AS SOON AS ADAM AND I HUNG UP, I CALLED THE PLACES he’d identified on the list: the El Camino Diner, the Bel Air Arcade, and Mr. G’s Karaoke. Mr. G’s wasn’t yet open, so I tried again a couple hours later. But when I got someone on the phone, the answer was the same as the answers I’d been given at each of the other places: “No, I’ve never heard of your sister.”
The next day was Saturday. Juno was on Eddy duty. The one and only rule that Juno’s parents ever gave her was she had to watch her eight-year-old brother the first Saturday of every month. (Technically, Eddy was Juno’s half brother, but no one in her family ever pointed out that distinction.) Juno’s mom and stepdad, Amy and Randall, were incredibly lax about every single other thing. Their kids could eat whatever they wanted, in whatever room they wanted. No one cared if they cursed. Once Juno came home drunk and puked into Randall’s open hands. The next day her parents brought her hangover cures in bed.
I’m sure my dad thought if he parented that way, I’d end up running a brothel out of our basement while freebasing cocaine, or something like that. But Juno was one of the best people I’d ever known, and Eddy was totally adorable. Even if there wasn’t a rule about it, Juno would want to spend quality time with him. I never minded joining them.
But when I walked into their family room that Saturday, Juno was fuming. “I’m stuck at home while Audrey is sinking her claws deeper into Cooper,” she said. “Meanwhile, where is this kid I need to spend quality time with? Oh yeah, he’s too busy playing his video games to even care that I’m here, which is exactly what I told my parents would happen when I asked for the night off. And for the record, I’ve never, ever asked to skip a night with Eddy before. So, would a little consideration for my social life be out of line? I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think so, either,” I told her. “But it’s not like you could do anything about Cooper and Audrey even if you didn’t have to watch Eddy tonight.”
“Ugh!” Juno said. “God, what does he see in her? What does she have that I don’t have?”
“A million things,” I said. “And none of them are good.”
“She’s like one of those female octopuses who strangle the males to death when they’re mating. Did you know they sometimes do that?”
“I did not.”
“I read it in one of Eddy’s animal-fact books.”
“The animal facts of life,” I said.
“Yep.”
“So Audrey has claws, and she’s an octopus?” I asked.
“She’s every awful creature you’ve ever heard of,” Juno said. “And yet, she has Cooper and I don’t. I thought . . .”
“What?”
“This is going to sound dumb. But I thought we’d be together forever.”
“It’s not dumb at all, Ju. It’s just, maybe, a little bit unrealistic.”
“But people do marry their high school sweethearts,” Juno said. “And now it could be him and Audrey.”
“Or they could break up tomorrow.”
“Audrey Davies,” she said. “It sounds wrong—the way both her first name and his last name end in an e sound. But Juno Davies, now that has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?”
“Personally, I’ve always liked Juno Kirkland,” I said. “You don’t have to change your last name when you get married. Your husband could even take your last name. There’s no law against it.”
I remember when Talley told me there wasn’t a law. “But why do ladies take men’s names if they don’t have to?” I’d asked.
“That’s what they call buying into the patriarchy, my little friend,” she’d said.
“I guess I’m a traditionalist at heart,” Juno said. “Hey, do you think it’s about these?” She knocked the heel of her hand to her ear.
“Your cochlear implants? What about them?”
“Do you think that’s why Cooper didn’t love me?”
“You’re being ridiculous,” I told her. “Just because you have a little hearing issue—”
“It’s a profound hearing loss. That’s not little.”
“And you had surgery to fix it, so now you can hear basically the same as everyone else.”
“I don’t hear the same as everyone else, and it looks weird, too.”
“I don’t even notice them,” I said.
“You want not to notice them,” she said, “but you do notice them. Everyone does. And if I don’t wear them, I can’t hear a thing. Cooper can’t, like, whisper sexy things to me in the middle of the night, and what if he really wants to? I’ve been thinking about this, because it’s just so hard to understand. I still wear his shirts to sleep, so I can feel close to him. And that’s the thing—I felt closer to him, more connected, than I ever felt to another human—I mean, not counting you, of course.”
“Of course I am,” I said.
“But how is it possible that I felt a connection that strong to Cooper, but he’d rather shack up with the clawed octopus? Sometimes I worry that I’ll be Juno Kirkland forever.”
“Talley was planning to be Talley Weber forever,” I said. “She thought it was buying into the patriarchy to get married. She didn’t think she’d ever do it. I guess she was right about that.”
“Oh, Sloane,” Juno said. “I don’t want to ask you how you are all the time, because I know everyone asks you that. But I worry about you—about how you are.”
“I’m awful,” I admitted. “I don’t understand—how does the sun keep rising every morning, now that Talley is gone? How does the world keep turning without her? How come everything happens the same as always? Doesn’t the universe know how important she was?”
“Oh, my poor Sloane,” Juno said.
“I don’t know if I can keep doing this. It’s only been sixteen days and she’s already getting too far away. The other day a lightbulb in the hall went out, and my dad put in a new one. Talley will never see the light from the new bulb. She’ll never be here for the new anything.” Now I was crying. “Even when I’m with other people, and they’re talking about something else, I want to listen, but really I’m just thinking about Talley. I can’t help it. And I’m obsessed with the whole Adam shit-slammer thing.”
Juno rubbed my arm. “I hate when cute guys turn out to be liars,” she said.
Naturally, we’d googled Adam, so we knew what he looked like. There was a baseball team photo online, and the names of the players were listed at the bottom. Adam was kneeling in the front row, but you could tell he was tall, because his shoulders came up past those of the other kneelers. Tall with dark hair. Maybe even tall enough to be a “large gentleman.”
