The Most Wanted

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Take five, Mowbray. Save some for next week. You’re a steeplechaser,” he said.

  I got on the scale after practice, and I’d lost four pounds since morning.

  Right then, right after my shower, I went out behind the practice facility, and I got out some of my special paper and wrote this note:

  Dear Dillon,

  I’m sure you’re very busy with your own life, but it’s been so long. Not that a week is a very long time, but it feels long. Letters are really a treat for me. It’s like getting a present. But anyhow, if you don’t want to write anymore, that’s okay too. I will miss hearing from you.

  Arley

  What I really wanted to write was, Now that you saw my picture, do you think I’m ugly or something? Can you tell I’m only fourteen? Did I let too much show with that stupid poem? Are you sick of me? But I didn’t say any of that. I did mail that letter second-day, even though I knew it was a waste of money because it would get there Monday, anyhow. And then I waited for a letter on Saturday.

  No letter came.

  That morning, I got a blank card out of my underpants drawer. I don’t know when I bought it. It had a picture of a little river flowing into the sea, and underneath it said, “The biggest chance is just ahead. . . .” But I wrote on the inside:

  Dear Dillon,

  Probably by now you really think I’m just a pest. Maybe you’re sick or really busy or dealing with a big crisis in your family. Or maybe you have a girlfriend now, and she doesn’t want you writing to anyone else, even just as friends. I would like to know, but you don’t have to tell me.

  I looked up your name, LeGrande, in my French vocabulary. Not your name, really, but the parts of it, as words. And it means “the great” or “the biggest one” or “the most.” The card I’m enclosing here is really a New Year’s card, but I was going to give it to you now, sort of in advance of the new year and your birthday. It reminded me of your name when I saw it because it says this year is going to be the biggest one yet. So if I don’t get to talk to you again, at least you know somebody wishes that for you. I hope you get more than you ever hoped from this year, and from the rest of your life from now on.

  With love,

  Arlington Mowbray

  And then I just went up and lay down on my bed. I couldn’t even drink water. I was supposed to work a fill-in that day, and I did something I never did—I called Ginny and lied and said I was sick. I figured if I went to work I’d kill somebody by putting green chili sauce in their salad dressing or something.

  Elena came over about two o’clock, pissed that she’d had to do my fill-in herself. I didn’t even answer the door. Mama was at work. I could hear Elena yelling up the stairs and finally pounding up. Elena is little, but she can sound like a herd of buffalo. Now she even drives that way, loud and hard and fidgety, lots of big motions. She came into my room and said, “Y’all sick?”

  “No,” I said. “Or maybe yes. A little.”

  “You got your period?”

  “No.”

  She sat down by me then, and she did one of those things that make me love her. She laid the back of her hand on my forehead, like I was her little girl, the way Mrs. G. still does to her, and she said, “You hot?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you going to get up?”

  “No.”

  “Arley, tell me,” she said, and it was so much Elena’s generous voice, the voice that made me go to her even when my coach would look at me like, Why are you two together, that I just started to cry, and I told her I thought I loved Dillon, and he hated me, how I lied about my age, how he must think I was ugly, and he only wanted someone to talk to but I practically told him I couldn’t live without him. And Elena rocked me back and forth and said, You fool, beggars can’t be choosers, that boy’s lucky a girl like you would even write him no matter if you’re six years old, you’d be better off loving Mr. Justice with the invisible fiddle or Cully the cook with his dreadlocks he never washed in five years; and though I didn’t believe her, I still think of her holding me, and when I put that up against what happened that same night, I still feel like somebody snapped a flashbulb right in my face: I have to shut my eyes and look away. Elena and I made up, almost right away, and we’ll always be friends; but after that night, nothing could ever be unsmudged and clear again. Elena says when I married Dillon, it stopped us being girls. But maybe it was really that night.

  When I finally stopped crying, we went downstairs and got some peanut butter and water biscuits, and she said, “Let’s not go to the movies tonight. There’s a party.”

