Worth a Thousand Words

by Brigit Young

  Jake introduced her to all of them. She knew their names, of course—Luke, Emma, Lily, Sean, Sarah, Ian—and their faces had long been documented in the files on her laptop as they’d moved in and out of one another’s social groups over the last year and a half, but they all said hi as if they’d never heard of her and she’d never seen them.

  The crowd passed around her camera, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over its manual lens and “old-fashioned” look. It only seemed old-fashioned to them because it wasn’t a phone. And besides, it was just a camera she had found at a yard sale, Tillie wanted to say, but she didn’t know if that was impressive or cheesy.

  Jake scooted in between Abby and Tillie as the cluster of kids yelled over one another to be heard. He leaned in toward Tillie, grabbed her arm, and whispered, “What class do you have next? I’ll walk you there so we can talk.”

  As she turned to him she saw that not only were his eyes bloodshot, but they were puffy, too, as if he’d been crying.

  Tillie tried not to stare as she told him it was art class with Ms. Martinez.

  “The love of my life,” Jake said with a mock lovelorn sigh, suddenly the opposite of the frantic person who had just whispered to her, turning back to his pizza crust, and, it seemed, his audience.

  “The love of your life? Ew. You’re obsessed,” Abby said to Jake in a quick aside before returning to her own conversation.

  Tillie surprised herself by joining in. “She is the greatest.”

  “Seriously,” Jake said. “After parent-teacher conferences my dad said she should be an actress or something, not a teacher.”

  “Oh, because only ugly old witches should be teachers, with actual warts and stuff,” Abby said, smacking Jake’s arm.

  “Yeah, and just because someone’s really pretty it doesn’t mean they have to move to Hollywood or something,” Tillie couldn’t help but add.

  “Wait a minute, whose side are you on here?” Jake protested.

  “She’s on the side of reason,” Abby went on. “So old women should be teachers and pretty ones should be actresses or models or something? They have to fit nicely into little boxes based on their appearance? You’re sexist.”

  “Totally,” Tillie agreed.

  “Okay, okay, stop ganging up on me!” Jake laughed and began to get up.

  But his laugh wasn’t like the night before. It sounded strained. Hollow.

  As he picked up his tray he said quietly to Tillie, “Okay, come on, let’s head out now and the hallways will be clear and we can talk.”

  Then he waved bye to his friends and tugged on Tillie’s shirt a little, as if to pull her up.

  She pushed his hand away.

  He was always putting on a show, she realized. He obviously hadn’t told his friends anything about his dad. Maybe he’d come to her because he was fake with the people who knew him. Watching him smile at his friends and then look to her with secret desperation, she wondered if there were times he’d just been pretending with her the past few days. This must be what he was doing at home, too, with his mom. It was a convincing performance. Tillie didn’t like it.

  This was one of the many reasons why being alone was easier—you didn’t have to see all that was wrong with people. The antisocial life had its pluses.

  Tillie took her camera back as several kids begged, “Pleeease let me take some pictures with it tomorrow!” Tillie nodded, but knew she wouldn’t. No one took pictures with her camera but her. That would be like … someone else speaking with her voice. But she’d let them look at it again, if they wanted. She got up, leaving her tray, pulling her bad leg up at a weird angle. Without being aware of it, she must have grimaced, because Abby said, “Hey, are you okay?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, totally,” Tillie assured her as Jake, tapping his feet and fidgeting wildly behind her, motioned with his head for her to follow, and they made their way out of the cafeteria.

  Jake led Tillie to the hallway corner. They dropped their backpacks at their feet and leaned against a locker. A few yards away from them, two eighth graders held hands and whispered. Toward the end of the hall, Cara Dale put on some makeup in her locker mirror and flashed a hallway pass at an ornery hall monitor. Other than that, the hallway was empty.

  Jake laughed again, but at nothing. The same empty laugh from earlier.

  Tillie forced herself to scan his eyes and she saw they were wet.

