Tornado Brain Read online

  She moved her chair forward so she was next to me.

  I scanned the corners of the room where the walls met the ceiling. “Is this being recorded?”

  My mom sighed.

  “Yes,” Officer Rollins said.

  “Where’s the camera?” I asked. My mom cleared her throat, probably trying to remind me to let Officer Rollins talk.

  Okay, yes, I talk a lot. Gabe sometimes reminds me not to “monopolize the conversation,” which apparently means talking about what you want to talk about and not pausing to listen to what other people want to say—even if you think what they want to say is boring or annoying. It doesn’t matter: you still have to do it.

  Officer Rollins had his superhuman forearms on the table, and he raised his right one like a drawbridge, pointing up, showing me where the camera was mounted.

  “I see it,” I said, craning my neck to look at the little dome near the overhead light with a tiny red eye peeking out. “Thanks. That would have bugged me.”

  “What would have?” Officer Rollins asked, stroking his face fur.

  “Looking for the camera,” I said. “Better I just know where it is to begin with.”

  The right corner of Officer Rollins’s mouth lifted like it was considering going full-smile but then got tired and defaulted to a frown. His circle beard made it look like he was stuck that way.

  I wondered whether he was able to smile. Is there something wrong with your face? Smiling isn’t necessary all the time. Clowns smile too much . . . They’re so creepy. Creepy like the Sea Witch. Remember that time we—

  “Is it okay if I ask you some questions now?” Officer Rollins asked, interrupting my winding train of thought. I nodded even though, let’s be honest, I wanted to ask more about the camera if we were going to talk about anything. “I’ll start by saying that you’re not in any trouble.”

  “Why would I be in trouble? Colette’s the one missing.”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling for real that time. “And we’re trying to find her, which is why we asked all of you in today—to see if you can give us any clues that will help us do that.”

  “Did you check her phone?” I asked. “Her whole life is on her phone.”

  “We assume she has her phone with her,” Officer Rollins said. “But her phone is off, so we haven’t been able to pinpoint her location.”

  “How about her computer?” I asked. He sighed, and I said, “Okay, you ask the questions.”

  “Thanks.” He checked something in a tan leather notebook in front of him. “So you’re one of Colette’s best friends, is that right?”

  “No.”

  “No? That’s what the other kids said.”

  My mom shifted in her chair.

  “Well, I used to be friends with Colette,” I clarified, “but we’re not friends anymore.” Officer Rollins looked at me like he wanted more of an explanation than that, so I kept talking. “When we were younger, Colette and I were best friends . . . and my sister and Colette were friends, too. The three of us hung out together a lot. Then Mia moved here in middle school and joined our group and Tess and Colette both really liked her but I didn’t, and then the group changed and I was . . .” I thought about that a second, not knowing what to say. Feeling silly about saying the truth, that I was left behind. “We just stopped being friends. That’s all.”

  Officer Rollins nodded and said, “I get it. I have a fifteen-year-old daughter.”

  “I’m thirteen.”

  “I know,” he said, smiling. “I’m just saying that I know how these things go.”

  While he made notes, I noticed that there wasn’t a clock in the room. I wondered if that was on purpose, like an interrogation tactic for criminals or something. The room didn’t seem very menacing, though: I mean, there was a poster of the beach at sunset.

  I daydreamed about building sandcastles with Colette and Tess, racing to stack packed sand bricks as high as we could before the tide came in and swept them away.

  “Frankie?” Officer Rollins asked.

  “What?” I tuned back in to the conversation. I guess he’d been having it without me.

  “I asked: When you were friends, what did Colette like to do?”

  “Sing,” I answered.

  “Oh yeah?”

  I nodded. “She secretly wants to be a pop star. She writes songs all the time—or at least she used to.” I looked at my mom. “Her parents don’t know that, so don’t tell them.”

  Mom smiled at me, and I looked back at Officer Rollins, adding, “She’s a pretty good singer.”

  “That’s great information, Frankie. No one else told us that Colette likes to sing.” I couldn’t help it; I smiled at the praise. He continued, “Do you think that Colette ran away?”

  I laughed out loud. “No!” I said. “She’s only thirteen! And she’s not that brave.” Colette couldn’t even hug a tombstone.

  “But do you think it’s possible that she ran away? Even remotely?” he asked, looking up at me from his super-messy handwriting. There was no way I could read what it said upside down.

  “No,” I said. I felt antsy and started swinging my feet.

  “We’re almost finished,” Officer Rollins said, looking down at my feet. He used the end of his pen to skim through his notes. “Just one last question and then you can go, Frankie.”

  “Okay,” I said, glancing at my mom. She gave me an encouraging smile that made me feel like I’d done a reasonable job answering the questions. Then I got the one I didn’t want to hear.

  “When’s the last time you saw Colette?”

  No!

  I’d decided that lying to the police would be a very bad idea. I’d made a deal with myself that if they asked directly, I’d tell the truth. But now Officer Rollins was looking at me with a question-mark face and it made me really nervous because right after the last time I’d seen Colette, she’d disappeared. And I didn’t like feeling like it was even a little bit my fault. Because it absolutely, positively wasn’t.

