by Joy Preble
To me. To Paris. To Max.
They can, can’t they?
I think again about how every atom, every electron is interconnected. Maybe when Max and I kissed, some infinitesimal piece of that kiss touched everything else in the world.
It is a bright and shiny thought, and it sits with me as we use up the hours until Beach Cinema opens at noon.
We find a diner and both order eggs and toast and hash brown potatoes with cheese. We eat. I insist on paying, but Max leaves the tip. We walk around, then go back to the truck and drive down the street of our old apartment building. I point to the second floor, to my bedroom window. I show him where we went to school.
We wander the Promenade and browse and drink more coffee and I tell Max how once out on the sidewalk there was this group demonstrating salsa dancing and Paris joined in and this girl in a red dress with long dark hair taught her the steps and then my sister danced and danced with this short guy who told her he was from Brazil. He twirled her around until Paris was dizzy and breathless and laughing like a maniac.
I remember watching her, knowing as I did that her easy grace would never be mine. Even at thirteen, I could calculate complex math problems and later things like Planck’s constant, but Paris—she could dance.
At five minutes past twelve we step inside Beach Cinema. The marquee announces a midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show and a marathon of detective movies beginning with Chinatown, which I have never seen.
My heart gives a quick surge. Except honestly, what do I expect? To walk in the heavy glass doors and see Paris thundering down the ancient red carpet, grinning at us?
Maybe. Yes.
“You have tickets?” The girl behind the concession stand—twenties, half-sleeve tats, both eyebrows pierced with bars—leans across the counter. She arches her thick eyebrows in a way that is more directive than optional, metal bars waggling. We’ve skipped right by the ticket window outside.
“Did a tall girl with long hair come in and walk upstairs?” I ask hopefully. “Maybe with a twisty bracelet and some hair clips?”
She responds with a snort and shuffles a giant box of Dots next to a giant box of Milk Duds (worst candy name ever) in the glassed-in shelves at her waist.
Okay then.
“Um,” I say. “I used to live around here. We’d come here all the time. He’s never been. I wanted to show him the balcony. We’ll come right down. I promise.” Like Max had earlier, I hold up three fingers in the Boy Scout salute, but this does not seem to impress her. Okay then. Not the scouting type.
The concession-stand girl drums her fingers on the counter. A tiny diamond stud piercing right above her mouth twinkles as she purses her lips.
“Well,” she says, looking both bored and annoyed. “If you’re not just going up to use the bathroom. They hate when I let people do that.”
“Thanks,” Max says, smiling sweetly. And then he looks sort of anxious, which surprises me. “I can look around down here while you go up,” he says. “You know. Divide and conquer.”
“Are you kidding? C’mon.” I turn to the girl. “We’ll only be a few minutes,” I say.
I gallop the red-carpeted stairs two at a time before she can change her mind. Max trails behind, his footsteps slower on the stairs than mine. Old movie posters ascend the stairway walls. A fedora-wearing Humphrey Bogart stares at us from the last poster before we reach the second floor.
I wait at the top step, impatient, for Max to catch up.
“Leo,” he says from behind me, voice oddly stiff.
Only I’m not paying attention to that so much because I’m eyeing the older guy behind the bar. The one with the ponytail and the tie-dyed shirt and the bird tattoo on his neck, wings spread like it’s trying to take flight.
“Oscar?” I say, voice rising in a question even though I’m sure it’s him. I can see the tray of drink condiments that he’s probably just filled since they’ve only been open a few minutes. A huge pile of those maraschino cherries sits smack in the middle of the sectioned tray.
He looks up. A grin spreads across his face.
“Leo? Leo Hollings?” He steps around the bar, recognition growing in his eyes.
At first this throws me. I didn’t expect him to remember after all these years. Then my brain kicks in. Paris must be here! Why else would he know me? My heart thumps to the beat of a country tune.
“Oscar,” I say again, testing the waters. “You’re looking good.”
