Chapter Text
“I didn’t see you at lunch today.”
Riz picks absently at the fraying tweed of the speakers on Fig’s desk. She sits above him, on her top bunk, legs dangling free over the side. A hanging prism in her window casts a splash of rainbow across the far wall. “I went to the library.”
“No, like,” Fig says, “I didn’t see you in the lunch line.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Riz shrugs. “I wanted to get some work done.”
“Did you even eat lunch?”
Riz makes a noncommittal noise.
“Dude,” Fig says.
“You’re not my mom,” Riz says, somewhat petulantly.
Fig quirks an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah, would she be chill with you missing lunch?”
The silence is a little damning.
“Dude,” Fig repeats, knocking her heels together with a plasticky clack, “I’m supposed to be looking out for you.”
Riz bristles. It’s not his fault that he’s here in this weird town, acclimatizing to a whole new school, trying to complete an impossible task. Well, it is a little bit. His briefcase lingers in his sightline from its spot beneath the bed. “I’m a senior too, you know. I can handle myself.”
“I know.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Sorry.”
Fig falls back onto her bed, the springs squeaking beneath her. Riz doesn’t know what this all means. It’s only been a few days, but he honestly expected Fig and the others to forget about him, to go back to their normal lives and their normal friends. But they haven’t, for the most part, and all of them- save for Seacaster- make an effort to wave at him in the hallways, or say hi in the few minutes between bells.
It’s… strange.
On the top bunk, Fig lifts a hand to trace a smudge on the ceiling. “So,” she says. “You got any homework tonight?”
~
The first weeks of school pass in a similar fashion. Riz takes obsessive notes: in class, during passing period, at lunch, by the bike racks after the last bell. He studies and he analyzes and he observes, and somehow doesn’t make himself a complete social pariah in the process.
He’s a novelty, he’s pretty sure, and that’s why people keep coming up to him and talking about the case, or what it’s like growing up in Elmville, or offering information that they feel is crucial to his investigation. Very little of it is.
He meets with the Thistlesprings, whose boundless enthusiasm brings Gorgug’s endless world-weary expression and mild-mannered nature into an entirely different light. They tell him that they’re the neighborhood go-tos for broken cars, fridges, boats, bicycles, and the occasional plumbing problem. They tell him that if anyone comes in with a suspicious inquiry that they’ll let him know right away, and to please take a plastic baggie of homemade biscotti and share it with the Faeths.
He meets with the Aguefort Academy teachers, the ones who knew Lucy and the ones who didn’t. Some say that she was behaving a little strangely prior to her disappearance, maybe a fight with a friend. Some say that she wasn’t acting out of the ordinary at all, and anyone claiming otherwise is misconstruing teenage hormones in the face of the intrigue of a missing persons investigation.
He meets with Lucy Frostblade’s mother, by accident, in the dairy aisle of the local grocery store. She looks him up and down, his basket of butter and everything bagels, and glances away.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” Riz says, because he can’t keep his damn mouth shut.
Lucy Frostblade’s mother- Belinda, he knows this- turns to face him with a downturned lip. “God, they really couldn’t have sent a real detective, huh?”
The grocery store, the local food mart, is laid with brown linoleum tiles that lend the place a warm, unpretentious atmosphere. Here, under the fluorescent lights, everything is unnaturally cold. Belinda is easily two feet taller than him. She’s a grown woman, a mother, and Riz is some teenager with a briefcase and a license from the state. “I’m sorry,” Riz says, because he’s not sure what else to offer.
“Oh, don’t be,” Belinda says, and it should sound derisive but it doesn’t. She sounds exhausted. And she turns and walks down the snack aisle, leaving Riz alone with the milk and the cottage cheese.
So Riz works harder.
He takes obsessive notes, he organizes dossiers and theories and timelines, and he skips lunch some days. Shoot him.
He tries to understand the weird little world he’s found himself in.
Aguefort Academy is strange; it was founded by some eccentric rich man, apparently, who was upset that his young daughter had to shuttle back and forth from the mainland every day for kindergarten. So he built a private high school, in the style of a grand manor, and made it free. Where he gets the money to staff and maintain it Riz has no idea, which might be worth investigating. Nevertheless the days pass in a bizarre fashion, in faded art deco halls in a town where half of the residents are fishermen and ferry captains.
He had thought that this story of the mystical Arthur Aguefort was some long-gone fable until the second week of school, when he discovered that the aforementioned daughter was in his math class and the aforementioned Aguefort was the principal.
