Free Wherever Nina Lies by Lynn Weingarten Page B

gone.
    “Nebraska,” I say. “What the hell was she doing there?”
    “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe we should go and find out.”
    I turn toward Sean.
    Is he serious? He cocks his head toward the door.
    I raise my eyebrows.
    He grins.
    Holy shit, I think he’s actually serious.
    But can I really do this?
    I stare down at the computer. Sean is almost a complete stranger. But somehow I feel like I already know him. And he really seems to want to help me. And right now he’s the only person in my life who does. And I need to find Nina. And this might be my only chance…
    I look at Sean again. He’s staring at me, smiling, nodding slightly.
    I take a deep breath.
    I nod back.
    And that’s how it’s decided.

Eleven
    T he summer I was twelve my mother sent Nina and me to stay with our Great-aunt Cynthia at her beach house. Our mother had insisted it would be good for us to have a change of scenery, to get out in the sea air, and spend time with our aunt. “But what she really means,” Nina had told me, the night before we left, as she stuffed her old blue duffel bag with handfuls of tank tops, “is that it will be good for her to have us gone.”
    “Seriously,” I had said, and rolled my eyes in agreement.
    But secretly, I was thrilled about the trip. I loved my aunt’s weird house and the warm Dr. Peppers she kept in the pantry and the lemony soap in the bathroom and the fact that her house was so close to the beach that sand blew in under the door and one time we found a sand crab walking around the living room like he owned the place. But what I was most excited about was the promise of an entire summer of just me and Nina.
    Nina complained a lot leading up to the trip, but everything changed after we boarded the train for our aunt’s house. We walked through the train car until we found two empty seats. Without speaking, Nina stopped, stood on her tiptoes, and pushed both our bags up into the racks. Then she turned toward me, gave me her crazy-looking Nina-grin and said, “Looks like it’s just you and me now, buddy,” and flopped down into her seat.
    Suddenly she was back to her regular self. And when the ticket taker came by and said “tickets, please,” Nina turned toward me and winked like “check this out” and said to the ticket taker, in a flawless French accent, “Oh, but ov course, here arr our teeckets.” And the ticket taker, a nice-looking older gentleman, took the tickets and smiled, not the humoring smile of an adult who was on to her joke, but the smile of a man who thinks it’s charming that two French sisters were traveling together on his train.
    And when the ticket taker walked away, Nina turned toward me and smiled. “Oh, I forgot to tell you, El, this summer we are from France.”
    And I just nodded and grinned right back, because this was turning out even better than I could have hoped. I remember leaning back with my knees against the back of the seat in front of me, looking out the window at the power lines and trees whizzing by, sucking the last bits of Sprite off the ice cubes in my plastic cup, giddy with anticipation ofwhat was ahead. I felt like I’d won a fabulous prize in a contest I hadn’t even known I’d entered—without Nina’s friends around, I had been promoted to the number one spot. I wasn’t just her little sister anymore, I was half of Team Nina, which was just about the best thing a person could ever hope for.
    The first four days were perfect. In the mornings we went to the beach, with a bag of books and Nina’s iPod, and lay out on our towels and talked in our accents and discussed the details of our made-up French lives: We were the daughters of French aristocrats and we lived in a French mansion and had a pet dog named Bijoux. Every so often, while we were walking on the beach Nina would just call out, “Bijoux? Come heeeere Bijoux? Where are you, mon cherie !?!” as though Bijoux was missing and we were out looking for her. At some point