“Whatcha doing here, Leo?” Oscar says, striding over. “Haven’t seen you and your sister in . . . Geez, it’s been a while, right?”
I start to respond, stomach sinking, but Max says, “Her sister’s here. You sure you haven’t seen her?” Something awkward and strange crosses his face.
The back of my neck prickles.
Oscar frowns. “Positive. I remember her, though. Paris. Hard to forget—”
“But she told me—” Max blurts, then stops abruptly, color rising swiftly up his neck, forming bright blotches on his cheeks.
What?
Everything seems to slow, like the room has slid underwater.
Oscar says something I don’t hear.
“Max?” I say, my voice loud and screechy and I don’t even care. “What’s going on?”
“Leo.” Max holds out a hand but doesn’t touch me. “Leo. Let me explain.” His face is pale, his eyes serious and sad.
I feel like I did at the top of the Stratosphere. Breathless and out of control. If I fall, I will land hard and badly and broken.
“Where’s my sister?” I squeeze the words out. Like a black hole, I think suddenly.
Max steps back, bumping one of the round tables with the rickety metal legs. It topples heavily on the threadbare carpet.
“She’s supposed to be here,” he says. “She told me she’d be here.”
“Told you?”
The only explanation is that I’m dreaming. We’re still on the beach and I’m asleep, and my brain has conjured a weird nightmare, like the one I had once where I was taking a chemistry test and everyone knew the answers but me.
Max opens his mouth, then closes it, drags out his cell, and gapes at the screen.
He holds up the text for me to see. Stay in LA with Leo. I’ll catch up to you soon. It’s almost over. I’ll explain then. Tell her to trust you. P.
“I don’t understand,” I say, the words sticking in my throat. “Where’s Paris?”
“Damn it,” he says.
My mind sorts the pieces, slowly, then quicker. I swallow, feeling sick, a terrible fear gripping me as I stare at the tiny words on the tiny screen.
I force my gaze to Max, this boy who has told me about Ashley and made my heart break for him. The one who’s driven me around Vegas and then here to California to this place that has stayed in my memory as wonderful and pure. Max who I have kissed. Max who didn’t know us before I handed him that piece of pie.
At least that’s what I thought.
“I made a mistake,” I say.
“Is something wrong with your sister?” Oscar asks.
“Leo,” Max says, but I don’t want him to talk.
The terrible fear is snaking through my veins, but now anger rushes in, too, clearing my mind, giving me focus.
“What is this? Some kind of sick joke? You don’t know her. You barely . . .” I stop then, the thought of what I need to ask forming but not moving because once I let it out, I will have to hear the answer.
“Just tell me, Max.” Max who made me trust him. Max who bought a ridiculous pine tree air freshener because I’d complained about his stinky truck. Max who knew physics and was nice to Noah the day camper. Max who kissed me like I’d always dreamed of being kissed.
The Paris and Leo dolls are still in my pocket and now I yank them out, squeezing them in my palm, cutting into my skin. I’m furious—and panicked and humiliated and a million other awful things.
I force myself to give the fear words.
“Did you
know Paris before two nights ago at the Heartbreak? When I brought you that piece of pie because she dared me, did you already know who she was?”
“Let me—”
“Yes or no, Max. Had you already met Paris?”
Silence.
“Yes or no?”
“Yes,” Max says quietly. “Yes.”
I slam the dolls to the floor.
“Leo,” Max says.
“No,” I say. “No. No. No.”
I turn.
I run.
SIXTEEN
MY SIDES ACHE AND I’M GASPING FOR BREATH, BUT I DON’T STOP running. I can’t.
Max’s hoodie is flopping against my legs, and I wiggle out of it, let it drop in my wake.
The sun is warm and the seagulls are squawking and only the tiniest wisps of white clouds flutter overhead. The ocean smells like where I want to be—far away in some exotic place where terrible things don’t happen.
Not to the beach this time, but down the street and onto the wooden planks of the pier, past the welcome sign and the one that reads Route 66. The highway that crosses the country and dead ends here. Unless you dive in and swim, it’s as far as you can go.
