Ex-Mas Read online

  But when she looked back at Beau, there was the oddest expression on his face, almost as if she'd hurt his feelings. Then his phone beeped and the usual mocking look returned.

  Lila glared at the iPhone.

  "Is it him?" she demanded. "He totally stole my phone, didn't he?"

  "Uh, yeah," Beau said, his attention on the screen. He shook his head. "And that's pretty much the least of our problems right now."

  He held out the phone so Lila could read the text Cooper

  46

  had sent: WE'RE GOING TO THE NORTH POLE TO SAVE SANTA--BACK IN TIME FOR XMAS.

  "I'm going to kill him!" She snatched the phone out of Beau's hand. She punched the buttons to redial her own cell phone, her anger mounting with each ring.

  "Um, hello?" came a voice, high and giggling.

  "You're dead, Cooper," Lila snapped at him. "Do you understand me? Tell me where you are!"

  "Good idea," Beau said sarcastically, standing right next to her. "Threaten him. That should do the trick."

  Lila turned her back on him. "Cooper!" she yelled. "I'm serious!"

  But all she heard in reply was laughter.

  Beau reached over and plucked the phone from Lila's fingers. "Cooper," he said into the phone. "Put Tyler on" He paused. Then, in a much friendlier tone than the one he'd been using on Lila, he said, "Tyler, man, where are you guys? Mom's going to freak"

  Lila couldn't stand the fact that she couldn't hear what Tyler was saying, so she moved closer to Beau, sticking her head next to his so she could hear. He threw a startled look her way, but tilted the phone toward her.

  "You took a cab, huh? But you can't take one all the way to Santa's. The North Pole is far away, especially for two little guys," Beau continued, reasonably. "Don't you think?"

  "It's okay," Tyler piped up. "We can do it."

  47

  "We can take care of ourselves!" Cooper said in the background. "Santa needs us!"

  "Santa really does need us," Tyler said very seriously. "Someone has to help him."

  Lila could feel the glare that Beau leveled at the side of her head. She raised her chin in defiance, but didn't respond.

  "If you tell us where you are," she said in a cajoling voice, "maybe we can help you help him."

  "We don't need your help!" Cooper cried, and then there was more laughter. Lila was about to lose it and start screaming when another noise sounded in the background. It was a PA system, and it was very distinct: ALL ABOARD! "Gotta go!" Tyler said with a giggle, and the line went dead. Lila and Beau stared at each other for a frozen moment, each waiting to see if the other had heard.

  "They took a cab to--" Beau began.

  "The train station," Lila finished, hope and relief exploding in her chest.

  "Let's go," Beau said at once.

  Lila followed him through the house and out the back door into the garage. She was so focused on finding Cooper and putting an end to this nonsense that she barely noticed Beau's beat-up old Escort, complete with the sorts of bumper stickers you'd expect from an angry hipster dude intent on alienating himself from the rest of the world.

  48

  She slid into the passenger seat and eyed Beau, who was, after all, the exact sort of scruffy guy you'd expect to be driving this car. She wondered which obscure band he'd tattooed on his back or around his calf in the last few years, and was only mildly surprised that he wasn't sporting more piercings. He still had only the one--a silver hoop in his left ear, attached in the middle instead of the lobe.

  She leaned back into the bucket seat and closed her eyes. She just needed to get her hands on Cooper, and then she'd be done with all of this--crappy car, pissy ex-boyfriend, and everything else so typically and annoyingly Beau.

  Soon, she thought, just like our relationship, it will be like none of this ever happened.

  49

  Chapter 6

  *** BEAU'S CAR

  LOS ANGELES

  DECEMBER 22

  3:47 P.M.

  ***

  "The thing is," Beau said, breaking the tense silence between them as he slammed the car into gear, then gunned it down the driveway and out into the street, "I don't understand what you thought was going to happen."

