Messenger 93 Read online

  A wave of willful belief surged through me. Boy would be there and he would talk to me and he would get it. He’d grasp a key piece of information that would help all of us see what needed to be seen.

  I’d forgotten to bring along a binder to pry the window open, so I fished in my coat pocket for my bus pass. I stretched off the branch as far as I could. The tip bowed and rocked. I was a lot heavier than I’d been at ten. If I was going to survive the jump into his window, I’d have to use quick and accurate movements.

  I slipped the bus pass under the bottom edge of the windowpane and jerked around until the pane lifted ever so slightly. Then I braced my fingers under the sash and pressed up. The window slid open as easily as if I were inside on a summer day and just wanted a cool breeze.

  Before I could second-guess my decision, before Boy could wake up and maybe defend himself in some violent way, I launched myself off the branch and into his room.

  There was a commotion. Grunting, a stifled scream, thumping, stumbling, a bang, and a soft thud. But I hardly made a sound — I landed clean on the broadloom, like a cat. The air was humid; it smelled stale and salty.

  A reading light clicked on and Boy was staring at me from his bed. My heart tilted in its familiar, sickening way.

  He blinked a few times, like he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing — not “who is that?” but “what is that?” His thick, loopy hair was rumpled, sticking up. The sheet was pulled tight against his waist. He wasn’t wearing pajamas, or at least his chest was bare, and there was a blotch of bright red on his white, hard-muscled skin. He didn’t look like he’d just been woken from a deep sleep. Actually, he looked pretty alert.

  “It’s okay, Boy. It’s just me. It’s me.”

  Being with him in his room brought me straight back to the old days when we used to hang out, flopped on his bed, laughing until I thought I’d burst. A feeling of pure joy came over me.

  “What is — What the —” He rattled his head.

  “I know, Boy. I’m sorry. I had to come —”

  “You can’t just break into my room —”

  “I know, I get it. But wait till I tell you —”

  “It’s like the middle of the —”

  “Just hear me out for a minute —”

  “Middle of the — It’s fucking —” He fumbled with his phone. Checked the screen.

  “Please, Boy — I just need to talk to you about this one thing —”

  “Are you high?”

  “No!”

  He leaned on his arm to look behind me, as if the shadows in his room were explaining why I was there. “Aw shit.” He slumped and ran a hand through his rumpled hair. “If I hear you out, will you leave?”

  “Trust me. If you hear this, you will get it.”

  He sighed. “Okay, whatever, go on.”

  But I couldn’t have stopped it from coming out if I’d tried. My heart was pounding so fast, it was a volcanic eruption.

  “I had this dream yesterday night, Boy. Not a regular dream. But a mind-blowing one. I dreamt that this giant crow came out of the sky and it had this really important message it had to give me. In my dream, I watched it fly closer and closer, and it was creepy and weird, but also really magical and cool. And then the whole thing started to feel really real.” Chills and goosebumps threaded over my skin and up over my head. I couldn’t believe it was finally okay to tell someone. “But then I could feel myself wake up, and when I opened my eyes, the crow was right there. Like, it was actually hovering over my bed. And it spoke to me. I could see it and hear it in my room. It called me Messenger 93. It told me that I had to find Krista. That if I don’t find her in seven days —” I took a breath. “Then she’s going to fall, Boy. It told me I had to save her. That saving her would save us all. That’s exactly what the crow said, I swear. As she falls, so do we all.” The edges of reality softened and smudged, like a vintage film shot. “And then today, Boy? Clio’s kid — the baby? — he said that a crow told him that you’re going to help me.” I pointed out the open window at the maple tree. “That’s why I had to come here, Boy. It’s like a sign or something. We can’t ignore it. We’re supposed to do this together.”

  Boy had such a look of amazement on his face. It was disorienting and thrilling to have him see me again. No excuses, no Krista pulling him away.

  “We have to find her, Boy. We still have six days. We can save her.”

  A smile suffused my whole being. I felt beauteous. Krista wasn’t even a person anymore. She was a mission.

  “C’mon, Boy, say something.” I smiled at him. Let his incredulous gaze penetrate me. “What do you think?”

  “For fuck’s sake.” The hardness of his voice startled me. Those were the last words I expected to hear in that sacred, awe-filled moment. “My name is Boyddddd. Boyd. With a ‘d’ at the end.” My body went cold as his words serrated the stale and salty air.

  Boy. It was my nickname for him.

  “A crow? Messenger 93? You know that’s crazy, right?”

  The story of the crow recoiled back inside me like a pulled cord. I could feel it winding tightly inwards, into my deepest emptiness, away and out of his sight.

  But I nodded and managed a smile. “You’re right, Boyd. I’m so sorry.” I was very small. A cricket. “I haven’t had much sleep.” I was hyper-conscious of my blinking eyes. How Boyd disappeared and reappeared, disappeared and reappeared. “Okay, I’ll get out of your hair now.”

  “Good.” He flopped his head back, cringed like he was in pain.

