Yesterday by C. K. Kelly Martin

suspicion. “Are you having more of those headaches?”
    I’m a step ahead of my grandfather, ready with another lie. “No—not that. Women’s stuff.”
    This is a surefire way to steer my grandfather away from the topic of headaches and another visit to Doctor Byrne. Men my grandfather’s age generally don’t like to hear about periods.
    A quizzical look, which I interpret as discomfort, clouds his face. “Let’s get you home before it snows again, Freya,” he declares. “The forecast says there’ll be quite a bit of it tonight.”
    We trudge out of the lobby together and towards my grandfather’s car nestled at the curbside, my thoughts back on Walmer Road with the boy who’s a complete stranger to me yet feels so much more familiar than my flesh-and-blood grandfather.

FOUR
    W hat I want to do is sit quietly by myself and churn it all over in my mind until I figure it out. Peel back the layers and unravel the core mystery of what happened today. The dark-haired boy haunts me in the car trip with my grandfather and once we’re home he haunts me throughout my mom’s rant about the school being neglectful and irresponsible in abandoning me at the museum. When my mother says she’ll call tomorrow and let them know leaving me in Toronto to fend for myself was totally unacceptable, I don’t argue. It would’ve been worse if one of the trip supervisors had noticed my absence on the bus, begun a search (how would I account for leaving the museum?) and raised the alarm. If any of that had happened they’d have alerted my mother, so it seems I fell through the cracks. Their neglect was my good fortune.
    My grandfather leaves before dinner, wanting to beat thesnow, and when my mother, Olivia and I are eating lamb at the table later, the phone rings, breaking the silence. My mom reaches for it, her cheeks flaring as if she’s expecting to hear a school official on the other end and is eager to tear a strip off them. Mom’s anger is usually subtler than my father’s but I instinctively suck in my cheeks, like I’ve tasted something sour. Tension prickles under my skin.
    Then my mother presses the receiver to her ear and I begin to relax as I watch her face soften. “I’ll have her call you back if that’s all right,” she says into the phone. “We’re just in the middle of dinner.”
    She hangs up, announcing, “That was Christine for you, Freya.”
    I thank her as the boy from earlier keeps blinking his green eyes inside my head, trying to tell me something I should already know.
    I envision him in the old brick house with the pale blue trim and try to imagine what he might be doing there this very second. His parents could be home from work now. He might be eating dinner with them. Will he be hungry despite the hotdog he inhaled, practically in one piece, earlier? Is he in high school like me or has he already graduated? What does he do with his spare time? What does he want to be? Does he ever think about mass extinction?
    Do I know him like I think I do? How is that possible?
    Nothing concrete happened today—I didn’t even speak to the boy—but just seeing him has changed things andI’m so swept up in him that I almost forget about returning Christine’s call. It’s my mother who reminds me when I pass her in the upstairs hallway just before eight o’clock.
    “What happened to you at the museum?” Christine wants to know once I have her on the phone. “You never came back. Are you ditching us like you ditched Seth?”
    “Of course not.” It never occurred to me that she and Derrick might think I didn’t want to hang out with them at the museum. Since the three of us were assigned different buses I guess they didn’t have a clue I wasn’t on mine when it left.
    “Just kidding,” Christine claims. “So what
did
happen?”
    I tell her that I fell asleep in the cafeteria and that I must have some kind of twenty-four-hour bug because I still feel sort of groggy. As I’m explaining about