The Lost Kids Read online

  ALSO BY SARA SAEDI

  Never Ever

  Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Sara Saedi

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

  Ebook ISBN 9780698197046

  Version_1

  For Bryon & Ellis

  Thank you for keeping me young

  CONTENTS

  Also by Sara Saedi

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Sleepless Nights

  Chapter Two: Operation Exile

  Chapter Three: Phinn and All His Faults

  Chapter Four: Toy Soldier

  Chapter Five: Deserted Island

  Chapter Six: Old Friends

  Chapter Seven: Fear and Loathing

  Chapter Eight: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

  Chapter Nine: Fine Wine

  Chapter Ten: The Lion’s Den

  Chapter Eleven: Two Truths and No Lies

  Chapter Twelve: The Next Generation

  Chapter Thirteen: Suicide Watch

  Chapter Fourteen: Punchbowl

  Chapter Fifteen: Old Habits Die Hard

  Chapter Sixteen: Trust Issues

  Chapter Seventeen: Moving On

  Chapter Eighteen: The Missing Dalton Kids

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  prologue

  "phinn, are you listening? Where’s Wylie Dalton?”

  Dead.

  Sleeping at the bottom of the ocean.

  Permanently trapped in the folds of my mind.

  Tucked away in a corner of my heart.

  All of the above.

  “You have a chance to do the right thing here. Answer the question.”

  A fan buzzed overhead. The steady beeping of the heart monitor made Phinn insane. He missed the pop-pop of parvaz flowers and the whirr of carefree teenagers flying above him. He missed the melodies of the island. Hell, he missed blue sky.

  “Where’s Wylie Dalton?”

  That question had haunted Phinn from the moment he’d heard Wylie plummet into the ocean, and now it was being asked with the urgency of someone looking for a set of missing keys. All he wanted was to see Wylie again, to hold her, and to tell her that the moment he’d met her, he’d given up on making her part of his intricate revenge plot.

  Phinn’s plan had always been to befriend Joshua. The son in trouble with the law seemed the most vulnerable among the Dalton siblings. But there Wylie had been on the dance floor, surrounded by friends yet somehow creating the illusion that she was alone. From where Phinn had sat that night, he’d barely been able to make out the emerald shade of her irises, but he’d seen a trace of pain behind her eyes. On that rooftop in Brooklyn, he’d forgotten about her dad and the reasons he’d engineered a run-in with the Dalton kids. Their future didn’t feel premeditated anymore. It felt inevitable.

  “If I knew where she was, don’t you think I would have found her?” Phinn finally responded.

  “What did you do to her?”

  I lied to her. I broke her heart. I held her captive.

  “Nothing. I didn’t do anything to her. I want to go home.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen.”

  Phinn did the math. He’d been here for ten days. That meant two hundred and eighty-five more days to spare before he’d turn eighteen.

  “How old were you when your parents died?”

  “What do you have on that little clipboard?” Phinn asked. “A list of every upsetting question you could ask me?”

  “This will go a lot more easily if you cooperate.”

  “Five. I was five when my parents died.”

  “And how did they die?”

  The same way Tinka’s and Maz’s and Gregory’s parents had died. At the time, he’d thought it was just an elaborate game of hide and seek; that, when he found them, they were only pretending to be asleep. He’d yanked his mother’s hair, screaming at her to wake up. He’d scraped her skin with his fingernails as Lola’s mother had pulled him away.

  Phinn looked into the eyes of his interrogator and waited until he was certain he wouldn’t cry:

  “They killed themselves.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  sleepless nights

  the water was still for once. Lying on the floorboards of the boat, Wylie almost felt like she was back on dry land. After three weeks trapped on this vessel, she was getting used to the cold dankness. The surrounding abyss of ocean no longer left her overwhelmed. The days of motion sickness slowly retreated into the past. Despite all she had grown accustomed to, the sleepless nights continued to torture her, and tonight was no exception. It didn’t matter that every joint and limb was weak from hours of exercise—Wylie’s mind refused to slow down. She spent every night searching for constellations and counting stars, but nothing seemed to lull her to sleep.

  It had been twenty-one days since she’d last seen her brothers. The Daltons had never spent that much time apart. Here, on this boat, she had no parents and no siblings. She was an orphan. The lost kids were her only family now. She sat up and looked at the sleeping bodies, sprawled in every direction. Charlotte snored loudly next to her like she did most nights. Wylie tried to shut out thoughts of smothering her with a blanket. It wasn’t Charlotte’s fault she could fall asleep anywhere she laid her head down.

  “I love sleeping,” Charlotte explained to her. “Every night that we go to bed, we wake up one day closer to taking the island back. One day closer to going home.”

  Home. Wylie wasn’t sure where that was anymore. She hoped it was still her cozy bungalow, but how could she live on Minor Island without her brothers? By nightfall tomorrow, she and the lost kids would sail to the patch of land that had changed the course of her life, and everyone seemed certain Micah and Joshua would be there when they arrived.

