The Taking (The Taking 1)

Tyler, who, the last time I’d seen him just the day before, had been only twelve years old.

CHAPTER TWO

“KYRA, ARE YOU SURE I CAN’T GET YOU SOMETHING?” Tamara Wahl asked, her disembodied head looming out of the darkness as she peered into the bedroom.

I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten here, but at least I knew where I was. Or thought I did. Everything felt topsy-turvy at the moment.

“No. I don’t think so.” I shifted on the Batman sheets that I’d laid on almost as many times as my own. “No. I’m okay.”

I glanced around at a room I had memorized. I knew right where the poster of Mark Spitz (the Olympic swimmer Austin idolized) was—the one with the preprinted autograph Austin had tried to replicate above it when he was eleven in scribbly purple marker. The furniture was arranged exactly the same as always: his bed, his dresser, his corner desk plastered with a mishmash collection of sports and music and bumper stickers he’d collected.

But despite the sameness of it, it was missing his everyday clutter. His overflowing clothes hamper, the discarded Coke cans and water glasses on top of his dresser, messy homework piles on his desk. Even the bed was too neat, the sheets too fresh and smooth, as if they’d just been changed.

As if I were inside a diorama of Austin’s room. A perfect, unused replica.

His mother had tried to explain things to me, but nothing she’d said made any sense. It was like she’d been speaking gibberish.

Five years, she’d kept saying. It had been five years since anyone had seen me last.

She was wrong, of course.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

It hadn’t been five years. It had been one night. I knew because I had been at my softball game. The championship game.

I knew because I was still wearing my uniform, and it still smelled like grass and sweat, and I still had the ribbons threaded through my hair.

One night, I kept insisting while my head and my throat ached. My dad and I had had an argument, and I’d run off to have a few minutes to myself—that was all. I must’ve wandered until I’d fallen asleep. At the Gas ’n’ Sip. Behind the Dumpster.

One damn night. Not five long years.

But she’d given me some time alone to absorb it, to let it sink in before coming back to check on me.

She patted my hand now, her voice cautious, as if I were held together by wishes and hopes. “Well, your mom should be here soon. Maybe she’ll do a better job of explaining things than I did.”

I shot upright. “My mom?” My throat constricted around the anticipation. “She’s coming?” My words barely made it through my airway, and the last one came out as a squeak. I didn’t want to cry, but just hearing that my mom was on her way made everything better somehow, and there was no way to stop the tears.

And then Austin’s mom, who I couldn’t remember not knowing, had her arms around me, comforting, reassuring, holding me in the way only a mother knows how. “It’ll be okay, Kyra. Everything’s gonna be okay now.”

Waiting, the same way I used to do when I was a little girl and I knew it was time for my mom to come home from work, I was standing at the window when I saw her pull up. She was driving a car I didn’t recognize: black and shiny and sporty.

If what Tamara Wahl had said was true, which I still couldn’t wrap my brain around because it was utterly-completely-totally insane, but if I allowed myself even to consider that I’d really lost five whole years of my life, then more than just who drove what had changed.

I know Austin’s mom believed what she said, and she definitely had some evidence to back up her story. Austin was off at college, or so she’d told me—living the life we’d always planned, attending his last year at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. And Tyler—pipsqueak Tyler, who used to follow us around the house, intruding on conversations and telling the same annoying jokes that we used to tell when we were his age—was now a junior at Burlington Edison High, the same school Austin and Cat and I had once gone to. I couldn’t deny that part, that he’d changed—I’d seen it with my own two eyes.

And, obviously, my mom and dad had moved.

All those things made it hard to argue with her. But that didn’t change the part where everything inside of me said she was wrong.

I wanted to cry and scream at the same time, and I was so ridiculously confused, I could hardly think straight.

Five years was a lifetime. An eternity.

I was surprised, then, when my mom stopped her sleek black car, not in front of Austin’s house, but in front of our old house. Habit, I supposed. It was the first place I’d gone too.

I watched as she emerged from her new car. Her hair was more highlighted than I remembered and shorter, skimming her shoulders rather than falling to the middle of her back.

I wondered if I looked different too. I’d tried to wash up and had examined myself in the mirror. I didn’t feel changed, and I couldn’t see anything that said five years had gone by, right down to the farmer’s tan where my uniform sleeves hit, from spending hour after hour practicing in those last days of softball season. I even had the same bruise on my right shin from where I’d banged it against our coffee table when Cat and I had been wrestling over the remote last weekend.

Well, last weekend plus five years.

But how was any of that possible? How could I have the same bruise and suntan? How could I still be wearing my uniform and the ribbons threaded through my hair, and smell like sweat and softball field if five years had passed?