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  Dana Fox?

  My ears immediately perked up. I shot Oliver a puzzled look. For some reason that name rang a distinct bell, though I couldn’t exactly recall why. I thought she might be one of the many kids I’d met that day.

  “Her name sounds familiar,” I said, racking my brain trying to remember which super-cheerful girl I had met was Dana.

  “No wonder. There must be hundreds of posters with her face plastered all over town.”

  Of course, now I remembered why I knew her name. “She’s that missing girl. The one I saw on the way to school this morning. What happened to her?”

  Oliver shrugged. “Nobody knows for sure. Other than Jackson’s one true love up and split one night without so much as leaving a ‘Dear John’ text or e-mail. Hence all those posters that Jackson keeps displaying, hoping someone will report something.”

  “How awful. Do you think she ran away?” Needless to say, I was highly intrigued.

  “Conventional wisdom says she did,” Oliver responded with a shrug.

  “What do her parents say?” I asked.

  “Very little other than she left town to get away from Jackson and is living with relatives,” Oliver admitted. “They’re pretty vague on the details. They’ve urged him to stop with the posters and all, but he refuses. In any case, heartbroken JW did a one-eighty James Dean bad-boy flip-out. Let everything go to hell. His grades plummeted. Friendships dissolved. He got in trouble with the cops and local security. Even blew off the Olympic snowboarding team trials. Now he’s practically a ghost that people barely notice anymore. Other than occasionally working in his family’s sporting goods store, he barely interacts with anyone unless it has to do with finding Dana.”

  “That’s so tragic.” Forget about Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë would’ve had a field day with Jackson Winters and his tale of woe. I wanted to know more. “So what was this Dana Fox like?”

  “She was awesome. Never had to work hard at anything,” Oliver said, without any hint of irony or judgment.

  “Sounds a lot like Maya,” I remarked pointedly.

  “On the contrary. She and Maya were polar opposites,” Oliver proclaimed. “Whereas Maya’s super competitive and works harder than anyone to be Queen Bee—with all her clubs and cheerleading and volunteering—Dana was always totally chill. Never sweated anything. And yet Dana always managed to excel at everything she did. Academically, athletically, socially.”

  “Let me guess. Maya hated being number two.” I have to confess I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about the Dana-Maya rivalry. Perhaps Maya wasn’t so perfect after all.

  “Not only that,” Oliver continued. “Maya made sure she and Dana were besties, from preschool on.”

  “Keep your friends close and enemies closer,” I retorted.

  “You’d think a girl like Dana, who had the golden touch, would be a stuck-up bitch. But truthfully, Dana was really sweet. Even to me.” Oliver shrugged and shook his head, completely mystified, as though he were the world’s biggest loser.

  “And now with Dana out of the picture, I guess Maya finally gets her wish to be numero uno.” I declared. “Triumph out of tragedy.”

  The class bell rang loudly. The remaining stragglers scattered off to their classes. Oliver and I lingered, now officially late.

  “What’ll really be a tragedy is if I miss all the fun in bio lab. It’s frog-dissection day. How awesome is that.” Oliver held his right hand up to his head, cocked it like a gun, and pretended to fire two rounds into his temple.

  I smirked in amusement. “It’s awesomeness squared. Just remember to pith Kermit between the atlas and axis of the vertebral column.” I pointed to the base of my neck, just to tweak him a bit.

  He cringed at the thought. “Thanks. I’m sure Kermie will appreciate it.” And then he flipped me off with a grin as he shuffled reluctantly into the last classroom at the end of the corridor.

  I stood alone in the quiet hallway and took a deep breath before entering my Algebra 2 class, where they were learning about sines and cosines and triangle identities.

  Given that I enjoyed math as much as a trip to the dentist, I silently slid into an empty seat in the back of the room and tried not to call too much attention to myself. Fortunately, Mr. Ramirez was a wiry, no-nonsense math nerd in pressed jeans and a bow tie, who happily kept new student introductions to a minimum rather than lose one minute of precious time discussing the exciting law of tangents. As he droned on in a monotone bass voice, my mind drifted back to Jackson Winters and his missing girlfriend, Dana Fox.

