Page 48

LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS

Poppy sits on her bed, seven scraps of paper with deep fold creases spread out before her. The coded notes that Alison Lane sent Poppy’s brother back in high school. Dash also gave her the key: a book called The Little Prince. The handwritten notes are short—a series of numbers—so it shouldn’t take her long to decode them. Dash said they were locations where they would meet in secret. He said it had been innocent—they would talk about life, her loneliness, his fears about the future. They kissed once, he said, but that’s as far as it went.

Poppy eyes the first note. It has 30–15–7 written on it. Chantelle had told Poppy that the codes usually make the first number the page of the book, the second the line, the third the word. She flips to page 30, counts to line 15, then traces her finger to the seventh word. She writes the word in the Notes app on her phone and realizes that this could take a while. She should get some sleep. But she’s still wired from the hospital, from her brother’s confession. Was that what it was? A confession? More like an unburdening. Dash has carried this with him since he was seventeen. Poppy’s father has always kept secrets—things he didn’t talk about from his time in the war—but Dash’s secrets have pushed Poppy’s world off-kilter.

She continues decoding. The first note says: The park, 10. The park at ten o’clock. Poppy reaches for the next note, and continues. Her legs are cramping from sitting on the bed, so she lies down, the book in front of her. She examines the cover. A simple watercolor of a boy standing on a barren asteroid gliding through space. On her phone, she types in the title. There are several entries for The Little Prince: literary analyses, a New Yorker story, SparkNotes. Poppy remembers it being assigned reading at their high school, the only reason Dash owned the book, but she doesn’t remember much more about it.

She clicks on Wikipedia. She reads that it’s a novella written by a French author. The story is about a pilot who crashes in the desert who meets a young boy who tells the pilot his life story. The boy is a traveler who lived on an asteroid and has gone planet to planet where he meets their lone inhabitants: a king who demands obedience but has no subjects, a drunk who drinks out of the shame of drinking, a geographer who has never been anywhere, and so on.

Poppy thinks she’ll read the book again. She wonders why Alison Lane loved it so much. It seems like a kid’s book. But maybe she felt like the alien boy, alone, trying to find meaning in her travels. Poppy looks up at her Beyoncé poster and decides, yeah, she needs to get some sleep—she’s waxing a little too poetic. But she needs to try to decode the note found in Alison’s car. She pulls up the photo of the note on her phone. It has several lines of numbers, each with a three-digit sequence. She spends the next fifteen minutes trying to decode the note, flipping through the pages of The Little Prince.

The message is gibberish.

It’s not the right book.

Defeated, Poppy says a prayer for her father, her mother, and Dash. And she closes her eyes and falls into a restless sleep.