Accomplice by Eireann Corrigan Page B

quiet about something that would make her parents so happy.
    My mom confessed, “I made him sneak over to pick me up. Or we’d meet by the lake.” She must have seen me looking confused, because she leaned back on her elbows and looked up to the ceiling. Her eyes looked a little less worn out, gazing up that way. “It sounds silly, but everything felt so new, and I was breathless and shaky all the time. In a good way. I just wanted to keep it all to myself for a while.”
    That made me panic a little. At first, I didn’t know what my mom was getting at, who she was comparing herself to. She snapped herself out of remembering and sat up a little. “Maybe that’s what it was like for Chloe.”
    I didn’t say anything. The corners of my eyes got hot and full. They wouldn’t shift toward my mom. I knew I was supposed to meet her eyes and smile. That’s what she expected from this heart-to-heart. There was a square of my quilt where the edges were unraveling a little. One of the lighter shades of blue. Chloe had the same quilt, in her bedroom down at the barn. They were expensive; we ordered them out of a catalog, and I remember feeling a little guilty that maybe they were a little pricey for my parents.
    “Finn, I know it’s hard. All of this is hard because we’re all missing Chloe. But it sounds like this would have been a hard time even if Chloe was right down the hill.”
    “I don’t know what you mean.” I wished my mom wouldn’t look at me so closely. I felt like the quilt. I felt like I was unraveling. “How come ravel isn’t a word we use?”
    My mom exhaled so long that I thought her bangs would blow right off of her head. “Oh, Finn. I’m just trying to help, honey.”
    “Well, haven’t you always wondered that? We say unravel when something’s coming apart, but we don’t call it raveling when we get it all knotted together.”
    “I’ve never wondered that, no.” My mom leaned back again, though, and her lips relaxed into a smile. “But I have wondered about pink, though.”
    “What about it?”
    “Well, pink is basically light red, right? Why don’t we have a word for light blue, then?” My mom just shrugged again. Leaning back on her elbows, she looked more like what I imagined my big sister might look like. If I had one.
    “I think Chloe’s okay.” I said it without thinking. Because I got greedy and wanted the two of us to keep acting easily around each other.
    But as soon as I said it, my mom tensed up. “What makes you think that?” She hung each word up carefully, the way we handle my grandmother’s glass Christmas ornaments.
    “I just feel like I’d know.” It sounded lame.
    “I hope that’s true.” My mom stood up. She brushed her hands over her thighs and checked the plate she had put on my desk. “All of this is cold. You should come down and microwave it.”
    “I’ll eat it cold.” I didn’t want to leave my room. Or warm myself with food. “I’m really tired is all.”
    “Okay, then. I finally got Sheila to take one of the pills that Dr. Hilsinger prescribed. So I’m not going back over until tomorrow morning. Unless…” My mom trailed off.
    “Unless we hear something.” I finished for her. Mom didn’t shut the door behind her like usual and I felt weird about running over and closing it. I waited until I heard her get all the way to the bottom of the stairs and then went to the bathroom just to close my door when I came back.
    I went online and checked e-mail. I thought about asking around to see if anyone had heard anything about Dean, but searched instead for local news headlines. I figured even our pieceofcrap newspapers would be less insane than the Colt River High rumor factory. Nothing in the Hunterdon County Record , but the New York Times said the police had been questioning a “person of interest.”
    That was what they were calling Dean now.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    I set my cell phone alarm to vibrate and went to sleep fully clothed. I listened