Finding Paris

by Joy Preble

  Max explains that he has two tours to conduct: a mini talk about extraterrestrials with a group coming to the Area 51 exhibit.

  “Hey,” he says when I giggle. “This is serious stuff.”

  He pretends to look offended, and as he shoves the truck in gear, I realize what I haven’t said.

  “Thank you for coming,” I tell him. I blink, hard, when my eyes fill with tears.

  “It’ll be okay,” Max says, using that word again. “I bet by the time I give my tours, your sister will be home. You’ll see. And don’t stress about the money. She’s got it. You know that, right?”

  He says it like it’s absolutely true, or maybe like people do when they’ve never had to worry about money. His optimism should annoy me. I am not a fan of overly cheerful, positive people. I always figure they have something to hide. But somehow with Max, it doesn’t bother me at all.

  We pull into the parking lot of the Atomic Testing Museum. Paris is still not answering her cell.

  Max untangles his name tag on its little blue lanyard from the air freshener and pulls it over his head. He’s wearing khakis again, and a different blue button-down that gives a slightly blue cast to his gray eyes.

  Max Sullivan/Tour Guide and I step into the heat and then into the artificial cool of the museum.

  “Do you know there were over one thousand nuclear tests in Nevada?” he says as the door closes behind us. “Crazy, right?”

  “Hmm,” I say. I rub my arms.

  “Wanna see the Ground Zero film?”

  This is not, it turns out once Max settles me onto a hard little bench in the front row of the darkened auditorium, about September 11. It’s actual documentary footage of the nuclear bomb the government tested at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. The benches vibrate and the light strobes and a huge wind rushes from the vents when the mushroom cloud rises.

  I watch it three times while Max works.

  After that, I walk around.

  Max is leading a group of day camp kids, all with matching blue T-shirts that say Heinrich YMCA Summers Rock! over to the special exhibit on Area 51. “We don’t normally allow tour groups in here,” he tells them in a loud, conspiratorial-sounding voice. “But I’m going to let you see anyway.” And in they go.

  I trail behind, listening as Max explains about Area 51 and aliens and UFOs and secrets and waves his hands in the air every time he says the word secret, in a very scary-sounding voice. The kids cluster tight around him like he’s the most interesting person they’ve ever met.

  Max keeps his face absolutely serious, even when a little girl asks if he’s ever seen an alien. “Maybe,” he tells her, and her eyes go wide. I cover my mouth so I won’t laugh and ruin the moment.

  “Who’s she?” asks a boy with tight dreadlocks. He points to me. “You work here, too?”

  “Don’t mess with her, dude. She’s got her own skeleton. She knows all the bones in the human body.”

  I blush, right up to the roots of my hair.

  “Are you a scientist?” the boys asks.

  This takes me by surprise. So does my honest answer. “I, uh . . . I’m going to be a doctor. So I can help people when they get sick.” I wonder if I say it aloud enough, I will figure out a way to make it true.

  “Science is serious.” Dreadlock boy glances at Max as if to confirm this.

  “Two atoms bump into each other,” Max says with a straight face. “One says, ‘I lost an electron!’ The other asks him, ‘Are you sure?’ And the first atom replies, ‘I’m positive.’”

  I leave them to discuss why this is funny.

  In front of the exhibit that tracks active radiation in the state of Nevada, I check Mom’s phone again.

  Eight missed calls, all from Tommy’s phone. Also a message.

  I decide that it’s just my mother calling her phone, trying to find it.

  Mom’s voice shoots shrilly into my ear. “Where the hell are you, Leo? I know you have my phone.” Then there’s a shuffling and I hear Tommy’s voice say something I can’t make out and then, softer, my mother says: “Honey. Leo. Come home. Please. We’ll find Paris. But I need you here. I need to know you’re safe. You’re with that boy, aren’t you?”

  I hear Tommy again, muttering something about how they should have put that tracker program on Mom’s phone.

  I press delete.

  In the exhibit area, I check the radiation levels for Las Vegas and Henderson and a few other places while my pulse stops pinballing.