But the students are nice enough. Most of them take school seriously and talk about college admissions in the hallways. Some of them plan to stay on the island after they graduate. The boy in Riz’s history class says he can’t imagine living anywhere else.
There’s a choir, and a speech-and-debate team, and Kristen’s philosophy club. Sometimes people ask Riz if he misses his old school and he doesn’t know what to tell them, because the truth is just too embarrassing: that he doesn’t really give a shit about his old school and didn’t have any friends there anyway.
Not that he has friends here, either. It’s just the kind of thing he doesn’t bother himself with.
Riz finds out, through an alto in Kipperlilly Copperkettle’s a capella group, that Kipperlilly has some fixed appointment on Friday nights and that nobody knows where she goes, not even her closest friends. Or, if her closest friends know, they aren’t telling anyone. Which, having met Ivy Embra, seems unlikely.
And then Riz accidentally lets this slip to Fig, who decides right then and there that they have to do a stakeout.
“She’s probably just got therapy or something,” Riz argues. “SAT tutoring.”
Fig rolls her eyes. “We already took the SATs and she’s not hiding going to therapy of all things, little miss I-teach-yoga-before-school.”
And so, mostly to appease her and the other conspirators, they do a stakeout.
That Friday they each have an early dinner and wait to be picked up in Gorgug’s beast of a van, a lumbering, clanking thing covered in bumper stickers for bands too hardcore for Riz to even have heard of them.
Nor Seacaster, it seems, who whistles and says that they’re sick. “My parents,” Gorgug admits, ears pink.
Through the neighborhood they all pile in; it’s a roadie relic, with sideways couch seats and not a single seatbelt to be seen. Gorgug assures them that they’re in there somewhere, wedged in the cushions, but nobody can find any. So Gorgug drives and adheres to the speed limit just so that they don’t get pulled over. Seacaster pounds on the ceiling and begs him to go faster.
Kipperlilly lives in a thickly settled neighborhood just outside of town, one with nice houses and stilts for sailboats to sit on in their driveways over winter. Because Gorgug’s van is kind of conspicuous, they park down and around the block, where they can sort of make out the house from certain angles out the windows. Gorgug kills the engine and they sit, the six of them, waiting.
September 13. 6:35 PM.
Kipperlilly’s house is a yellow two-story colonial. It looks like houses in movies that they try and pretend don’t cost a million dollars (edit for subjectivity). Her parents are realtors, I think, or maybe just one. Explains how they’ve got such a nice house. Quiet wealth. The downstairs lights are on and maybe some of the upstairs ones, but it’s still bright enough outside that a light being off doesn’t mean someone’s not in the room.
Why is nobody in this van talking
We weren’t able to find out when exactly Kipperlilly’s appointment is, so hopefully we’re able to catch her leaving. And hopefully we’re able to follow her without notice, which is probably impossible and a stupid idea in the first place. Whatever. It’ll placate them. I think they’re jealous of not being as included in the investigation as they want.
Which is interesting, in terms of social evidence. These teens don’t seem to be broken up about the probable death of their classmate. They want to play spies and be included in the investigation. A good PI would call that suspicious behavior.
“You must stop that.”
Riz snaps his notebook shut, looking up at the disruption. It’s not about him, apparently, but about Gorgug drumming on his thigh with a pen, which Seacaster has just snatched out of his hand. Riz hadn’t even noticed.
“Dude, it literally wasn’t bothering anyone,” Fig defends.
Seacaster splutters. “Pen noises are one of the most bothering things in the world, there are lists about it.”
“Lists,” Fig repeats.
“Guys,” Kristen says.
Seacaster glares out the window.
They don’t like each other enough to organize a crime, Riz writes. So if any of them are suspicious, it must mean that it was a lone one of them, maybe two.
It’s hot in the van. Gorgug admits, only after people start sweating, that his heating has been broken since May and that they just haven’t gotten around to fixing it. Usually he just drives with his windows down, but that’s not really protocol for a stakeout.
Fig has taken off her big boots and sits stretched across the small middle aisle, her feet pressed against the opposite window.
Riz watches vague figures move in the windows of the Copperkettle’s house. “Kipperlilly teaches yoga before school?”
Fig rolls her eyes. “She does everything. If you can put it on your college apps, she’s doing it.”
“She’s the treasurer of the pre-med club,” Adaine says, “and one time I asked her what she wanted to study in college and she said rhetoric. So.”
“You think she’s disingenuous,” Riz summarizes.
Adaine snorts. “Sure.”
The sun sets slowly, first adorning the world in a bronze glow. Seagulls go wheeling overhead while Seacaster checks his watch.
