Page 9 of Finders Keepers

Mom sits on the couch in the living room, her attention fully on her e-reader so she doesn’t notice me until I’m in front of her.

Which is good, because it keeps her from making a quick getaway like earlier when I tried to talk to her and she slipped out the back door, mumbling something about meeting a friend for lunch before I could point out that it was after three o’clock.

She clutches her chest as I appear in her field of vision. “Nina, sweetheart. Goodness.”

“We need to chat, Mother.”

“Okay, all right,” she capitulates, placing her e-reader on the coffee table. “Go ahead.” Her chin goes up, probably to get a better view of me standing in front of her, but it also makes her look like a little kid trying to put on a brave face.

“Why did you pretend you didn’t know he was back?” I ask.

“Who?”

“Slim Shady,” I say, folding my arms in annoyed disbelief.

She returns my stare, one eye narrowed as she tries to make sense of the reference.

To be fair, my mother isn’t particularly known for her knowledge of early 2000s rap.

“Quentin, Mom. Quentin Bell. You know, about six feet tall, reddish hair, big fan of pancakes and getting on my nerves?”

Mom presses her lips together primly.

“When I asked you yesterday, you acted like you’d never heard of him in your life, much less noticed him living next door for the last week and a half.

Then this morning he’s sitting in our dining room, chatting away like it’s part of his daily routine.

Why didn’t you just tell me he was here instead of being so weird about it? ”

She sighs. “I didn’t mean to be weird about it. It’s only…”

I have to admit, it feels wrong to interrogate my mother like this. But she’s left me no choice. “It’s only what?”

“Well, you were so sad after he left, Nina.”

“What? I was not sad.”

Mom gives me a long look that says she vividly remembers me playing No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak” on repeat for weeks after Quentin moved to Michigan to live with his mom. Which, considering he wasn’t speaking to me at all, is actually quite ironic now that I think about it.

“Okay, fine, I was a tiny bit sad, but it wasn’t…

It wasn’t all about Quentin. I was fifteen.

A lot was happening, like, hormonally and life-wise.

” I’ve always believed that it wasn’t losing Quentin himself that made that fall and winter so awful so much as losing the steadiness of having him around.

Especially with my father’s accident at the quarry; his long, painful recovery; our resulting financial struggles; and the court case that took a decade to settle.

There was a lot going on, and I found myself in a dark place.

Without Quentin to talk to and to compete against, I had all of this nervous energy and nowhere to focus it except into catastrophizing.

It was the perfect breeding ground for my burgeoning anxiety disorder.

Until I realized I could make myself so busy and future oriented that I wouldn’t have to think about the present outside of what I needed to do to achieve my goals.

If my academic success also made my parents proud, gave them something to talk about other than my dad’s chronic pain and overdue bills, and took some of the weight off their shoulders when it came to paying for college, all the better.

“Regardless,” I add, “it doesn’t justify you not telling me he was back. ”

“I was only trying to look out for you, baby. I didn’t want to upset you when you have so much going on,” she says.

“So much going on?” My laugh is small and filled with a probably unfair amount of bitterness. “I don’t have anything going on anymore. That’s kind of the whole reason I’m here, remember?”

“I am sorry for not telling you.” She folds her hands together in her lap, then unfolds them again. “But I…Never mind.” The intensity with which she’s keeping her mouth closed is visible at the corners of her thin lips.

I groan. “Mom. Whatever you’re thinking, just say it.”

“The biggest reason I didn’t want to bring him up was that I was afraid it would embarrass you.”

“Why would Quentin being back in town embarrass me?”

“I know kids like to believe their parents are stupid, but you think I didn’t notice how you were inseparable for months only for him to leave you and never mention him again? It’s obvious something went wrong between you two, and I’ve always figured it had to do with your crush on him.”

My eyes go wide at Mom’s words, and all I can do is let out an unconvincing ha .

Sure, I may have developed some no-longer-strictly-platonic feelings for Quentin over those three months we spent treasure hunting.

And the night before everything went wrong, when we were lying side by side on a blanket in his backyard, looking up at the stars as we finalized our plans to search Sprangbur one last time, I can’t say I didn’t want him to lean over and gently press his lips against mine.

For a split second, I even thought he was going to.

But it’s not like I filled pages of a notebook with hearts or practiced signing my name as Nina Bell or anything like that. I wasn’t, like, pining after the kid.

She tilts her head, as if saying, Really, Nina? “It was clear you were gone for him.”

I scoff, not very convincingly. “I was absolutely not gone for Quentin.” In fact, I’d be willing to bet that those feelings were nothing but the product of my aforementioned teenage hormones and forced proximity.

A crush I will admit to. But there’s no world in which I was in love with Quentin.

Any thoughts I had about us becoming more than close friends were simply the inevitable outcome of being young and having spent so much time together—nothing more, nothing less.

Like, if I had hung out with Francesca O’Brien from down the street as much as I hung out with Quentin, I’m sure I would have had recurring dreams about making out with her too.

“You and he were together nearly every single day that last summer, from dawn to dusk…” Mom continues.

