Kids These Days

Chapter 27: Ronan

Sand scrapes against my cheeks as I peddle down the desert road, fighting against the rain and fierce gusts of wind. My APO jeans are chafing the inside of my thighs, and sweat keeps dripping down my forehead and into my eyes, blinding me with salt. If I believed in a higher power, I'd say that someone is especially pissed-off with me tonight.

The wind swells again, nearly knocking me off my bike, and I curl my shoulders and duck low against the handlebars. When the next breeze hits, it's accompanied by a memory-- 1984, the summer I spent with a bronzed California boy and the wicked Santa Ana winds. The boy's name was Chase, or Dylan, or something West Coast like that, and we'd stay up all night in his family's den, trading ghost stories and urban legends. I was only thirteen-- or twelve?-- so my favorite was the story of the Santa Ana winds.

Chase/Dylan called them the Devil Winds. "Satanás. That's the Spanish word for Satan. Notice the similarity between Santa Ana and satanás? It's no coincidence, bro. Like my dad used to say-- when the Devil breathes down on the valley, the air burns."

"Satanás," I repeated, tasting sand between my teeth. "Damn."

"Yeah." Chase/Dylan chuckled nervously. "Just don't say that around your mom." He'd only met Sabrina once, when she came to pick me up in her Rolls-Royce. He didn't like her, and I liked that. "She'd never let us hang out again, and that'd be a real shame."

But the real shame came three months later, when we moved from California to New York, and I never saw Chase/Dylan again.

Finally, I catch a glimpse of headlights in the distance-- the RV. I peddle faster, eager to snag a reprieve from the storm. My eyes and cheeks are stinging with windburn.

Today was interesting, to say the least. After my impromptu colloquy with Rachel, I kicked around town for a bit, irritating both the librarian and the owner of the ice cream shop on Main Street. The original building was torn down in the fifties, she told me, allowing me to cross the shop off my list of potential "taverns". We don't have a basement. What we do have is the best peppermint ice-cream in California! Care for a cone?

Thirty minutes later I was finishing my waffle cone on the library stairs when Andy pulled up in her hideously yellow Volkswagen. She rolled down her window and demanded (in a tone that made me reconsider the joke I was about to make about her car), "Have you seen Becca or Finn around?"

"Not since breakfast."

Andy turned to face Talia in the passenger seat. They exchanged a concerned look, as if I'd just failed some type of test. "Do you have any idea where they'd be?"

"Uh, no."

"Seriously? No idea at all? God, you're useless!"

"Uh, sorry?"

As Andy started to crank up the window, I noticed that behind her horn-rimmed glasses, her eyes were red and puffy, like she'd been crying. Next to her, Talia was drumming her knuckles against the dash and clenching her jaw tight enough to burst a vein. There was no music playing -- also unusual. Andy never drove anywhere without her favorite rock station blasting loud enough to wake the neighbors.

This was not your typical drive-by interrogation. It felt more like a Hail Mary.

I stood up and tossed my ice-cream wrapper in the trash. "Hey, what's going on?"

"Oliver's missing," Andy told me, her voice cracking on the last word. "Rachel left me a message. Supposedly, she caught him trespassing on her property."

"Really? Why?"

"Do you think I'd be driving around in circles if I had the answer to that? All I know is that Oliver is mixed-up in something way over his head, and I've got to help him before Rachel..." Andy trailed off, leaving the window half-down. She looked like she was about to start crying again. "If you see Becca and Finn, can you tell them I need their help?"