  I told her I wasn’t going anywhere. For one thing, I had to work on my “Three Poems by Poe” paper for quarter grades. For another, I was half sick to puking.

  “Girl,” she said, “you know you need a party. You don’t need to be sitting around writing about the crow.”

  “ ‘The Raven,’ ” I said, “and the one about the kingdom by the sea, and then ‘The Bells.’ I like those, Ellie. You like Patty Loveless.”

  “You can’t sing to them.”

  “Missus Murray showed us how you can sing every poem Emily Dickinson ever wrote to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.’ ” And I started doing that: “Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me . . . ,” and we started laughing, and I thought, Well, what the hell, I could get a poetry paper done in one night, anyhow, and I was just going to sit around making myself sick with worrying, so I said, “Whose party?”

  “Eric Dorey’s,” she said. I kind of liked Eric; he sat by me in math. He told me once he was going to be a doctor, like his dad, and I believed he was already on the way to it, since his hands were so clean, they were practically wrinkly and faded out from washing.

  “Birthday party?”

  “Nope, a parents-are-in-Dallas-for-the-football-game party.”

  “Well,” I said, “when?”

  “Nine.”

  “Nine?” I yelled. “We never get back from the movies later than even nine-thirty. Where am I going to say I’m going that starts out at nine?”

  “Well, Arley, let’s think logically,” said Elena in her teasing way. “Say we go out at seven, like we always do, and we just keep going—we get barbecue or something, then we get back on the bus and go to Eric’s. It’s right outside Angelus; they got a big ranch thing. I mean, how many times in your whole wide life has your mama been home when you got home on Saturday night?”

  I thought. “Never.”

  “And when does she come home?”

  “Bar time. Or morning. If she’s working.”

  “And Cam, the wonder man—you think he’d notice if you came home at midnight and brought the Chicago Bulls with you?”

  “No.” I was laughing now. “Maybe the Spurs . . .”

  “So there you have it, Arlington. Logic just like Mister Hogan taught me in math.”

  “Like Mister Hogan taught me and I taught you, you mean.”

  So I compromised. I worked on my paper an hour, reading over and over those lines about Edgar Allan Poe’s lost love. This one library book said that Poe married his little cousin, who wasn’t but thirteen or so. I had thought it was Elvis or somebody did that. But it said they were very happy, and he even liked his mother-in-law a lot. But that age-difference thing made me start thinking of Dillon again, and Elena had played all the old Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes in the house and was going through the medicine cabinets, reading all the labels on the bottles Mama had lifted from the hospital when people died and left their pills behind. Finally, she kind of whined, “You got a shirt I can wear? I’m not going all the way back home.”

  So we went in my room, and I put my Poe book back under the Ps. Then we pulled out all my clothes and put them on the floor, and Elena ended up wearing my summer track day-camp silk tank on backward under my denim shirt, which left me nothing to wear but the rose-colored blouse I got for school pictures. With my jeans and the black-and-red boots Langtry left once and never came back for, I
looked pretty good. I went to brush my teeth, and when I finally got back in the kitchen, there was Elena sitting on the table, talking to old Cam, which was kind of a shock.

  “Arley,” he just looked up and told me, “I’m coming to this party, why not?”

  Well, he struck me dumb, I must say. Cam going out, except to hear music with that boy Jesse Hudson—who we called Dracula because he wore some cape thing—or to dance with the older girls at Chase’s, was unheard of. Out with me, for God’s sake, never; the river’s likelier to run backward.

  “This is just a party for ninth graders,” I told him, shooting Elena the eye. Why would she want Cam around all night?

  “It’s not, though,” Elena said. I thought, What in hell is the matter with her, she doesn’t give Cam the time of day, and then I remembered that night she’d stared at my brother.

  “Eric’s a sophomore,” Elena said. Which was true enough. Elena and me were in the high math—but only because I did both ours.

  “Well, Cam,” I said then, getting disgusted, “you could probably comb your hair for it. Or is that just an annual thing?”

  “Arley, why don’t you shove—” he began.

