The Taking (The Taking 1)

This.

All of it. Me and Tyler. Being here at the school. The fact that they’d named the field I’d once played on after me. In memorium . . . like I was dead.

And I had been dead in a way. For five long years everyone had mourned me. They’d let me go and “moved on,” and everything had changed.

And now I was back. A corpse with a second chance.

I slipped out from beneath his arm, from where I suddenly felt trapped, cornered by his presence. “I have to go,” I insisted, pulling out my phone and checking the time. “I need you to take me home. Now.”

There were four messages waiting for me on my bed when I got back, all written on multicolored sticky notes that were stuck together so precisely they formed a perfect neon-rainbow fan. I assumed they were also in chronological order.

Flipping through them, I noted my mom’s handwriting and was grateful she’d decided to take phone messages rather than to give out my new cell number. It wasn’t even nine o’clock when Tyler dropped me off, but my mom and her new family were already tucked away in their bedrooms for the night, so I had the house to myself.

In the kitchen there was a plate covered with plastic wrap. Through the film I could see she’d made me my favorite: spaghetti with Grandma Thelma’s homemade meatballs. I felt a stab of guilt for not being there for dinner, but the very idea of sitting through a meal with them and pretending we were an actual family made me nauseous.

Maybe if I tried harder, though, maybe if I made more of an effort to talk to my mom, she would finally say something real to me.

Taking the calendar off the wall, I carried it, along with the plate of spaghetti, to the table. I looked at the time on my phone and double-checked it against the time on the microwave. It bothered me that the two weren’t exactly in sync—they were a minute apart—and I watched until the microwave’s clock caught up to the time on my phone before turning to the calendar.

I flipped to May and put my finger on today’s date, and the moment I did, the panic in my chest subsided. I knew why. It had become like an obsession with me, keeping tabs on the time. The constant reassurance that I hadn’t lost another day. Or another hour or minute or second. That I was still here, and time was moving at the exact right speed it should.

I didn’t reheat the spaghetti because I’d always liked it better cold anyway. I peeled back the plastic wrap and thrust my fork into the center, thinking I should be starving. I hadn’t eaten anything since I’d stolen a handful of popcorn from “my brother” while on our shopping trip. I twirled the fork, mesmerized by the way the pasta swirled and whorled around it, gathering it into a bulging wad, and then I lifted the entire mass and plunged it into my mouth.

My mom had always complained that watching me eat spaghetti was like watching the animals feeding at the zoo and that I might as well lift the plate up to my mouth and shovel it directly in. She wasn’t entirely wrong; I did love my spaghetti.

Clamping my teeth down on the first bite of the soft pasta, I closed my eyes, preparing to savor it, letting it roll over my tongue. But I knew immediately that something wasn’t quite right with it. Maybe it was the recipe. Maybe my mom had tweaked it over the years. Or maybe there was something wrong with the ingredients she’d used. Regardless of the reason, it definitely wasn’t the same spaghetti I’d remembered.

I chewed anyway, forcing it down. I tried the meatball. My grandmother’s recipe had been handed down from her mother and then passed to my mom, and would eventually be passed down to me. My dad used to say I’d cut my teeth on these meatballs.

But it was just like the spaghetti. The meatballs were the same, but not. Like everything else since I’d returned. They were . . . off.

I continued eating, but less enthusiastically, and halfway through my meal I finally gave up and washed the rest of it down the garbage disposal. It was the first time in my life I got no real joy out of my mom’s spaghetti, and I couldn’t help wondering if it was me or if she’d done something to sabotage it, although I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why.

Tucking the calendar beneath my arm, I went back to my room and threw myself on my bed to read through the messages my mom had taken. Three of them made my pulse rise all over again—the three from Cat.

Cat, and not Austin.

Cat, who’d called at 4:15, 4:53, and again at 6:36. Her cell number, which was the same as it had been five years ago, was also written down on each note, as if it wasn’t permanently etched in my brain.

I crumpled up all of the messages and tossed them into one of the shopping bags my mom had left piled in my room, filled with the clothes she’d brought back with her from Old Navy, Macy’s, and American Eagle—none of which I’d bothered looking through yet.

The fourth message was from my dad, letting me know he hadn’t been able to make it back tonight but that he would definitely be here first thing in the morning to take me to breakfast.

Probably better that we’d be going out. Maybe without my mom around I could talk to him—really talk to him. And maybe he’d stop bringing up the whole light thing or his whacked-out theories about UFOs.

Maybe he’d go back to being my dad again.

When my phone buzzed, it scared the crap out of me.

I bolted upright and checked the time on the digital clock that I’d set so it was synchronized precisely with my phone, which I assumed was set to some sort of world standard. I hadn’t been sleeping, but I’d been trying to, or at least pretending I was trying to, as I’d stretched out and stared at the ceiling, waiting for that drowsy-floaty feeling of sleep to claim me. If only I could shut off my mind for a few seconds.