It’s a little unbearable in the van. It’s hot, and they’ve been sitting in a hot metal box on the side of the road for about an hour and a half for no good reason, just sweating and bickering back and forth.
Riz doesn’t know why, really, they’re not all friends. He thinks that if he had known a bunch of teens from birth he would have jumped at the chance to befriend them, maybe have sleepovers and big birthday parties and stuff.
But they all sit, the five of them, sullenly watching Kipperlilly’s house like she’s going to jump out and yell ‘boo,’ absently picking up their phones to look at the lock screen and then putting them down again.
Riz undoes a button of his shirt.
“Fuck, marry, kill,” Gorgug says. “Sundays, jazz bands, parmesan cheese.”
For a moment there’s silence. Riz can feel sweat blooming on his temples; this was all a mistake, gathering this group in a van for hours, hoping something interesting would happen, something that would make all of this worthwhile. Gorgug’s bizarre conversation starter hangs in the air, and for a moment it really looks like it’s gone over like a lead balloon, and for a moment Riz thinks that this might be the most unbearable night of his life.
But then.
“Easy,” Seacaster responds. “Fuck Sundays, marry jazz bands, kill parmesan cheese.”
“What?” Both Fig and Kristen screech in unison.
Adaine shushes them, because at least she remembers that they’re on a stakeout. Fig ignores this, twisting around in the passenger seat to face the back. “Dude, fuck jazz bands, marry Sundays. Kill parmesan cheese.”
“Kill Sundays,” Kristen corrects, “fuck jazz bands, marry parmesan cheese.”
Adaine shushes them.
From the front seat comes Gorgug’s shy, earnest voice. “Does nobody want to fuck cheese?”
And Adaine lets out a wild, barking laugh, clapping her hand over her mouth in surprise at the sound that escaped her body, and everyone breaks down in fits of hysteria.
It lasts way longer than it should, the laughter. Even Riz can’t stop himself.
And then Adaine starts crying, her face beet-red, and that sets everyone off again, the fact that Adaine’s so undone by something that wasn’t even that funny.
It takes a while to gather themselves, a hectic few minutes of shushing and gasping and wiping away tears, until a lull falls over the van.
“You guys,” Fig says, giggling, “is she even here?”
And nobody can stop laughing after that.
~
They drop off Seacaster first, because he lives the farthest out of the way. Just before eight, thirty minutes after the sun set for good, they had turned in for the night and it a loss. Fig plugs her phone in Gorgug’s aux and blasts jangly, upbeat dance music. With the windows down, a safe distance from Kipperlilly Copperkettle’s neck of the woods, the feeling in the van is light and jovial. Nobody is thinking about what they would do if anyone had seen them, what that would do to their images and status. Instead they pull in at Seacaster manor, among the towering vacation mansions, and wait for a moment to come that feels like a proper ending to the evening. The big house is mostly dark. Gorgug idles in the driveway.
“Well,” Seacaster says, as they all hesitate for what to say. “Good night.”
“I’ll see you in gym on Tuesday,” Adaine offers.
“From the bleachers,” Fig jibes, poking her with her shoeless toe. “How long before Daybreak figures out that girls’ periods doesn’t last a month?”
Adaine pokes her back. “Another month, let’s hope,” she says, as Seacaster pulls the creaky sliding door open.
A man stands on the porch of the manor, silhouetted in light, broad-shouldered and imposing. And Riz realizes that this must be William Seacaster, the elusive and mythical proprietor of the marina.
Seacaster steps out of the van.
“Fabian!” Bill shouts from the porch, and Seacaster’s shoulders stiffen. “Late night adventure, eh?”
“I’m sorry,” Seacaster mumbles, and there’s one terrifying silent moment with dew on the grass and everyone’s heads stuck out through the windows, watching.
And then Bill laughs, wild and abrupt, and everyone breathes again. “Well come in, lad, and tell me all about it!”
Seacaster shoots one last look back at the van and goes off down the garden path, a slow, tired version of his usual swaggering walk. Bill lifts a magnanimous hand at Gorgug. “Ye drive safe, now,” he says.
Gorgug offers him a brief wave and guns it out of the driveway.
Riz and Fig are second-to-last to be dropped off, before Kristen, and it feels almost normal for Riz to leave with Fig and walk into her house. Some things have become second nature, like tossing his shoes into the shallow plastic tray by the door.
That night, while Riz journals and Fig noodles on her bass guitar, cross-legged on the carpet, Riz watches the easy curve of her posture and asks, “so are you guys all friends now?”
“No,” Fig says, insistent, but she can’t hide the shy tilt of a smile as she tucks her chin to play.