Ex-Mas by Kate Brian
He wasn't as big as Erik, and he definitely didn't work out, or walk around with Erik's adorable cockiness. But there was something about the way Beau held himself that made it clear he wasn't to be messed with. That he belonged up on a stage, in front of a crowd, always and forever on his own terms.
Just then, he looked right at her and smiled.
"And now for something a little lighter," he said into the microphone. He still held Lila's gaze. He strummed a chord, then another.
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No way.
Lila knew those chords as well as she'd once known Beau. He'd written the song to cheer her up when she had a cold in the seventh grade. The next time he sang it was over the phone, while she was visiting her relatives in Michigan the summer after eighth grade. They'd dubbed it their lullaby. They'd added to the song over the years, and sung it to and with each other ever since. Up until ninth grade, anyway. Lila remembered every single word.
"Roses are red, violets are blue, are you allergic to flowers, too?" Beau sang now, up onstage. The dim light from above bounced off his cheekbones. "What if I brought you cookies instead? One sniff of your roses and I could be dead."
Lila smiled back at him. But she still didn't get up to join him at the mic.
It was one thing to appreciate the past. It was something else to relive it.
"That guy was lying through his teeth," Beau said as he eased back into his Ford Escort a couple hours later. He settled himself in the driver's seat and glared through the windshield at the blue-coveralled mechanic, who had the nerve to wave at them.
"About what?" Lila asked quietly, suddenly feeling oddly shy
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in Beau's company. Probably because she was tired. It had been the longest day of her life.
"The car wasn't that jacked up," Beau said. "He said it was done hours ago."
"But I'm betting he took all the money anyway." Lila's dad had pointed out on many occasions that mechanics were all crooks--all the more reason she should appreciate not having a car.
"I talked him down, but it was still six hundred and fifty," Beau said ruefully. "My best-paying gig ever, and I spent most of the money on this damn car."
Probably his best-received gig, too, Lila thought as he guided the Escort out of the gas station parking lot and back to the winding seaside road. The guests had crowded around him at the end of the reception, and more than one had asked for his phone number, claiming they had parties they wanted him to play, all over the state of California. One woman claimed she would fly him to Iowa. Cougar.
"Here," Beau said, snapping Lila out of her thoughts. She had moved on to a happy fantasy where she told all the old women exactly how little chance they had with Beau. He hated everybody. He certainly wouldn't go for the elderly!
He tossed his iPhone at her, and she caught it by reflex. She blinked down at it.
"Check to see when we get service," he said. "We have to
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figure out how far behind the train we are. It's going to suck if they made it to Canada or something while we were trying to get out of Big Sur."
Oh, right. Reality. Lila wasn't hanging out with Beau to hear him sing or to remember that time back when or to watch old ladies slobber all over him. Or even to come to terms with his good looks. She was on a mission to retrieve Cooper and save herself from a lifetime grounding. She scowled down at the phone.
Ten minutes out from the convenience store, Lila squealed in delight.
"Service!" she cried.
"Excellent," Beau said with relief. "And about freaking time."
Lila laughed a little as she went online and quickly looked up the status of the train on the Amtrak website. She drew in a quick breath.
"Let me guess," Beau said. "It turned supersonic and is now in Vancouver. Because why not, after everything else tonight?"
"No," Lila said, still not believing it herself. She waved the iPhone at him, as if he could read it while navigating the dark, treacherous road. "It's been delayed! It's been sitting on the track outside San Luis Obispo for a couple of hours already!"
"No way," Beau said, laughing. He turned toward Lila, a happy glint in his eyes. "You mean we're actually getting some good luck?"
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"There's a scheduled crew change in San Jose," Lila read off the Amtrak site as she scrolled down further. "We can intercept them there, instead of in Oakland."
"Perfect," he said immediately, and grinned at her.
She returned his smile and settled back in her seat. Maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to spend some more time in the car with Beau.
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Chapter 10
*** SAN JOSE AMTRAK STATION
SAN JOSE, CA
DECEMBER 23
12:33 A.M.
***
Gritty-eyed and jacked up on way too much roadside coffee--with a generous helping of SweeTarts and Cool Ranch Doritos--Lila was more than ready to collar Cooper and throw him in the back of the car when Beau pulled into the San Jose train station.
"The train is still about seven minutes out," Beau said after he parked the car, glancing at his phone.
"Check it out." Lila climbed out into the chilly night air, stretching her cramped limbs. "We can actually walk into the station and figure out which track the train is supposed to arrive on. It's like we're on vacation or something." She barely noticed the cold, thanks to the adrenaline pumping through her veins. She pulled her leather jacket tighter around her and shoved her hands into her pockets. The air smelled like gasoline and something
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sickly sweet and floral--a far cry from the clean seaside air in Big Sur.
Beau grinned across the hood of the Escort and pulled his hunter green sweatshirt up close around his head. The wind picked up and seemed to blow right through them as they stood there. It had been getting steadily colder as they traveled north. It almost felt the way Lila supposed December should feel.
