12. Chapter Twelve
Chapter Twelve
“How did it go?” Mia asks when I reach the Jeep. “You guys ready to adopt each other now?” Her tone has a slight bite to it, and I frown.
“You okay?” Gabe asks, while I try to figure out why Mia is upset with me. She has to realize she was monopolizing the conversation. I should be upset with her.
“It was fine.” I don’t want to say I totally messed up with Gabe standing right there, and I’m mad again that he invited himself along to babysit. I tuck away the worry to talk over with Mia later and climb into the back seat, but Mia takes shotgun instead of joining me. It’s more comfortable when we’re not both squished into the back, I guess.
“Where to next?” Gabe asks.
“I’m not sure. Seth knows the other two siblings, but he wouldn’t give me any info except that the other sister follows his Instagram.” Sister. I have a sister. It’s still surreal. I pull up my RootsDNA account, but there’s still no message from either of the other two sibling profiles.
“Can you pull up Seth’s Instagram?” I ask Mia. “I want to scan for anything that looks like a sibling reaction in his comments. Can you take the last six months and I’ll do the six before that?”
“So I’m supposed to sit here and do what?” Gabe asks. “Play Candy Crush while you two stalk Instagram?”
“Basically,” I mutter.
“Fine. Tell me when you give up so I can drive us home.”
“That was mean even for you,” I say, glancing up from my phone. “How many times do I have to remind you that it’s your fault you’re here?”
“He’ll be less grumpy if we feed him,” Mia says.
“Find a drive-thru,” I say.
Mia and I scroll for a few minutes while Gabe pulls into a fast-food place and orders a breakfast sandwich, but instead of parking to eat, he puts us back on the road.
I lean through the front seats. “Excuse me, where are we going?”
“Flagstaff. Route 66 runs through there. Seems like a road trip ought to include Route 66. Better than sitting here while you guys stalk.” He looks over his shoulder at a red light. Our faces are only inches apart, but I stay put.
“But how far is it?” I demand. “What if it’s the opposite direction of where I need to go? Pull over.”
“What if it’s the same direction? It’s better than sitting here forever.”
“Pull. Over.” I grind the words out through clenched teeth.
He gives an irritated sigh but pulls into a 7-Eleven parking lot. “This is stupid.”
An itching starts in my chest, but it’s not the kind that scratching will help. Yelling at Gabe would take care of it.
Mia shoves a quarter at me. “Flip. Heads we stay parked, tails we drive.”
“I don’t need to flip. I already know what I want to do.”
“It doesn’t always have to reveal great truth,” she says. “Sometimes it’s just a tiebreaker.” Annoyance laces the words.
“Why are you mad?” I ask.
“Seriously?” She twists to look at me.
Gabe turns his head like he’s trying to distance himself from the conversation.
“Can we talk outside?” I ask her.
“Why?”
“So we can work this out in some privacy?”
“I don’t need any privacy. There’s nothing to work out.”
“Then why are you mad?”
“Why do you keep saying I’m mad? I’m fine. I’m doing your wild goose chase.” She waves her phone. “You know, like a good little friend. Flip the stupid quarter so we can decide if we’re staying or going.”
There will be no pushing her. Mia talks when she’s ready to talk and not a second before. She’ll eventually calm down and understand why I needed to take time with Seth for myself.
I almost tell her that she should be the tiebreaker and take my side, forget the stupid quarter. But her temper burns quick, and she’s just as likely to storm out of the Jeep and escalate the situation.
I’m about to flip it when she says, “I’m fine.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t say it like you don’t believe me. I said I’m fine .”
“You know what’s more fun than being a road trip chaperone?” Gabe asks. “Being a chaperone when the kids are fighting.”
“Remember how you’re Free Uber Guy?” I snap. “Nobody wants you here and definitely nobody wants to ride in a Jeep that reeks of gym socks”—Gabe scowls—“and the Uber Guy doesn’t get to have an opinion about where we go. It makes no sense to get on Route 66 before we even have a destination. Worst. Uber. Ever.”
“I’m with Gabe,” Mia says.
Only because you’re mad at me. I take a deep breath, trying to figure out how to get Mia and me back on course. “Okay. For you and only for you, I’ll flip a quarter. Heads, we stay here and figure out our next move, tails means we go check out Route 66 and do our sister sleuthing along the way.”
“Okay.” Her answer is level, her way of taking the peace offering.
I flip and admire the spin but wrinkle my nose when I check it. Damn it, George. “Tails. Route 66.”
Gabe, catching my face in the mirror, smirks.
“Just drive,” I order. “And if you complain anymore, I’m going to spend the next two hours singing every version of ‘Route 66’ I can find.”
“My Jeep doesn’t smell like gym socks,” Gabe says, putting the Jeep in gear. He adds in a low voice to Mia, “Does it?”
“No, Kendall’s teasing you.”
I might feel bad if he weren’t dragging us into the middle of nowhere. Instead, I get back to Seth’s Instagram without any guilt for the sock comment.
“We’ll start with the original ‘Route 66’ version,” Mia says as the first notes of a fifties song fill the Jeep while I scroll. By the second chorus, she’s singing along about a string of cities from New Mexico to California, with Flagstaff right in the middle of the list.
I tune her out and keep searching.
We’ve only driven for a few miles when Mia interrupts her singing. “Watch for a commenter named Powder_fresh.”
