The Fifteen Wonders of Daniel Green by Erica Boyce

Author:Erica Boyce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2019-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Six

Daniel

Nessa swears sharply under her breath when the guest room door creaks on its hinges and as she fumbles through her suitcase in the dark. When she accidentally walks into the bed on her way to her mattress, I give up.

“Don’t worry about it,” I say, and she stifles a shriek.

“Shit! Sorry,” she whispers.

When the air mattress’s plasticky shifting has stopped, I say, “Did you tell him?”

“Yeah,” she says, her voice flat. “He’s not coming home.”

In the light through the curtains, I can see her staring at the ceiling. I should probably just let her be. “Did you tell him it was stomach?” I ask stupidly.

“Yes.” She swallows hard enough that I can hear it. “Apparently…” She pauses. “I guess my dad said some pretty bad things about him before he left for med school. Not to his face,” she says, though she sounds unconvinced that the detail matters. “Charlie overheard him. But it—well, it makes it pretty hard for him to go back.”

I turn onto my back and close my eyes, like I’ll find the right thing to say inside my eyelids.

“We should leave in the morning,” she says.

I think of Zach, the way his voice picked up speed while he and Nessa made our Sunday plans. We would go to Golden Gate Park, they said, since I’d never been. Walk through secondhand bookstores and eat a late garlicky brunch. Charlie pulled out his phone while they talked, checking his emails, but he smiled in all the right places.

“Okay,” I whisper. “Sounds good.”

She turns away, toward the wall. “Good night,” she says.

“Good night.” And we settle in for a long night of listening to each other breathe in the dark.

* * *

When I wake up the next morning, the air mattress is already folded away and tucked under the bed. Nessa sits against the wall, staring blankly at a book. It’s Anne of Green Gables, the same one she was reading back on her parents’ porch.

“I didn’t know you brought that with you,” I say after I’ve cleared the sleep from my throat.

She stuffs the book into her bag and reaches for her phone. “I found this story on an extraterrestrial forum this morning. I don’t think you have to worry about that Ray guy anymore.” She tosses the phone to me. It lands facedown on the bed.

I flip the phone over and am about to tease her for finding those forums when I see the headline: “Local Eccentric Responsible for Rash of Crop Circles.”

I scan the article. Lionel did a good job—the list of circles includes all the ones from the past year where the town held some fragment of doubt. The one near Des Moines, where the local newspaper decided it must’ve been some big senior prank from the graduating high school class. The one in Montana, where everyone in town rolled their eyes and assumed the farm owner was just trying to draw attention to his new hemp field. (It didn’t help that he managed to mention the evils of cotton in every post-reveal interview.

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