FOURTEEN

SO BASICALLY EVERYTHING is completely terrible and also a total disaster right now.

This is how it feels, for me, at least, to be alive, in Maine, which is huge, by the way.

Dave keeps texting me, and now that I know what I know, I have no idea what to say to him anymore. It’s not as if I feel like I’m talking to a stranger now, but rather like he’s talking to a stranger whom neither of us know. I just keep answering that everything is fine, then tell him about the clouds I can see from the car, or type something cute and witty, because what else can I tell him that won’t put both of us in danger?

My phone lights up with a buzz, and I think how quickly I went from loving when that happens to absolutely dreading it.

How’re u feeling bae? It’s Mimi.

tired//hungry//great, I text back. The first two items on that list are true, but as to the last one, my plan right now is that maybe I shouldn’t tell anyone what I am feeling, because what I am feeling is basically that all my authority figures are liars, and the government wants to kill my sister, and my parents are at least half-fine with that. And maybe if we get Callie where she’s going safe and sound, she’ll find somewhere she belongs more than with me. Which is great, but also the worst thing ever to have happened. And how do you say that to your best friend, or to the boy with whom you do homework, plus other stuff too? I know that Mimi and Dave only want to help and that they’re worried about me. But they can’t help, no one can help, because I can’t tell them all the things I’ve just learned.

The one thing I do know is that Stan and I have to get Callie and Ted to wherever they’re going. I can’t think about anything else— especially the part about maybe we’ll be killed if Stan and I get Callie and Ted to wherever they’re going. And this is what’s churning around and around in my head when Stan nearly crashes into the guardrail. We stop abruptly. After I turn to make sure Callie’s okay and all buckled in, I whip right around to face Stan.

“What the hell!” I shout.

“Sorry! Sorry! It’s this idiot guy! He’s been, like, waving at me, at us, viciously. What the hell is he doing?”

I look. A car is parked right behind us, and the driver’s side door is open. A guy in his twenties or early thirties gets out, and then I look closer and see a girl sitting inside the car in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead.

The guy approaches and sticks his head in Stan’s window.

“Hi!” he says. “I’m Bobby.”

“Uh, hey, Bobby,” we say, tentative as all heck.

“I see you guys have some Orphans in there,” he says, blocking the sun with one hand and putting his forehead against the back window. “Or AROs, as you might call them?”

“Um,” we say. Stan looks at me, and all I can do is stare blankly back.

“So let’s go somewhere and talk!” says Bobby.

“You want us to go somewhere with you?” I say, every protective instinct in me firing up on all cylinders.

“Wait a second, dude. Why would we follow a complete stranger who nearly just ran us off the highway? What do you want?” says Stan.

“Huh! Good point! Fair enough,” Bobby says, putting his hands up and smiling. “Let’s start over? I’m Bobby, and it’s very nice to meet the both of you. I’m a grad student in anthropology. That’s Greta,” he says, gesturing with a nod toward the girl sitting in his car. We follow his nod and then look back at Bobby. “Greta used to be real close with my younger brother, Alex,” he goes on. “But now it’s just me and Greta. My stipend covers off-campus housing, so she stays with me. Anyway, the other day, Greta built this amazing island.” Stan and I look at each other while trying to make it look like we’re not looking at each other. “And after that, things got what I’d call vaguely . . . nuts. She dragged me to the car, and here we are, headed north. And your friends in the backseat there have that same look.”

“What look?” Stan says. I can feel his defensive feathers ruffling.

“Same as Greta there. Sandy blond hair, pale eyes with that look in them that says that language, or what we call language, doesn’t mean anything to them. Then of course there’s the whole steering the car north thing and all.”

“Could you hold on for just a sec?” I say to Bobby, holding up a finger and smiling weirdly, and then I pull Stan out of the car through my door and walk him around to the hood, as far away from Bobby as I can get without losing sight of Callie.

“Who the hell is this guy?” I ask as quietly as possible.

“I don’t know,” Stan whispers back. “But he’s basically narrating our day back to us, minus a bear attack. And”—he doesn’t look happy saying this—“his sister sounds like she’s probably an Iceling too.”

“So what do we do? Just go with him? He could be anyone.”

“I mean . . . should we just go get a bite and see what this guy is about?”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay, I guess.”

“We’ll be somewhere public. With people . . .”

“So if he tries anything . . .”

“Exactly.”

Bobby is still whistling inconspicuously. Stan pokes his head out and says, “Okay, dude. Let’s go get something to eat. Separate cars.”

“Of course!” says Bobby. “This’ll be great.”

We get back in the car and wait just long enough for Bobby to get his car started, then we pull onto the freeway with this stranger and his sister, his purported Iceling sister, in the backseat, and we all head, convoy-style, toward the nearest rest stop.

