in January, with
nothing but the clothes on my back.
He wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be. I stood up and pulled out the first
granola bar.
~
I’ve spent my whole life one wall away from Kai. Our families live in
the two units of a townhouse, and our bedrooms share a wall. When we were kids
we had a tin can telephone—we used one of Grandma’s needles with the biggest
eye to pull the thread through the screens in our windows, then attached each
end to a can inside our rooms. Whenever one of us wanted to talk, we’d knock on
the wall, and the other would know to go pick up their can.
We had to replace the string a
few times, and the last one fell apart years ago, but the can still lives on my
dresser, with a million other things Mom keeps telling me to throw away.
The last few years, if Kai wanted to talk to me, he’d knock on the wall,
and I’d go downstairs and meet him in the backyard. I don’t knock anymore—I
learned a long time ago that the only way to have a relationship with Kai is on
his terms.
Manda says that’s unhealthy. I say Manda’s a hypocrite—she forgives
people who keep hurting her, too. She says it’s different because Kai’s not my
family. But he might as well be. You don’t stop loving people just because they
become unlovable. I may not have liked Kai much, the last few years. But I’ll
always do anything for the sake of the person he used to be.
~
I know it started when we were nine, the trouble. That was the year Kai
got glasses. It was also the year he got mean. (Unrelated.) He just got meaner
and meaner. He had a special talent for mimicry that showed up that year, and
he just—
There was a huge rosebush between our front doors, and it made the
biggest, brightest, best-smelling red roses I’ve ever seen, prettier even than
the ones you can get from a florist. We were sitting just in front of it, holding
very, very still, because there were a bunch of bees around. (Kai always liked
bees.) And all of the sudden he shouted.
I asked him if he’d got stung, and he shook his head. “Feels like
something flew into my eye.”
A minute later a bee landed on his hand, and he caught it—grabbed it by
the wings.
“What are you doing?”
He shrugged. “I wanted a closer look,” he said. And he held it up really
close to his face—I think he needed the glasses by then—but it was struggling,
so it was hard to really look at. So he grabbed the stinger and pulled it
out—because losing their stingers kills them—and then it wasn’t moving anymore,
and he could get a better look.
And it was so mean, and I was shouting at him, and then he just—dropped
it, and he said, “I don’t—I don’t know why I did that. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean
to.”
We dug a little hole and buried the bee under the oak tree in the
backyard. But that was when it started. The day he killed that bee. It happened
slowly. He started mocking people and stomping on ants and being rude to
Grandma. But only sometimes. Other times he was nice. Other times he was still
my best friend. And I just kept hoping he’d grow back out of it.
(When your best friend grows up to be a jerk, you never suspect it’s
because of magic.)
~
I was twelve by the time I admitted to myself that Kai and I weren’t
friends anymore. I was sleeping over at his house—we were already a few years
out from being sleepover friends, really. But my parents have always travelled
a lot, and until I turned fifteen and they decided I could stay home alone
overnight, I stayed with Grandma and Kai.
Kai still had his bunk bed back then—one bed for him, and one for a
friend, and that friend was always me.
I don’t even remember what he said. He’d been saying horrible things,
and I’d been trying to ignore them, for a long time by then. I didn’t hang on
to the things he said—I always just tried to forget them as soon as possible.
But whatever he said that night, it upset me, more than the things he said
usually did. It might have been about my parents—my adoptive parents, not my
bio ones. Kai would never go there, even at his worst. Both sets are sore
subjects, but there are lines Kai won’t cross, and there were more of them when
we were twelve.
My parents are my uncle—my bio mom’s brother—and his wife, really. My
bio parents died in a car crash, and they were the only family left. At least,
the only family we know about, because my bio dad was from Taiwan, and no one
knew if he had any family left there or how to contact them. My parents adopted
me because I was family, and it was the right thing to do. They love me, I
think. They’ve had me since before I turned two. But I know they never wanted
kids. So I’m touchy about it. That would have hurt my feelings, more than most
things Kai might have said when we were twelve.
Whatever he said, I climbed down from the top bunk and went to Grandma’s
room; she was sitting up in bed, reading.
“I don’t want to sleep in there. Kai’s being mean.”
Grandma sighed and put down her book. She was hoping he’d grow out of
it, too, but no luck, no matter how many groundings and timeouts and whatever
he got. “Well, maybe you’re getting to be at the age where you shouldn’t be
sharing a room.”
After that I slept on the pullout couch, until Mom and Dad let me just
stay home.
~
I was thoroughly lost and down two granola bars by the time I thought of
Grandma. (His grandma, not mine, not really.) To be told Kai was probably dead,
and then that I’d gone missing—well, they’d probably find my body before Kai’s,
even if he really was dead, because I didn’t go barreling toward the
Mississippi like a first-rate idiot.
We’re all she has left. To lose us both in the same weekend—
And my parents. My parents—I’m the only family they have, too, and
they’d definitely blame themselves if I wandered into the woods and froze to
death when they were both working late again—and I knew I was going to freeze
to death. I was beyond numb. I kept starting to fall asleep, and then the panic
would wake me. I had no idea how long I’d been out—I didn’t have a watch, and
it gets dark so early in the winter, it could have been less than an hour, or
it could have been three or four. No one would miss me probably until
morning—when Mom and Dad got home they’d just assume I was already in bed, so
either they’d find my bed empty in the morning, or they’d leave early and
someone at school would be the first to realize I was gone.
I was going to freeze to death searching for a stupid jerk who was
probably dead already, and there was no way Manda would ever believe I wasn’t
in love with him after this—or anyone else either, and why should that even
matter, when I was about to freeze to death?
~
We live in a cul-de-sac, with a huge circle of grass at the end, where
the turn-around is—I guess it belongs to the city. But we used to build snow
forts there every winter. Me and Kai—we were the only kids on the block, back
then. There are some younger kids now, and I’ve seen them do the same thing.
It was always a huge fort—we’d work on it for weeks. The plow would pile
all the snow from the street there, so we had plenty of material to work with.
We’d dig tunnels into the big piles the plow left. We were in there all day on
weekends, and over Christmas break, until Grandma or my parents came to dig us
out.
Grandma would never come into the fort—she said her knees were too
old—but she used to bring us each a thermos of hot chocolate while we were
working. We’d go into the biggest cavern we’d dug out so far, and sit on the
packed-down snow on the ground, pressed tight together, to drink it. No one
makes hot chocolate like Grandma—I’ve watched her do it, and she just uses the cheap
powder like everyone else, but hers tastes better.
I was sitting on the ground in the woods, imagining Kai was pressed into
my side, thinking of Grandma’s hot chocolate. And I wasn’t cold anymore, and I
knew I was dying.
Then I woke up.
-
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