“Yeah, because we were hunting for treasure.”

She flaps a hand, waving away what I’ve said. “Whatever you want to call it, it was none of my business. I made sure you knew about safe sex well before that, and I trust that you took precautions—”

“Ahh! Stop!” I cover my ears and close my eyes.

“That is not a euphemism for anything! Quentin and I spent that summer literally hunting for the Fountain treasure at Sprangbur.” My mother has become much more sex-positive in recent years after joining a local romance book club, but I am still not mature enough to find the ease with which she now attempts to talk to me about it anything but mortifying. Maybe when I’m thirty-five.

Three deep breaths later, I explain, “We agreed to look for it after reading about Fountain’s will in social studies that spring.”

“Oh, I remember hearing about that,” she says. “When they were renovating that mansion, people were joking about what they might find in the walls.”

In my mind, Sprangbur Castle is still shuttered and dotted with Do Not Enter Under Penalty of Law warnings. But I suppose the renovations they started right before I left for college must be done by now. Is it open to the public? I wonder what it’s like inside.

“Anyway,” I say, returning my focus to explaining to my mother what happened in 2008, “even though we were supposed to be looking together, I went rogue and started doing some solo research to find the treasure on my own. Quentin found out the night we went—uh, the night before he left for Ann Arbor, and I never heard from him again. He wouldn’t respond to my emails or texts.

Not even a peep from him until the other night when I got here and he’s just—surprise!

—next door.” Also, we got caught trespassing and taken to the police station, which I have never told you and will not be telling you now.

And also I sort of thought maybe he was interested in me the same way I was interested in him, which he wasn’t, so my ego was pretty bruised on top of everything else.

Mom’s mouth falls open with a shocked gasp, and she brings a hand up to cover it politely. But is she taken aback that I hurt Quentin, or that he hurt me? “I can’t believe he goblined you,” she says from behind her palm.

“Goblined? What does—Oh, geez, Mom. Do you mean ghosted?”

“It’s ‘ghosted’? Really? Hm, I suppose that does make more sense.

What is a goblin, again?” Her gaze drifts off to the side as she mines her mental bank of imaginary creatures, trying to recall.

Then she remembers the point of our conversation and her eyes meet mine. “Well, that was very rude of him.”

“Yes, it was. I agree.”

“But…”

I sigh. “But what?”

“You were both very young, Nina. And fifteen-year-old boys aren’t known for their emotional intelligence.”

“We haven’t been ‘very young’ for a while now, though.

He could have tried to reconnect with me at any time.

The internet would have made it pretty easy if he cared to bother.

” Part of me always expected it to happen.

But at some point it became less of a “when” and more of an “if.” Then each passing year of silence nudged it closer and closer to the “if” side until it seemed on par with pigs flying.

So that’s why I was so flabbergasted to find Quentin here, ready to pick up where we left off.

It was like looking into the sky and finding Babe and Wilbur waving to me from the cockpit of a 747.

“Well, maybe it’s time to think of it as water under the bridge.

He seems to want to, considering how eager he was to see you this morning.

Kept asking when you’d be down.” She smiles slyly, like his impatience to talk to me is the equivalent of asking for my hand in marriage.

“Besides, holding a grudge never helps you get where you’re going. It only holds you back.”

This is actually quite poignant advice. It’s also unexpected and notably hypocritical, considering my mother hasn’t talked to one of her cousins for thirty-five years over a minor dispute concerning the flavor of her wedding cake. Then again, who better to know, I suppose.

“I’m not holding a grudge,” I protest. “I don’t even care about it.

” Maybe I did a long time ago, back when losing Quentin’s friendship and any possibility of more felt like the worst thing in the world that could happen.

When it was the rug pulled out from under me, making me stumble and fall into a big puddle of anxiety and depression.

But over time it slipped places in its importance, falling farther and farther behind in the Grand Scheme of Things.

I figured out how to harness my angst, my heartbreak, and my worries, and transform them all into something more productive.

That’s when Ambitious Nina made her debut, with her big dreams and determination to work her ass off to get where she wanted to go.

Moping over a stupid boy certainly wasn’t part of the plan. Quite frankly, it still isn’t.

No. Thinking about the past, Quentin-related or otherwise, isn’t a good use of my emotional energy.

Because all of that stuff happened to a different person, one who doesn’t exist anymore.

Badass Nina may not have lasted long, and Ambitious Nina may or may not return, but it doesn’t mean I need to unearth that old, sad version of myself.

I don’t know who to be right now, but I know I don’t want to go back to who I once was.

“I’m sorry for not telling you he was here, especially when you asked directly,” Mom says.

“Thank you.” I bend to wrap my arms around her and squeeze lightly.

“My sweet baby.” Her soft, familiar voice and the warm cucumber melon–scented squishiness of her hug loosens some of my tension.

It doesn’t last long, though, because as soon as I pull away she says, “In the interest of full disclosure, I feel like I should tell you that Quentin and your father are currently at the hardware store together.”

Right. Because of course they are.