  “They couldn’t have gotten away,” Hopper told her. “They’d never steal a boat in time, and they couldn’t fly all the way back to the mainland.”

  But Wylie had learned that nothing was guaranteed. Maybe her brothers had made it back to their Manhattan brownstone. For all she knew, they were sitting on the fire escape together right now, wondering if they’d ever see their sister again. If she closed her eyes long enough, she could make believe she was back in her old bed, wrapped in worn out flannel sheets. What she would give to wake up in the morning and brush her teeth in a normal sink and take a hot shower in an actual bathtub!

  The snores were even louder now. Wylie gently tapped Charlotte’s shoulder.

  “Charlotte,” she whispered. “You’re snoring.”

  Charlotte groaned and turned on her side. The rumbling subsided for a few minutes until it started back up again. After three weeks of insomnia, Wylie wasn’t s
ure what tormented her more: sleep deprivation or Phinn.

  She’d finally conquered it last night as she’d let her mind drift to the party at Vanessa’s and remembered what it had felt like to see Phinn across the rooftop. She’d recalled how everyone else melted away except for them. Before the memories could turn dark, before she could remind herself that Phinn was a monster, she’d fallen asleep. But tonight, the very thought of him made her restless mind even more alert.

  Wylie stretched out her legs and quietly pulled herself up to her feet. She grabbed the thin blanket that barely kept her warm and wrapped it around her shoulders. She’d perfected the art of moving without disturbing others in their sleep. Her feet knew every floorboard to avoid and every sleeping body to step over in the pitch dark. All she had to do was follow the soft sounds of guitar strumming to the bow of the boat.

  “Couldn’t sleep again?” Hopper asked, as she tiptoed toward his regular spot.

  “Nope.”

  “What about last night? You were sleeping like a baby.”

  “Charlotte must’ve been snoring less.”

  “No way. I bet they could hear her all the way on the island.”

  “Mind if I hang out here for a while?” Wylie asked, lying down before he answered.

  “Not in the slightest.”

  Hopper wasn’t always this nice to her. During her first few days on the boat, he’d mostly ignored her or given one-word responses to every question she’d asked him. And he’d never asked any questions in return. He’d be terrible on a date, Wylie had thought.

  “He doesn’t like most humans,” Lola explained at the time. “Don’t waste your time trying to win him over.”

  Perhaps it was boredom that made Wylie determined to be his friend—or maybe she needed a challenge. After their daily training sessions on the boat, the lost kids spent the rest of the day fishing and perfecting their weapons. Most of them filled the hours rehashing every bad thing Phinn had done to them. But time had given them more distance than it had given Wylie. For her, conversations about Phinn were still a painful reminder of her own mistakes. So she turned her attention to Hopper. It was like her secret game: Person who doesn’t like most humans, I will make you like me.

  It wasn’t an easy pastime. In the beginning, Wylie’s sarcastic quips and witty jokes had gone over like an atheist at a bible study. Hopper would respond with a blank stare, mutter an excuse under his breath, and walk off to another corner of the boat. Try to find something you have in common, Wylie told herself. Their mutual hatred of Phinn seemed like an obvious starting point, but Wylie preferred to avoid the topic of her ex. She tried to bond over music by casually referencing the classic rock albums her dad used to play for her growing up, but Hopper shut down even more at the mention of her parents. When Wylie tried a more forward approach and asked if she could pass the evenings with him while he played guitar, Hopper said he’d rather be alone.

  Finally, Wylie remembered his manifesto. There was no e-mail or texting on this boat, but Hopper himself had admitted he communicated best on paper. So Wylie wrote her own manifesto. She told her story, in her own words, and confessed how stupid she felt about falling for Phinn.

  She folded the sheet of paper into a rectangle and slipped it under the strings of Hopper’s guitar. He never mentioned reading it, but the following day, he meandered next to her as she tried in vain to fish for her dinner. They both knew she never caught anything.

  “If you can’t sleep tonight, you can come hang out with me.” He said it casually, as though the ocean hadn’t shifted from the invitation.

  Now, every night since, she snuck over to his corner of the boat and listened to him clumsily play guitar. Hopper was a proud lefty, which meant he normally used his right hand to press down on the frets. But, thanks to Tinka, he was now missing three fingers on that hand and had to fumble with his left hand along the fretboard. The chord changes were still slow and unsteady, but Wylie hummed along to distract him when he got frustrated.

  “Maybe she has a deviated septum,” Wylie said.

  “Who?” Hopper asked.

  “Charlotte, obviously. What if we pinned her down, plied her with vodka, and did surgery to fix the thing? You hold her arms and I’ll go in with a knife.”