  Lila flicked a look at him but didn't answer. His tone did not bode well. It reminded her of many past conversations in which Beau dissected her seemingly endless character flaws. Yay. She belted herself into the passenger seat and tried to get warm by rubbing her hands together. The temperature was falling, and the wind was kicking up outside, making the trees sway and rustle. The houses on Beau's street were decked out in Christmas lights, with fake snowmen on the green lawns and reindeer posed beneath the palm trees. It was the start of the holiday weekend, and everyone was preparing to enjoy themselves.

  50

  Everyone except Lila.

  "I mean, did you even think for five seconds what Cooper might do?" Beau continued. "When you basically told him Santa Claus was in mortal danger?"

  Oh, right. She should have guessed immediately. The Beau Hodges Blame Game.

  "I don't know," she said, pretending to think it over. Beau drove way too fast down the residential backstreets of their town, headed for the train station at a speed that would get them a hefty speeding ticket if clocked. "I guess I thought that maybe it would be cool to ignore two eight-year-olds for two hours and then act all shocked and surprised that something happened to them while they were unsupervised." She looked at him. "Oh no, wait. That's you."

  "I'm not the one who provoked them!" Beau barely halted at a stop sign and then floored the gas pedal through an intersection. Lila's head rocked back against the headrest like they were on a roller coaster. Why was she not surprised that he was a crazy driver?

  "Maybe not," Lila said, "but you did ignore them, didn't you?"

  Beau turned his right signal on and gunned it around a corner. "Cooper and Tyler have played together, without incident, at least ten million times while I played a little guitar downstairs. Why was today any different? Because Cooper got hit with Hurricane Lila."

  51

  "Hurricane Lila," she echoed derisively. "Cute. You have names for me, still. After all these years."

  "You didn't think before you dropped the global warming thing on Cooper," Beau said. He was vibrating with tension all of a foot away from her, clearly fighting for control. "You just wanted to hurt him."

  "You're right," Lila snapped. "I did. Better he learns now that if you mess with people, you might get messed with in return." She sniffed. "It's practically a public service."

  "What about the part where you're ten years older than him, and should maybe figure out how to be the bigger person?"

  She suddenly remembered their shared art class in sixth grade, when they had to make papier-mâché animals for a class project. Lila's pig had been lopsided and soggy, and in no way resembled a pig of any kind. She thought it was hilarious, and named the lumpy thing Gerald. Beau, on the other hand, had painstakingly constructed a life-size, anatomically correct rooster. Even then, he thought he was better than her.

  "Ever considered the possibility that watching the kids might mean, you know, watching them?" Lila asked with acid sweetness. "Instead of hiding in your basement pretending someone cares if you can play all of 'Jesus of Suburbia'?"

  "You know what, Lila?" Beau's voice was angry and tight. Lila knew she'd scored a direct hit, and wished that felt a little more satisfying. "I think maybe we should both just shut up."

  52

  Lila pursed her lips but didn't say another word as Beau careened into the train station parking lot. They leaped out of the car as soon as it screeched to a stop, and sprinted toward the station doors. Beau ran ahead of her, his lanky legs taking long strides. He wasn't even a little breathless when they got inside. Their eyes wildly searched the nearly empty terminal. The long rows of plastic seats were dotted with only a few commuters, most reading the newspaper or quietly talking on the phone.

 
Lila scanned and re-scanned the scene, seeing only the same handful of people, none of them two mischievous little boys. "I don't see them," she said angrily. "What are we going to do?"

  "I don't know," he replied in a similar, clipped tone. He jerked his chin in the direction of a nearby Amtrak worker. "Maybe somebody noticed them."

  Lila followed him over to a woman in an Amtrak uniform, with the biggest, roundest, red hair she had ever seen. It skyrocketed off her head and was hair-sprayed into a glossy bouffant. Lila had to force herself not to stare openly.

  "I'm sorry to bother you," Beau said, with an easy politeness. Lila gaped. Since when was Beau charming? "But have you seen two little boys running around here, by any chance? All alone?"

  "They're both about this big," Lila chimed in, holding her hand just above her waist. "One wears Harry Potter glasses, and the other one has a mess of freckles and was wearing a bright green sweatshirt."

