1
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Missing
“Have you seen Ali?”
Dara Monahan looked anxiously at her friends Pandita and Mana, as they stood waiting with her for the doors of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School to open. Both girls shook their heads.
“No idea,” Mana said. “Were you supposed to meet him before school?”
“We were supposed to come here together,” Dara replied. “Maybe I misunderstood, but still, Ali’s never late. He should be here by now. Something must have happened, or he would have texted me.”
She scanned the crowd of waiting kids, searching for his mop of honey-colored hair. Ali was a year older than the other ninth graders and taller than most. He’d spent a year out of school, waiting in France for the papers to come through before he and his parents could emigrate to the States. But there was no sign of him now.
“Not here,” she announced.
Dara had a bad feeling. Besides her mother, Ali was the most important person in her life—soul-mate, sparring partner, best friend. So where could he be? She thought back to the only other time he had gone missing—on the far-off planet Beyond. It had taken him almost two weeks to reappear, famished and disheveled and in pain.
Where had he been? He explained he was busy organizing a successful resistance against invaders from the shadow planet Tartaros. Though what he did then was heroic, Dara had felt abandoned, as she did now.
That was the trouble with sharing a past: You couldn’t help seeing the present through the prism of prior events. And their adventures on Beyond were something she shared with Ali and no one else. Her small family circle and friends here in Cambridge had never visited that planet, though they knew it existed. Or at least they knew Dara thought it did. Pandi and Mana still considered Beyond an elaborate hoax.
“Come on,” Pandi shouted as the first period bell rang. “Trust me, Ali will show up. Then we can give him hell for upsetting you!” She gave Dara a reassuring smile and took her arm.
Dara let herself to be guided through the massive entryway, thronged with noisy students. The din was overwhelming, and people pushed from all sides. Dara hated the noise and the pushing. They brought back such bad memories. Too many bad ones for a fifteen-year-old, she thought. Once I just wanted to be a happy kid. Then Dad died and I got swept off to Beyond and all this weird stuff started happening. But at least I had Ali.
So where was he now? Dara forced herself not to think of what might have happened tohim and followed Pandi through the school doors.
Unlike the playful colors that enlivened Dara’s old middle school, the exterior of Cambridge Rindge and Latin was a uniform and depressing gray. It sat like a giant tomb between Cambridge Street and Broadway, its bleak outline relieved only by the odd city library that adjoined it—half a medieval manor with a turret, half an aggressively modern confection of flamboyant steel.
Once CRLS had been two separate schools—Cambridge Latin and Rindge Technical—before merging to create a mega-school of 1,800 students. That population was divided into four “learning communities” labeled (of course) C, R, L, and S, of about 450 students each. Any one of them was still larger than her old school, but 450 it was still better than 1,800. And she, Ali, Pandi, and Mana were all in “C.”
Classes also ran longer than at her former Putnam Avenue Upper School—an hour and twenty-five minutes each. Teachers assumed that older students had longer attention spans, something Dara found more hopeful than true. In exchange, students only took four courses at a time. Dara’s were English, French, World History, and Algebra I. Mana and Pandi were taking Spanish and Biology.
Her first class after Community Meeting was French. Dara sat in her seat by the window and tried to focus as Ms. Fontanelle came in, her brown hair pulled back in a twist, wearing a navy pantsuit with a white blouse and red scarf. But Dara felt in a daze. Ali should have been sitting there beside her; now that seat was empty. The other students quieted as Ms. Fontanelle called out “Bonjour” in a cheery voice and proceeded to the whiteboard at the front of the class.
“Alors, qui veut nous expliquer ce qui se passe au début de la nouvelle que nous avons tous lu?”
She was asking someone to explain the beginning of the short story assigned for today about a girl named Éliane, but Dara’s mind was mush. She had no idea how the story began or ended. Apparently other students suffered from a similar memory lapse. The silence grew and Ms. Fontanelle began to look somewhat peeved.
“Bon, dans ce cas, il faut que je choisisse. Vous avez remarqué mon emploi du subjonctif?”
Yes, Dara had noted her teacher’s use of the subjunctive—a construction that Ali used with ease after his time in Paris, but that she still had trouble formulating. Luckily Ms. Fontanelle called on Sara in the front row to say something about the book, then began an explanation of the subjunctive that had other students as puzzled as Dara. Her mind was still mush.
She thought of asking permission to visit the school nurse, but how was she going to explain that she knew, just knew, that Ali Kolar was in trouble. “We have this bond,” she could say, but that sounded like a cliché. In fact it was a cliché, though true. “I don’t feel well” was also a cliché—just the sort of thing a Poor Helpless Female would use as an excuse to skip class. Dara had a horror of being thought a PHF.