  But Elena snapped at him, “Shut your mouth,” and off he went like a puppy, and when he came back, Lord, had the boy cleaned up—a yellow shirt embroidered with an angel, and his best boots, and his hair in an Indian band. Him and Elena were talking about the BoDeans all the way to the bus stop, and then at Fat Boy’s, Cam put this old band called The Drifters on the jukebox, and Elena got up and started dancing around. I ate half her barbecue. Cam ate two. Then we walked up Sam Houston and he lit a cigarette, and Elena said could she have one, and he put his hands around hers to protect the lighter from the wind. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought he was coming on to her. We took the Cemetery bus to a stop about a two-block walk from Eric’s. Cars were lined up nose-to-tail even there. Every time somebody else would spin around that drive, which was big, like the Texas houses on TV, the juterbirds would squawk out of the cedars that lined the driveway. It sounded like those cars didn’t have but three mufflers among the fifty of them.

  It took us a long time to find Eric in his own house. Kids were in every room, and every room had different music. It reminded me of the Care Fair at school when I was little: one room the cakewalk and one the black-light dance.

  Finally, there was old Eric, stretched out in a lounge chair. There was a full container of Morton’s salt and a bottle of Cuervo Reserva de La Familia. “That’s rich, my brother,” Cam said. “That costs.”

  “I never bought it,” said Eric, with a moony old smile.

  “Let me do one of them shooters,” Elena said then. My heart started to twitch in my chest. I knew Cam and Dracula drank beer, but I never saw Elena do it. Still, she knew just how to make that little hollow on the back of her hand, between her thumb and her forefinger—they call it nature’s saltbox—and Eric filled it up with salt and handed her a shot of tequila and held the lime for her. She threw her black hair back and sucked it all down and grabbed the lime and said, “Damn.”

  Then Cam said, “Damn, girl.”

  I just took off. There were some kids line dancing, and I like to do that. So I danced for a while. Then I went back outside. Elena was lying in the chaise, my brother sitting next to her. Eric was down on the patio blocks, but he didn’t look sick, just asleep.

  “How much of that you have?” I asked Elena.

  “Six,” she said. “No, five.”

  Eric sat right up then. It about scared me to death. “You want one, Arley?” He had me dead to rights. So I made a cup of my hand and sipped the salt, and then down went the tequila, and you know, I never thought it would taste like a cactus smells, but it does, like a cactus burning. My head went around once.

  “That good?” asked Cam.

  “Well, I guess.”

  “You don’t have no more. You ain’t but fourteen,” he said. Well, I thought, didn’t you just watch me have it? For a second just then, I loved Cam again. It was like when we were little and I’d get extra chores for punishment, and he’d help me do them behind Mama’s back. But even a girl like me, when you’re the age I was that night, can have a wayward tendency—so the absolute wrong thing seems the only thing to do. Maybe I just felt fed up with being such a good girl, doing everything the right way, like using a ruler to draw a pencil line at the top of my theme papers to write my name so it wouldn’t be crooked. What good had it all done me? Dillon hadn’t even written back. So I poured me another shot and took a sip—Cam still watching—but that sip seemed to dive plumb down into my bowels, on top of the greasy pork I’d eaten, and I set the glass down on the ground carefully, the top of my head feeling like a hot stove. I walked into the hall and up some stairs, and there came Ricky Nevadas, dragging some girl along the hall; she had her arms around his neck like Virginia creeper. “Arley,” he said, “this is Allison.”

  “Pleased,” I said, and went into the bathroom. All the stuff in there was Eric’s mama’s stuff, and I used creamy mint skin cleanser to wash my wrists and my forehead. The smell was like my toothpaste. I was sure then that I wouldn’t puke.

  When I went down, everything was dark. For a minute, I thought I’d, like, gone to sleep and everyone’d gone home, but then I saw the shapes on the couches, so I kind of felt my way back toward the terrace, where I could see a big wheel of broken moonlight on the ground, shining through a roof trellis.

  I got as far as the patio door.

  What I saw stopped me dead in my tracks.

