The Finding of the Ice Princess

Chapter Five - Unforgettable

"Well, you got what you wished for," Bianca's voice drawled from the cell phone pressed to Ophelia's ear. "Congratulations. You're Martin Brynner's girlfriend. You must be the happiest girl on the planet."

The words whirled around in Ophelia's head, but she didn't have time to make sense of them. She shifted her car into 'park' and cut the engine. Her eyes flitted up to her mother's cedar-sided medical clinic over the garage.

"Are you listening to me?"

A little tickle found its way up Ophelia's neck and she scrambled for an excuse to visit her mother's clinic. She dropped her phone and climbed the steps. By the time she opened the door, she realized she couldn't think of an excuse, but she no longer cared.

She wanted Adrian.

Ophelia opened the door and found the clinic empty. Her mother's desk stood near the open window. White curtains fluttered with a gentle breeze.

Ophelia closed the door behind her and went to the computer.

Now that Adrian had been treated, his complete medical record would be on the computer database. She peeked up over the monitor and out the window. She knew it was wrong and she'd never done it before. She turned on the computer, determined to find Adrian's file.

It wasn't difficult. Her mother only knew enough about computers to function in her practice. She was barely one step up from paper and snail-mail.

Adrian Grayer's medical file was clearly marked. Ophelia opened it.

He had no middle name and his seventeenth birthday had been in July. His parents were both deceased. He was named after his father and his mother's name was Mary Rose.

"Ooh." She leaned on her hand, his grief vivid in her heart.

His older sister was listed as his legal guardian.

"Perdita Grayer." Ophelia remembered the name. She'd read ahead in her English textbook. Perdita was a lost princess in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.

The phone number spot remained blank, but it wasn't unusual to not have a phone in Togo, Alaska. Mrs. Langdon called most modern technology a damn nuisance.

Adrian's address was listed as 27 First Road. Ophelia rubbed her tense brow at that. She couldn't remember any houses that far down the street.

The sound of the garage door alerted her to her mother's return. She quickly shut down the program and the computer.

Ophelia remembered her sister sneaking out the back window while grounded and decided to do the same. She climbed down the woodpile stacked up against the garage's back side.

Feet back on solid ground, she walked casually around the garage and went into the house like she'd been in the garden. Once inside, she hurried upstairs to her room and shut the door.

No one would find out Ophelia had sneaked into the medical files. She was the good twin who always colored inside the lines. And she was light-years ahead of the rest of her family in technological know-how. She resisted the urge to hide in the closet and fell into her bed instead.

She hugged a pink pillow to her chest and saw only Adrian in the forefront of her thoughts. She closed her eyes and he was there. She opened her eyes and felt dizzy, like she needed to scream.

***

Ophelia woke as the night grayed with the coming dawn, warm and certain of one thing.

Adrian.

In that moment, nothing else mattered.

Somehow, she just knew he wasn't gay. But, why would he tell everyone that he was? It was the opposite of conventional wisdom for a heterosexual male to say he was gay in a small town populated with so many hypocritical minds.