  “I was up all night,” Jake said, his breath rapid and panicked. “I just … It’s been a week now. And I still don’t know where he is, ya know? And last night, I mean, it was crazy, but it didn’t actually lead to anything. And it was stupid. I know. It was stupid. A waste of time.” Jake smacked his own head.

  “Hey,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder to quiet him, and then swiftly bringing it back down to her side. “I have an idea,” she said as calmly as possible. “Let’s look through the photos we have, okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.” Jake nodded hard and fast.

  “Can we sit?”

  “Yeah.”

  They slid down the lockers and clicked through her photos.

  School. Squirrels. Jim. Cubicle Man. Car. School.

  Beside her, Jake’s skinny legs wobbled side to side. He bit his nails. It caught Tillie off guard how worried she felt about this behavior. About him. She wanted to make it all better. She wanted her pictures to fix everything.

  “Wait,” Jake said. “Go back to the car.”

  “It’s too blurry. If you zoom in you can see most of the license plate number, but not the last digit.”

  “I know, I know, you said, but look.” Jake grabbed the camera.

  “Careful,” Tillie warned as Jake furiously scanned the photos of the blue Chevy.

  And then Tillie saw his whole body unwind. His limbs went still. He exhaled audibly. “Got something.”

  Tillie took the camera back and they looked together. All she saw was a blurry shot of the side of the car. “What?” Tillie asked, frustrated, seeing nothing.

  “Zoom in on the window.”

  She did so. The inside of the car wasn’t visible. The shot only revealed a reflection of light and a little white sticker in the bottom corner. A sticker … with bar codes. “The bar codes?” Tillie turned to him.

  Jake smiled. A real smile this time, though his eyes still looked slightly crazed, like in a cartoon when spirals replace pupils. “It’s a rental,” he said. “The bar code sticker means it’s a rental.”

  Tillie stared at the sticker. She hadn’t known that about cars (she didn’t know anything about cars, and didn’t particularly care to). But if Jake was right, then they had a path forward.

  “Time to research Templeton rentals,” Jake said as the bell rang, the cafeteria doors burst open, and a sea of kids swarmed the hallway. “How much you want to bet this leads us to Cubicle Man? I bet you anything.”

  They stood up.

  “We have a lead,” he murmured, more to himself than to Tillie. “We have a lead.” Jake turned and bounded off to his next class.

  Tillie moved slowly and steadily in the tidal wave of students. She turned toward the stairwell and clutched the stairway’s banister as she headed toward art class. Out of pride, she’d long refused to take the school elevator. Some people really needed it. She didn’t. One foot up. The other foot up to match. Repeat. Take a photo on each step. Repeat. Forget Jake’s eyes. Repeat. Forget his bitten-down nails. Repeat.

  When Tillie handed Ms. Martinez her collage, Ms. Martinez smiled, and said, “Look at that. Just lovely.”

  The mistakes had made it better.

  As class started and a lecture on Matisse began, Tillie took out the small camera she’d brought in her pocket and, hiding the camera behind a propped-up textbook, she clicked through pictures from the past two weeks that might help in the search for Ms. Martinez’s glasses. It was a search that might not be as exciting as a conspiracy or a night out in the darkness, Tillie thought, but it was one that wouldn’t make her feel so many
baffling, elating, exhausting things.

  It was a lost thing no one would cry about if it couldn’t be found.

  11

  Loner

  Tillie and Jake texted all weekend about the rental car.

  i called a bunch of rental places, he texted her on Saturday. asked if they rented out a blue chevy malibu recently. no help

  Understandable, Tillie responded. They can’t give out that info just like that …

  even tried my old man hausmann voice where i sound intimidating. no luck.

  He sent her screenshots of spy and action movies. they say you do your best learning outside of school, he wrote, followed by a smiley face. no seriously im learning some crazy stuff.

  Saturday night he tried to hack into his mom’s email and see if she’d really been communicating with his dad.

  i cant get in! he texted. what kind of parent doesnt use their kids name or birthday for a password. whatever. now i search for those bank statements. maybe ill find something. An hour later he added, no luck.

  By Sunday he had grown unhinged.

  over a week now. gone over a week. ten days. TEN DAYS!!!! he wrote at 10 a.m.

