by Sara Beitia
Albert felt claustrophobic and alone. He wished there was someone he could actually talk to about it. But when he’d moved away the few friends he’d left behind had all gradually dropped him, and his best friend from what he thought of as “back home” was overseas, no longer his high school buddy Chris but an enlisted man. He hadn’t seemed able to make any new friends in this town, a situation not likely to improve under the circumstances. He couldn’t talk to his parents, either—he hadn’t confided in them about anything important since he was a pretty small kid. They loved him, he knew, but they had a narrow idea of the way things were supposed to be done, and neither of them had approved of his getting involved with Lily in the first place.
“That girl is too fast for you,” his mother had said after the first and only time he’d brought Lily to meet his parents.
“She was in some trouble last year,” his father had added, “and I’ve heard she has problems. You don’t need that. Find someone else to go out with.”
Albert had wanted to knock their heads together, and wondered if Lily’s parents were saying the same kinds of things about him to her. But he dealt with his parents’ nagging like he always did: he clenched his jaw and kept his mouth shut—at least, whenever he could manage it. After the fun little conversation with his parents, he avoided mentioning his new girlfriend to them whenever possible.
So it turned out that Lily’s disappearance was solid proof to Albert’s folks that she meant nothing but trouble. As Albert dragged himself through the week following her vanishing act, he knew he was in deep trouble because of it. Yet when he wished for someone to talk about it with, he wished first for Lily. Whatever happened, he couldn’t help that.
He couldn’t sleep at night, and getting out of bed in the morning was almost more than he could pull off. Whatever people thought he knew about Lily, he knew nothing after the moment she’d left him alone in her bedroom the night she’d disappeared. And not knowing was awful. But even worse was the tidbit that the cop, Andersen, had given him—that the neighbors claimed to have overheard Lily arguing with someone just before she drove off. It was driving him crazy.
Because if the neighbors were right and they had overheard an argument, it hadn’t been between Albert and Lily. And if Lily had been one half of the argument, then there had to be someone on the other end.
That was the person the cops needed to find.
Albert couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if he’d been the one to overhear the shouting instead of the neighbors—who were apparently nosy enough to listen, but not concerned enough to check it out or even just call the cops. Or if Lily’s bedroom had happened to overlook the driveway instead of the other side of the house. Or if he hadn’t slept through whatever had happened.
What might have been different?
Sluggish from lack of sleep and what he guessed was depression, Albert found himself zoning out in misty fantasies where the what-ifs were wiped out and he rushed in to save Lily from whatever, or she returned home safely—either way, there was always a storybook happy ending. The fantasies only made him feel worse when he came back to reality. Then, at other times, he tried to imagine where Lily actually was now, but he never got too far in this before his heart began a painful, uneven thumping. He stopped paying attention in his classes or to anything else. He didn’t have time for the present; he was obsessed with the might-have-been and the what’s-to-come. And he kept waiting for some signal from Lily that would finally put things right.
So Thursday at noon, Albert didn’t even notice that there was something brewing in the lunchroom until it was already happening and he was at its center. A senior he recognized but whose name he didn’t know reached under the lunch tray Albert was carrying and slapped it up out of his hands. Brown gravy splattered Albert’s face and the front of his shirt, and the tray itself landed with a loud crash in a wet pile of the stuff it had been carrying. The sound of the plastic tray landing was deafening; the entire lunchroom went still when it clattered against the concrete tile floor.
Dazed, Albert looked down at the floor and his ruined lunch, then up at the guy who’d done it. He was very aware that everyone seemed to be staring at the two of them. Then he saw that they were not alone in the center of attention but surrounded by a bunch of other guys, mostly seniors, at least half of them muscle heads from the baseball team. His eyes and the eyes of the tray-slapper met. Then Albert lost the contest and was the first to drop his gaze, settling it back to the vaguely meat-and-potato-shaped mess at his feet. The silence in the lunchroom stretched on, and Albert’s only thought was to wonder how he would ever travel from this side of the moment to the other.
“Oops,” the guy said. All his friends were laughing, though the rest of the room was still quiet. “Need a hand?”
Albert just looked at him. Dave Jensen, he thought, the name suddenly popping into place. This guy’s name is Dave Jensen.
“Sure you do. Here,” Dave Jensen said, dumping the food from his own tray onto the floor. “Guess you’d better clean that up.”
“Go to hell,” Albert muttered, dropping to one knee and trying to scrape up the mess from the floor onto his tray.
Jensen moved closer and ground Albert’s hand under his sneaker. “What was that?”
Lubricated by gravy, Albert’s hand was easy to slip out from under the guy’s foot, though not before his knuckles cracked painfully. He stood up. “What’s your problem?”
“I think you know what my problem is.”
“Yeah?” Albert flicked his hand, and a tiny wad of gravy and mashed potatoes landed on Jensen’s cheekbone, right under his eye.
The guy shoved up his sleeves to expose his alarming forearms and stepped closer to Albert. “This is going to be fun.”
