Meg Cabot - Missing You

Not that I’d specified a year or color. Any bike would have suited me fine. The fact that he’d gotten me such a perfectly pimped ride had really been the icing on what was already some pretty delicious cake.

Still, with one thing or another—the war, and then my acceptance to Juilliard—I had only gotten to ride her a couple of times. I hadn’t dared bring her to New York, where she’d have been stolen in—well, a New York minute. She was a real beauty, the color of the sky on an Easter Sunday—not quite turquoise, but not exactly teal, either. I loved her with an affection that probably wasn’t normal. I mean, for an inanimate object.

But she was just so perfect, with her cream-colored leather seat and shiny chrome trim. My dad had gotten me a matching cream-colored helmet, which I put on after dragging her out from behind my mom’s trim paint cans.

A second later, I was gunning the engine. It rumbled like the finely tuned instrument it was. Four months of disuse had done nothing to dull this beauty queen.

And then I was out on the street with her, feeling the tension that had settled in my neck—around about the time I’d opened my apartment door to find Rob there—finally starting to dissipate.

There is nothing like riding a really finely tuned motorcycle to get rid of stress.

But instead of turning towards downtown, where Douglas’s comic-book store was, I turned Blue Beauty—yeah, okay, so I’d named my bike. I think we’ve already established that I’m a freak—towards the newer part of town, over by the big, multimillion dollar hospital they’d finished a few years ago. New apartment buildings had sprung up all around it to house the several thousand people who worked there.

Not the doctors, of course. They all lived in my neighborhood. The orderlies and nurses lived in this one.

Hannah Snyder, as I’d learned from my dream about her, was crashing in Apartment 2T at the Fountain Bleu complex just behind the Kroger Sav-On, right next to the hospital. I was surprised to see that there really was a fountain at the Fountain Bleu apartment complex. It was kind of a lame one, but it bubbled away in front of the complex in a somewhat soothing manner. All it needed, really, was a couple of swans, and it would be like the real Fountain Bleu it was named for, over in France. Or wherever.

I parked the bike and stored my helmet in its carryall. Then I strolled across the parking lot and thumped once on the door to 2T.

“Who is it?” a girl’s voice asked.

“Me,” I said. “Open up, Hannah.”

She had no idea, of course, who I was. Not yet, anyway.

Still, I’ve found, over the years, if you answerMe whenever anybody wants to know who it is, they’ll nearly always open the door, thinkingthey ’re the dumb one for not recognizing your voice.

Rob’s little sister stared at me a full five seconds before she realized I wasn’t the “me” she’d been expecting.

But she definitely recognized me. Even though we’d never had the pleasure of making each other’s acquaintance before. I guess she was up on her local history. Either that, or Rob had a picture of me somewhere.

Okay, probably she recognized me from TV.

She said a very bad word and, looking panicked, tried to slam the door in my face.

But it’s hard to slam the door in someone’s face when they’re holding a motorcycle-booted foot against the door frame.

Seven

“Better let me in,” I said.

Hannah made a face.

But she let go of the door.

“I can’t believe this,” she was grumbling as I pushed the door all the way open and invited myself into a stark white, fairly small living-room-dining-room-den combo. The paint still smelled fresh, and all of the furniture—a cheap leather set that reeked of no-payment-down—looked brand-new.

“He said you two were broken up.” Hannah looked hot-cheeked and accusing.

“Yeah,” I said. “We are.”

I noticed a large-screen TV against the wall. She’d been watching Dr. Phil’s most recentFamily in Crisis . I wondered if she’d noticed any similarities between their lives and her own. I found the remote on the couch and flicked it off.

“Where is he?” I asked her.

“Who?”

Hannah had started to cry. Not because she was unhappy, I didn’t think. I think because she was frustrated. And maybe a little scared. It’s no joke when America’s foremost psychic hunts you down. Especially when she’s wearing motorcycle boots.

I guess Hannah doesn’t read the papers much or she’d have known—you know. That I hadn’t exactly been in top form lately.

I thought about telling her that she ought to be gratified that I’d found her at all. She was my first find in over a year. That had to be an honor, of some kind.

Except that to her, it probably wasn’t.

“You know who I’m talking about,” I said to her. “Where is he?”

“My brother?” Hannah sniffed. “How should I know? At the stupid garage, I suppose.”

“Not your brother,” I said. “Your boyfriend.”

Hannah’s mascara-rimmed eyes widened in an unconvincing attempt at looking innocent.

“What boyfriend?” she asked. “I don’t have a—”

“Hannah,” I said, “I didn’t come a thousand miles to listen to lies. Somebody’s paying the rent on this apartment. So tell me where he is, or I swear to God I’ll have Child Protective Services here in five minutes flat.”

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket to illustrate the seriousness of my intent. Although truthfully, I didn’t exactly have the number for Child Protective Services on my speed dial. I’d stolen that line fromJudging Amy , one of Ruth’s favorite TV shows, which she makes me watch in syndication at least five times a week. It is oddly addictive.

Hannah seemed to realize she was up against a force greater than her own, since she said with a defeated sniff, “He’s at work. He’s very important, you know.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” I said sarcastically. “What does he do?”

“His dad owns this place,” Hannah said with a flicker of In-Your-Face-Girlfriend ’tude. “The apartment complex, I mean. He helps run it.”

Well, that explained the apartment, anyway.

But not the rest of it.

“So you picked a real winner, there,” I said. Again with the sarcasm. “If he’s such a catch, how come your mom didn’t approve? And don’t even try to tell me she did. Is it because he’s too old for you?”

“She’s such a bitch,” Hannah said from the little ball she’d curled herself into on the leather couch. She was wearing jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. Between the shirt and her hair, which was still dyed to resemble spumoni ice cream, she was a veritable rainbow of color. “I mean, she brings home a different guy every week practically. But I tell her about Randy and she completely flips!”

I went to the window and pulled back the curtain liner. I could see the other side of the complex. There had to be over a hundred units altogether, making up Fountain Bleu Luxury Apartments. In the center of the complex was a pitifully small, kidney-shaped pool. A young mother sat beside it, as her kids paddled around in the shallow end.

“Where’d you meet him?” I asked, dropping the curtain and turning back towards Hannah. “Internet?”

She nodded. “A manga chatroom,” she said. “Randy’s a big manga fan. You know what manga is?” The look she darted me was sly.

“Japanese illustrated novels,” I said. I wasn’t about to mention that my brother had one of the foremost manga collections in southern Indiana. “Go on.”

“Well, he asked me to meet him in a private chat room, so I did.” Hannah was picking at the threads in a hole in the knee of her jeans. “And he was just…everything I’ve ever dreamed of. He asked me to spend the weekend with him, but when I asked my mom, she was like, no.”