"It's freezing up here," Beau said, blowing on his hands. He started for the old train station's doors. As Lila followed, she found herself focusing on the strangest things: the way the cuffs of Beau's jeans were frayed and dragged against the ground. The way he leaned slightly against the cold as he walked. The way his jeans hugged his--She shook her head a little bit and snuggled deeper into her hot pink scarf. The caffeine and sugar had clearly addled her brain.
Inside the station, the lights were so bright they were almost dizzying. Lila had to blink a few times to see clearly. She frowned, looking up at the board and trying to make sense of all the arrivals and departures.
"This way," Beau said. He motioned with his elbow, his hands shoved into his pockets. Lila walked beside him toward the track, wondering idly if the people who saw them together thought they were a couple.
As they passed a glass window, she looked at their reflection. While Beau's scruffiness was downplayed by his surprisingly
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nice hoodie, her own trademarked put-together-ness had taken a serious hit. She'd been forced to pile the entire mass of her carefully blown-out dark hair on top of her head, using an elastic she'd found in Beau's glove compartment. She chose not to wonder who the elastic might have belonged to in its previous life. She looked bedraggled and crazy-eyed from all the coffee and sweets. If anyone did think she and Beau were together, they would no doubt be wondering how such a hot mess had snagged such a sexy guy.
"Crap," Beau muttered.
"Crap?" she echoed.
"I think we have to have tickets to board the train." Beau nodded toward the entrance to the track, where a uniformed employee stood guard.
"Why can't we just get on, grab them, and get off?" Lila asked.
"If you want to argue with that guy, go right ahead," Beau said. Lila took a closer look at the uniformed guard. He was radiating unfriendliness even from a distance, like Dwight on The Office. He looked like he would welcome the opportunity to ruin someone else's Friday night. Lila sighed.
"You're using the leftover money from Big Sur, right?" Lila asked, suddenly afraid that he was using his own money. Lila was fine with him using that money, but she didn't want him to
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use his own to fund a caper that had probably been Cooper's idea.
Beau shook his head at her, his mouth curving slightly, like he had just tracked every thought that crossed her mind. "Stay right here," he said quietly.
A few minutes later he was back, tickets in hand. He presented them to Mr. Surly at the gate. Lila walked behind him, checking her watch. Twelve thirty-five. The train was due at 12:40.
"How should we do this?" Lila asked, peering down the track, her stomach tightening in anticipation as she saw the point of light in the distance that heralded the arrival of the long-overdue train. "How do we find them before the train leaves again?"
"I figure you start at one end and I'll start at the other," Beau said. "Meet in the middle when we're done." The train whistle sounded, forcing him to raise his voice as the train whooshed into the station and the PA crackled to life above them. "Make sure you check the bathrooms!" He took off running, chasing the front of the train down the track.
Lila moved in the opposite direction, headed for the last car. Once the train stopped, she swung aboard, not even waiting for any of the passengers to exit.
"Excuse me!" huffed one affronted lady, but Lila had much bigger fish to fry. Like her brother, who she'd happily fry the second she got her hands on his grimy green sweatshirt.
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The train was much longer than Lila had expected it to be--not that she'd previously given much thought to the length of trains, or for that matter trains at all, unless it was for one of those boring SAT math questions. She moved through the cars swiftly, on a mission, scanning the seats and looking in each bathroom or pounding on the locked door until the person inside angrily proved they weren't Cooper. In one car, she saw a flash of green and messy brown hair poking over a seat. Gotcha, she thought. She threw herself at the seat, only to find herself face-to-face to with a startled mother and a little girl who definitely wasn't Cooper.
"Um, sorry," Lila mumbled, and kept moving.
It wasn't until she was almost to the middle of the train that she started to panic.
Where is he? For the first time, her own annoyance and anger over her foiled plans faded away, and Lila was confronted with the fact that her eight-year-old brother was hours away from home. And not where she'd imagined him to be. Her heart began to pound. He was obnoxious, sure, but he was still her brother. He had the street smarts of a fluffy bunny. She wanted to kill him, but she didn't actually want anything to happen to him.
"He has to be here!" she said out loud, desperately, startling the couple in the seats directly in front of her. She forced a smile and kept going.
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Above her, the intercom crackled, and the conductor warned that the train was preparing to leave the station. Lila panicked. What if something really had happened to Cooper? Her panic rising in her throat, she moved even faster, bursting through the doors into the middle car--the snack car.
"All people not traveling on this service, please exit the train immediately," the conductor droned from the speakers up above.
Lila looked around frantically at the makeshift café and long, empty tables. She glanced up to see Beau charging in through the doors at the other end of the car, his forehead wrinkled into a fierce frown, his hands empty.
"How can this be happening?" Lila demanded, knowing perfectly well he didn't know any better than she did. "Beau--where are they?"
"Maybe they're holed up somewhere," he said, sounding desperate. "We ran through the train--maybe we didn't look as closely as we could have."
There was a lurch, and then the train began to roll.
"Great," Lila said in despair, twisting to look out the window.
"We'll look again," Beau said grimly. "We'll--"
"Beau."