  53

  "I was wondering who was supposed to be with those two," the older woman replied, shaking her head. Her gaze turned faintly accusing. "They had online tickets, but they seemed a little young to be traveling to Seattle all by themselves."

  "Seattle?" Lila could not possibly have heard that right. She ignored the accusing look and matching tone from Mrs. Red Round Hair, and focused on the part that did not make any sense at all. The part that could not make any sense. "Did you say they were going to Seattle?"

  Beau closed his eyes for a moment. He ran his hands through his hair, which Lila remembered he did when he was agitated. Like when his dog had run away back in the sixth grade and he'd maintained a tense nightly vigil for two weeks until Fender had come back. Or when she'd demanded he explain why he refused to go to Carly's birthday party in the ninth grade, and I hate zombies didn't count. He'd looked her straight in the eyes and said, Because I'll hate you, too.

  "They got on the Coast Starlight service headed north," the woman said, looking back and forth between Lila and Beau. "Final destination is Seattle. It runs daily"

  "Seattle," Lila said again, as if saying it out loud might change the end result somehow. "As in, Washington state. That Seattle."

  "Thank you," Beau said to the Amtrak worker, giving her another polite smile. He turned to Lila when the woman walked

  54

  away and raised an eyebrow. "'That Seattle'? Is there another Seattle that I don't know about?"

  "There's no time for mockery!" Lila snapped at him, her mind racing. If Cooper was going to Seattle, how could she possibly keep that from her parents? He was on a train! Anything could happen!

  She ran over to the big display of train schedules near the information booth. She scanned the colorful pamphlets and snagged one that read Coast Starlight across the top. She glanced at it quickly, then took off toward the train station's tall front doors, headed for the parking lot.

  Beau followed.

  "What exactly are we doing?" he asked, still not breathing heavily.

  "Simi Valley is the next station," Lila replied, puffing a little bit. And she actually ran a few miles every other day. She didn't know why it was suddenly so important to her that she be more athletic than Beau. "If we hurry, maybe we can catch them there"

  She made it to the passenger side of his ratty old car and waited impatiently for him to unlock it. He had to climb inside and reach across the seat to do so by hand.

  "I'm not sure chasing a train across the Valley is the best idea here," Beau said, resting his palms against the steering wheel. What he was notably not doing was driving his car.

  "Beau!" Lila stomped the floor of the car, wishing she could

  55

  move it forward herself, like the Flintstones' Stone Age car--which was probably better-made than this wreck of a vehicle. "Come on!"

  Beau started the Escort and backed out of his parking spot, but he was frowning.

  "I think maybe we should face the fact that this is out of control," he said as he started to drive through the side streets that surrounded the train station. It was still the afternoon, and the real L.A. traffic thankfully hadn't kicked in. Yet. "We're talking about two eight-year-olds. This isn't, like, a Disney movie or something where a talking dog will lead them to safety"

  "And you are definitely no Zac Efron," Lila said, smirking as she tried to imagine Beau in High School Musical. Or even watching High School Musical.

  He ignored her. "I think maybe we should call the police, Lila. Do they put out Amber Alerts for missing kids even if you know it's not an abduction or whatever?"

  Oh my God, police? Lila thought she might have a heart attack. The police would want to talk to the boys' guardians, wouldn't they? That meant hunting down her parents at Aunt Lucy's house in Phoenix, and that meant total and utter disaster. Look what had happened when they'd found out about the party! Lila couldn't imagine what they would do if they discovered Cooper had embarked on interstate--and possibly international--travel. 56

  "We can't call the police," she said in a flat, no-arguments tone. She and Beau would simply have to find the boys themselves.

  "We can't?" Beau threw a look at her. "Um, why is that?"

  "All you need to do here is drive fast, okay?" Lila rubbed at her arms. "We'll head them off at the next station. We'll get them back safe and sound, with absolutely no reason whatsoever to call the police. Except maybe for when I kill Cooper with my bare hands."

