Eden murmured something so he paused his episode again.
“What?” he asked without taking out his earbuds. An old friend of the beauty queen’s had just come out of the woodwork, and he really needed to find out what she had to say.
“What do you think that is?” Eden nodded toward the front of the room. “That thing on the desk.”
Marwan turned and saw the black cube she must have been referring to. “Don’t know,” he said. “Bluetooth speaker thing or something?” He shrugged and hit play again.
He had a few texts from his father. Reminders about things to pick up on his way to work. Or things to do at the restaurant if he got there before his father did.
And whoa the best friend had just dropped a bomb of new information about the night the beauty queen disappeared. Something that threw the whole imagined timeline of the crime way off.
Marwan sent a gentle reminder to his father that he had soccer that afternoon and wasn’t working, and his father wrote back, Right. Of course. I will miss seeing you, son.
Leaving for college next year was going to be brutal; his father might not survive it.
Eden got up and walked forward, accidentally kicking a wad of paper that skipped like tumbleweed across the room. Marwan imagined the instruments in the corners of the room playing that famous Old West whistle—from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, was it? When she got about four feet from the desk, the object pulsed white-blue light once, then went dark again.
She backed away.
Marwan paused the podcast and took out his earbuds. “Hey, Alexa,” he tried. “Play some easy-listening music.”
The cube didn’t respond.
Eden said, “Ha ha,” dryly.
The room seemed eerily quiet even as a train rushed past outside—the rhythm of it like a gun being loaded and reloaded and reloaded but never fired.
Marwan said, “Okay, Google,” but the cube didn’t respond to that either.
“Was worth a shot,” Eden said.
The door opened, and Eli Alvarez came in, looked up from his phone at Marwan and Eden, and then looked down.
Marwan shrugged at Eden again and put his earbuds back in, resuming the episode.
EDEN
Before the door even closed behind Eli Alvarez, who slid into a seat without a word, Ilanka Sokolova walked in. Eden knew both of their names and not much else, except that Ilanka was rich and Russian and Eli didn’t talk much—at least not to Eden—but somehow managed to get in trouble for cracking jokes in class pretty regularly. She’d gone to school with him since sixth grade, and they had first period math together this year, but she wasn’t sure they’d ever had a conversation.
“What’s this about?” Ilanka said, irritation perched on her nose.
“We have no idea.” Eden checked her phone.
Ilanka took a seat.
Eli looked up from his phone—some game screen by the looks of it—and said, “Where’s Mr. McKay?”
Eden and Marwan shrugged.
Julian had just posted from Starbucks. A photo of his name, misspelled “Gillian,” on a cup.
Eli said, “What’s that?” and pointed toward the desk.
“No idea,” Eden said. “But it lit up when I got close to it.”
Eli looked at her like she was an idiot and stood. He walked toward the cube, and again it pulsed light, then stopped. Eli picked it up, turned it around to examine it, and shook it like it was a Magic 8 Ball.
“I wouldn’t do—” Eden said, but Eli cut her off.
“What exactly do you think is going to happen?” He had long dark bangs he had to flip out of his face.
She checked her phone. Noted the time stamp at Starbucks, then looked at the time. If she left now, maybe he’d still be there. “I don’t know,” she said. “What if it’s, like, a bomb?”
“If it’s a bomb, why are you sitting here?” Eli said.
Eden groaned. “I didn’t actually mean it was a bomb.”
“Then what?” He put the cube down.
She had liked Eli more when he didn’t talk to her.
Marwan looked at his phone. “Listen. Mr. M’s not here, and I’ve got to go.” He reached for his stuff.
The cube pulsed once, and again, and again.
One side of it lit up with letters—red words traveling like a stock market ticker around all four of its vertical sides. Eden could just make out the message:
I am not a bomb.
She had a rapid-onset bad feeling about this. A worse bad feeling than the low-level dread she had about most things.
That message went away, and a new one appeared. Eli went closer, bent down to read, and blocked Eden’s view.
“What’s it say?” she asked, and a chill burst inside her like it had that day her mother had called and said, “Something happened to Dad.” It settled like frost on her skin.
Eli turned to them with his eyebrows raised. “It says, ‘Nobody leaves.’ ”
MARWAN
“Yeah, okay, I’m leaving.” Marwan stood.
He wouldn’t be late for soccer if he hustled, and he really couldn’t be late because soccer was the way out. If Marwan managed a soccer scholarship, his father could hardly say no to his going away.
“I’m leaving, too,” Ilanka said. “That’s just creepy.”
She got up and threw her backpack onto her shoulder with such force that her water bottle flew out of its side mesh pocket and landed on the floor with a clang, like a dull cymbal. It skidded toward Marwan—a small herd of pink unicorns galloping across the room—and stopped at his feet, so he picked it up and handed it to her.
“Thanks,” she said.
Marwan wasn’t sure they’d ever been in a class together or even spoken, but somehow he knew her name. She was pretty, in a sort of severe, chiseled Russian way, which made sense because her parents, he was pretty sure, were Russian. Accents and all. She wore heavy makeup and had dark brown hair that was always tied back in a tight bun—like at any moment she expected she’d get a call from the Olympics and be asked to do an uneven parallel bars routine. He knew that about her, too, he guessed. Gymnastics. And now, unicorns, though she didn’t seem the type.
Eli was whatever the opposite of athletic was; he was tall and skinny but not like in a fit way. At lunch every day, he sat with a group of guys who were all into video games that Marwan had no time for, or maybe just no interest in. He and Eli had had an early class together last year, and Eli always came in looking like he’d stayed up too late—no doubt playing dumb games with remote competitors—and his grades notoriously suffered. He was a going-nowhere kind of guy who Marwan stayed away from without having to work very hard. They were on paths to entirely different destinations, so those paths never crossed.
His and Eden’s paths had crossed enough times over the years that he’d felt physically ill when he heard about her father’s accident. The school had really rallied around her and her mom—delivering meals and raising money—and flowers had appeared … then died at the intersection where it had happened. It was the reason Marwan had started wearing a helmet. But he and Eden had never been actual friends. He had the sense she was a bit of an outsider like he was, but somehow their outside spaces didn’t overlap.