Page 25

TWENTY-FOUR

I can’t get out of the neighborhood fast enough; my foot is almost flat against the floor. As I look in the rearview mirror, I can feel the stares and judgment from everyone back at the house branding me as I go.

“What the hell was that about?”

“I told you it was a bad idea going there,” Nadia says, her eyes glued to the rearview mirror, like she can’t fully accept what just happened.

“It was only a bad idea because you weren’t honest with me,” I say. “How do you know Josh?”

“I don’t know him,” she says, sitting back, resting her hand on her forehead. “I know Crystal. She dated my brother years ago.”

Nadia had three older brothers, but I hardly remember them. Whenever we’d hang out with each other, we were trying to avoid our families, and her brothers had no interest in hanging around their kid sister. As we got older, her siblings were in and out of trouble, like us, but it always seemed more severe. I know one was sent away to a juvenile detention center. I’d never stopped to think about where they’d be now, as adults.

“If they used to date, why were you at her house last week?” I ask. “And why doesn’t she want you there now?”

Nadia exhales, fiddling with the hem of her jacket.

“I just now got on good terms with my brother again. He’d been in prison for a while, but now that he’s out, we’re trying to rekindle a relationship. Make things right.” She pauses, as though she doesn’t want to continue. “Turns out I’d missed out on a lot in the years we were estranged. I never even knew he and Crystal had a child together.”

That last sentence shakes me to my core. I struggle to keep control of the wheel as the sheer enormity of the information crashes into me.

“Your brother is Evie’s father?”

She looks at me and nods. “Evie is my niece.”

I’m tempted to pull the car over, just to get my mind right. When Nadia came back into my life, I was convinced she only needed help with the burglary. Now, I’m questioning her other motives. Did she know Evie was her niece this entire time, and that she was on my basketball team?

“You’ve been lying to me from the beginning,” I say. “You were using me to get closer to Evie.”

“I swear that’s not what happened,” she says. “I know how bad everything looks. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you the truth. If you knew that Evie was my niece, you’d think I was involved.”

“Her mother must think that, too,” I say. “That’s why she doesn’t want you around.”

“She doesn’t want me around because my brother has been a deadbeat dad for the past decade,” she says. “When I approached Crystal and told her who I was, she told me she didn’t want me anywhere near Evie. She didn’t want us to have a relationship.”

As reluctant as I am to admit it, I agree with her. Crystal isn’t the best role model, and appears to be a neglectful parent, but she has every reason to be cautious of Nadia, or anyone else, entering her daughter’s life. Then I think of Josh, the new boyfriend. Clearly, she isn’t putting up the same safeguards when it comes to him.

I look ahead at the road. “How did you and Josh start fighting?”

“Josh was sitting on the porch with those other guys. They must have spotted us pull up. After about ten minutes, he came over to the car and started asking questions. You saw how aggressive he was.”

“You weren’t really trying your best to de-escalate the situation.”

“I hadn’t done anything wrong,” she says. “He had no business talking to me like that.”

Nadia has always been a loose cannon. In school, it was something I was grateful for. Never again did I have to worry about people messing with me on the school bus or bullying me in between classes. Nadia soon earned a reputation as my crazy best friend, and no one wanted to get in the middle of that.

Her chaos rubbed off on me, too. I used to watch Nadia fight with people and it was exhilarating. The way no man or woman could intimidate her. I wanted to bottle that same confidence for myself.

My attitude was one of the first things Coach Phillips wanted to tackle after I started living with him. He noticed how the smallest thing—a car cutting us off, a teammate refusing to pass me the ball when I was wide open—made me angry. I was always on the hunt for retaliation, ready for an excuse to express my stifled emotions.

“You get more flies with honey,” he told me, after a heated disagreement with one of the other girls on the team.

“She was in the wrong,” I whined back to him.

“She was,” he said to me. “But you aren’t able to get your point across when you’re yelling at someone. You have to lower your voice. Whisper if you have to. Make them hear you.”