Something came loose in Albert’s head, and just like that, he didn’t care if these guys beat him bloody as long as he hurt somebody first. His bony, long-fingered hands balled up tight and he was already anticipating the satisfaction he would feel when his fists started pounding this guy’s face. “You do whatever you have to do,” he said, “and so will I.” All the while he was thinking, One good hit to flatten his nose or bust up his eye. I just want to feel something break before he kills me.
“There are at least half a dozen cops hanging around this place these days,” Jensen said softly. He was smiling. “But I don’t see any of them here now. So if you want to go, killer, let’s go.”
“Stop it!”
They both turned to the source of the voice.
It was Olivia Odilon, Lily’s sister and a girl Albert barely knew.
“Why don’t you stop acting like a Neanderthal?” she said to Jensen. “We all know you can kick his ass. Good enough, okay?”
There was a tense moment when Jensen turned his attention to Olivia, but she just stood there, almost like she was bored, until Jensen rolled his eyes and walked away. He said something rude, something no one but his buddies could hear, and they laughed at whatever it was.
Albert felt like he should say something. It was humiliating to be bullied like a third-grader and then defended by his girlfriend’s little sister. But he was saved from having to come up with something to say to her because she walked off in the other direction, now that she’d chased Dave Jensen and his jock squad away from Albert.
At the same time, someone had apparently gone for a lunch lady, because by then she and the janitor had arrived to find Albert and the gooey mess at his feet. The spell of silence was broken by the arrival of the two adults, and gradually the room was buzzing with normal chatter and a little something extra. Albert felt bad leaving the mess for someone else to clean up and he was too embarrassed to face walking through the lunchroom anyway, so he bent down and tried to help scoop the mess into the janitor’s bucket.
The lunch lady pushed him aside impatiently. “Just get out of the way, will you?” she said in a voice that was gentler than her words. “It’s fine.”
The janitor winked
at him and jerked his head toward the exit.
Albert straightened up, unsure of what to do now. There were at least fifteen minutes until the next class period. He saw Olivia still standing a few feet away. The corners of her mouth were turned up in some kind of smile, but she didn’t look happy. She looked tired, he thought, maybe as tired as he was.
“Come with me,” she commanded when their eyes met.
Not knowing what else to do, he followed her through the lunch room. “Where are we going?”
She ignored his question until she stopped at an empty table on the edge of the large room and plopped herself down in a chair. She hooked another one with her feet and pushed it out for Albert. “I’m going to give you half my sandwich,” she said.
“Thanks.” He took what she offered—peanut butter and banana—and ate it in about three bites. “I guess I owe you two, now.”
“Gawd, you stink like old spaghetti,” she said, wrinkling up her nose as she picked at her half of the sandwich.
“I think it was pot roast,” Albert said, looking down at the wet brown stain soaking through his shirt.
“Don’t you have a shirt you can change into before next period? You look like you wiped diarrhea on yourself.”
“Lovely.”
“Seriously,” she insisted. “You’d better find something, because they’re not going to let you into class like that.”
“Okay, okay,” Albert said. “I think I have a sweatshirt in my locker.”
She went back to eating her sandwich and they were quiet.
After a bit, she said, “I love how those guys stand up for my sister now. You should have heard some of the crap they said about her after the accident. Even Pat, who I thought was different than that. Some of them were there, everyone knows, but no one came forward and no one helped her. They were her friends, until they weren’t.” She paused. “Lily told you about her accident, right?”
This girl didn’t waste time dancing around what she wanted to say, Albert had to give her that. “That’s not what she called it, but yeah.” Albert knew about what Lily called “The Bad Thing That Happened” because she’d told him about it on their first date, since, as she’d put it, someone else was bound to tell him about it if she didn’t first.
Olivia rolled her eyes. “Well, she didn’t mean to overdose on nitrous and end up with severe brain trauma, right? So it was an accident, no matter how it started. Partying or whatever.”
Albert was acutely uncomfortable. He barely knew Olivia. They didn’t have any classes together, and he’d only been in their house a couple of times when he was actually supposed to be there. On those rare occasions, he’d gotten the feeling that Lily’s family didn’t approve of him any more than his family approved of Lily. He could barely identify any member of Lily’s family, he’d seen them so little. Of all of them, only Lily had made an impression.
“I wonder …” Olivia began. She was staring off into space as if seeing something that wasn’t there. “I wonder if Lil is just off on another patented Lily Adventure. You haven’t known her very long, so you don’t know how it is with her.”
“How is it with her?” he asked, too sharp.
Olivia sighed. “You really don’t know, dude. Ever since we were kids, things would be going along, nice and normal, and then out of nowhere, she’d have to shake things up. Like she couldn’t stand the quiet, you know? Her randomness is actually pretty predictable anymore. But our parents won’t listen to me. And Jesus, you should hear what they say about you. So, what do you think?” she asked Albert. “Do you think Lily’s just jerking us all around?”
