Since You've Been Gone Read online

  He looked up at me, then back down at his sneakers. “It’s happening again.”

  “Are you sure?” I crossed the porch to the door and pulled it open. I was hoping Beckett was wrong; after all, he’d only experienced this twice before. Maybe he was misreading the signs.

  Beckett followed behind me, stepping into what had originally been an entry parlor, but which we had turned into a mud-room, where we dropped jackets and scarves and keys and shoes. I walked into the house, squinting in the light that was always a little too dim. “Mom?” I called, crossing my fingers in my jean shorts pockets, hoping that Beckett had just gotten this wrong.

  But as my eyes adjusted, I could see, through the open door of the kitchen, an explosion of stuff from the warehouse store one town over. Piled all over the kitchen counters were massive quantities of food and supplies in bulk—instant mac and cheese, giant boxes of cereal, gallons of milk, a nearly obscene amount of mini micro cheesy bagels. As I took it in, I realized with a sinking feeling that Beckett had been totally correct. They were starting a new play.

  “Told you,” Beckett said with a sigh as he joined me.

  My parents were a playwriting team who worked during the school year at Stanwich College, the local university and the reason we had moved here. My mom taught playwriting in the theater department, and my dad taught critical analysis in the English department. They both spent the school year busy and stressed—especially when my mom was directing a play and my dad was dealing with his thesis students and midterms—but they relaxed when the school year ended. They might occasionally pull out an old script they’d put aside a few years earlier and tinker with it a little, but for the most part, they took these three months off. There was a pattern to our summers, so regular you could almost set your calendar to it. In June, my dad would decide that he had been too hemmed in by society and its arbitrary regulations, and declare that he was a man. Basically, this meant that he would grill everything we ate, even things that really shouldn’t be grilled, like lasagna, and would start growing a beard that would have him looking like a mountain man by the middle of July. My mother would take up some new hobby around the same time, declaring it her “creative outlet.” One year, we all ended up with lopsided scarves when she learned to knit, and another year we weren’t allowed to use any of the tables, as they’d all been taken over by jigsaw puzzles, and had to eat our grilled food off plates we held on our laps. And last year, she’d decided to grow a vegetable garden, but the only thing that seemed to flourish was the zucchini, which then attracted the deer she subsequently declared war on. But by the end of August, we were all sick of charred food, and my dad was tired of getting strange looks when he went to the post office. My dad would shave, we’d start using the stove inside, and my mother would put aside her scarves or puzzles or zucchini. It was a strange routine, but it was ours, and I was used to it.

  But when they were writing, everything changed. It had happened only twice before. The summer I was eleven, they sent me to sleepaway camp—an experience that, while horrible for me, actually ended up providing them with the plot of their play. It had happened again when I was thirteen and Beckett was six. They’d gotten an idea for a new play one night, and then had basically disappeared into the dining room for the rest of the summer, buying food in bulk and emerging every few days to make sure that we were still alive. I knew that ignoring us wasn’t something either of them intended to do, but they’d been a playwriting team for years before they’d had us, and it was like they just reverted back to their old habits, where they could live to write, and nothing mattered except the play.

  But I really didn’t want this to be happening right now—not when I needed them. “Mom!” I called again.

  My mother stepped out of the dining room and I noticed with a sinking feeling that she was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt—writing clothes—and her curly hair was up in a knot on top of her head. “Emily?” my mom asked. She looked around. “Where’s your brother?”

  “Um, here,” Beckett said, waving at her from my side.

  “Oh, good,” my mother said. “We were just going to call you two. We need to have a family meeting.”

  “Wait,” I said quickly, taking a step forward. “Mom. I needed to talk to you and Dad. It’s about Sloane—”

  “Family meeting!” my dad boomed from inside the kitchen. His voice was deep, very loud, and it was the reason he was always getting assigned the eight a.m. classes—he was one of the few professors in the English department who could keep the freshmen awake. “Beckett! Emily!” he stepped out of the kitchen and blinked when he saw us. “Oh. That was fast.”

  “Dad,” I said, hoping I could somehow get in front of this. “I needed to talk to you guys.”

  “We need to talk to you, too,” my mother said. “Your father and I were chatting last night, and we somehow got on—Scott, how did we start talking about it?”

  “It was because your reading light burned out,” my dad said, taking a step closer to my mom. “And we started talking about electricity.”

  “Right,” my mother said, nodding. “Exactly. So we started talking about Edison, then Tesla, and then Edison and Tesla, and—”

  “We think we might have a play,” my dad finished, glancing into the dining room. I saw they already had their laptops set up across the table, facing each other. “We’re going to bounce around some ideas. It might be nothing.”

  I nodded, but I knew with a sinking feeling that it wasn’t nothing. My parents had done this enough that they knew when something was worth making a bulk supermarket run. I knew the signs well; they always downplayed ideas they truly saw promise in. But when they started talking excitedly about a new play, already seeing its potential before anything was written, I knew it would fizzle out in a few days.