  “I saw Colette last night,” I blurted out, making Officer Rollins look up at me, surprised.

  “What?” my mom said, sitting straighter in her chair. “Why didn’t you say anything abou—”

  “If you could let Frankie speak, please,” Officer Rollins interrupted.

  “Sorry,” Mom said, “go ahead, Frankie.”

  “She came to my room at six forty-five.”

  “I see, and . . . ,” Officer Rollins began. Then his words faded and his forehead wrinkled up in confusion. He flipped quickly through the pages in his notebook to find a certain entry. “Do you mean six forty-five in the morning yesterday?”

  “Uh . . . no,” I said, laughing. “Who would come over that early?”

  “You’re saying that Colette came to your room at six forty-five in the evening yesterday?” I nodded, and he looked at me sternly. “How do you know what time it was?”

  “It was right in the middle of Tornado Ally and I was annoyed that she was making me miss watching it live.” He didn’t say anything, so I added, “I don’t like watching it recorded and Colette knows that. And it was getting close to homework time, and I’d have to stop watching and leave my room, which made it doubly annoying.”

  “Why did you have to leave your room to do homework?” Officer Rollins asked. “Did you go to the library?”

  I gave my mom a look. “She makes me do it at the cottage so she can watch me.”

  “So I can help you,” Mom said quietly.

  Officer Rollins rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands and then rubbed his forehead and bald head and I wondered if he’d stop before rubbing his skin off but then he finally stopped. “Frankie, is this some kind of a joke?” he asked.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, not seeing the humor in it at all. I stared at him seriously. Then I go
t distracted by the number of lines on his forehead. I started counting them: one, two, three, four . . .

  “Frankie?” He’d raised his eyebrows, making the lines really pronounced. He looked at my mom with an expression that I interpreted as: I see what you mean.

  I wanted to act normal, but I didn’t know what he’d said. “Huh?”

  “Will you please try to pay attention?” my mom asked.

  “I am!” I snapped.

  Officer Rollins took a deep breath. “Frankie, I was saying that someone else said that Colette visited them at precisely six forty-five last evening and stayed for about twenty minutes, and unless Colette is magic, I don’t think she could have been in two places at once.”

  “She’s not magic,” I said, confused, “and I’m not lying. I know when Tornado Ally was posted—you can check on Viewer.”

  “I’m sorry, are you saying tornado ally, or alley?” Officer Rollins asked.

  “Ally, just like I said,” I answered. “Like a friend of tornadoes, not Tornado Alley, the place that gets the most tornadoes in the country.” I rolled my eyes. “Although all these questions are making me feel like I’m in Tornado Alley . . . and like I need an ally,” I joked. No one laughed. I was embarrassed. “I’m telling the truth about when Colette came to my room, too. She was there for like ten minutes. Or fifteen, maybe. The other person has to be lying.”

  Was it ten? Or more like five? I had no idea, but I wasn’t telling him that.

  “And you’re sure it wasn’t more like six thirty when she came by? Because then she could have made it—”

  “I’m one hundred percent sure,” I interrupted him.

  My mom cleared her throat again.

  “I wonder if you’d say that if you knew who it was,” Officer Rollins said.

  “Who is it?” My head was spinning. I was positive I’d told him the right time. Why would someone else say Colette had visited them then, too? They were clearly lying! “Tell me who said that.”

  Officer Rollins closed his notebook and frowned at me. Both adults were quiet for a long time, looking at each other, then at me, then back at each other. Finally my mom shrugged, and Officer Rollins answered the question.

  “It was Tess.”

  chapter 6

  Fact: The majority of tornadoes only last for a few minutes.

  I PUSHED THROUGH the doors of the police station and paused on the sidewalk, my hands balled into fists. A female officer was going into the building, carrying a big envelope, and she almost ran into me. I didn’t apologize for stopping abruptly in her path because I was fighting back angry tears. And I was in the worst possible place to cry: right on Pacific Avenue. In a story about our town, Pacific Avenue would have been called Main Street.

  My mom had stayed behind to speak with the officer again privately, frustrating me even more. I turned left and walked past the mini-carnival, closed until Memorial Day, to the benches by the fourteen-foot-tall frying pan. The sign in front of the frying pan will tell you it’s from the 1940s and was put there in celebration of the clam festival. I sat down and avoided looking at the tourists getting their pictures taken while pretending to be bacon, which is the least original idea ever.

  I tried to talk myself down from ten, because if my mom came out and saw me losing it, that would go on her list of reasons why I should be on medication.

  Colette is probably perfectly fine and she’ll be home soon, I told myself. We will all go back to school on Monday and have our normal day and this will just be a weird thing that happened.

  That’s self-talk. It’s supposed to help, but it didn’t. I kicked my heel against the bench a few times, grunting. My face probably looked mad, because when the tourists at the frying pan noticed me, they walked away.

  Stop it! I told myself. Mom’s coming out soon.

