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Allison sneaks down the hall in careful silence.
She should be in bed, she knows, but sleep hasn’t come easily since Five disappeared. She’d thought that he’d be back after a day or so, after storming out that fateful meal and the argument of his readiness for time travel, but a second day passed, then a third, then a week, and she was in front of cameras next to her anxious siblings, telling the public to keep an eye out for their missing brother, please, he’s so very missed.
But Dad wouldn’t let them go out to search for Five, and no one ever turned up with where he might be. So, here she sits, nearly three months later, not quite resigned to the reality that he might never return. That she might never see Five again, in his brash confidence, and open defiance, and cleverness that bled into an arrogance that she hated in the moment, but missed fiercely in his absence.
It is too quiet at this late hour. It is the kind of quiet that presses on her chest and makes her nervous, because a single creak could give her away, but she knows this house and where to step, and she opens the door to Five’s bedroom with a slow and gentle push. It has been left mostly untouched since he’s left, other than Mom coming in to dust it weekly, and Allison can almost imagine that Five will blink into the room in a flash of blue, rumpling the bedsheets and scattering notes across the desk.
Almost, but not quite.
She knows she shouldn’t be in here. She knows she shouldn’t be snooping. But she’s been haunted for weeks about Five and his assertion that he could time travel, that he was ready, but what if he wasn’t? She pulls the battered notebook from his desk, the one he said was just math work, but that he never let anyone read. Her hands nearly shake as she flips it open. She can’t shake the sense that Five will just appear and scold her for looking. She can’t decide if she’d be thrilled to face that kind of scolding if it just means he’s come back.
Allison scans the pages. It’s filled with numbers, columns of equations and calculations that make no sense to her. All the complicated math that Five loved, the stuff he excelled at. She pauses, blinking hard as the letters and numbers begin to blur together, her frustration rising with page after page. It’s all math—just math. Nothing about him, nothing that can explain where he went, or why he’s gone. She almost slams it shut but stops when a small scribble in the margin catches her eye.
It’s nearly illegible: the handwriting is messier than usual, rushed and cramped in between what she thinks are unrelated equations, as if Five didn’t want anyone to see these words. But it’s unmistakable not that Allison has spotted it—these are his thoughts, his plans, tucked between equations. The more she reads, the more she understands.
Get out. Jump w/ seven ppl. Money. Year?
She scans through the notes, half-hidden between lines of calculus and algebra and physics, and written in partial sentences and shorthand, but still. Her hands shake as she flips to another page, the writing more frantic, desperate. The details become less precise, the escape plan falling apart in scribbled fragments—ideas he never got the chance to complete. It starts to sink in what Five had meant to do. He had been plotting, planning a way for all of them to escape Reginald, to leave this house and never look back.
Except Five had left, and he’d taken none of them with him.
“I heard a rumor that you came home,” she whispers into the room. Her voice is hollow. It’s the same phrase she’s repeated to herself since the day he vanished, like a broken record stuck on the same ineffective plea. But the room remains silent, as empty as it’s been since the day he disappeared. There is no one to be Rumored in this abandoned bedroom anymore than the other parts of the house she’s tried to call him back to.
Her heart clenches, the familiar ache spreading through her chest. She shuts the notebook and clutches it to her chest, squeezing her eyes shut as if that will somehow bring him back, because she knows now, she knows, so Five can return now, please, and finish the rest of this.
“I heard a rumor that you’re waiting downstairs,” she tries again, the words coming out sharper, more desperate this time. She bites her lip, frustration rising like a storm inside her. Of course, he’s not waiting downstairs. He’s not coming through the door. He’s gone—somewhere out there, in a time or place she can’t reach. That none of them can reach. Probably living his life, safe. Without them. Without her.
She lets out a long breath; thought sends a jolt of anger through her. If he’s safe, if he’s really out there somewhere, why hasn’t he come back? Why hasn’t he even tried? She shoves the notebook aside, pushing it across the floor as if it’s the source of her pain. He planned to save them, to get them all out—and then he just disappeared, leaving her with nothing but empty rumors and unanswered questions.
“I heard a rumor that you’re safe.”
Her voice is quieter now. Maybe it’s better if he’s safe, even if it means he left them behind. Isn’t that what she should want? For him to be okay, even if she isn’t? Hadn’t she planned to leave too? She wants to be famous one day, and she takes care of her diet, and is aware of how she looks when she fights, and the way she talks to the reporters whenever they put cameras and microphones to her face. She wants to make an impression, and the moment she can move out, she will. It feels selfish to be mad at Five for wanting the same, just a little ways earlier.
“I heard a rumor that you never left.”
Allison says these words with a bitterness that has sat on her tongue for months. She has spent many nights thinking about how things might be different if she had said it earlier, if she had said something before he’d ran out the door. If she’d Rumored him to sit back down, to stay for the meal and all that came after, to give up his plans for time travel, because if Dad said he wasn’t ready, then he wasn’t ready, and these incomplete plans are proof, aren’t they?
Or maybe they aren’t incomplete. Maybe these are just old. Maybe Five had made a new plan; one that didn’t involve the rest of them like the notebook accounted for. Her vision blurs with tears that she refuses to let fall. Or maybe, maybe, Five was—Five might be—Allison did not want to think about that scenario.
Her voice is barely a breath now. “I heard a rumor that you’re alive.”
She knows that this Rumor is no more effective than any of the others, not without a target for her Rumor to attach itself to, but she says it anyway. She hates the idea that Five is out there somewhere, living it up while the rest of them have to deal with his absence, but she hates the idea of Five not being out there somewhere more. She doesn’t want to even consider the thought of him being gone forever, and when she does, the possibility twists her insides in ways she can’t bear to manage for more than a short while.
“I heard a rumor that you're here with us,” she says, her voice cracking. She wants to believe it, but the truth is too heavy. The room is too empty. He’s not here, and he hasn’t been for a long time. Nothing happens, and she expected it. But she finds herself disappointed all the same regardless.
Five just never seems to listen. Not to Dad before, and not to her now. She shoves the notebook back where she found it. She doesn’t want to look at it anymore. She doesn’t want to think about the brother that abandoned the rest of them. But, as Allison turns to leave, her hand lingers on the doorframe, and she can’t help herself from whispering one last time like a feeble wish:
“I heard a rumor that you came back.”
And still, nothing happens.