  3. LIGHTS OUT

  * * *

  The last bell rang precisely at two forty-five p.m. Classes were thankfully over for the day. After a few wrong turns, I finally found my way back to my locker. I sorted through the stack of deadly boring textbooks, figuring out which ones I really needed to lug home.

  My heart fluttered for a few brief seconds. It did that sometimes when I felt anxious. Kind of like having butterflies in the stomach, only it lasted longer. I steadied myself, stood up straight, and took a long, deep breath. I had survived yet another first day in a new school in a new place. If only they gave out prize money for that kind of thing.

  I felt exhausted (still fighting off brutal jet lag) and slightly overwhelmed by the amount of busywork (aka homework) that was assigned in each subject. I was probably looking at four hours of work, and it was only my first day. Not that I’d never had homework before—believe me, I had. It was just that I was used to a less rigid and more creative approach to education, especially the time spent outside the classroom.

  Which is what had led me to Master Kru at the Fighting Spirit Gym in Bangkok, where I’d learned Muay Thai kickboxing, also known as the Art of Eight Limbs.

  It’s not that I had a burning desire to kick some serious butt or become this awesome fighter—a female Tony Jaa. Not in the least. The truth was, I had already run through the usual “girl” pursuits of music lessons (piano, guitar, and viola) and dance lessons (ballet, jazz, and modern), followed by five years of soccer (it was the one sport that was played in every town we lived in). Anyway, I was bored and itching to try something different. Something new and challenging, very out of the box. Not to mention I was living in Thailand, and kickboxing was considered the national sport. So, as the saying goes, “When in Rome . . .” Or Bangkok, in my case . . .

  Not that I wasn’t a tiny bit nervous. Believe me, I was. Totally terrified and intimidated. Which made me all the more determined (or stupid, depending on your point of view) to go for it. Plus my good friend Lai, who was a serious gymnast in trampoline and tumbling, came along for moral support. She was petite and adorable with a bubbly personality and always pushed me to try everything Thai. The first afternoon I entered the Fighting Spirit Gym, a sprawling warehouse devoted entirely to kickboxing, I heard Master Kru instructing two ripped young guys in neon-blue silk boxing shorts who were sparring in a padded boxing ring. The boys, both shirtless and barefoot (and yes, totally cute), jabbed and kicked each other with lightning speed and efficiency while Master Kru watched with his laser-beam eyes.

  He seemed to sense my fear and waved me over. A compact, soft-spoken man in his forties, Master Kru was no taller than me. And yet he commanded such authority and respect from everyone in the gym without ever demanding it that I felt compelled to obey. He was one of the greatest kickboxers in Asia, I later learned.

  I stood there, fidgeting, expecting to be taught some basic moves. After a minute of silence, which felt like an eternity, he finally spoke, uttering one word: “Breathe.”

  Breathe? That was it? My first big lesson? I almost laughed, but one look at his calm and fixed expression told me he was dead serious. I was familiar with meditation, so I tried a yoga inhalation that I’d learned from my mom. After a few breaths, Master Kru held up his right hand, stopping me. Wasn’t I breathing properly? Apparently not. I felt like a total dork.

  Master Kru inhaled, taking in a long, deep breath. He
held it for a moment, then slowly exhaled. I watched in amazement how his entire body seemed to inflate and almost grow taller before my eyes. I swallowed, and then I breathed in again, this time more aware of the air rushing into my lungs. I felt the muscles in my abdomen tighten while I held the breath for a moment longer than usual before slowly exhaling. My body was suddenly overcome by the strangest sensation. I became aware of my heart beating and the blood pulsing through my veins, sensations I’d never noticed before.

  My entire body felt alive.

  I shot Master Kru an astonished look. He acknowledged me with a quick nod and then explained that breathing is “the source of life.” With proper breathing, he said, we can control our bodies and everything we do.

  “When the breath wanders, the mind is unsteady. When the breath is still, so is the mind.”