  Although the levels of gamma radiation are currently okay, it is entirely possible that at some point they were not.

  No wonder the museum is mostly empty except for Max’s groups.

  “My mom took me here last year,” says a voice, and I jump. It’s dreadlock boy, separated from the herd. He frowns at the charts. “She says a bunch of actors got cancer because they were filming movies in the desert near the testing.”

  “Well,” I say. “That was a long time ago.” He does not look comforted. I am seriously bad with kids. “That’s why they check now,” I tell him, making it up as I go along. “Every Tuesday afternoon, like clockwork.”

  “Sometimes Wednesdays,” says Max from behind me.

  My ears go hot. How long has he been standing there?

  “You Noah?” Max says to the boy.

  “Yeah.” Noah stares up at Max. “You’re tall.”

  “You’re late. You want the bus to leave without you?”

  Noah considers this. “Maybe,” he says.

  “People would miss you,” I say. “They’d be worried you got lost.” I nudge my foot against Noah’s sneaker.

  Noah considers this.

  “Nah,” he says. “I’m not lost.” He looks confident and happy, the way kids do when they believe nothing in this world can ever actually hurt them.

  Max escorts Noah to the exit.

  Maybe it’s watching him bounce happily at Max’s side. Maybe it’s just the odd way things come to you when you’re not expecting them.

  She’d been trying to tell me, hadn’t she? I smack the heel of my hand against my forehead, like in a cartoon. All I need is one of those thought bubbles.

  In my head, I see our little apartment in Santa Monica. The last place we were ever happy in the way people want to be happy. Even if the bills weren’t getting paid on time and the carpet in the family room had a burned spot in the corner where a previous tenant had dropped a cigarette and the landlord hadn’t replaced it.

  Noah, dreadlocks bouncing, climbs onto the bus.

  Max strides back to me, arms swinging cheerfully at his sides.

  “Hey,” he says like he’s been gone awhile.

  “LA,” I say. Adrenaline punches through me. The fear eases its grip.

  “Huh?” Max tilts his head.

  “Paris is in LA. I need to go to LA, Max. She’s there.”

  My sister is not just dicking around Vegas driving me crazy. Not just disappeared without me, either. If she ran away, my sister would never take my stuff with her. Never leave me . . . no.

  Something’s happened. She needs me. And yeah, her method of delivery needs some work, but we can discuss that once I’ve found her.

  A curious expression crosses Max’s face, lingering just behind those gray eyes. “You really think so?” He’s not doubting me, just asking.

  “Yeah,” I say. I make him read the notes again. I jab my finger to the one taped on the railing of the Stratosphere, pointing to the word happy.

  “I didn’t think she’d be so obvious about it,” I say. “I mean, that part’s not like her. Paris usually dances around stuff, but I guess not this time. I know it’s crazy, right? But I don’t know what else it could be. I don’t know where else she’d go but there.”

  He doesn’t look convinced—which I get. He is a scientist, like me. He needs a context.

  But how do I explain how my sister feels about LA? I would have to tell him about that red wallet with its pictures of strangers that Paris turned int
o something new. How she took people who’d been discarded or lost and made them into art. How when she had finished, she sat there looking so satisfied at what she had created. And that when, not long after that, our mother announced that we were leaving LA and moving to Vegas with Tommy Davis, Paris decided to leave the pictures on the wall in her room in our Santa Monica apartment. The one with the window that faced the ocean—at least if you hung your head out and craned your neck.

  If she were really in trouble, I think she’d feel safe there. Familiar.

  But why not tell me? Why just take my money and run?

  I have no choice but to find her. Maybe that’s the point.

  But even as I try to put all this in words, Max’s face curves into yet another bright smile.

  “Then I guess we’re headed to LA,” he declares.

  My heart and pulse rocket off to unknown heights. He can’t really mean it. Who would do this for a person he barely knows?

  “You don’t have to come with me. I get if you can’t—”

  “I can,” Max says. “If you want me to. When my shift is over. Do you want me to go with you, Leo?” He looks at me intently, holding my gaze tight until finally I’m the one who looks away.