  “Okay, well —” A cool breeze swirled in through the open window. “Before I go —” I readjusted my clothes like they were somehow stopping me from leaving right away. “It’s just that — Can I ask you one more thing?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Can you think of anything about Krista that you haven’t told anyone else? Something that might help find her? Even if it seems random or insignificant?”

  “You don’t think her mom and the cops and everyone asked me that already? You don’t think I told them? They downloaded all our data. They have everything we ever did or said. They searched my house. Homicide and Missing Persons. That’s what the department is called. Like I hid her body in the walls or something.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That is — That’s terrible.”

  He scrunched the hem of the sheet against his bare chest. His expression lost its edge. “I swear, I have no idea where she is.” His voice lost its edge too. He sounded more like the Boy — Boyd — I remembered. “Other than the text,” he said, “I haven’t heard from her at all since she left.”

  “And what about the text?”

  “What about the text?”

  “Only you? The emojis? The eye, finger, scissors, stars?” Yes, I’d unintentionally memorized it. “What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, exasperated. Traumatized maybe. “That she was pissed I broke up with her?”

  The flow of blood to my head stopped. I reached for the windowsill. “You broke up?”

  Boyd collapsed into a deep, despairing slump. He said, so low it was almost a whisper, “It happened right before she left. The night before.” He groaned and rubbed at his face, his eyes. “Aw shit! I shouldn’t have said anything.” He threw his head back, scrunched at the sheet along his chest. “This is my fault.”

  “No, Boyd, it’s not. It’s not your —”

  “Please don’t tell anyone, okay?” He looked at me and there were actual tears brimming along his bottom lids. “Her mom doesn’t even know yet. I was going to tell her yesterday — But there was too much — She was crying — Expecting me to — Please don’t tell anyone! I’ll do it. I swear. I’ll tell her today.”

  “Sure, of course. I would never tell.” I fumbled with my coat. It was impossible to process.

  “I’m no
t smart like you guys.” He stuck his thumbs into his tears and jerked them away. “I’m not a detective. I don’t know what any of your messages mean.”

  I tried to clear my head. “I thought there were no other messages.”

  “Your message. I don’t know what it means either.”

  I racked my brain — somehow I’d lost track of what we were talking about. “You mean the stuff about the crow and saving Krista?”

  He threw up his hands in frustration. “Krista hates you. Why do you even care what happens to her?”

  It was too much. I didn’t know what I wanted right now, what I was supposed to do, what any of this meant. I looked out the window and measured the distance to the maple’s reaching arm. If I missed, it was a long way down. Falling might actually be less painful than this.

  I tried a low-key impression of my brother Trevor: “If the crow says you have to go, then you have to go.” And before I could speak another tragically miscalculated word, I launched myself out of Boyd’s window and into the night.

  2

  THAT WAS IT — I had cracked. It had been one too many things and I had cracked and I would be forever broken. And my brokenness would be glaring to everyone and it would be the only thing anyone would ever see and I would be accused of being nothing but eggshell for the rest of my life.

  I hooked my backpack over my shoulders and ran blindly down the street. Boyd’s words kept repeating in my head.

  I have no idea where she is. She was pissed I broke up with her. I hid her body in the walls. Krista hates you. Why do you even care what happens to her? Fucking crazy.

  I collapsed on someone’s driveway behind their giant burgundy SUV. Didn’t people self-harm when it got to be too much? It suddenly seemed like a solid approach. If you hurt yourself, all other hurts would pale.

  I slapped the pavement. There was a radiation of heat. Tiny pebbles imbedded my palms. I slapped the pavement again, harder. The ache was metallic. Electric. I slapped again and again. There was something to it. Boyd — his scorn, his despair, his distractingly bare chest — receded with each fresh blow.

  “Hey, hey, stop.”

  I turned around to find a woman standing over me. She was backlit and mostly a silhouette, but I could see she was fussing with her jacket, zipping it up. As my vision adjusted to the dark, she began to rack into focus. Not a woman — a girl. Rows of smooth gold-ringed braids framing her face. “Remy?”

  “Hey. Hi.” Everything about her was tense. On high alert. “I just came from Boyd’s.”

  The stifled scream when I jumped in — it had sounded high for Boyd.

  “You were there?”

  “It freaked me out when you came in through the window.” She was pulling out her phone, tapping into the screen. “I kind of ended up on the other side of the room.”

  Mortification filled me. It set me on fire. “You heard all that?”

  I remembered Boyd eyeing that one dark corner behind me.

  “He needs my help right now, okay? This has been really hard on him.” Bitterness seemed to ignite off her, drifting through the air and landing like tiny alien beings on my skin. She stuck her illuminated phone in my face. “Why did you send this to him?”

  I stood up. It was a screencap of a message in Boyd’s inbox. An owl emoji, Fri at 2 beside it.

  The message was from my Ittch account. The Ittch account I had deleted a year ago. Sent the morning before. Around the time I was loitering in front of Boyd’s locker. “I didn’t send that.”

  “At first I thought it was because you had something to do with Krista being gone.”