“You think that’s her?” I go back to the first picture I started with and look through the comments and likes again. About a month after Bg112, the blank pink profile, joined RootsDNA, this Powder_fresh profile starts showing up pretty regularly to like Seth’s pictures. I scroll more, and about three months later she starts to drop occasional comments. “Good luck,” on a pregame picture. “Dork,” on one with Seth and some friends in Nacho Libre costumes.
She sounds like any of his friends who chime in until I scroll through two more months to a picture of his messy hair he captioned, “Mid-term hair. #cowlicksoextra.” And it’s true. He’s got an all-star cowlick sprouting near the crown of his head. Powder_fresh commented, “I have those too. Must be a bio thing.”
A bio thing. A biological thing? Like how Seth and I have the same green eyes? I recognize the satisfaction in her comment, like she’s pleased to have pinned down a similarity between them.
I reach up and touch the spot near my crown that always acts unruly. I can’t keep my hair too short or it sticks up too.
“I think you’re right,” I say to Mia, reading the comment aloud to her. “Pink avatar Bg112 is Powder_fresh. Has to be.”
“Listen to this one from February 14,” she says, craning around the seat to talk to me. “He posted a meme that says ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, vodka costs less than dinner for two.’” Gabe snorts. We ignore him. “Powder_fresh comments that hating Valentine’s Day is definitely genetic.”
I click open Powder_fresh’s profile picture, thirstier for information than the Arizona desert flying past us is for water. Her profile picture is an orchid. Her bio only says, “Seeker, rider, maker, thinker,” which doesn’t tell me much. I work through her feed, recent pictures first. Mostly it’s pictures of a valley with mountains in the distance.
The sixth one explains her screenname, I think. It’s the first one to show a person, a slim girl—or young woman?—standing at the top of a ski run. The picture is shot from the back. She’s wearing a bright green snow jacket, and she’s strapped into a snowboard, her arms thrown wide like she’s trying to hug the blue sky above her. I can’t tell anything else about her except that her hair is very dark and barely long enough to make the ponytail she’s gathered it into.
“Some more clues,” I say. “We’re looking for mountains and someone who snowboards.” I scroll through more pictures, looking for ones that show her face.
“Cool. So the Smokies, Rockies, Catskills, Appalachians,” Gabe says. “Basically, not the Midwest. Narrows it right down.”
Mia peers at her phone. “Those mountains are pretty pointy. Less erosion. That means a western mountain. They’re newer.”
They remind me of our Colorado ranges. “Wouldn’t it be funny if she’s in Denver or something?”
Gabe snorts, but Mia’s shaking her head. “I think she’s in Oregon. Check out this picture.”
It shows her feet strapped into a snowboard. It’s captioned “Best thing about Bend.”
I scroll and stop when I get to one of her and a younger boy in a restaurant booth hashtagged #brothersandbrats #nothingbetter.
I’m not quite sure how to process this first look at her face. “Check out this one.” I show Mia my screen, and she finds the photo on her own phone.
Mia studies it carefully. “Is she biracial?”
She looks Hispanic, maybe? If my skin tone is ivory and Mia’s is gold, Powder_fresh is somewhere in the middle. Her strong eyebrows curve over high cheekbones, and her hair is much darker than my medium brown. A hollowness echoes through my chest, the same feeling I get when I drive past an empty industrial park in Adobe. It’s a space where things should be but aren’t. We look nothing alike, but if this isn’t my sister, my only lead may be slipping away. “Maybe this isn’t her,” I say, “but why would she make those comments about cowlicks and hating Valentine’s Day being genetic on Seth’s stuff?”
“Hey, you remember how Adrian married a white girl?” Gabe asks. “And how they made a kid who’s biracial?” Sarcasm drips from every word.
“Yeah, but we knew Maverick would come out biracial,” Mia says. “I think Kendall expected her siblings to be white.”
“I did,” I say. “Just hadn’t occurred to me that they wouldn’t be. Not that I care, but I’m worried now that this isn’t the right person.”
“I don’t see why else she would make those comments,” Mia says. “This is her.”
I reach through the seats and grab Gabe’s phone.
“What the—”
“I’m setting a new pin for Bend. That’s Oregon.”
His arm waves behind him as he blindly grabs for his phone, brushing against my knee and squeezing it, releasing it and groping farther up my leg in search of the phone.
He’s leaving a trail of heat everywhere he touches. I push his arm away. “Knock it off, perv.”
“You wish. Give me my phone.”
Instead, I grab his arm again and hold it down with one hand while I reach around him with the other to hold the phone in front of his face so it unlocks. Then I collapse against my seat, making sure to sit exactly where he can’t touch me no matter which arm he reaches back with.
“Dammit, Barrows.”
“I’ll give it right back.” When I open it, a picture of me fills the screen. I’m sitting in the restaurant booth alone after Seth left. An odd feeling curls through my stomach, like I’ve caught Gabe staring at me, but I don’t know how to feel about it.
“Gabe? Why do you have a picture of me on your phone?”
Mia looks up from her screen.
“I wanted something recent to show the cops if things went wrong.” Mia nods like this makes a lot of sense. “You can put in the new destination after I see Route 66,” Gabe adds. “Give my phone back.”
I set it on the console then pick up my own phone to figure out what kind of DM to send my probable sister, but I can’t help sneaking a glance at Gabe. He’s watching me in the mirror, but his gaze darts away as soon as I meet it, back to the road.
I open a new message to Powder_fresh, but I can’t help wondering . . . Why did Gabe snap a picture of me after Seth had already left and there wasn’t any danger at all?