  I try to work it out like an equation. Me plus boy I don’t know plus missing sister plus road trip . . . but the unknown throws me, and I don’t know how to solve for it.

  Max is silent, waiting.

  Everything that has happened swells around me, also waiting.

  I swallow. Breathe through my nose.

  “Yeah,” I tell Max.

  “Yeah you’re going? Or yeah I’m going with you?”

  “Both?” I leave it a question.

  “Both.” Max makes it a statement.

  TWELVE

  “WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SLEPT?” THIS IS WHAT MAX ASKS WHEN the last of his second tour group marches out the front door. I’m sitting on a wooden bench in the lobby, the items in the museum gift shop, including the Albert Einstein bobblehead, having occupied me for only so long.

  I stare at him, yawning. “Not tired,” I lie. I yawn again.

  “You can sleep on the way,” Max says, sounding peppy. “I’ll drive.”

  Well, of course he’ll drive. It’s his truck. The plan sounds perfect . . . for like three seconds. Then reality hits. I have known Max for less than a day. Do I really want to sack out in his truck while he drives for hours through the desert?

  I tell him as much. His forehead creases. I observe that he could probably use some sleep, too. The last thing we need to do is drift off and crash in the desert. I do not add the following: now that he has fumigated the Ranger, we wouldn’t even have fast-food refuse to snack on until help came.

  When I’m done talking, Max says he agrees.

  This poses another problem: me plus boy I don’t know plus napping.

  “I’m not going home until I find Paris,” I say, brushing my bangs with my fingers.

  “I get that. We can crash at my place. Then we’ll go.”

  Max is a very smart and gainfully employed Atomic Testing Museum worker. But poker players are poker players.

  Even poker players who know physics. I am not going home with him.

  “Well,” I say, and stop. Maybe we can just curl up in the Area 51 exhibit.

  Max shoves a hand through his wild hair. “I’ll call Nate.”

  “Nate? Stratosphere Nate?” Is he insane?

  “He also works valet at the Luxor.”

  “So?”

  “So he has connections. C’mon,” he says, tugging my hand. I dig in my heels. “You’ll see. Trust me,” he adds when I hold my ground. “Really.”

  As if to seal the deal, he disappears briefly into the gift shop and returns with a souvenir T-shirt, the one with a mushroom cloud and the words Have a Blast.

  “Really?” I say as he hands it to me.

  He grins. “It’s our best seller.”

  The Luxor Hotel is a huge fake pyramid, rising from the concrete desert, a giant fake Sphinx guarding its front. At night, a huge blue beacon shoots up into the sky from the top of the pyramid, like a lighthouse for lost sailors.

  Only this is Vegas. The Luxor light guides people headed up I-15 from the coast to a casino designed to take their money.

  We valet the truck. Nate, it turns out, is not the only Luxor employee in Max’s acquaintance. The valet guy—chubbier than Nate and older—hands Max a room key card in its little holder and tells him that he should drop it off when we pick up the car.

  “You know a lot of people.” People who hook you up with hotel rooms that don’t require checking in at the desk.

  Max shrugs, looking away then back to me. He’s holding the bag of In-N-Out Burger we picked up on the way, and I can smell the grease from the burgers and fries.

  He pulls a small duffel bag from behind the driver’s seat.

  “Clothes,” he says when I eye the duffel. Does he keep the bag there all the time? Is Max Sullivan always prepared for impromptu road trips? And why is it—really—that he’s not in college, but here, guiding tours at the Atomic Testing Museum and eating at the Heartbreak and playing poker with guys like Nate?

  He has volunteered to drive me to LA. Is this enough to trust him?

  There is only one person I trust completely. And she is currently missing.

  We leave the heat and walk inside. The cavernous hotel makes me half dizzy—because it’s a pyramid, everything in the Luxor is on an angle. Even here in the lobby where it’s not quite as obvious.

  The entire place is aggressively artificial. Suddenly I need to hear something from Max that feels true and real.

  “What’s your story?” I study him in the dim light, watch his eyes flicker with all sorts of things, possibly even the truth.