He stopped talking, and followed the finger she pointed out the windows, to the platform beyond.
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Cooper and Tyler stood there, shoulder to shoulder, sporting identical smug grins. The two boys waved excitedly as the train picked up speed. It hurtled forward, taking Beau and Lila with it, away from the platform.
And farther and farther away from their brothers.
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Chapter 11
*** OAKLAND AMTRAK STATION
OAKLAND, CA
DECEMBER 23
1:43 A.M.
***
Fifty-three minutes later, their tempers at a low yet consistent throb, Lila and Beau climbed off the train they'd never wanted to board in the first place and found themselves in Oakland.
In the middle of the night.
Without either of their brothers, or Beau's car.
Lila had spent the train ride calling and texting Erik from Beau's phone with zero success. She finally gave up and let Beau try to reach their brothers. So much for the big go-to-Stanford-and-abandon-Beau plan. Or for the screw your final and go catch my brother at the San Jose train station and keep him in a headlock addition.
Beau looked up from his phone, catching Lila's gaze. "We're screwed. They still aren't picking up."
"I see you've mastered the power of positive thinking," Lila
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muttered, even though she actually agreed with him. She pulled the elastic out of her hair and attempted to tame her locks into a neater ponytail. They were now an hour from Beau's car--and their horrible little brothers. Assuming, of course, that Cooper and Tyler had stayed put. For all Lila knew, they could be on their way to Timbuktu at this point. By raft.
"And Erik's a dead end?" Beau asked.
"What's that supposed to mean?" she demanded, a defensive spark skittering up her spine.
Beau blinked. "I mean, he didn't answer his phone when you called, right?"
Fluorescent lights buzzed softly overhead. Someone had scratched the initials KZ + JM into one of the station's glass walls. Lila tugged on her new ponytail and scowled at him. "Like I told you on the train, he has a major take-home final due tomorrow. So yeah, it'd be awesome if he could come pick us up, but the truth is, I'd be shocked if he answered his phone. He's probably holed up in the library, working his ass off. He's really determined to get great grades this semester, which takes a whole lot of dedication and work--I mean, he was obviously going to come to my party until he found out about this exam...."
A man in the corner with a gray mustache rustled his copy of the Oakland Tribune. Beau was staring at her, his eyes bluer than ever in the canary yellow lighting. The expression in them wasn't mocking or superior--just weary.
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Which for some reason made her feel even more defensive.
"Even if he has his phone with him at the library," Lila continued, knowing she was rambling but unable to stop the word vomit, "And even if it's turned on at this point, why would he answer? He probably doesn't answer unfamiliar numbers, and obviously he doesn't know yours. Why would he? It's not like you and he have ever even spoken a sentence to each other, much less been, like, phone buddies!"
Beau held up a finger to silence her. "I have an idea," he said in his careful tone, the one Lila had always hated. He handed her his phone. "You stay here and keep trying. I'm going to go over there"--he pointed across the station toward the information booth--"and see about getting a train back to San Jose, so we can at least have a car while we figure out our next move. Okay?"
"Fine, but I'm telling you, he won't pick up," Lila said. Mustache Man folded up the paper and dropped it in a trash can, frowning at a straggler who was passed out on a long wood bench. "He probably thinks somebody from my party is drunk-dialing him."
She envisioned Erik, hunched over a table in the library, surrounded by towers of dusty books. In her fantasy, he was even wearing glasses, looking incredibly scholarly and cute. He would glanc
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screen, but of course he was far too busy to engage in a conversation in the middle of an exam.
Lila ignored the niggling voice in the back of her mind telling that he wasn't responding to her texts, either. But maybe he'd just finished his take-home final a little early and crashed. Why stay up when he was finished? And why leave the ringer on when he was desperate for a good night's sleep?
She opened her mouth to point that out, but Beau just shrugged and started for the booth. Lila glared at his retreating back and wrapped her scarf in a tighter knot around her neck, punching in Erik's number once again.
The phone rang and rang, until Erik's voice came on the line: Hey, this is Erik. Leave me a message and I'll hit you back. Lila hung up, feeling like hitting something herself. Surely a truly perfect boyfriend would be able to sense, somehow, that she was stranded a zillion miles from home, right? That she was having a sibling emergency of the worst kind. Even if he was at the library, or asleep?
But Erik's perfect-boyfriend sensor was clearly on the fritz, because he failed to pick up the next three times she tried, one right after the other--like the clingy, needy, high school girlfriend she had always prided herself on never being.
"I told you," she said matter-of-factly when Beau walked back to her side and looked at her expectantly. "He's taking an exam."
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Beau rocked back a little in his Converse sneakers and shrugged. "There are no more trains back to San Jose tonight."
"Crap." Lila rubbed at her temples. "Okay, what do we do?"
"The way I see it, we have two options," Beau said. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans and shook his shaggy hair out of his face. "Number one, we sleep here, on the floor."
"Pass," Lila said immediately, wrinkling her nose at the sticky linoleum tiles. They were covered with suspicious-looking brown splotches.