  That may sound simple and New Agey, but I found it deceptively difficult to pull off.

  I stood in the middle of the Barrington High School hallway, shut my eyes, and breathed: slowly and deeply, exactly the way Master Kru had taught me. I tuned out every sound and every thought from my head. I felt my heart rate slow down. My breathing became steady. Within seconds I felt calmer and more relaxed. After a minute I opened my eyes and sighed. Momentary relief.

  But just because I might be able to face hours of homework tonight didn’t mean that I was happy about my predicament. One day here at Barrington High and I knew the school sucked and the kids were freaks. Maybe that sounds melodramatic, but I had fit in better at my last school in Bangkok because, since I was an American, no one had expected me to fit in. Here I was supposed to fit in, and there was no way I could or wanted to.

  I shut my locker, then zipped up my shoulder bag, which was weighed down with almost twenty pounds of textbooks and class handouts, and headed to the exit.

  • • •

  As I hurried down the stairs to the first-floor administrative offices (I remembered I had to hand in my signed class schedule to my new guidance counselor, which would confirm that I hadn’t ditched any classes), I heard deep voices arguing in the hallway—male voices. At first I thought it was two students and barely paid much attention. But then, as I turned the corner, I caught a glimpse of my object of desire, Jackson Winters. He was getting reamed by what I assumed was a very pissed-off teacher near one of the exits. When Jackson tried walking away, the well-dressed African-American man grabbed his arm to stop him. It was then I realized he probably wasn’t a teacher. A teacher wouldn’t do that, I thought. The man angrily ordered Jackson to “stop looking for her.” Jackson yanked his arm free and shouted back, accusing him of lying about Dana and something else, which I couldn’t catch.

  Part of me wanted to hang around and eavesdrop, of course. But the other part (the occasionally sane and cautious half) knew better than to butt into someone else’s business and turn a tense situation into an ugly one. So I decided to sneak off in the opposite direction to the administrative offices.

  At the very last second, though, Jackson looked away from the man and over at me. I was mortified. All I could think about was getting the hell away. So I rushed off, praying he didn’t know who I was.

  • • •

  Five minutes later my heart was still pounding as I stood quietly in the office of Mrs. Julie Henderson, listening to her thank me effusively for turning in my schedule so promptly. She was cute and a lot younger than I expected a guidance counselor to be. Thirty-nine years old, I was guessing, courtesy of her Northwestern University diploma, class of ‘96, which was prominently displayed on the wall alongside photographs of her riding an elephant somewhere in Africa, posing in front of the Parthenon in Athens, and at her wedding. With a pixie haircut and cool sense of style and dress—most probably Betsey Johnson—Mrs. Henderson seemed like a welcome change from most of the other staid, vanilla-bland teachers I had met. After she politely inquired about my first day, she suggested scheduling a meeting for the following week to discuss my goals and future.

  “Before you know it, all your time will slip away if you don’t plan ahead,” she chirped with a bright, eager-to-please smile as she scrolled through her calendar on her computer, searching for an available time slot. “No matter how prepared you think you are in life, there are always unexpected adjustments.”

  Goals and future plans, as in college and career and the great beyond known as adulthood? Was she for real? Here I had barely finished my first day in this new school in this new town, and she was already pressing to know what I wanted to be when I graduated in two years?

  My disbelief and horror must have been pretty apparent, because she immediately got this apologetic look and quickly dialed everything back to zero.

  “You know, on second thought . . . there’ll be plenty of time to discuss all that stuff later.”

  She closed her calendar file and put her computer to sleep. Then she stared at me. I squirmed about in my chair, feeling scrutinized.

  “Listen, I hope I didn’t freak you out too much,” Mrs. Henderson remarked, pushing her computer to the side and smiling self-critically. “I have a tendency to get a little carried away with all the planning. As my husband so often reminds me.”

  And I had a tendency to run for the hills when facing down a control freak, but instead I kept my cool, muttered something noncommittal like “no problem,” and then took off before she had time to think of any other helpful suggestions.