WE FIND A pavilion that has Burger King and Sbarro and Starbucks. We’re all grateful to be stopping to eat and rest, and plus Bobby’s buying. It really seems like Bobby wants us to like him. Imagine that.

Bobby tells us he’s a linguist. He “got into the field” after something happened to his little brother, Alex, who was incredibly close to Greta, who is currently disassembling her salad on the plate and then reassembling it, piece by piece, on her fork. It’s not really clear what happened with his brother, the way he tells it.

And what he keeps repeating, really stressing, is how inseparable Alex and Greta used to be. He tells us a story about how, one day, when Alex and Greta were around eight or nine years old, they wandered off to the greenhouse. After a few hours, their mom asked Bobby to go check on them. And when he did, there was just Greta. But she wasn’t at the greenhouse. She was about a mile away, in the woods. Bobby’d seen the start of their tracks and followed them easily enough, but then the wind carried them away. “They found Alex a few hours later,” he says, but exactly how they found him, Bobby doesn’t seem to want—or be able—to say.

“I’d rather not talk more about that, if that’s all right,” he says, but then after a few deep breaths during which he stares down at his plate in front of him, he starts talking about it more. “It was winter. I couldn’t see their tracks because of the fresh snow, so we had no idea where to start looking for them. All we knew was they got at least twenty feet from the greenhouse. When we got to Greta, she was warm. No frostbite. No hypothermia, no shaking, no loss of color. Nothing. She looked like she always looks. She didn’t have a jacket on. It was the strangest thing,” he says so quietly, then looks away.

I look over at Callie. “Hey, kid sister,” I say. She doesn’t turn to look at me; instead she gulps down her Sprite, closes her eyes, then smiles quietly to herself.

Bobby tells us he misses his brother. “Every day, I miss him. And it’s weird how you hold on to memories. You know? How you start to wonder if the things that happened happened exactly how you remembered them or if that’s just the story you tell yourself to keep going. But I get Greta. And she and Alex were so close, it’s almost like there’s a piece of him still here as long as she’s around. So that’s something.” He stops, then takes a long gulp of his iced tea, the ice at the bottom of the glass rattling around.

It’s hard to tell, only spending the greater part of an hour with her, but Greta seems to be somewhere between Ted and Callie, temperament-wise. If Callie is shy yet sociable, and if Ted is antisocial and rather aggressive when provoked, then Greta’d be categorized as relatively sociable and mildly assertive. She eats more slowly and with more patience than Ted and Callie, who tend to approach their meals in random bursts of hunger. We used to keep track of Callie’s eating patterns on these worksheets we got from Jane, which were, apparently, for the freaking government to use to determine whether or not my sister is a monster.

And seeing the three of them together, they look like siblings. Like fraternal triplets. It’s weird. Weirder than how it was when I first saw Callie and Ted together. There were so many similarities, but I didn’t think of them as brother and sister. But now, the three of them . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of this.

Bobby finishes his drink and starts telling us how his interest in language and linguistics stemmed from the questions Alex used to ask when he was a kid, about how to better try to talk to Greta. Hearing him talk about it, I realize that Bobby’s approach to those questions is something I wish I’d thought of, honestly.

“It just made me think, you know?” says Bobby. “About the roots of language, why we need it, how and why it works. So in the time that I’ve been the sole brother taking care of Greta, my Iceling—real great neologism, by the way, I’m really cottoning to it—I’ve tried every sort of base language and permutations I can think of, writing programs to cycle through them endlessly, getting Greta to sit and listen to them with headphones on, electrodes to her temples, her butt in a chair in the living room of the apartment we share, checking to see if anything lights up. She watches a lot of plant docs on YouTube and Netflix and whatever. I started renting some from libraries too, playing them for her one after the other, sometimes keeping the electrodes on and wishing that I had any idea how to quantify, let alone name or navigate or define or even begin to get a glimpse of, the responses behind her eyes.”

I’ve got to say, I admire his dedication to Greta. And the fact that he doesn’t seem to blame her for his brother’s death, the way you’d think the TV version of a guy like Bobby would. I can tell Stan’s listening through his standoffish veneer and that he got especially perked up about the electrodes. I want to know what he’s thinking right now. About Bobby and Greta and this whole trip now that we’ve met Bobby and Greta. And I want to hear what Bobby has to say about as badly as I want us to get back in the car and talk to Stan about what Bobby’s saying.

“Like I was saying when I first met you guys, back on the highway, about the island?” Bobby says, and I nod to encourage him to keep going. “Well, just the other day, she started to build this island. Out of dirt and flowers and these sticks she uses to prop up plants. Building, like, very insistently. Somehow she built this island so that in the center of it was this kind of . . . undulating field. And these blossoms that looked . . . heavy. You know? Like they were about to give birth or something. And after she built it I could just tell that she needed something. She had her suitcase already packed—no idea when she did that, but that was another thing she’d gotten up to lately that was strange: packing and unpacking her suitcase like it was some kind of relay race. Anyway, after the island, with her in the car and looking so worried and scared and excited and I don’t even know what, I had this thought: that I might be able to finally help her. The same thought Alex had that night. But he couldn’t do it. And maybe I can. So that’s why I’m here.”

