The Art of Us

Chapter Four

Kal

Kal scrubbed his hands over his head and stared up at the ceiling of Geppetto’s. Ireland had left without saying goodbye. Dude. Not cool. Also intriguing. Why didn’t she want him to take her home? Was she living in a crap neighborhood and so felt ashamed of her situation? She couldn’t think he was that shallow, could she?

Maybe she thought he was some sort of skeeze and she didn’t want him to know where she lived.

He dismissed the thought with a laugh as soon as it came to him. Not likely. Nothing about him could have been called skeezy. Average, maybe ... sometimes he felt like he wallowed in average.

He turned his head to look at the door. How long could she have been gone? Taking the heavy cans off the shelves in the storeroom took fewer than two minutes. She had the pizza boxes, which would slow her down. Kal lifted his chin in the manager’s direction to get his attention. “Hey, Chaz. I gotta get.” When Chaz acknowledged him back with a raise of his own chin, Kal hurried out.

At the sidewalk, he inspected both directions. Nothing. She was nowhere to be seen. He chose right and started jogging. When he reached the next block, he spied her lithe frame and long, dark braids. She balanced the pizza boxes and turned left when she reached the next street, away from the direction he would have assumed. She was heading to the outskirts of town. There weren’t any houses in that direction.

Kal stayed low and used cars, trees, and shrubbery to block him from her view so she wouldn’t know she was being followed.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “Maybe I am a skeezer.”

He was surprised when she entered the almost invisible animal trail by the dumpsters behind a Lutheran church and disappeared into the tree line. “What are you doing, Ireland?” he whispered to himself. Maybe her family lived in a trailer in the woods?

Maybe.

He found it was harder to track her once they were in the trees because the trail had small twigs and branches that could snap with any step. But she stayed on the trail, keeping her footsteps one in front of the other as if she was purposely keeping her path as small as possible. He did the same, figuring he could respect whatever it was she was doing. It was getting dark, and with the sun’s exit from the sky, the temperature was dropping. Kal considered that he should have noticed the cold more, but the adrenaline pumped hot through him.

Adrenaline was weird—how it could boil blood and sharpen and dull senses at the same time.

Kal worked to be as silent as possible, but it felt like his breathing rasped loudly in the air around them. There was no way she couldn’t hear him. And maybe that was the appropriate thing. Maybe he should just call attention to the fact that he was following her rather than stalk her from behind like some axe murderer. Maybe he should call out, “Hey, Ireland, where are you going? Do you need a hand with those pizza boxes?”

But how did he explain the fact that he’d already been following her for as long as he had? She’d yank out her cell phone and call the police faster than he could say, “I’m sorry for being your local stalker.” Or worse, she could pull out a can of mace and spray him in the eyes. She could tell him he was the idiot that he knew himself to be and never talk to him again.

That would definitely be the worst. Because he liked her. And now that she was talking to him, he really wanted her to keep talking.

Because he’d stopped paying attention to the trail due to the attention he was giving to his internal battle, he caught a branch wrong, and it scratched the side of his face and across his ear. He bit back a yelp. If he was smart, he would go back. But how could he possibly go back now when Ireland was wandering through the woods by herself? She was doing something. And he needed to know what.

Blood trickled from the new wound in his cheek. He pulled the collar of his shirt up higher to apply pressure so the bleeding would stop. Stupid branch had got him good. He’d be lucky if it didn’t scar. But maybe the scar would make him look more adventurous? He scoffed at that. A musician with a scar. How much more clichéd could he get?

Kal finally came to a place where the trail seemed to open, not a lot, but enough that he didn’t feel like he was battling trees. And suddenly there was a building.

Well, “building” might have been an exaggeration. It was more of a cinder block shed. Careful not to snap any branches or twigs, he ducked behind some shrubbery and watched because Ireland had stopped. She glanced around and licked her lips and then rubbed them together. She disappeared inside the shed with the pizza boxes but came right back out without them.

She glanced around again and then went to a nearby tree and untied a rope he hadn’t noticed was there until she called attention to it by tugging on the knot. She balanced herself against a rock and started to lower whatever had been tied up in the tree. For the first time, it occurred to Kal to worry that maybe, of the two of them, she was the serial killer. Maybe she was the one hiding bodies out in the woods, and he had suddenly come across an evil plot he didn’t really want to be involved in. Especially when the thing that lowered from the tree line was a large duffel bag. It was big enough to hold a body, easy.