In college, I took Psych 101 and learned as much. When people grow up in a household surrounded by yelling, they’re ready to fight back. Raised voices and slurs and threats. If someone is shouting at you, and you respond with a soft voice, it catches them off guard. They don’t know how to react, and they almost have no choice but to listen. De-escalate. I remember my classmates, most of whom I’m guessing grew up in households where there wasn’t much yelling, were surprised by this tactic.

I’d already learned it from Coach Phillips.

“Fighting isn’t going to get us any closer to figuring out what happened to Evie,” I say. “And neither will keeping secrets.”

“I wasn’t trying to keep secrets,” she says. “Since I’ve been back, everything happened so fast. I only learned I had a niece a few weeks ago. I’d hoped Crystal would be open to the two of us having a relationship, but she shot that down without even giving me a chance. I was afraid if I told you I was related to Evie, you’d do the same thing. You wouldn’t trust me.”

“Have you met Evie?”

“No. I saw her walking home from practice one day, but that was it. I wasn’t going to approach her without talking to Crystal first, and since that conversation went south, I figured I lost my chance.” She pauses. “Then you told me she was missing. I don’t even know how to feel.”

“Evie’s mother seems genuinely distraught,” I say, trying to focus on why we went by her house in the first place. “But she got defensive when I brought up the boyfriend.”

“How so?”

“She immediately knew what I was getting at and said she would know if anyone was making Evie feel uncomfortable,” I say. “But she also admitted she’s hardly ever home. I wonder if she isn’t kicking herself for putting Evie in a dangerous situation.”

“No wonder Evie was on edge. I can’t imagine living with a guy like that. He was drunk. And obviously has anger issues.”

“She said something else that bothered me,” I admit. “About the girls on the team. She said they’re mean to Evie.”

“Does that come as a surprise to you?”

“I’ve never seen it, and I’m with them more than anyone.”

“They’re going to be on their best behavior whenever you’re around. You’re the coach. You always acted your best whenever Coach Phillips was around.”

She’s right. Even in my most chaotic years, Coach Phillips was always someone I respected. I wanted to be on my best behavior. After I moved in with him, I started distancing myself from Nadia for that reason. I was afraid if he thought I was still like her, he wouldn’t give me the chances he gave me.

Nadia had always been there for me. And yet, part of me knew Coach Phillips was right. Nadia was headed down a dangerous path, and I could easily end up right beside her if I wasn’t willing to make changes. I’ve always felt guilty about the last conversation we had. I can hardly look at Nadia now because of the shame.

Then I think of the multiple ways in which Nadia has deceived me since re-entering my life. Pressuring me to assist her burglary. Lying to me about her true relationship with Evie. Is it possible her motives now are more sinister than she’s letting on? She’s made it clear Crystal refuses to let her around Evie. Could Nadia or her brother have orchestrated Evie’s disappearance to get more time with her? My instincts say that’s not what happened, but with Nadia, I find it hard to trust myself.

“I’m sick of not getting the full story from you.”

“I told you why I didn’t say anything,” she says. “I didn’t want you to have any doubts about me. If anything, being Evie’s aunt gives me even more reason to want to find her.”

“If you wanted a relationship with Evie, you should have been more focused on that than breaking into Manning Academy,” I say. “You’re as selfish now as you’ve always been.”

As we pull back into the school parking lot, Nadia says, “If I were you, I’d stop chasing the thrill of getting involved and leave the investigating to the professionals.”

“Right. Because you put so much faith into cops.”

“In case you don’t remember, last time we took a situation like this into our hands everything spiraled. If you keep making stupid choices, Cass, that’s just going to lead to more people getting hurt.”

“I’m just trying to help?—”

“Well, stop. You’re the fully mature adult now, remember? Try acting like it.”

Nadia slams the door as she gets out. I watch as she enters her car, a luxury vehicle she’s able to afford through conning and manipulating others. Am I allowing her to do the same to me?

I don’t want to believe it. I want to believe that out of everyone, Nadia is the one person I can trust, and yet she lied to me about her true connection to Evie. She understands me in a way no one else ever will, but maybe there isn’t enough distance between the woman she is now and the girl she was before.

Maybe she’s just as dangerous as she was back then.