Ava

Sticky white buttons

Numbers without solutions

Calculator blues.

Ty shuffles the cards with the ease of someone who doesn’t even practice, who just does. His eyes follow them with a focused kind of disinterest, like his eyes are only placed there because they have nowhere else to be. He flicks his thumbs and the cards fan out, one on top of the other, shuffled into a pile, fanned out again, over and over and over.

I’m trying not to be impatient. Annabelle is perfectly still and quiet, eyes trained on what must be the same place Ty’s are. I can’t stop looking between them, at the door of the dark classroom we’ve locked ourselves in, at the half-curtained window letting in just enough light to see by,  to see my half chewed-down nails tip-tip-tapping against the linoleum tiling and Annabelle and Ty’s quiet, patient, refined focus.

I think about all of the AP Composition homework I’m not going to get done this weekend between camping and hiking and searching. I wonder if well get back early enough on Sunday evening for me to finish it; whether it would be rude to ask them to leave before 5 pm so we could be home by 8 am so I don’t have to stay up until 4 am writing this stupid essay that’s-

Annabelle elbows me in the ribs without sympathy, drawing my attention away from glaring at the “READ!” poster on the wall to Ty’s hands spreading his cards out on the floor.

Cards flick out, one after the other, arranging themselves piece by piece until they form some kind of sprawling shape and Ty sets the left-over cards on the floor next to his leg. He considers the cards carefully. There are ants beneath my skin. I want to know whatever it is Ty has to say, want to get out of here before a janitor or a teacher bursts in, want to get on the road with the simple, occupying motions of driving and some song blaring into my ears louder than my thoughts.

“What does it mean?” Annabelle asks, impatience catching up to her. It’s easy to forget she hates waiting almost as much as I do when she gets focused on something so hard it feels like she’s burning a hole right through it.

“It doesn’t say anything about a quest,” Ty starts off. Sometimes the cards show him an answer to what he asks. Now doesn’t seem to be one of those times. “We’ll grow.”

I can see, out of the corner of my eye, Annabelle’s hands clenching, her posture shifting, her eyebrows leveling down over her eyes.

“Grow?” I ask.

Ty’s gaze swings from the cards to me, blinking away the haze that always coats his eyes when he does a reading.

“Metaphorically, of course,” he elaborates, hands shuffling the used cards back into the stack. “It means we should go, at any rate.”

“Ask the cards again,” Annabelle demands suddenly. Her impatience is tangible in the air around her.

“Anna-” I begin. We both know better than that, even if tarot is nothing but gibberish to us.

“Shut the hell up, Christina,” Annabelle hisses out without even looking at me. I have to hold back a flinch. Ty’s eyes snap from mine to Annabelle’s in a fraction of a second and turn from considering to venomous just as quickly. They hold each other’s gazes for a moment. Annabelle breaks first. Ty gathers his cards in one hand, stands in one movement, unlocks the door, and steps out of it.

Annabelle doesn’t look at me. I follow Ty out.

Ty, predictably, passes out ten minutes into the drive even with my terrible dubstep music playlist blasting at a ridiculous volume through the tinny speakers of my car. He’s sprawled out in the backseat, feat up on the ledge of the window, head resting against a bunched-up bright pink hoodie and bag resting on his stomach. Winding highway spreads out before me, lined with towering pines and the dirt-dusted remnants of snow beneath their shadows. Skrillex doesn’t drown out Annabelle’s furious energy in my passenger seat. I don’t think the noise is helping her calm down, but I don’t turn it down.

Fourty minutes into the drive, Annabelle quietly reaches over and turns the volume down enough to leave my ears ringing from the loss of sound. I hate driving in this kind of quiet. I hate driving when Annabelle has something to say.

“Do you think we’ll find him this time?”

“Dunno. Maybe.”

“We have to.”

The two month deadline to our four-year quest hangs over us like a guillotine. Two months until graduation, two months until all three of us get out of our pathetic little town, two months to find him.

 

It happens another fourty minutes later.

The thing about searching for something for so long is that you set goals for yourself, and you have in mind exactly when and where and how you want to acheive them. Our search was supposed to end after a long, dark hike in the middle of the woods, following deer trails and rusted train tracks and old lumber roads. It wasn’t supposed to end with the screech of tires and Ty startling awake as I stomp on the brakes, skidding to a stop in the middle of an empty stretch of road as we all stare upwards, and upwards, and upwards.

He’s a mountain made of shaggy brown fur stretching up towards the layer of mist that shrouds the top of his head and the trees. His hands are the size of my car, his head even bigger, and his feet…

It’s him.

Bigfoot.