Chapter Sixteen

Day 4

The next morning, my eyes flutter open much earlier than they should.

Not again.

For a few minutes, I lie in bed, trying to fall back to sleep. But the tick-tick-tick of the wall clock and air conditioner’s steady hum combine forces. The thin strip of light feels like a barrier this morning, separating me from Laurel. I slide out of bed to close the curtains.

Mist blankets the courtyard below, making the lamplights look hazy. I shiver, then reach up to move the curtain.

The tall grass sways, then goes still. I stare for so long, I start to wonder if I imagined it.

Someone else appears, right below my window. Dark purple hair. The glint of a silver stud in one ear. I watch Isa wade through the grass, then disappear behind a toolshed.

Now I’m positive I won’t be able to go back to sleep.

I put on shoes, and grab my phone and room key, then head out.

On the ground floor, I make my way toward the far end of the hall. I pause in front of the door that Meritxell came out of when my team ran into her on Monday. Meritxell and her smile that makes my chest flutter. Meritxell, who makes it seem so simple to say exactly what you’re thinking.

I couldn’t even manage to tell Laurel what actually happened with Abba yesterday.

At the end of the hall, a door is cracked open a sliver. I slip outside and wade toward the center of the courtyard, just like Isa did a few minutes ago. Now that I’m down here, it reminds me more of an overgrown garden.

Voices. Soft, whispered words.

I inch closer to the shed.

A small clearing appears on the other side of the shed, framed by benches. Isa’s perched on one, Andy another.

Isa spots me first.

“Ellen, hey.” Once again, a single earbud cord snakes out of Isa’s ear.

“Hi. What are you doing down here?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Andy says. “Gibs’s snoring is epic. I should record it for y’all sometime.”

I glance over at Isa. “What about you?”

“I’ve just always liked being up late at night. Back home, it’s the only time my house is quiet.” They shrug. “Want to sit with us?”

Isa points to an empty bench between the two of them.

“Does Laurel snore, too?” Isa asks once I’m seated.

“No. I just couldn’t sleep.”

I keep my eyes on the ground. A light breeze rustles shoots of grass that stick up from cracks in the cement.

“Gotcha.” Out of the corner of my eye, I spot Isa crossing one leg over the other. “Andy was just about to show me one of your dad’s graphic novels.”

“Yeah!” Andy pulls the Fisher omnibus out of his bag. It’s a special edition that features all three volumes of Abba’s latest series.

He hands it over to Isa, who studies the cover. “His art is incredible. Like, seriously amazing.”

“It’s awesome, yeah,” Andy says. “And the story is beyond epic. It’s set in the South but it’s an alternate universe where each town has a different Paradigm. Actually…” He turns to me. “Ellen can probably explain it better.”

My eyes dart up to Andy, then down again. For once, I’m not wishing Laurel would step in. She’s never read Abba’s novels.

I take a breath.

“It’s a set of rules that everyone in each town has to follow.” The Paradigms are my favorite part because they remind me of my dot diary categories: straightforward and logical.

“Right.” Andy leans forward. “So, volume one is about a boy, Fisher, and how he starts questioning his town’s Paradigm. By volume three, he and his friends are trying to take down the entire system.”

Isa flips through the pages. “Yeah, I’ll definitely be reading this. Cool if I borrow it?”

“Sure,” Andy says. “There’s a character named Comet who’s my favorite. Plus, no one really dates anyone, so the fandom can ship each character with whoever they want.”

Just like Abba chose specific terms for the Paradigm rule system, I know there are special words in the world of graphic novel readers. Fandom is a group of people who all like the same thing: graphic novels, obviously, but also TV shows, video games, and other stuff. Then ship is short for relationship, except it’s a verb.

I glance at Andy. “Do you ship Comet with anyone?”

“I, um. Kind of.” Andy’s hands tighten their grip on the edge of his bench.

Did I say something wrong?

“Hey…” Isa looks up. “Can you wait until I have a chance to read? Then I can tell you who I ship, too.”

“Yeah, totally.” Andy’s hands relax.

There are plenty of characters in Fisher’s Final, but I’ve never really thought about shipping any of them. My thoughts flicker to Meritxell, then back to Abba’s novels. I wonder if any of the girl characters might be good together.

“So, has anyone looked at the second clue yet?” Isa asks.

Andy and I both shake our heads.

“Want to see if we can figure it out?”

“Sure.” Andy reaches for his phone and backpack.

I glance between them as Isa also pulls out their clue. “I didn’t bring it with.”

I didn’t even remember to look at it after dinner. It’s still folded up in my shorts pocket.

“That’s okay,” Isa says. “You can look at mine.”