  “Why are you here? Not here”—I gesture with one hand to the Luxor lobby—“but in Vegas.”

  He doesn’t answer right away. A girl a little older than me, in six-inch red stilettos, teeters by, dragging a multicolored wheeled carry-on bag.

  “Leo,” Max says slowly. He swallows. I watch his Adam’s apple bob. The hotel angles around us.

  “I . . . things were bad for me in Texas. So I left for a while. But I’m going back to college. At least that’s the plan.” He pauses, biting his lower lip. “Biology,” he says, holding my gaze. “I’m going to narrow it down once I get there. Biophysics, maybe, since I like physics, too. Or biochemistry. I think I’d like to do research. Or maybe end up an engineer. There’s a lot of possibilities.”

  He sounds so confident that it will all work out. But he’s not a kid like that boy Noah at the museum. A million questions rise to my tongue, including what he would research, but I hold them back.

  “So not premed like Nate, right?” I say instead, arching my eyebrows. There’s a pause and then Max laughs.

  “Nate,” says Max Sullivan, “is a shithead who nevertheless helped us get a room to crash in. A big room,” he adds, neck reddening, but so slightly I might have missed it. “With more than one bed.”

  We’re silent for longer than feels comfortable, and so I say, “I’m going to Stanford if I get in, then med school.” Max is not the only one who can fake confidence in his life plans.

  “Physics major?” Max grins.

  How did he . . . Oh. My first words to him were a physics joke.

  “But you’re just a senior, right?” he adds.

  Is it that obvious?

  I nod, feel awkward. “I want to be a doctor,” I say, trying to sound focused and older. Not like the girl whose college fund—which probably is only enough to pay for a year of textbooks—has gone missing with her sister. “My SATs are high, but I’m going to take them again. I need to up my verbal scores mostly. Not that they’re low. Just that it could always be higher, you know. For Stanford.”

  I trail off because how much of the painfully obvious can I spout here? Max looks like he might say more, but he adds only, “It’s all good, Leo Leonora.�
��

  He holds out his hand, and after a few beats I extend mine. We shake, warm palms pressed together. I don’t know what we’re agreeing to.

  Elevator, I discover, is not an accurate term here in fake Egypt. At the Luxor they are called inclinators because they haul you up the pyramid on an angle steep enough that somewhere as we rise to Floor 25, I stumble as it jolts sideways and Max grabs my arm so I don’t fall.

  Our room has a slanted window. I know this because I smack my head as I lean to check out the view.

  After that, we make the following plan: We will eat our burgers. We will nap. Around six as it gets cooler, we’ll head out, driving west as the sun sets. If there’s no traffic, we’ll make it to LA before midnight.

  This is the plan Max and I make as we sit at the little table near the window where I just hit my head hard enough to raise a lump on my temple. I nibble a fry from the pile we’re sharing and begin to wonder if any of this makes sense at all.

  Maybe I should just go home. Max will go wherever Max needs to go. If Paris doesn’t show up, I will go to the police and drag my mother with me. We’ll report my sister missing. Maybe they’ll do something.

  But my eyes are drooping again and my belly is full of grease and I flop down on the bed nearest the door, setting my Diet Coke on the nightstand.

  “Leo,” Max says, his voice tired sounding and low. He closes the drapes, but not all the way, so there’s this little gap of light in the gloom, and he stretches out on the other bed, arms behind his head. “Don’t worry, okay?”

  “Not worried,” I lie.

  “Tell me more about you,” he says, and my pulse skips. It is not the question I expected.

  “Like what?”

  His voice rises in the darkened room. “Like more than Stanford. Things you like. Things you hate. Stuff. You know.”

  It feels like a test. Or a job interview. Or maybe it’s because I don’t talk to guys much. And guys like Buddy Lathrop aren’t interested in knowing stuff about you.

  “I hate frozen yogurt.” If the floor opened up right now and swallowed me, that would be a good thing. I am glad it is dark and we are not looking at each other. I imagine if we were, his gray eyes would be laughing.