“Well, Bobby,” says Stan, “that’s exactly why we’re here too.”

“Yours too?” Bobby says.

“Yup,” I say, and then all three of us gaze out at our siblings like proud parents at a dance recital.

Bobby smiles and excuses himself to go to the restroom.

I still don’t know exactly what to make of Bobby, but I do know that the scared and suspicious feeling I got when he first flagged us down is pretty much gone now. I watch Stan watching Bobby as he walks, and I can tell that he’s still skeptical. A few minutes later, Bobby comes back and then Stan gets up to use the bathroom, which is when my phone buzzes with a text from him that says, Okay, fine. His stories are crazy, but they sound pretty legit. But I can’t take someone who dresses like a fancy nerd that seriously. I allow myself a little smile and then take a second look at Bobby’s outfit: kinda tight chinos tucked into a pair of duck boots, faded button-down, a lined deck jacket. I don’t know many grad students, but Bobby’s style doesn’t seem so off-base from the language-obsessed intellectual he claims to be. yr just jealous of his sweet all-weather gear, I text back, trying to let Stan know that I’m not worried about Bobby, but that this is first and foremost our journey.

Anyway, if Bobby’s attentiveness to his appearance is Stan’s only complaint about him, then I know he agrees with me that this guy knows about Icelings. It’s clear he’s lived most his life alongside one of them, and he knows all about the delicate balancing act you’re forced to perform when you’re the one pivot point between them and everything else in the whole world.

Stan joins us back at the table, and we share a look and a wink to acknowledge our secret text conversation. Then Bobby leans in, as if to initiate some kind of huddle in which he’s about to tell us the game plan.

“I figure,” he tells us, “that if my Iceling did this, and your Icelings did this—building the islands, I mean, and then making us drive north—then probably other Icelings are doing this too. Maybe all the Icelings are doing this. Like a mass exodus sort of thing,” he says.

Bobby waits a beat, as though he’s waiting for us to say something. When we don’t, when instead Stan and I both just study him and try to figure out if he’s for real, Bobby continues. “If that’s true, then that means something, something deep in their bones or their hearts or their memories, is calling them home. All of them at once. So we’ll probably see more of them, and more of us, out here on the road pretty soon. And what worries me is that someone other than us’ll notice too.”

“You’re right,” says Stan, without a hint of mocking or smugness in his voice.

“Yeah,” Bobby says, and then we’re all quiet as we try to think about what this means.

“Oh my God,” I yelp. “Where are they?” Because all of a sudden Callie and Ted and Greta are gone, and I have no idea where they are.

Stan panics. “How the hell did this happen? They were right there! We were right there!”

“Guys,” says Bobby, “it’s fine. They’re by the cars. They probably just got impatient. See?”

Bobby points at the window behind Stan and me, and there they are. By the cars. Just like Bobby said. And I don’t know how Stan feels about it, but I do know that right now I’m feeling a little bit jealous of Bobby and his skills at being a big sibling.

“Let’s get out of here,” Stan says, and we bus our tables and head out to where our Icelings wait to get back on the road to the Great Wherever.

Out in the parking lot, Bobby says, “Hey, guys, I got this big old SUV from my parents a while ago. I converted it to biodiesel, so it smells like french fries, but it’s got a ton of room.”

“Nice sales pitch,” says Stan. “You trying to get rid of it?”

“Ha, no, man, you’re funny. I just mean that if things are feeling a bit crowded in your car, you guys could always ride with me. Since we’re heading in the same direction and all. Plus, I don’t know what your situation is, man, and I don’t mean to presume, but I do know that I’m not a teenager driving a car in my parents’ name, so no one’s looking out for me in that kind of way. You know?” I can’t tell if what Bobby’s saying sounds more ominous or practical—though it’s definitely a little pushy, I know that, and I have a feeling Stan does too.

“Nah,” says Stan. “Even if our parents freaked, and on that possibility we’re mostly covered, I think, when it comes down to it, the government’s been keeping tabs on the Icelings their whole lives. Once they figure out what’s happening, if they haven’t figured it out already, they’ll be tracking us anyway. So if it’s cool with you, let’s just do this convoy-style?”

“Hey, fair point,” says Bobby, holding his hands up in mock surrender. “I’ll see you out there on the road!”

We exchange numbers, get in our cars, and wave to one another as we start our engines and roll out. It’s my turn to drive, and I wink at Callie as I turn around to back us out, and then Callie reaches forward and points us north again. It’s fifteen minutes before I realize we missed the sunset.