Not far enough.
Max follows. He might have been a high school athlete, but he’s got loud footsteps and I hear him behind me most of the way.
“Let me explain,” he says, the sound of his attempted confession following me like an echo. Now and then he yells my name, and once I shout over my shoulder that he should drop dead, which he doesn’t because I keep hearing him.
In New York, a cop might have stopped us, but this is California. People look around for the video cameras like maybe we’re filming a movie. So I run faster, chest heaving, stopping only as I clatter by the Ferris wheel—the one that all the tourists go to. The one you see in every movie about LA. I stop short. My breath catches as the wheel moves up and over, up and over—and then stops. I can’t help myself. My gaze fixes on the top car. Even from here, I can see it’s a guy and girl. Their car starts rocking back and forth—lightly and then more forcefully.
Don’t do that, I almost shout, everything inside me wild and out of control.
Me. Who never used to be afraid of heights until the day at the stupid Arizona State Fair. I feel that nauseous, helpless fear.
Everything is falling apart, breaking. Including me.
“Please stop,” pants Max, next to me now, out of breath, his hoodie scrunched in one hand.
“Where is she?” I shout it at him.
Max bends at the waist, his hands on his hips. “You’re damn fast,” he says. “And I don’t know. Really, Leo. She was supposed to be here. But she’s not. And this is new, anyway. It was her texts I kept answering. I—she was going to be at the Stratosphere. You and I would ride the Big Shot and when we got off, she’d be waiting. That’s what we’d agreed on when I said I’d drive around with you. But she changed the plan. Added another note. California, she said. And I figured okay. Why not?”
Why not? I have driven to California with him because of why not?
He shoves a hand through his already wildly messy hair. There’s a smudge of dirt on his chin. He smells sweaty.
“Call her,” I say. “Tell her it’s over.”
“She isn’t answering,” Max says. “I don’t know where she is.”
“Sure you do, Max. She texted your damn phone.”
But he shakes his head and says again that he doesn’t know. Tells me he deleted my sister’s other texts so I wouldn’t see them. He talks and talks, and I tell myself he’s lying. But I know he isn’t. At least not now.
“I trusted you. God, Max.”
“She said you needed to get out of your rut.” He looks down, blushing red, then redder. “She was going to pay me fifty bucks if I went through with it. I—I thought—”
“Only fifty? Guess that twenty to Nate was a bargain.” My own cheeks heat with a humiliation that shoots straight down to my toes. I let him touch me. I trusted him. I thought about . . . How could he do this?
“That was before I . . . shit. Leo, you know I’d never . . . Once I knew you, I . . .”
“Gonna finish any of those?” I snap, and he presses his lips together.
In my head I see Max and me on the top floor at the Stratosphere. Feel that Heartbreak receipt in my hands, the one that tallied up what somebody else had eaten. And on the back, scrawled like she was rushing to do something and didn’t have time—all those words crossed out—that message about us being happy. The one Max says she added in at the last minute. The one that began the journey that led me here.
“You knew every clue,” I say, forcing myself to hold his gaze. “At the Paris, that note on the wall outside. And all the rest of it. Even Beach Cinema. God. I’m such an idiot. Thinking I figured it all out. You must have been having quite the laugh, Max. Poor little Leo. Let’s study SAT problems. Let’s drive across the desert. Let’s pretend she’s too sweet and innocent to stay in a hotel room when really you . . . shit. Telling me about you and Ashley. Here’s the truth, Max. You were playing me. You and my sister both.”
“No. Leo, no. You have to believe me.”
Something catches in his voice and I remember how he looked, there on the 108th floor. His jaw tight and his eyes surprised as I read the note. And then stupid Nate said stupid stuff and we went on from there. To the Luxor. To the desert. To the beach.
To here.
I am a stupid girl who makes stupid mistakes and this is what I get.
I don’t know what stops me from running again. I want to. Run and run along the beach, hugging the coast until I hit Malibu and then beyond, until I couldn’t run anymore. Ventura. Santa Barbara. Whatever.