  “So we might be working a bit,” my mother said, in what was sure to be the understatement of the summer. “We bought supplies,” she said, gesturing vaguely to the kitchen, where I could see the jumbo-size bags of frozen peas and microwave burritos were starting to melt. “And there’s always emergency money in the conch.” The conch shell had served as a prop during the Broadway production of Bug Juice, my parents’ most successful play, and now, in addition to being where we kept household cash, served as a bookend for a listing pile of cookbooks. “Beckett’s going to be at day camp during the week, so he’s all set. Annabel’s going too,” my mother said, maybe noticing Beckett’s scowl.

  “What about camping?” he asked.

  “We’ll still go camping,” my dad said. Maybe seeing my alarmed look, he added, “Just your brother and me. The Hughes men in the wilderness.”

  “But . . .” Beckett looked into the dining room, his brow furrowed.

  My dad waved this away. “We aren’t going until July,” he said. “And I’m sure this idea won’t amount to much anyway.”

  “What about you, Em?” my mom asked, even as she drifted closer to the dining room, like she was being pulled there by gravitational force. “Do you have your summer plans worked out?”

  I bit my lip. Sloane and I had made plans upon plans for this summer. We had concert tickets purchased, she had told me she had mapped out something called a “pizza crawl,” and I had decided we should spend the summer seeking out Stanwich’s best cupcake. Sloane had a plan for both of us to find “summer boys,” but she had been vague on just how we were going to accomplish this. We’d blocked off the weekends we would drive upstate to the various flea markets she’d spent the last few months scouting, and I’d already gone through the drive-in calendar and decided which nights we needed to block off for the double features. She’d planned on making friends with someone who had a pool, and had decided this would be the summer she’d finally beat me at mini golf (I was weirdly naturally skilled at it, and I’d discovered that Sloane got strangely competitive when there were stuffed-animal prizes involved). I wanted to learn the zombie dance from “Thriller” and she wanted to learn the dance from London Moore
’s new video, the one that had sparked all sorts of protests from parents’ groups.

  At some point, we were going to need to get jobs, of course. But we’d decided it was going to be something unchallenging that we could do together, like we had the summer before, when we’d waitressed at the Stanwich Country Club—Sloane earning more tips than anyone else, me getting a reputation for being an absolute whiz at filling the ketchup bottles at the end of the night. We’d also left lots of time unscheduled—the long stretches of hours we’d spend at the beach or walking around or just hanging out with no plan beyond maybe getting fountain Diet Cokes. It was Sloane—you usually didn’t need more than that to have the best Wednesday of your life.

  I swallowed hard as I thought about all these plans, the whole direction I’d planned for my summer to go, just vanishing. And I realized that if Sloane were here, suddenly having my parents otherwise occupied and not paying attention to things like my curfew would have meant we could have had the most epic summer ever. I could practically see that summer, the one I wanted, the one I should have been living, shimmering in front of me like a mirage before it faded and disappeared.

  “Emily?” my mother prompted, and I looked back at her. She was in the same room with me, she was technically looking at me, but I knew when my parents were present and when their minds were on their play. For just a moment, I thought about trying to tell them about Sloane, trying to get them to help me figure out what had happened. But I knew that they’d say yes with the best of intentions and then forget all about it as they focused on Tesla and Edison.

  “I’m . . . working on it,” I finally said.

  “Sounds good,” my dad said, nodding. My mom smiled, like I’d given her the answer she’d wanted, even though I hadn’t told them anything concrete. But it was clear they wanted this off their plates, so they could consider their children more or less sorted, and they could get to work. They were both edging toward the dining room, where their laptops glowed softly, beckoning. I sighed and started to head to the kitchen, figuring that I should get the frozen stuff into the freezer before it went bad.

  “Oh, Em,” my mother said, sticking her head out of the dining room. I saw my father was already sitting in his chair, opening up his laptop and stretching out his fingers. “A letter came for you.”

  My heart slowed and then started beating double-time. There was only one person who regularly wrote to me. And they weren’t even actually letters—they were lists. “Where?”

  “Microwave,” my mother said. She went back into the dining room and I bolted into the kitchen, no longer caring if all the burritos melted. I pushed aside the twelve-pack of Kleenex and saw it. It was leaning up against the microwave like it was nothing, next to a bill from the tree guy.

  But it was addressed to me. And it was in Sloane’s handwriting.

  JUNE

  One Year Earlier

  “You sent me a list?” I asked. Sloane looked over at me sharply, almost dropping the sunglasses—oversize green frames—that she’d just picked up.

  I held out the paper in my hands, the letter I’d seen propped up by the microwave as I headed down that morning, on my way to pick her up and drive us to the latest flea market she’d found, an hour and change outside of Stanwich. Though there hadn’t been a return address—just a heart—I’d recognized Sloane’s handwriting immediately, a distinctive mix of block letters and cursive. “It’s what happens when you go to three different schools for third grade,” she’d explained to me once. “Everyone is learning this at different stages and you never get the fundamentals.” Sloane and her parents lived the kind of peripatetic existence—picking up and moving when they felt like it, or when they just wanted a new adventure—that I’d seen in movies, but hadn’t known actually existed in real life.