At every sound behind her Dara turned to see if it was Ali coming in late, but no.
She stuck it out, hoping not to be called on, and until the bell freed them all for their next class, which ran from 10:00 to 11:25. Today’s World History class on the Chinese Han Dynasty was a bore, but at least Mr. Hanniford liked to lecture and seldom called on his students. Then finally it was lunchtime.
But when she entered, the CLRS dining hall felt even more strange than usual. Its interior was ringed with white metal tubing that supported the ceiling above their heads like the ribs of some giant beast, now reduced to a skeleton. Eating inside a skeleton was not an appetizing thought.
Mana and Pandi joined her at the table that seated four, and Dara shook her head. “Still no sign of Ali,” she said. “So I’m going to go look for him after lunch.”
“And cut classes?”
“Yes, cut classes. Something happened, something bad—I can feel it.”
“Why don’t you see if he’s texted you.”
“Oh yeah, texted. I forgot.” Cell phone use was forbidden during class, but not at lunchtime. Dara checked, but instead of a text from Ali, there was one from her magic teacher who was also her mother’s boyfriend, Simon Ambrose. Before she could read it, Pandi gave a shriek.
“You won’t have to cut class! Look who just walked in!”
Dara jumped up and saw the mop of hair heading toward them. For a moment she could not believe Ali was really there. But he was.
“Ali!” she screamed so loud that every head turned in her direction. She shoved back her chair and raced to meet him and only realized when she was a few feet away that his arm was in a sling, which made it hard to give him the hug she had been saving all day. He limped toward her. His face was bruised but he still managed a grin.
“Hey, Dara!”
“My God, what happened?”
Ali’s grin vanished. “My dad, that’s what happened. He showed up today with no warning and wants to take Mom and me back to Paris with him. When we said no, he lost it and slapped her—hard. I grabbed him and slapped him back and then he pushed me down the stairs. I kept him from hurting her, but I broke my arm.”
“So you went to the ER?”
“No, Mom set it herself. She’s a doctor, remember? I wanted to stay with her in case he comes back, but she insisted I come to school this afternoon. She’s going to get a—what’s it called—a something order.”
“Restraining order?”
“That’s it. I’m not sure how it works, but she said that was all she needed and I hope she’s right. When my dad gets that way, he’s just, well, crazy. Like anyone who disagrees with him is like the enemy.”
By this point Dara had tugged Ali into the fourth chair at the table at he found himself talking to all three girls.
“When did he come?” she asked.
“This morning, early. He said he found a good job in Paris and America was the wrong place for us and we had to leave. Now. ‘The family has to stay together,’ he kept saying in Slovenian. But there’s no way we’re going to leave. I’ve made friends here, Mom’s just gotten certified as a family physician, and this is our new home. I mean, Paris is great, but not if my dad is there.”
Dara gave his good hand a squeeze. She could not imagine life without Ali, and was relieved that he seemed to feel the same way. But just as the bell rang to announce the beginning of Block 3, she remembered to check the text Simon had sent.
Urgent —come to my office before you go home. Simon.
What could possibly be that urgent? What did Simon need to tell her that couldn’t wait? The last thing she knew he had been safely off in Europe doing the sort of research that Harvard professors did, or at least that Simon did, studying magic cults and old customs in tiny European villages that looked as if they hadn’t changed in hundreds of years. Simon was smart and often kind, but also self-confident and at times overbearing. Dara still missed her real father, who had died more than a year ago. She and Simon mostly got along, though it was often a struggle.
With a sigh Dara resigned herself to visit him at the Peabody Museum. It helped that it was only two blocks away. But no sooner had Ali shown up than she had to deal with Simon. It was going to be that sort of day.
“Something bad?” Ali asked, noticing her frown.
“I have to go to Simon’s office at Harvard after school.”
“Men are always ordering people around,” Pandi grumbled.
“You sometimes order me around, Pandi,” Mana said with a smile.
“Yeah, but that’s different.”
“Because you’re not a man?”
“Well—”
“Hey, we have to go,” Dara interjected, hoping to forestall an argument. Just because Pandi and Mana were a couple didn’t mean they always saw eye to eye. “And I’m sorry, Ali, but I have to go see Simon before I come to your place.”
“Just come as quick as you can. I have a bad feeling about this. I’m not sure this restraining order thing will work, but if my dad does come back, having you there might help.”
Ali’s father, Branko, was a car mechanic built like a tank. Perhaps her being there really would help protect them, like Ali said. But Dara had the same bad feeling: This was not going to turn out well.