  Beau looked skeptical. "Isn't that what you're supposed to do when kids go missing?" he asked. "Call the cops?"

  "They're not missing!" Lila yelped. "We know exactly where they are!" Still he frowned in that way that signaled he didn't agree with her. "Listen, Beau," she said urgently. "What's the first thing the police are going to do? After they intercept the boys wherever?" She made an impatient noise when he didn't respond. "They'll tell our parents." She shuddered, and not for effect. "It will be carnage. The total and utter end of me."

  "I thought you said they're already pissed at you," Beau pointed out with a shrug, like the end of Lila was not something that overly concerned him. "Isn't that why you stomped all over Cooper's Santa fantasy in the first place?"

  "Getting tattled on for allegedly, maybe throwing a party is one thing," Lila said darkly. "Getting called by the police because

  57

  Cooper took off on a train to Seattle? They'll ground me for the next eighteen years. I'll never go to Stanford, and I will never, ever be the proud owner of a convertible VW Beetle."

  "A car?" Beau frowned deeper, his mouth curling derisively. "You're worried about getting a car?"

  "Easy for you to say, since you have one," Lila retorted. She wrinkled up her nose as she looked around at his version of a vehicle. Sort of.

  She blew out a frustrated sigh. "Listen, Beau, your mom has always been way more chill than mine. Remember when we snuck out to see that movie in eighth grade? I was grounded for two weeks and had to do yard work. Your mom just laughed." At the time, she'd thought that the punishment was worth getting to be out so late with Beau. Now she couldn't imagine pulling a single weed just to spend a few minutes with him. "But do you really want her to know that you lost Tyler and he's now on a train? To another state?"

  "No," he said quietly after a moment, surprising her straight down to the soles of her boots. "I don't."

  Something about the way he said it made her wonder if something else was going on. But maybe she was just imagining it. She shifted around so she could look at him as the streets zipped by outside the window, one ranch-style split-level after another. The only thing that really distinguished the houses were their varying front-yard holiday decorations. "I mean, it

  58

  would be different if they were really missing," she said. "But we know they're on that train. They're, like, contained."

  This time when Beau looked over at her, his eyes were crinkled up a bit in the corners, like he wanted to smile but wasn't letting himself.

  "You can stop the hard sell," he said gently. "I'm not
arguing about it. I'm driving."

  "Okay, then," Lila said, feeling suddenly off-center. She looked away, at the red taillights of the car ahead of them as they raced west. "So--drive faster!" she ordered him, hunching down in her seat. "We have a train to catch."

  59

  Chapter 7

  *** ROAD TO SIMI VALLEY

  LOS ANGELES

  DECEMBER 22

  4:01 P.M.

  ***

  Three minutes later, Lila thought she might have to reach over and strangle Beau and then throw his body out of the window toward the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains that loomed in the north. Or even the Simi Hills to the south--she wasn't picky.

  "What are you doing?" she asked when he zoomed past yet another entrance to the freeway. What was the matter with him? Didn't he know where he was going? Everybody knew the quickest way to Simi Valley from their hometown in the San Fernando Valley was the 118 Freeway that curved through the mountains separating them.

  Everybody but Beau, apparently.

  "Um, I'm driving." Beau didn't spare Lila a glance. He just slouched there, one wrist falling over the top of the steering

  60

  wheel and the other in his lap. So nonchalant, like he wasn't, in fact, racing a train across California.

  "You just missed the freeway," she pointed out, trying to sound calm. "Twice."

  "I didn't 'miss' the freeway." Now he looked at her, his dark eyebrows high, like she was the one acting crazy. She could see a gleam of that mocking blue, and it immediately made her shoulders tense up. "I don't like the freeways."

  "You don't like them," Lila repeated, as if she couldn't understand the words without sounding them out. "Nobody likes the freeway, Beau. But it does happen to be the quickest route between point A and point B."

  Beau snorted like that was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard in his life. "Sure, if there's no traffic, the freeway is great. But when does that ever happen? It's always a parking lot."