  Elena was stretched out on that chaise, and Cam was on top of her, and they were kissing so hard their heads looked merged. Then his hand came up and grabbed the waist of her tights, and she lifted her hips to help him pull them down. Then she lay back down and opened her legs partway.

  She was so beautiful. I had seen Elena undressed four hundred times, but only changing, or trying on dresses at Dalton’s. Now I saw her the way a boy would see her, her belly this brown little hill that looked perfect as a vinyl doll. Cam laid his hand on her so light he could have been touching wet paint. “Look at you, girl,” he said. Then he pulled her tights the rest of the way off and let them down on the side of the chaise longue and went to raise up the denim shirt. My denim shirt. She pushed his hand away. “Let me look, Elena,” he said. “Just look.” So she let him, and there was nothing underneath that little tank top but breasts practically silver in the moonlight where her tan left off. “Let me kiss you,” Cam said, sounding like he had bread stuck in his throat.

  “That’s all,” she told him, loud.

  “That’s all,” he promised.

  I swear I could feel it both ways, the way her brown nipple must have tasted, like a lozenge in his mouth, but at the same time, the way it felt to her. I put my hand up and squeezed my own breast. Scream, girl, I thought. Run. You must be some kind of damn pervert, looking at your own brother about to have actual sex with your best friend. But right then, Elena sort of started to sit up, and Cam said, “Honey, wait. This is good. Don’t you like it?”

  She said, “Well, I reckon I don’t hate it. Here I am.”

  “You ever let a boy love you?”

  “No way, José,” said Elena. “I’m not getting no damn AIDS or cooties—”

  “I want to love you, inside you.”

  “—or having no baby.”

  “I can pull—”

  “No. You sit up now.” But she wasn’t sitting up, and when Cam reached down real fast and started to rub her, she just opened her legs a little wider so he could get his whole hand against her. His hand disappeared under her, just the white of his wrist showing.

  “Touch me, then,” Cam said.

  “Touch your own self,” said Elena. But she didn’t kick him or roll away when he undid his silver buckle.

  “No, girl. I need you,” Cam said.

  “Then put that away.” He pulled up his underpants and she opened her legs all the way and let him
center himself on her, as she started to buck her hips up and down a little. Cam groaned, putting his whole face on Elena’s chest, and then she looked right over his head and saw me.

  “Arley, you shit!” she yelled at me, and she was up off that chaise longue so fast it dumped old Cam on his butt.

  “I’m sorry! I just got here!”

  “Arley, you are sick, sick, sick,” Elena was yelling, picking up her tights and jamming them into a ball.

  “I’m sick!” I said then. “That’s my goddamned brother there.”

  “Well, I ain’t his sister.”

  “You’re my friend!”

  “Not anymore! What were you, jealous? Thinking about old pervert down in Solamente River?”

  “What’s going on?” Cam sounded like a busted cassette. He couldn’t seem to get his belt buckle to shut. “Who’s in Solamente River? In the army?”

  “He’s not in the army!” Elena screamed.

  “Shut up!” I screamed even louder.

  I turned around and ran away from them, tripping over some guy and girl lying on the floor, falling to my knees and getting up running. Tears were coming down my face, but I had no idea where I was going. To catch the bus, I guess. To get away from the sight of them, because though I knew they hadn’t done anything to me personally, I felt like both of them had betrayed me in the worst way they could.

  I almost got knocked over by one of the cars when I pulled open the front door and ran out there, half blind from crying. This one bunch of guys in a pickup and this other guy in a big old blue antique car were jamming around Eric’s parents’ circle driveway like it was the Indy 500. From what I could see, there was a girl sort of half standing up on the hood of the car, holding on to the roof, and all the guys in the back of the pickup were standing up and yelling. The music was so loud from the bass cannon in the truck, it made my insides shake. Then this other guy pushed past me and ran for one of those pickup trucks that sit up on the big stunt wheels. “You sonofabitch!” He was laughing and yelling. “Wait’ll I catch up to you.” The guy in the passenger seat of the car sort of jumped up and leaned out, the way a dog does when it wants to catch the wind in its mouth.