  • • •

  The parking lot had thinned out considerably, as most kids had already left for the day. I spotted my father standing by his Prius in the drop-off zone. He was chatting with a tall, sandy-haired boy I didn’t recognize.

  My dad smiled as he saw me approach. “Here’s my girl. How did your first day go?”

  “It went,” I replied, in no mood to go into details about my exhausting day with some blond dude I didn’t know standing right there.

  My father smiled indulgently at my flippant response but knew better than to pry or prod me for further details, especially in front of a stranger. “By the way, you guys know each other?”

  “Don’t think so.” I stared right at the guy. “I’m Nica.”

  Blondie stared right back, supremely confident and not the least bit intimidated by my prickliness. “Chase Cochran. Pleasure to meet you, Nica. I heard a lot about you today.”

  “Interesting. I didn’t hear a word about you.” Snarky, I know, but I hated feeling like all the kids were dishing me before I even knew them. I couldn’t hide my grumpy mood even with a smile.

  Chase chuckled, easily amused. “Lucky for me.”

  Okay, so the boy was quick-witted, with a sense of humor. Points for that. He also had the brightest megawatt smile I’d ever seen. Which no doubt he whitened twice a month for maintenance. And he apparently had already won over my dad, who was beaming brightly at the sight of his daughter getting acquainted with this boy. It was a little unnerving how smooth a player Chase was, not to mention how good-looking.

  Though to call Chase Cochran good-looking was an understatement. Excessively handsome was more like it. The kind of handsome that almost hurts your eyes—like one of those unnaturally ripped Abercrombie models who look like they’ve been genetically engineered. Yes, those boys are gorgeous hunks, but they’re not quite real. Chase had a strong, chiseled profile and such a sharp jawline it probably could slice steel. And judging from his school jacket, which he wore proudly with its numerous varsity letters, Chase was undoubtedly an awesome athlete. Odds were he was also incredibly popular. Guys that good-looking invariably are, no matter which school they attend. The guy every boy wanted to be—and every girl wanted to know. And adults admired. A star.

  And he was staring at me. Checking me out.

  “Mind if we go, Dad? I’m really fried.” And, I admit, I was more than a little self-conscious with Chase scrutinizing me that way. I was so obviously not his type. And neither was he mine.

  “Ready when you are. Can we drop you somewhere, Chase?” My dad w
ould have to be Mr. Polite and offer blond Adonis a ride.

  “Thanks, Dr. A. I got my own wheels,” he responded with a grin.

  Dodged a bullet on that one, I thought. The prospect of being trapped in a car with Chase and my dad literally made me nauseous. Just like I didn’t do group activities, I didn’t do charming very well.

  “Catch you later, Nica.” Chase grinned and gave me a lingering and, if I was not mistaken, lascivious look before heading off. But still, I wasn’t sure if he was flirting with me or merely acting attentive in front of my dad.

  “Yeah. Later.” Very much relieved, I hopped into the passenger seat and watched Chase stride confidently over to a posse of guys who were goofing around on the lawn. There was a flurry of fist bumping as they opened their arms and made room for Chase, like he was their prodigal king returned from battle.

  “He acts like he owns the place,” I muttered, half under my breath.

  “Actually, his dad does.” Dad pressed the ignition button, then drove the Prius out of the school parking lot onto the main road.

  There was an edge to my father’s voice, which made me sit up and press further. “Who’s his dad?” This was the second time my dad had slipped something into conversation (the first being curfew), and I was curious why.

  “Richard Cochran. He’s president of Bar Tech Industries. And chairman of the hospital board, among other things.”

  That explained a lot about Chase’s egotistical attitude. His dad’s company was literally everywhere in Barrington. I stared out the window at the Bar Tech logo, which was emblazoned over the school sign.

  Fortunately, Chase Cochran’s name was never mentioned again during the ride home.

  • • •

  My dad dropped me off at the house before heading back to the hospital for the rest of the afternoon. He had patients to see and promised to be home no later than seven with a delicious sushi dinner. Meanwhile I was more than happy to have a few hours of much-needed alone time.