  Only ten minutes later, he added: my dad definitely saw cubicle man do something. or cubicle man is money hungry. but what does jim know? he must be in on it too.

  Around lunchtime, he wrote: biking to my dads office. no one is there but I don’t care. cant stay here. cant sit still

  Later in the afternoon, she received a series of nonsensical emojis—guy golfing, medical syringe, heart with a bow on it, Israeli flag, unicorn—followed by freakin out freakin out freakin out

  On her end, she printed out the important photos in the case and put them all in chronological order. She wrote out a timeline of all the events as best she knew about them. She made a list of all the rental car places in town and noted which ones were close to Jake’s dad’s office so they could go to those first. But it had been ten days since he left home, and they weren’t close to an answer, and a big part of her prayed that by the end of the weekend his dad would waltz through the door and say, “I’m home from my trip, son! Why would you have worried?”

  Around dinnertime Jake started to call her multiple times, and she plugged in her phone near the kitchen and went to her bedroom to ignore it. Just for a little bit. She needed a break. She needed life to go back to normal for a few hours.

  That night, as Tillie studied her pictures, she got a step closer to finding the missing glasses. Ms. Martinez had been wearing the lost pair, light brown with white polka dots, on March 8, a date recorded on the digital image. Tillie had a picture from that day of Ms. Martinez, her mouth frozen mid-sentence while she held up Deshaun’s sculpture in her hand as an example to the class of how to portray movement, her glasses obscuring her nearly black eyes.

  In a picture from the next day, taken when Tillie was waiting for the school bus to come, Ms. Martinez wore those glasses pushed up on her hair like a headband as she headed toward the faculty parking lot. But the next class, March 10, the day that they started to learn about cut-outs and collages, her brown glasses were replaced by her other pair. All Tillie had to do was ask Ms. Martinez where she went that day after the clay sculptures, and then go there, and ask around to see if a pair of glasses had been left by a pretty woman with dark hair. Maybe she’d get lucky.

  The array of Ms. Martinez photos covered so much of Tillie’s desk that some of them had slipped off onto the floor.

  Tillie heard a light knock at her door.

  “I’m busy!” she hollered.

  The door opened. For once, it wasn’t her mom.

  “How’s it going?” her dad asked her.

  He looked at his feet just like she did, she saw.

  “Pretty good,” she answered.

  “Great,” her dad said.

  Tillie attempted to cover the spread of the Ms. Martinez photos on her desk with her hands.

  “Look, I know I said this the other day, but … But I’m really sorry I didn’t take you to the doctor’s.”

  “Huh?” Tillie said.

  “The other day. I really am sorry,” he answered. His big toe twitched up and down inside his sock.

  “It’s okay.” She hadn’t even been thinking about it.

  “I will from now on.”

  “Okay,” Tillie said. Her mom must have really gotten to him this time.

  “No, Til, I just—”

  Tillie waited for him to finish, but he didn’t.

  He paused, standing awkwardly by her door. “Oh, hey—lots of talk this week about the World Cup.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Looks like it’s going to be too hot, so they might have to move locations. Let’s hope they bring it to Illinois, right?” Her dad chuckled.

  “Well, I don’t know much about it,” she responded. She could hardly remember ever having been interested in soccer.

  “Oh, of course. Sure.”

  “Well, not for any good reason,” she added. It wasn’t because of her leg that she didn’t know, she wanted to say. She probably would’ve lost interest in soccer at some point, anyway, no matter what had happened. Come to think of it, her grandpa might’ve given her a camera at some point, accident or not. Maybe he just thought it suited her. And if he hadn’t, she probably would’ve found photography in some other way. “Just not really my thing.”

  “Yes, of course. Okay, well, I’ll take you to the doctor’s next time, Til.”

  “Okay, Dad,” Tillie said, wanting to believe him.

  He started to leave but stopped, turned around again, and said, “Oh, and Vivian Maier was a photographer.” He paused. “Her stuff is great.”

  “Really?” Tillie sat up a little straighter.

  “Yeah.” He smiled.