Stop that, he chided himself. Because really, what could a girl have out here in a duffel bag in the woods that she’d be willing to carry a bunch of pizza boxes to? If there was a dead body in that duffel, she wouldn’t have taken a picnic to it. Even so, Ireland clearly was up to something, or she wouldn’t look so nervous. So guilty.

Ireland untied the duffel bag from the rope and hefted it to the door of the shed. It was then that Kal noticed the door had a worn-out, sun-faded sign indicating a male and female. A bathroom?

She opened the door and went inside with her duffel bag. She closed the door behind her, and he heard the distinct sound of a lock clicking into place. What? A light flicked on through the small windows at the top of the bathroom. He waited for several moments, thinking she was just using the restroom before she continued on with wherever she was going. But she never came back out.

He crept closer, being careful not to step on anything that could snap or crack and give him away.

He could hear muttering from inside, a voice bouncing off the cinder blocks. She sounded like she was cussing someone out. Then he could hear water running. Still, she didn’t come back out. Was she going to stay there all night?

And then realization hit him like getting punched in the face. This is where she was sleeping. This is where Ireland Raine was living . Alone. In the woods. Totally vulnerable. This was why she sneaked pizza off of plates. This was why she ghosted through the school.

Ireland Raine was homeless. And he was pretty sure nobody but him knew it.

He stood there for a long time, unsure of what to do. Did he knock on the door and say, “Hey. I know your secret. Do you want to crash at my place for a night or two or three while we figure this out?” He couldn’t leave her there, could he? How safe was it for a teenage girl to be out on her own in the woods? And it’s not like he watched the news, but he heard enough about what was going on in the world to know that human trafficking was real, and for someone looking to exploit the vulnerable, Ireland had definitely put herself in a position to be of interest. He didn’t know what to do.

Kal pulled his phone out several times, intending to call someone, but he could never figure out who he was supposed to call. The police? His mom? One of Ireland’s friends? But as far as he was aware, she didn’t have any friends. It wasn’t just that she didn’t talk to him, but that Ireland didn’t talk to anybody .

He now felt like he understood why. She didn’t make those connections because she didn’t want anyone to know her secret.

He could respect that, which was why he put his phone back in his pocket. At the very beginning of this new friendship with her, he was not in a position to betray her secret. After all, she had locked the door. She was probably safe for now. Obviously, she’d been doing this for a while, so she could probably make it through the weekend. That would give him time to think of what he should do. There had to be something.

He carefully picked his way back to the trail that had brought him to Ireland’s little shed. As soon as he’d moved away far enough to be sure Ireland wouldn’t see it, Kal pulled out his phone and switched on his flashlight app so that he could see his way back to the Lutheran church where they had started. The last thing he wanted was to get lost in the woods. Ireland might know where she was at, but he really didn’t. He was new enough to the town that becoming disoriented in a maze of redwood and shrubbery sent a visceral shiver through him. Coming from the desert meant that there hadn’t been a lot of woods for him to get lost in growing up.

His brain worked furiously on the situation that was Ireland. He wanted to tell an adult. Hadn’t he always been taught that when something happened, you tell an adult? But did that count for when it was something that happened to someone else? Probably. But maybe not. He desperately wanted to do the right thing.

Helping Ireland doesn’t bring her back , he thought to himself. Until that thought came to him, Kal hadn’t realized what he’d been thinking: that maybe by saving one girl, he could save the other. But the other girl was far out of his reach. Out of anyone’s reach. She was buried under a headstone with horses carved into the granite. And there was nothing he could do about it. But maybe he could keep this girl from being lost in the same way his friend was lost. Couldn’t he?

Kal tripped over a branch that had been just barely sticking up out of the soft earth. He landed on his hands and knees and cursed. His mom and dad would have no idea what had happened to him when he showed up bleeding and scratched with dirty clothes. What would he say to them? How could he explain it without revealing the secret? The following Ireland into the forest part of the secret was his. Surely it was okay to tell that part. But wait; he couldn’t, right? How could he tell one part without revealing all of it? He picked himself up off the ground and rubbed his hands together to remove the dirt, small rocks, and leaves that had tried to embed themselves into his palms.

He worked to pay better attention to the trail even as he placed one foot in front of the other in a way that kept his trail as small and unnoticeable as possible. Kal didn’t want to lead some sleaze to Ireland’s shed and put her in danger.

Scary people existed in the world. No one knew that better than Kal. And he was not about to lose another friend to the scary people of the world. At the very least, he could make sure she had food. That was something in his power. He could figure out a way to get her shelf-stable groceries. Protein bars, cereal, apples, carrots. Stuff that would provide her good nutrition without her needing a fridge.