“I’m going to explain,” Max says, no longer phrasing it as a question. “You’re going to listen.” He reaches out a hand and I slap it away.
“Here’s what I think, Max. You want this to even the scales. You help me and it makes up for leaving Ashley. You get to tell yourself how heroic you are.”
His face goes pale and tight and I don’t care. I can see I’ve hit a truth. I can see I’ve hurt him. Good.
“It’s not like that,” he says. But we both know it is.
He swallows and shoves his hand through his hair a bunch of times and paces back and forth while people sidestep around us, some gawking openly, some pretending not to watch our drama unfold.
Let them watch, I think. Let them see. What difference does any of it make anymore?
“You’ve got things you’re not telling me either,” Max says, and my heart stops briefly. “Let’s face it, Leo. Your sister is running from something, too, isn’t she? I mean, why else . . . I just don’t know what it is.”
My heart starts up again then, and we holler at each other some more, but everything is lost and wrong and in the end, I don’t know what to do except listen to what he has to say.
“Okay,” I say finally. “Tell me your side of the story.”
What I do not say aloud is that after that I will probably have to call the cops or worse, my mother—whose phone is probably headed toward Hawaii.
I think about her briefly now and the last time we were on the pier—her and me and Paris. It was raining—hard, cold drops, but fresh smelling, mixing with the salt from the ocean and the greasy odor of churros frying. The churro guy was closing up. “This one’s on me,” he said, leaning into the rain toward my sister. Guys offered her stuff all the time. Mom made us split it in three even bites. I reminded them I had homework.
“He’s a good guy,” Mom said of Tommy Davis, who we still barely knew. She was in love, she told us. He was the one. Fresh start. New place. Las Vegas! The exclamation mark was hers, not mine.
Now, Max and I catch our breath. Glare at each other. Then we walk the beach again, keeping our distance, threading around sand castles and towels and people enjoying the sun. The sand is warm, the day bright and blue and perfect. California is a sly place, a clever facade.
“You have to understand,” Max says. “I first met her about two months ago. She was hanging with some girl who knew someone who knew Nate. At a club in Henderson. There was a poker game in the back and I needed to make some cash so I could pay my rent and that’s why I was there. Your sister asked me to buy her a Coke.”
I narrow my eyes. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. That’s why I paid attention to her. Some girls, when a guy’s just won it big, they ask for a beer at least. Your sister asked for a Coke with cherries.”
I decide that this time Max is telling the truth.
The rest of Max’s story goes like this: They talked. Paris drank her Coke. Maybe they flirted a little. “I hadn’t met you yet,” he says with that part. Of course he hadn’t. I look toward the water, but keep listening.
“I’d see her here and there,” he continues, and my mind stutter-steps over his words. “Your sister, well, she’s hard to ignore, you know?”
I did know.
“And then I ran into her again a few weeks ago.” Max pauses. He glances toward the ocean then back to me, squinting in the bright sunshine. “By then we sort of knew each other. Like you do with people you keep bumping into.”
He’d been talking to Ashley’s family. Her mom had begged him to come back. Said Ashley missed him and that she wasn’t putting her best efforts into her physical therapy. But Max wasn’t coming back. Only he didn’t know how to say it.
So there was my sister, Paris. The girl who had asked only for Coke. And when she asked for more, Max figured, why not?
“You were right,” he tells me quietly. “What you said—before. The way I figured it, if I helped her, helped you, I guess, it would balance things somehow. Erase the debt. Absurd, I know. But that’s what I was thinking. She wasn’t asking much—just flirt with you and drive you around and follow some crazy clues she’d set up. She said you needed something. You’d been having a hard time. So she’d come up with a plan. And I was the perfect guy to help her.”
“God, Max.” I make a low hissing sound. Why did Paris tell him those particular things?
Max shrugs. “I asked her why me? You know what she said? ‘You have nice eyes. You can trust a boy by his eyes.’”