  “What’d she like to take pictures of?” Tillie asked.

  “People. People everywhere. Shopping, playing with their kids, working. And all kinds—rich, poor. She took … I mean, it must have been over a hundred thousand photographs. And this was on film, of course, not digital or anything.”

  “Wow,” Tillie whispered.

  “Yeah. But she never showed them to anyone while she was alive.”

  “Why?”

  Her dad shrugged. “I don’t know.” After a beat he added, “She was a bit of an outsider. A loner, I think. Didn’t want attention.”

  A loner, Tillie repeated in her head.

  He nodded over and over like he did when there was nothing left to talk about. “Okay, Til, I’m heading to bed. Night.” He closed the door, leaving her alone to exhale and let the pictures under her hands go free.

  She had to print those pictures of her dad from that morning and search his face. Something was going on with him. Something new.

  She had to sleep.

  She had to learn more about Vivian Maier and her thousands of photographs.

  She had to find out how to go from a bar code on a car window to an answer.

  She had to …

  Her mom knocked on the door and opened it. She held out Tillie’s cell phone.

  “I didn’t pick it up,” her mom said immediately, as if to stop any of Tillie’s protestations before they began. “But that boy Jake is definitely trying to reach you. I wasn’t snooping, I swear! I just saw his name when it lit up!”

  Tillie let out a small laugh at her mom. “‘That boy…’”

  “What? I just—”

  “I know, Mom. He’s just a kid from school, okay?”

  Her mom nodded. “Okay, sweetie.” She paused. “You guys have sure been talking a lot. Maybe you should have him over sometime? We could meet him?”

  “Sure, Mom,” Tillie soothed her. “It’s not like that, though.”

  “Whatever you say.” Her mom’s attempts at trying to now be okay with the “boyfriend” she’d created for Tillie in her mind were so transparent it was funny. She blew Tillie a quick kiss and shut the door.

  Tillie’s phone vibrated in her hand
. And then it vibrated again, and again.

  “What’s going on?” Tillie answered.

  “Where have you been?”

  “I was—”

  But Jake cut her off.

  “Forget all other leads. Forget everything else. It happened. He made contact.” Jake was nearly hyperventilating. “He called and I picked up. And I know where he was calling from.”

  12

  Don’t Ask Questions

  “He called me from a number I didn’t know,” Jake told her. “At first I was like, ‘Who is this?’ and right away, there’s breathing, and I know it’s him. He said to me, ‘I’m sorry, buddy, I have so much to tell you.’ And then I asked him where he was and all he said was: ‘I’ll talk to you soon. Really soon. I promise.’”

  “And then what?” Tillie asked.

  “And then he hung up. He sounded really upset. Like he didn’t have a lot of time.”

  “You said you know where he was?”

  “Pins and Whistles. For sure.”

  Tillie’s silence conveyed how meaningless this name was to her.

  “The bowling alley, of course!” He’d been panting a little, but he started to settle down.

  Tillie heard TV in the background, as usual. Her own parents were down the hall watching TV, too—their Sunday-night ritual.

  “Okay, so how’d you know that’s where he was? If it was an unknown number?”

  “It was obvious,” he said, and she could perfectly imagine his know-it-all look. “It had all the sounds of a bowling alley–karaoke place. And I only know of one. Don’t you?”

  “I never heard of any, actually. But okay.” Tillie opened her laptop and looked up Pins and Whistles as they spoke.

  “Oh, come on, you never went to birthday parties there or anything?”

  “No.” It wasn’t that kids were trying to be mean when they’d stopped inviting her to things back in elementary school. It’s just that after she hadn’t been able to go for so long, they fell out of the habit of asking her to come.

  “There were three things that gave it away,” Jake began. “One, the sound of horrible singers ‘performing’ ‘Piano Man.’ Two, crashes and cracking sounds.” Tillie heard Jake smack his hands together, illustrating. “I mean, I didn’t hear anyone yell ‘Strike!’ but I may as well have. And then,” he added, as if it were an afterthought, “I, uh, Googled the number. And it was the number for Pins and Whistles.”