  Hopper’s face broke into a smile at the suggestion. It felt like such a victory when Wylie could get him to break from his usual scowl.

  “You’re such a weirdo, Dalton,” Hopper said.

  “A weirdo you’re stuck on a boat with, Hops.”

  “I know. I should have left you on that rock.”

  Wylie playfully tugged on his long curls. She hadn’t expected to get used to his appearance. Phinn was chiseled and clean cut, but Hopper was neither of those things, though it was hard to know what his face looked like under his beard. If she saw him in her old life in New York, she’d think he was a homeless person. Most days, he smelled like one, too, but so did she. Good hygiene wasn’t really an option on a small boat filled with over a dozen sweaty kids.

  “I would give anything to go to sleep,” Wylie replied.

  “How about when we get back to the island tomorrow, after we do the whole, you know, overthrowing Phinn bit, we’ll go to the Forbidden Side, and pick a bunch of rahat flowers and sleep for days.”

  Wylie felt like an imposter whenever Hopper talked about Minor Island. He always made references to plants or landmarks she wasn’t familiar with, but she hadn’t lived there nearly as long as he had. She felt like one of those people who called themselves New Yorkers after spending only a year in the city.

  “No one ever told me about rahat flowers,” Wylie admitted.

  “Good. I like getting to be the one to tell you about stuff. They’re red, almost burgundy. They’re twice as big as parvaz, but they don’t make any sound when they grow. Phinn never liked people taking them. But they made me feel . . . invincible. Aldo and Patrick gave them to me to help with anxiety, but if you take enough, they make you sleep for hours.”

  Wylie remembered spying the plant he was describing through the bars of her cage, just out of reach. Lola had mentioned there were herbs that were native to the Forbidden Side, but she’d never mentioned rahat flowers. Wylie wondered what else about the island she had yet to discover.

  “They sound tropic.”

  “Tropic?” Hopper teased. “I don’t know what that means. I don’t speak Phinnish.”

  “Whatever. I could have used a few rahat flowers when Phinn had me locked up,” Wylie said.

  “I used to beg him for them, especially after they chopped off my fingers, but he wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Well, he won’t get a say now.”

  Their plans, or what the lost kids referred to as Operation Exile, fell squarely on her shoulders. They had grown accustomed to calling Wylie their secret weapon. But none of them knew she had a knack for disappointing the people who counted on her most. She didn’t have the heart to tell them she might lose her nerve. They talked about how they’d get rid of the cages on the Forbidden Side. Hopper promised he would personally nail down the floorboards to the panic room and would never make anyone hide in the dark. The girls would no longer be herded into the clinic, forced to take birth control. Everyone could use their preferred form of contraception.

  “Condoms are kind of a drag, though, you know,” Hopper joked.

  “It’s a good thing no one in their right mind would have sex with you. Especially not Nadia,” Wylie replied.

  Hopper had confessed that he’d developed a crush on Nadia when he lived on the island, and Wylie loved teasing him about it.

  “Not looking like this, she won’t,” Hopper agreed.

  He dug a pouch out of his guitar case, opened it, and handed Wylie a razor and a pair of scissors.

  “When Phinn let me out of my cage and shipped me away, this is more or less what I looked like. If I d
on’t want some crazy Phinn loyalist to bash my head in when we get to the island, it’ll probably help if I don’t look like myself,” Hopper said. “Will you do the honors?”

  “Are you sure? I had some bald Barbie dolls as a kid because I tried to give them haircuts.”

  “I’ll take the risk.”

  The dull blades of the scissors made it tough to slice through Hopper’s dense curls. Wylie cut them an inch from his head. She tried her best to keep the trims even, but she had no experience with cutting hair.

  “Do you think Phinn will put up a fight?” Wylie asked, squeezing the blades of the scissors together.

  “If he’s as stubborn as he used to be, yes. But when news spreads about what he did to Lola . . . he won’t have much choice but to go to the mainland.”

  * * *

  Wylie wondered what Phinn would do if he was forced to live in New York. He had no family in the city. He had no formal education. She pictured him wandering around the streets, wielding no power and no influence. Eventually, he’d find some poor sucker to take him in, but he’d never get over being shunned from his home. No one will love him in New York, Wylie thought to herself. She felt a pang of sympathy.

  “All done,” Wylie announced.

  Hopper ran his fingers through his short curls. His beard was now longer than his hair. He eyed the razor on the ground next to them.

  “Can I trust you with my beard, or will you accidentally slice my neck open?”

  “As long as you don’t breathe or move, I promise not to draw blood.”

  Hopper stroked his beard, not quite ready to part with it. Wylie knew that, though he would never admit it, it was his security blanket. Hiding his face allowed him to disguise the fact that he had feelings.

  “Maybe I should keep the beard for now,” he said.

  “No.” Wylie was adamant. Even with a haircut, the beard would make him recognizable to an army of kids who wanted him dead.