Fragments of the Lost by Megan Miranda

Author:Megan Miranda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2017-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

I leave in my car, but pull around the block, determined to fit the pieces together. As if by fitting them together, all that we’ve lost will suddenly be found again.

I knock on Max’s front door with the binoculars in my hand, but nobody answers. I ring the bell, but nothing. His car isn’t here, either. I consider sending him a text, but we don’t do that anymore. Not since the day of the flood.

—

“I’m home,” I call when I walk through the front door of my house. But I head straight up the steps to my room.

I flip through Caleb’s pictures, trying to find what had been on his bedside table, what glass had broken. I scan through all of them until I find the one of me and Mia on his bed. There’s a lamp behind us, and there’s a small glass figurine beside it.

I remember, suddenly. It’s a unicorn. Mia gave it to him. If I had noticed it missing, if I’d given it any thought at all, I might’ve assumed it had been moved to a different shelf, or a drawer, or maybe that Mia took it back for her own collection, changing her mind.

But I didn’t really notice. And now I know it was what had shattered that day. Shards of it ground into his beige rug. Another victim of his arms thrown out in dreams, or in nightmares.

Something settles inside me, this piece of information, as if I can make sense of things after all. Part of a movie scene, played in reverse: fragments from the floor un-breaking, un-falling, resettling on the surface of his bedside table. Everything slips into place, and I believe once more that I can trace the start and end, the cause and effect, the trail of events that led to Caleb in a car, heading east.

—

Logging onto my computer, I see I have a message. My pulse picks up, and my finger hovers over the icon. It’s from Ashlyn Patterson, and it’s like there’s another version of Caleb in the screen tucked just beyond here. I can almost see him, waiting there.

She has written a single line in return: I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know any Caleb Evers.

I groan out loud and go back to scrolling through the images on the other profiles, but no other Ashlyn Patterson fits the description. They’re either too young or too old, too unrecognizable.

I keep scanning faces until my dad calls me for dinner.

Downstairs, I eat in the dining room with my parents, but my heart isn’t in it. My stomach isn’t in it. But my parents let me be, ignoring the fact that I’m just moving the food around my plate. I’ve been in and out, here and gone, since that day in mid-September, when Caleb drove off the bridge. I’ve quit cross-country, but I run alone, at night, in the dark, with nothing but the sound of air rushing in and out, the imaginary rumble of a river between my gasping breaths.

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