Since You've Been Gone by Morgan Matson

shoes across to Doug, who was back to reading his paperback. A Murder of Crows , the cover read, featuring a fierce-looking bird about to alight on a flaming sword. He stood and got Beckett’s sneakers without looking up from his book.
    “But, Emily ,” Beckett whined.
    I just shook my head. And we walked out to my car insilence as I tried to steel myself for what I was going to have to do. I usually didn’t play the Big Sister card—Beckett and I got along fine, mostly because there were seven years between us, we’d never been competing for the same things, and I usually felt more like his babysitter than his sibling. But this was one of the instances where I knew I had to do it, since my parents certainly weren’t going to step up, not right when they’d begun a play. I put the key in the ignition, but didn’t turn it yet as I faced my brother, who was sitting cross-legged on the seat, glaring down at his hands. “Beck, you can’t do stuff like that,” I said. I suddenly wondered if it would have been better if Beckett had gotten hurt at some point during the years he’d been climbing, so he’d have a healthy degree of fear, or at least some understanding of the consequences. “You shouldn’t be taking risks like that. I don’t care what you climb at home. There were other people around. You could have been hurt, or you could have hurt them. It’s called being reckless.”
    I started the car and headed home, Beckett not speaking, still looking down. I knew he was mad at me and figured he would probably sulk the rest of the drive, so I was surprised when he spoke up as I turned onto our street.
    “But I wasn’t,” Beckett said. I wasn’t sure what he meant, and it must have been clear, because he went on, “I wasn’t hurt. Nobody else was, either. And I got to see a really great view. So what’s that called?”
    I just shook my head, knowing somehow that there was aflaw in his logic, but not exactly sure how to articulate what it was. “Just . . .”
    “I know, I know, be more careful,” he said as I pulled in to the driveway. He contradicted this immediately, though, unbuckling his seat belt and jumping out before I’d even put the car in park. “I’m going to Annabel’s. See you later,” he yelled as he slammed the door and took off running behind our house. Annabel lived at the other end of the block, and she and Beckett had spent most of last summer finding shortcuts between the two houses that they guarded closely and refused to disclose.
    I watched him go, then picked up my phone. I had pressed the button to call Sloane automatically, when I realized what I was doing. I hung up—but not before I’d heard the phone was still going directly to her voice mail, the one that I’d heard a thousand times, the one that she’d recorded with me next to her as we walked down the street. Toward the end, you could hear me laughing. I set the phone down on the passenger seat, out of easy reach. But it always felt like nothing had really happened until I’d talked to Sloane about it. I was used to recapping my experiences to her, and then going through them, moment by moment. And if she’d been here, or on the other end of the phone, I could have told her how bizarre it was that Frank Porter was working at IndoorXtreme, about Collins, and what I’d heard about their evening plans—
    I suddenly understood something and glanced up at my bedroom window, picturing the list in my drawer. I got nowwhat Sloane meant by number twelve. It wasn’t just a bizarre fruit-gathering mission. She wanted me to go to the Orchard.
    I waited until ten before I left. By this point, Beckett was in bed and my parents had retreated to their study at the top of the house. All their patterns from a few years ago were coming back, and this was how they had worked then: they would write all day in the dining room, usually forgetting about dinner, and then head upstairs, where they would go over that day’s pages and