Isa scoots to the edge of their bench. I steal a glance at their earbud as I take a seat. If they have anything playing, it’s too soft to hear.

“Just so you know,” Andy tells me, “getting Señor L to approve our first clue yesterday wasn’t too hard.”

“Yeah.” Isa holds their clue sheet out for me. “He just asked us to choose who was going to recite it in Spanish, then translate it and show him some pics of where we went. Andy volunteered.”

“Oh, okay.” That doesn’t sound too bad, but the thought of reciting Spanish in front of my classmates twists my stomach. As Andy hunches over his phone, I study Isa’s clue sheet. Maybe I can convince Isa and Gibs to recite the other clues if I do a good job helping to solve them.

Isa’s translated a few words that already appeared in clue one (calle, busquen) and others that I remember learning in class last year (visitan, grande, playa, plus all three mosaic colors).

Two words catch my attention. Isa’s written @ signs over both o’s in “artistos callejeros.”

“What’re those for?”

“Nothing clue-related. I just made them gender neutral.”

“Like the Spanish version of they, their, and them?”

“Sorta. You know how words that describe women usually end in -as, and for men it’s -os?”

“Yes.” I learned this in Spanish last year.

“Well, the @ sign with an s at the end is the gender-neutral version you can use for nonbinary people, or just groups in general. Some people use an x instead—like they’d say Latinx instead of Latino or Latina—but I think the @ sign is more fun to write.”

I consider this. “So, if you needed to put something like this into categories, it could be ‘men,’ ‘women,’ and… ‘nonbinary’?”

“Yep,” Isa says. “‘Other’ could work, too. Or ‘gender neutral.’”

Excitement surges through me. It makes sense when Isa explains it like this. Now I have a new dot diary list to put under my pronouns category.

“Okay! I think I’ve got it translated.” Isa and I look over at Andy, who sits up straighter on his bench. “There’s no confusing stuff like warrior chimneys this time, so that made it easier. It looks like we’ve just got to find a big, famous street that has street performers, a mosaic, and a beach.”

“That’s”—Isa squints at their clue sheet—“not very specific.”

A memory sparks. Something about Laurel. Possibly shopping?

“Yeah,” Andy says. “There are tons of places where you can see these things, I bet.”

Isa and I reach for our phones at the same time.

“There are so many streets that lead to the beach.” Isa stares at a Google map, shoulders rounded. “Not sure they’d all have performers and a yellow, blue, and red mosaic, but yeah.”

I flip through my videos until I get to the one I took at La Pedrera, panning across apartment rooftops. I pause it at the street where double-decker buses seemed to be dropping off tourists.

Isa leans closer to me. “Did you find something?”

I click off my phone fast. My videos feel private.

“Maybe.”

La Sagrada Família felt right, too, and I don’t want to be wrong twice.

“What’ve you got?” Now Andy looks at me, too.

What did Laurel call that place Madison told her about? I should’ve written it down.

“Laurel said there’s a huge street that has lots of shopping on it, plus street performers. It also leads to the beach.”

Isa sits up. “That could be it.”

“Except I don’t remember what it was called.”

“Top ten… famous… streets… Barcelona.” Andy types into his phone. “Okay, there’s Avinguda Diagonal.”

I shake my head.

“Passeig de Gràcia,” Andy says next. “But Señor L wouldn’t have us go to the same place twice.”

He looks back down at his phone. “How about Carrer Petritxol? Rambla de Ravel?”

“That one!” I say. “But just the ‘rambla’ part.”

Andy’s fingers fly over his phone screen again. “Rambla means ‘boulevard,’ but there’s a famous one that’s just called La Rambla.” His voice rises in excitement. “It starts at a big square called Plaça de Catalunya and goes all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. Does that sound right?”

“Yes.” I don’t let myself get as excited as Andy yet. “That might not be what the clue means, though.”

“Sure. But at least it gives us a place to explore tomorrow.” Isa yawns.

Andy yawns, too, and I yawn along with him.

“La Rambla it is, then?” Isa stands.

“After a couple more hours of rest,” Andy says.

“Well, obviously!” They shoot him a grin.

One by one, we wade through the weedy grass.

As we reach the steps that lead up into the hotel, I look at them both. “Will Gibs be mad that we worked on the clue without him?”

“No way.” Andy shakes his head. “He’ll probably be glad we already figured it out, to be honest. Doing homework isn’t his favorite thing in the world.”

“That totally sounds like Gibs,” Isa says.

We head inside, then say goodbye to Andy on the girls-plus-Isa floor landing.

“Hope you can get a little more sleep,” Isa whispers to me. “But if you ever wake up early again, now you have someplace to hang out with me. Andy too.”

I return to bed with happiness warming my chest.