  I’d learned by now that Sloane used this excuse when it suited her, not just for handwriting, but also for her inability to comprehend algebra, climb a rope in PE, or drive. She was the only person our age I knew who didn’t have a license. She claimed that in all her moves, she’d never quite been the right age for a permit where they were, but I also had a feeling that Milly and Anderson had been occupied with more exciting things than bringing her to driver’s ed and then quizzing her every night over dinner, geeking out on traffic regulations and the points system, like my dad had done. Whenever I brought up the fact that she lived in Stanwich now, and could get a Connecticut license without a problem, Sloane waved it away. “I know the fundamentals of driving,” she’d say. “If I’m ever on a bus that gets hijacked on the freeway, I can take over when the driver gets shot. No problem.” And since Sloane liked to walk whenever possible—a habit she’d picked up living in cities for much of her life, and not just places like Manhattan and Boston, but London and Paris and Copenhagen—she didn’t seem to mind that much. I liked to drive and was happy to drive us everywhere, Sloane sitting shotgun, the DJ and navigator, always on top of telling me when our snacks were running low.

  An older woman, determined to check out the selection of tarnished cufflinks, jostled me out of the way, and I stepped aside. This flea market was similar to many that I’d been to, always with Sloane. We were technically here looking for boots for her, but as soon as we’d paid our two dollars apiece and entered the middle school parking lot that had been converted, for the weekend, into a land of potential treasure, she had made a beeline to this stall, which seemed to be mostly sunglasses and jewelry. Since I’d picked up the letter, I’d been waiting for the right moment to ask her, when I’d have her full attention, and the drive had been the wrong time—there was music to sing along to and things to discuss and directions to follow.

  Sloane smiled at me, even as she put on the terrible green sunglasses, hiding her eyes, and I wondered for a moment if she was embarrassed, which I’d almost never seen. “You weren’t supposed to get that until tomorrow,” she said as she bent down to look at her reflection in the tiny standing mirror. “I was hoping it would be there right before you guys left for the airport. The mail here is too efficient.”

  “But what is it?” I asked, flipping through the pages. Emily Goes to Scotland! was written across the top.

  1. Try haggis.

  2. Call at least three people “lassie.”

  3. Say, at least once, “You can take my life, but you’ll never take my freedom!”

  (Say this out loud and in public.)

  The list continued on, over to the next page, filled with things—like fly-fishing and asking people if they knew where I could find J.K. Rowling—that I did not intend to do, and not just because I would only be gone five days. One of my parents’ plays was going into rehearsals for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and they had decided it would be the perfect opportunity to take a family trip. I suddenly noticed that at the very bottom of the list, in tiny letters, she’d written, When you finish this list, find me and tell me all about it. I looked up at Sloane, who had set the green pair down and was now turning over a pair of rounded cat-eye frames.

  “It’s stuff for you to do in Scotland!” she said. She frowned at the sunglasses and held up the frames to me, and I knew she was asking my opinion. I shook my head, and she nodded and set them down. “I wanted to make sure you got the most of your experience.”

  “Well, I’m not sure how many of these I’ll actually do,” I said as I carefully folded the letter and placed it back in the envelope. “But this is awesome of you. Thanks so much.”

  She gave me a tiny wink, then continued to look through the sunglasses, clearly searching for something specific. She had spent most of the spring channeling Audrey Hepburn—lots of winged black eyeliner and stripes, skinny black pants and aflats—but was currently transitioning into what she was calling “seventies California,” and referencing people like Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg, who I’d never heard of, and Penny Lane in Almost Famous, who I had. Today, she was wearing a flowing vintage maxi dress and sandals that tied around her ankles, her wavy dark-blond hai
r spilling over her shoulders and down her back. Before I’d met Sloane, I didn’t know that it was possible to dress the way she did, that anyone not heading to a photo shoot dressed with that much style. My own wardrobe had improved immeasurably since we’d become friends, mostly stuff she’d picked for me, but some things I’d found myself and felt brave enough to wear when I was with her, knowing that she would appreciate it.

  She picked up a pair of gold-rimmed aviators, only slightly bent, and slipped them on, turning to me for my opinion. I nodded and then noticed a guy, who looked a few years younger than us, staring at Sloane. He was absently holding a macramé necklace, and I was pretty sure that he had no idea that he’d picked it up and would have been mortified to realize it. But that was my best friend, the kind of girl your eyes went to in a crowd. While she was beautiful—wavy hair, bright blue eyes, perfect skin dotted with freckles—this didn’t fully explain it. It was like she knew a secret, a good one, and if you got close enough, maybe she’d tell you, too.

  “Yes,” I said definitively, looking away from the guy and his necklace. “They’re great.”

  She grinned. “I think so too. Hate them for me?”

  “Sure,” I said easily as I walked a few steps away from her, making my way up toward the register, pretending to be interested in a truly hideous pair of earrings that seemed to be made out of some kind of tinsel. In my peripheral vision, I saw Sloane pick up another pair of sunglasses—black ones—and look at them for a moment before also taking them to the register, where the middle-aged guy behind it was reading a comic book.