  I forced myself to stop kicking the bench. I forced my mouth into a fake smile, because sometimes if you do that, you’ll accidentally really smile. I didn’t, but maybe a weird fake smile looked better than a scowl. I focused on uncurling my fists. Finally I flipped my hands over so my palms were facing up. Someone had told me to do that once—and today, that was the thing that worked. The cool breeze on my palms felt so nice and calming that my fake smile faded to a neutral face and I didn’t have to think so much about not kicking the bench: I just didn’t do it.

  I sniffed and checked my phone. It was 2:50 in the afternoon. Even though it’d felt like longer, my internal freak-out had only lasted a few minutes.

  I looked across the street at Marsh’s Free Museum, which is more of a curiosity gift shop than a museum so I’m not sure why it’s called that. The parking lot was crowded because it was starting to get warmer since it was the middle of April, and Marsh’s was one of the few things for tourists to do in Long Beach besides hanging out at the beach and taking bacon pictures.

  Colette and my sister and I used to go to Marsh’s with our piggy banks and buy saltwater taffy and have our fortunes told, then dare each other to look at Jake the Alligator Man for a full minute, which is super-tough because I’m telling you, that half-man, half-alligator thing looks completely gross. I still have some videos of us inside Marsh’s saved somewhere. It was part of a game we used to play called dare-or-scare. It was cool.

  Thinking of that made my tears dry up.

  I wondered if Kai had gone to Marsh’s after his interview at the police station; Kai’s parents ran the store and they made him help sometimes even though I think that might be illegal. Part of me wanted to go apologize for being rude and part of me felt like he’d probably already gotten over it so what was the point.

  “Hi, how are you feeling?” Mom asked carefully when she joined me near the frying pan.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “Really?” I didn’t like how surprised she looked, but I nodded anyway.

  “Well, that’s great,” Mom said, “because they want you to come back in. Both you and Tess. I just got off the phone with her and she’s on her way back. Another officer found something in Colette’s locker that they want you to see.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Mom shrugged; the sun blasted into my eyes when I looked up at her. “We’ll find out soon,” she said. “And I think they want to talk more about when you last saw Colette, too.”

  “Tess is a liar,” I said matter-of-factly. I felt bad about saying it, but it had to be true because I knew I wasn’t lying.

  “Please don’t call your sister names,” Mom said, frowning.

  Her long, dark brown hair blew up all around her like she was a superhero, and she should have just let it go, but she wrapped it into a lady-knot at the back of her head. Mom, Tess, and I all have the same hair color—except Mom’s has some gray in it—but theirs is straight and usually clean and brushed, and mine is curly and usually dirty and wild. That’s why I keep it shorter: brushing out snarls is the worst.

  “I’m telling the truth,” I said, pushing off the bench and walking back toward the police station. Mom followed me. “I know that Colette came to see me at six forty-five. I’m one hundred percent sure that’s the right time.”

  “Frankie, I believe you. But do you think your sister would lie to the police?” Mom asked. “Do you honestly think that?”

  “No one would ever think that Tess would lie to the police or do anything wrong,” I said, trying to keep my tone of voice steady. “I am the person people would call a liar, no matter what.” I blew my bangs out of my eyes; I needed a haircut, but I hated getting them. “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “I said I believe you,” Mom said. “I believe that both of you believe you’re telling the truth. But one of you must be wrong—by accident, of course.”

  “Let’s just go in,” I said. We were outside the police station again.

  “We need to wait for Tess,” Mom said, leaning to the left so she
could see down the street, pulling her sweatshirt tight around her. “She’ll be here soon.”

  “Fine.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE SAME interview room as before, Officer Rollins dragged in another chair. Tess sat down in the one by the far wall, hunching forward like she always does, her arms wrapped tightly around herself.

  “That’s my seat,” I said.

  “It’s not yours,” she said quietly, pressing her lips into a line.

  “It’s the one I sat in before, so it’s mine.”

  “I used this one when Mom and I came in earlier, too. Can’t you just sit in the—”

  “Tess,” Mom said in a low voice.

  “What?” Tess asked her quietly. “Can’t she just sit in the other chair? This is mortifying.”

  “Can we get started?” Officer Rollins asked. “There are chairs for everyone.”

  “Yes, but she’s in mine.” I pointed at the new chair and said to Tess, “You can use that one.”

  “So can you?” Tess said like a question. She looked from me to Officer Rollins to Mom. Tess seemed really embarrassed and I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t stop myself from demanding that she give me the chair by the wall.

  Sitting down in the chair that I was standing right next to would have been the easy thing to do. But sometimes I can’t make myself do the easy thing.

  “I can’t sit near the door.” My voice was sharper. I started to feel the tightness that happens in my throat before the tears show up. I could feel the scream building in me. Tess needed to move.

  “You can have my chair,” Mom said, getting up.

  “You know I can’t sit in the middle either.” My arms were hanging by my sides, and I flipped my hands so that my palms were facing out, wondering if it’d work again. But it was hot in the room and my head itched and I had to scratch it, so I didn’t keep my palms up for long enough.

  “Ladies, we really need to get started,” Officer Rollins said. He sounded annoyed.