“I … I don’t know,” he said, which was true. Then something in her face made him add, “But I don’t think so. I think it’s something more.”
“Yeah?”
He shook his head in the negative. “You don’t think I … ?”
“No. You’re not that guy. It’s totally obvious.”
“Thanks,” he said. “You’re the only person who seems to think so.”
Olivia sighed again. She looked as if she wanted to ask another question, but she didn’t break the silence. A few moments later, Albert couldn’t stand it anymore and left to go find a dry shirt. He looked back once at Olivia, and she was staring off into space again.
When school was finally over, Albert left the grounds at a sprint. He felt like a coward but he wanted to get a head start, just in case Dave Jensen was looking to finish what he’d started at lunch.
Once he was clear of the school and pretty certain no one was following him, he slowed his pace from a jog to a shuffle. The late-winter wind was sharp as a knife. He was sweating from the jog and the cold didn’t bother him, except in his lungs. He worked to control his breathing. The street he walked down was quiet and empty and his footsteps echoed dully on the pavement. There were no places with this kind of almost-perfect silence back in his old town, and even now, almost six months after moving here, he was still getting used to it. But today the silence and solitude was a relief. Behind him was hostility and accusation at school, and in front of him was his claustrophobic house, where they all mostly pretended to each other that none of this was happening. But of course it was all he thought about, and here on the empty street, he could think about it without distraction.
Still, even shuffling as slowly as he was, eventually Albert found himself on his street and in front of his house. He grabbed the mail from the mailbox and went inside, planning to start his homework instead of giving in to the now-constant desire to just go to bed and forget everything. In the still house, Albert dropped the mail on the dining room table and leaned his backpack against the table leg.
He looked at the clock. There were still a couple of hours before one of his parents came home from work. Two short hours left in which he didn’t have to act some role.
He sat in one of the chairs and pushed aside a pile of the table’s constant clutter of papers and bills and unopened junk mail, clearing a spot where, theoretically anyway, he might actually do his homework. He pushed today’s mail in the other direction to keep it from being eaten by the older pile. As he did so, something caught his eye, and he focused his attention on the stack of envelopes he was shoving aside. He ruffled through them with his fingers until he’d found the one that had interested him.
The envelope itself wasn’t anything special—just a dull white rectangle, the blue crisscross of the security lining bleeding through just a little, like veins under a paper skin. There was no return address, but he recognized the small black handwriting addressing the envelope simply to “Albert.”
He slit the envelope with his finger and saw that there was a postcard inside. He plucked it out and held it up. On the front was a grainy photograph of a large, freestanding arch with a city behind it. Yellow, bubbly letters cried “Greetings from St. Louis” along the bottom of the picture. It wasn’t a remarkable postcard at all, except that Albert had seen it before.
The last time he’d seen it, it had been tucked into the frame of the mirror over Lily’s dresser. A souvenir, he thought he remembered her saying, that she’d picked up years ago on some family vacation.
Turning the card over, he saw a folded piece of lined notebook paper clipped to it. He unclipped and unfolded the paper to see more of Lily’s dense, back-slanted handwriting.
His pulse raced as he read:
A.—
I’m in a hurry and I don’t have a lot of time to say what I need to say. I don’t even know how much I can say. Who else might be reading your mail?
First off, I want you to know that (a) I didn’t plan to leave that night and (b) I’m okay for now. I know they’re looking for me, though, so I don’t know how long I’ll stay that way.
After the bad thing, I didn’t remember anything that happened—the days before it or the months after and obviously not the accident itself. But I’ve started to remember now. Mostly about Perry. And this is the thing: he knows it. I don’t know how, but he does.
/> The night I left, he thought I was alone in the house, so he came back with bad ideas and I had to get away from that asshole. He didn’t know you were there, so at least I knew you were safe. If he knows now that you were there, he might think you know other things, too. What I’m saying is, Perry’s dangerous. Please believe me.
I didn’t know what to do the night I left, but I’m going to the last good place. Don’t tell anyone—when they come for me they’ll believe him over me and there won’t be anyone left to protect me.
I need time to figure out what to do next. I’ll try to stay there and wait for help as long as I can (should the Machine of God decide I deserve it).
Love,
L.
It was a halting, odd little letter. He read it several more times, quickly at first, but then more carefully, trying to understand what she was circling around so indirectly. With each read he hoped it would make more sense, but it didn’t. His heart continued to thump, and he tried not to think about what would have happened if one of his parents had seen the envelope first.
He tried to understand what she was trying to say to him. Perry had come for her that night, thinking he would find her alone—and then what? It had been loud, a fight over something … something connected to the break-in and Lily’s accident, maybe, and loud enough to wake the neighbors … and then she’d just vanished.
Albert had the realization that Perry Kogen was the only person who knew, at least in part, what had happened to Lily. He knew more than anyone else about it, anyway. He knew, yet he was letting people worry and search for her and think the worst.