Of course, maybe she had a fridge. Maybe she had a full luxury studio apartment going on in there. How was he to know?

But then, that duffel bag didn’t look big enough to hold a fridge. No. She was trying to hide her presence. She wouldn’t have that place tricked out like it was her living space during the day while she was away. Why else would she hide the duffel in the tree?

He had to give her credit. The entire idea of her living situation was sort of ingenious in a Boxcar Children kind of way. Kal’s grandma had read him those books when he was a kid.

There was a part of him that wanted to say Ireland was living the dream. She had no parents to tell her what to do. No adults giving her rules and regulations. But the logical part of him understood it wasn’t a dream but more of a nightmare. There was also no security. No protection. No one to talk to. No love. No reminders to brush your teeth. No mom to insist on hugs and to scowl at you as you pretended you didn’t want them.

He felt a burn at the back of his throat and in his eyelids. Ridiculous. He was ridiculous. Crying over imagined hugs? Who did that?

At least there were no witnesses.

Kal released a noisy sigh of relief when the cross that topped the church came into view. He wasn’t going to get lost in the woods today after all. If he was in some sort of old-school Scouting program, they’d give him a merit badge for ... something. He didn’t know the merit badges well enough to know what he would get. Explorer? Adventurer?

More likely he would get a merit badge for Stalker.

He broke into a run when his feet left the path and were on solid pavement again. Kal ran all the way back to Geppetto’s, where he gathered up his things, loaded his beat-up, half-rust and half-red Dodge Ram truck and headed for home.

When he got inside, Kal felt a ping in his chest at seeing his dad absently scratching the top of his thick, dark hair. His dad had a laptop propped up on his long legs that rested on the gray footstool in front of the couch. His mom always said Kal was lucky that he got his father’s height and thick hair and dark eyelashes. Kal had never really wanted to look like his dad, but now seeing him after having been tromping around the woods made Kal rethink his disdain toward anything about his parents. His dad looked up. “Hey, kid, what kept you so late?”

Kal checked the time on his phone. Dang. It really was late. He was surprised his parents hadn’t called him to find out if he was dead in a gutter. They worried a lot more now than they used to, ever since the whole incident with Brell.

“Friends and I stayed after and had some pizza. We got to talking, and I guess we lost track of time. Sorry, Dad.” Kal hoped he looked contrite and not guilty. Honestly, he was surprised his dad hadn’t called. He was more surprised that his mother hadn’t called.

He found comfort in the fact that they worried. It took off some of the burden of worry he was carrying himself.

“Make sure you call when you’re going to be late. The kitchen is extra clean because your mom needed something to do instead of hovering. She’s now working on my office. Go interrupt her so that she can stop. I can never find anything when she cleans up after me.”

Kal grinned and shook his head. Gratitude surged in him, threatening to overwhelm him and make him break down and bawl like a baby right then and there. The fact that his mom had dared brave his dad’s office and the avalanche of bizarre receipts and paperwork that he kept in there meant she really was trying to give Kal the space that he had told her he needed.

He clenched and unclenched his fist as his smile slipped and he had to force it back up. “I’ll put a stop to that.”

In his dad’s office, his mom shoved back a strand of loose dark hair that had escaped her short ponytail as she stood and muttered over the desk covered in lopsided stacks of books and papers. Kal only caught every few words, but it was enough for him to get the idea. “What ... thinking? How ... find anything ... infuriating.”

“Hey, Mom.”

She whirled around as if she was doing a tryout for a horror film and needed to pretend to be more terrified than she’d ever been in her life. Her hand went to her chest in a clear attempt to put an end to the heart attack that had surely begun. “Oh, you’re home. Oh good. I really didn’t want to clean your dad’s office. Look at this.” She gestured to the desk and the piles on top of it. “It’s like he’s trying to do a reenactment of Everest. I’m almost certain that there’s climbing equipment in here somewhere.”

“Not that anybody would notice,” Kal said. “I really am sorry I was late. I should’ve called. I will next time.” Then he did something uncharacteristic of him lately. He stepped forward, opened up his arms, and folded his mom up into them. He’d grown a lot over the last year. He was a good foot taller and could easily rest his chin on top of her head.

“What’s all this?” she mumbled against his shirt sleeve.

“It’s just nice to have parents who care. I appreciate that you didn’t call to check in on me. That you trusted I was okay.” There was so much more he wanted to say. He was glad he was safe. He was glad he had a roof over his head and a bed to sleep in. He was glad he had food to eat. And he really wanted to figure out how to help Ireland get the same things.