Emmy & Oliver - Robin Benway Page 0,2

stay with you. We won’t leave, either.”

It was a promise that she kept, too. We didn’t leave. We stayed in the same house next door. Other neighbors left and new ones moved in, and all of them seemed to know about Oliver. He had become a local celebrity in absentia, famous for not being found, a ghost.

As time went on, it became hard to imagine what he looked like, even as the police age-progressed his second-grade school photo. We all watched an artist’s rendering of Oliver grow up over the years. His nose got bigger, his eyes wider, his forehead higher. His smile wasn’t as pronounced and his baby teeth morphed into adult ones. His eyes never changed, though. That was the strange part. The hopeful part.

We stayed and looked and waited for him to come back, as if our love was a beacon that he could use to light his way home, to crawl up the sides of the earth and back through his front door, his tag still sticking up in the back.

After a while, though, after years passed and pictures changed and false tips fell through, it started to feel like the beacon wasn’t for him anymore. It was for those of us left behind, something to cling to when you realized that scary things could happen, that villains didn’t only exist in books, that Oliver might never come home.

Until one day, he did.

CHAPTER TWO

I remember it was a Thursday because I had gone surfing that afternoon. I always go out on Thursdays because both my parents work late those days, which makes it easier to sneak a surfboard in and out of my car. It had been soft that afternoon, the sky hazy and the waves no bigger than three feet or so, and I was rinsing off in the shower at the edge of the sand when I heard someone screaming my name. “Emmy! Emmy! Where is she? Is she here?!” I looked up from the end of the path and saw my best friend, Caroline, tearing toward me.

Her hair was tangled, as tangled as mine after dousing it in salt water and sea air for a few hours, and she was dashing barefoot toward me, her shoes dangling from her hand. The whole beach stopped and watched as she hurtled down the hill, and I heard one surfer say to his friend, “Dude, she’s fast.”

I stepped away from the water, my heart racing. Was it my parents? An accident? Where was our friend Drew? Oh God, it was Drew. Something had happened to Drew! “Em,” she said, and there was something scary in her eyes, wild and hopeful and terrified all at the same time.

I had never seen her look like that before and I probably never will again.

“Emmy,” she said. “They found Oliver.”

It’s funny. You think about hearing certain phrases and you plan how you’ll react to them. They found Oliver. And yet when you do finally hear the three words you’ve been too frightened to even think about, for fear of jinxing them, for fear that you might never actually hear them, it’s like they aren’t real at all.

“Emmy!” Caroline grabbed me by the shoulders and bent down so she could look me in the eyes, her grip so hard I could feel her fingertips through my wet suit. “They found Oliver. He’s okay.”

“Caroline,” I said slowly. “You’re hurting me.”

“Oh, sorry! Sorry!” She let go of my shoulders but stayed close. “Are you in shock? Are you okay? Do you need something with electrolytes?”

I shook my head. “They found him? How—?”

Caroline grinned. “Your mom just called me. You weren’t answering your phone so she sent me to find you.” My mom knew what she was doing. Caroline is definitely the sort of person that you want to deliver news. Good or bad, she will rip that Band-Aid clean off.

“He’s in New York,” she continued. “He’s coming home.”

My knees were shaking. Maybe I needed something with electrolytes after all. “Who’s in New York?”

“Oliver, Emmy! God, focus!”

“Can I—? Where’s my phone? I need my phone!”

Caro was still jumping up and down as I ran up to my towel, digging around underneath it for my bag and finding my phone at the bottom. Seven missed calls and three texts from my mom: CALL HOME NOW, they all said.

“Did you tell my mom where I was?” I asked Caro, shoving my phone back into my bag and trying to get my wet suit off as fast