I wiped my face. “You think he’s cute?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Oh, Sloane, that’s bull,” she said. “First of all, he’s totally your type, with that dark-haired, lopsided-grin thing that he’s got going on. And second, even if he wasn’t your type, he’s objectively a good-looking person. Saying you didn’t notice that is the same as saying you don’t notice my cochlear implants. You might not want to notice, and you might think it’s not important. But you noticed it all the same. He may even be cuter than Cooper.”
I mock-gasped.
“Look, I know that Cooper isn’t everyone’s type,” she said. “It doesn’t matter to me. I may be deaf, but love is blind.”
“Ugh, Juno,” I said.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I set off the cheese-whiz alarm.”
“Big time.”
“My point is—you noticed Adam is cute.”
“Fine, I noticed,” I said. “But I prefer guys who aren’t pathological liars.”
“It’s possible he wasn’t lying,” Juno said. “‘Shit-slammer’ could be an expression people use in California, or Adam and Talley could have a friend in common who says it.”
“Maybe. Either way, I just need to get out there so I can do some thorough detective work, but my dad would say I need to get over it. To move on.”
“We’ll get you out there,” Juno said.
“I mean, just calling people up on the phone isn’t enough. There’s no guarantee that the people who pick up are the right people. Or, even if they are, that they know Talley’s name. Some people might only know her by face. I need to get out there and show everyone her picture. It’s the only way. It just seems like maybe . . . I don’t know. You know Talley and her puzzles. I think this is what she wanted me to do.”
Juno nodded. “We’ll get you there,” she said again.
“It’s over two thousand miles from here. It would take us about thirty hours in the car, not counting stops to sleep and pee.”
“I was thinking you should fly there. School’s almost over. Let’s book you a ticket.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “I’ll put your flight on my credit card. Your hotel, too.”
“Ju—”
“I know you’re going to say it costs too much, but it doesn’t,” Juno said. “Not to me.”
“Even if it wasn’t too much money, I have to be at the Hogans’ with you the Monday after next,” I reminded her.
“I can handle the first couple days on my own,” she said. “You’re my best friend. You’re going through the worst thing in the world right now. There’s nothing I can do to change that. But I can do this.” She paused. “I mean, if our roles were reversed right now, what would you want to do?”
“I’d want to do whatever I could to help you,” I said.
“You see?” she said. “Please. Let me do this.”
“I still need to tell my dad something,” I said. “There’s zero chance he’d let me go if he knew the real reason. He wouldn’t even drive me to Wayzata. I’m okay with lying to him. But I want him to at least know what state I’m in.”
“How about we make up a contest and say you won an all-expenses paid trip?”
“But then if he googled it and couldn’t find it, he might not let me go. He’s pretty thorough about things like that—about making sure things are what they say they are, and there aren’t any hidden contingencies and taxes you have to pay.”
“Sloane, I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer me honestly.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to go to California? Like, really? Because if you do, then we’ll find a way to make this work. But you’re coming up with a lot of reasons why you can’t go. If you don’t want to, that’s okay, too. You don’t have to.”
“I do want to go,” I said. “I have to go—for Talley. I didn’t know how sad she was. I wasn’t looking closely enough. Dean said she was special, and special has a way of hiding trouble. But I think that’s just an excuse because we didn’t see what we should have seen—I didn’t see it. I wasn’t paying close enough attention, and I can’t let this list go, too.”
“All right, then,” Juno said. “We’ll find a real contest. You don’t have to actually win it. You just need to convince your dad that you did.” She raised up her butt to pull her phone out of her back pocket, then elbowed me. “Come on, woman. Get out your phone.”
I pulled my own phone out of my pocket and went onto Google. “Win a trip to California,” I typed into the search bar. Click. A few million results popped up, and I began to make my way through them. There was a Palm Springs getaway, but the dates were wrong; a trip to wine country, but being underage, I wasn’t eligible to enter; and a Disneyland vacation, but that one was for a family of four. Actually, everything I found was for at least two people. I guess even people who are going somewhere for free don’t want to go alone.
The heading for the next link was: “Stanford Wins in Closing Seconds.” It was an article about a football game, not a contest, but I stared at the words for a few seconds anyway.
I remembered Talley telling Dad that the novelist John Steinbeck had been a college dropout: He started out at Stanford, but he never finished.
Stanford was in Palo Alto. I knew from studying maps of the Bay Area that Palo Alto was the city adjacent to Menlo Park, where Adam lived.
I had an idea and typed “Stanford Summer Writing Program” into the search box.
The fourth link from the top was an application for a week-long writing intensive offered to high school juniors and seniors. There were three different sessions, and the first one was the week after next.
Eddy pounded in the room. “Sloane!” he cried. “You’re here! Neato bandito!” I braced myself for the impact as he flung himself into my arms.
“Ooof,” I said. “Eddy, you’re bigger every time I see you.”
“Is this a good surprise?” Juno asked him.
“Duh,” he said. “It’s the best!” He sat down in my lap and looked at my face. “Hi, Sloaney. Are you crying? Juno, I think Sloaney is crying.” He reached up and softly swiped the tear from my cheek.
I smiled so Eddy wouldn’t worry. And then, for no particular reason, I started laughing. “What’s going on?” Juno asked.
“There’s a weeklong writing program at Stanford,” I said. “It’s, like, practically next door to where Adam lives. It starts a week from Monday. I could tell my dad I applied and got in and got a scholarship—including airfare—and fly out there,” I said. “I mean, if your offer still stands.”
“My offer still stands.”
“What are you talking about?” Eddy asked.
“Sloane got accepted into a writing program,” Juno told him. “Isn’t that great? Isn’t Sloane our favorite writer?”
“She is!” Eddy said. He pecked me on the cheek and bounced out of my lap. “I want pizza!”
“Trepiccione’s to celebrate your acceptance?” Juno asked.
“Yes, please.”