  “Me?”

  “Because you hate her so much.”

  “I don’t hate — I don’t —” But I did. More than anything.

  “I was going to tell the cops about you, but Boyd wouldn’t let me. He couldn’t figure out what you wanted, but he didn’t think you, like, kidnapped her or something.”

  I remembered how Remy had lurked me at school all day. Like she was at war with me.

  I could hardly speak. “Well … Good. Because I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, I know that now. After what just happened.”

  All the things I’d said about the crow.

  “Are you trying to get with him?” She looked so serious, I almost laughed.

  “No,” I said, just as seriously. “That is so —” I couldn’t think of the right word — “gross.”

  She took a breath. Seemed to relax.

  I examined my palm. The pavement had left a mosaic of tiny indentations. “So you and Boyd are together?”

  “I — I think so.”

  Remy sitting on the sidewalk down the street from Krista’s house. Waiting for Boyd to finish with the cops and Clio. There to help him through his trauma.

  “Does Krista know about you?”

  “God, no!”

  All the new pieces of information were still floating in. Landing one by one.

  Boyd had broken up with Krista.

  Boyd had broken up with Krista.

  Boyd had broken up with Krista.

  It didn’t seem like a possibility. And I don’t mean a possibility in this story of Krista, I mean a possibility in all the manifestations of the space-time continuum.

  They were the perfect couple. Soul mates. Destined to be together always.

  But they had ended. And now he was with Remy.

  “He’s such a mess,” Remy said plaintively, as if she’d heard my thoughts. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  I ran my fingers over the indentations on my palm. “It’s not Boyd’s fault that Krista ran away,” I said. “He’s allowed to break up with her. He’s allowed to be with you.”

  “That’s what I keep saying!”

  And he was. Remy was a thousand-million times better than Krista. Anyway, it would never be me.

  Remy seemed to consider something. Her expression changed — she was older than me suddenly. The mature one. “You said you wanted to know everything about Krista?” she said. “Even if it seemed random and insignificant.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know what this is.” She huddled her chin into her jacket collar. “Or if someone told the cops or Krista’s mom about it already.”

  “What?”

  “The day she ran off, I saw her at the park with that dell girl.” She raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to react.

  “From the deli? On Twentieth?”

  “No. Dell. You know, Dell.”

  My brain scanned over all the school-famous names and faces I was supposed to know. There was no Dell in any memory track. “From Careers and Civics?”

  “No. Dell. Dell. You don’t know Dell? She’s that social media star. The one on Ittch with all the followers.”

  Except I wasn’t on Ittch. Despite owl messages sent from my account the day before.

  Remy said, “She goes to Fairdale Collegiate?”

  I still had no idea who we were talking about.

  “I couldn’t believe it was her,” Remy was saying. “I’d never seen her in real life before. And there she was with Krista.”

  If Remy knew who Dell was, Krista must’ve known too. It should’ve impressed her. Meant something to her. “What time?”

  “Like, 12:30. Lunch break.”

  Everyone already knew that Krista’s last confirmed sighting was lunchtime in the park in front of our school. But I hadn’t heard anyone talk about seeing a famous girl named Dell.

  “You talked to them?”

  “No. God, no.”

  “You saw them talking to each other?”

  “She was posing.”

  “Krista posed for her?”

  “No, Dell was posing. Krista took a picture of her, then she gave Dell her phone back and then she left with her frien
ds.”

  “Krista left?”

  “No, Dell left … Here, wait.” She tapped into her phone again, clicked into her Ittch account, and angled the screen towards me.

  Dell was gut-wrenchingly pretty. Her style was late-last-century: tousled white-blond hair; calligraphic eye liner; tight top, loose pants or tight pants, loose top; various vintage leather boots; strategic skin. She had more followers than kids who went to all the high schools in the city combined.

  Remy clicked on the latest post. Sultry cool-weather look. Pale pink full-length cashmere coat fluttering open to reveal a tight, black, belted one-piece. It was one of the few long shots on her feed. Framed, I guess, to show her arm sticking out and her thumb pointing down. Behind her was a short stretch of park grass, then the street, then our school. Underneath the photo, there were thousands of likes, hundreds of comments.

  “She does this thing,” Remy said, pulling her phone back to look at the photo herself, “where she picks a school and challenges the girls to beat her like-count. Then she gets shots of herself in front of the losing school.” She waggled her phone at me. “Like this. Always taken by someone who goes there. But this post? The one Krista took? It went viral. Like, it sent Dell to a whole new level. Everyone knows her now. They just announced her as the host of that huge Influencers party next week.”

  I waited for some epic meaning to fall into place. A clue that would reveal Krista’s true whereabouts. But nothing. There hadn’t been a big fight between Krista and Dell. Krista hadn’t run after them. Dell hadn’t forced her into a van or anything.

  Remy looked at me expectantly. “I mean … Maybe Dell knows something. And — I don’t know — maybe if it’s a young person asking her questions, instead of, like, a cop or whatever, she might tell you something.”