The Stories You Tell

by Kristen Lepionka

  A few beats later, a door along the back wall opened and a man emerged. As promised by his book cover, Boomer K. Wiggins was tallish and muscle-bound, squeezed into shiny black workout pants and a red polo shirt with the gym’s logo embroidered on the chest. His ponytail, which was yellow-blond on his book cover, was a frizzy ash color in person and resembled a coonskin cap more than human hair. “Hello!” he exclaimed. “Welcome to CleanSweat! Are you here for a consultation? We’re doing the Spring Break Challenge right now, to get you beach-body ready for—”

  I cut him off. “Isn’t any body at the beach a beach body?”

  He deflated a little bit. “Well, yes, I didn’t mean … it’s just a marketing saying? Um…”

  “It’s okay. I’m not here about me.”

  We retired to his office, a cramped closet-sized space jammed with random fitness equipment and paperwork. Boomer balanced on a core-strength ball behind his desk—he’d offered it to me, but I elected to stand.

  “Wyatt’s a real good kid,” he was telling me. “We met at the Habitat for Humanity Re-store over on Westerville Road. Volunteering. His was court-mandated but he was no stranger to community stewardship. He grew up very active in his mother’s church, although he’s drifted away a bit. We struck up a convo. He was angry—and I don’t blame him, not after what happened. But you’re not defined by what happens to you, rather, by what you happen to do about it.” His voice took on a rehearsed quality on the last sentence.

  “Is that from your book?”

  “Yes, ma’am, and it’s a lesson I’ve learned the hard way.”

  “So you’re friends?”

  “I think Wyatt would consider me a mentor.”

  “A mentor that he pays so he can work out here?”

  Pain flashed through Boomer’s face. “He doesn’t pay me. Not a cent. He works out for free in exchange for cleaning the place for me. Wish I could do more for him, but you know how it is. Money’s tight for everybody these days.”

  I frowned. It sounded like Boomer was the one getting something for free. “How often does he do that?”

  “Clean, or work out?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “Every day, usually.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Last Monday, I think it was. He was cleaning when I came in, around seven in the morning.”

  That was, of course, before whatever had gone down at Nightshade. I said, “And you haven’t talked to him since?”

  “No.”

  “Has he been here to clean?”

  Boomer bounced up and down slightly. “Well, yeah. I run a tight ship. He has to clean every morning. That’s the deal.”

  “So he was here this morning?”

  “Not when I was here, but the place is spotless, so yeah.”

  Spotless might have been a little strong considering the stink out there, but that was hardly the point. It seemed odd to me that Wyatt hadn’t gone home but had managed to keep up his end of the arrangement with Boomer. I realized that CleanSweat would be a good place to hide out if you needed to hide out. “Does he ever confide in you?”

  Boomer nodded gravely. “We talk. Mostly about macros.”

  “Macros?” I was thinking camera lenses.

  “Macronutrients. The building blocks of nutrition!”

  “Do you talk about anything other than macros? Something not fitness-related,” I amended as I sensed a lecture about deadlifting coming on. “Like maybe about the club where he works?”

  “No, ma’am. He knows where I stand on that front.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Sobriety turned my life around,” he said. “That, and my lord and savior Jesus Christ. I told Wyatt, ‘You don’t have to do what I do. You don’t have to go to church, you don’t have to pray, you don’t have to live like a monk. But I don’t want to hear anything about that place. I don’t want people from there coming in here. You don’t come here hungover or hopped up on anything.’ He’s a good kid, but he’s a kid.”

  “Does he respect that rule?”

  “’Course he does.”

  We chatted a while longer, but Boomer didn’t have anything else useful for me. As he walked me out, I said, “Well, if you do see Wyatt, would you mind giving me a call? I’m interested in helping him get out of whatever trouble he might be in.” Then I noticed a rack of fitness apparel near the door and realized that I was neglecting my only paying client pretty severely at the moment. “Hey, do you carry SpinSpo here?”

  Boomer laughed. “Heck no. My customers are here to get right, not play dress-up.” He frowned at the young woman staffing the front desk, who seemed suddenly interested in our conversation, and said, “How’s that list coming?”

  She blushed bright pink. “I’m working through it, Mr. Wiggins.”

  Boomer disappeared into his office.

  I went over to the counter. The woman busily typed away on her keyboard and didn’t look up at me. Her name tag said Tara. “Either you’re very into SpinSpo, or you know something about Wyatt.”

  Now she looked up, blinking innocently. “Can I help you?”

  “It’s okay, either way. I won’t tell Boomer. Who, by the way, I can’t believe makes you call him Mr. Wiggins.”

  She gave me a small smile. “He likes things a certain way. And I do wear SpinSpo. Not today,” she said, half-turning to check out her own ass, “but some days. He actually told us not to. There’s even a policy, it’s right here. He’s very serious about it.” She pointed at the surface of the desk, where a sheet of orange paper with black text was adhered with masking tape.

  NON-DRESS CODE

  NO FROWNS

  NO “BELLY” OR “MIDDY” (MIDRIFF-REVEALING) SHIRTS

  NO BRANDED LEGGINS—THAT MEANS LULULEMON, SPINSPO, NIKE, UNDER ARMOUR—ANY AND ALL LOGOS HAVE TO BE COVERED NO EXCEPTIONS

  I cracked up that Boomer had actually typed “leggins.”

  I said, “I could probably hook you up with a few free pairs of SpinSpo, um, pants.”

  “Really? Do you work there?”

  “Something like that, as unlikely as it seems. What’s he got against logos?”

  “He says it’s lustful. To put a logo near your butt.”

  “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. But anyway, Tara, if you can help me with Wyatt, I can help you with lustful athletic wear.”

  Her expression went back to vaguely uncomfortable. “It’s just that,” she said, and stopped.

  “It’s okay,” I said, “I’m not looking to jam anyone up.”

  “Well, it’s that—I’m not sure, but I think—I think Wyatt has been doing laundry here. And taking food from the kitchen.”

  “Really.”

  Tara nodded. “Mr. Wiggins would totally freak out. You can’t tell him.”

  I promised not to tell Boomer. “Why do you think that?”

  “Well, we always have a box of clementines in the kitchen. Mr. Wiggins thinks they’re just the best. He eats like ten of them a day. But I noticed that the box was getting low really fast. Then I found some of Wyatt’s clothes in the laundry the other day.” She nodded at a bin of towels behind the front desk. “When I gave the stuff back to him, he acted like he’d spilled some cleaning spray on his shirt and had to wash it. But then when he was putting the clothes into his bag, I saw that he had, like, so many clementines in there. And he got really embarrassed.”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “But you can’t tell Mr. Wiggins.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Wyatt’s a nice guy.”

  “So I keep hearing. Hey, if you see him again, don’t tell him you talked to me.”

  Her expression went quizzical.

  “Do you like the ebony leggings, or onyx or anthracite? Or all three?”

  Now she smiled. “Could I have all three?”

  “Size?”

  “Two.”

  “Deal.”

  * * *

  Tha
t evening, while I waited for Wyatt to show up at the gym, I sat in the Ethiopian restaurant across the street with a plate of sambusas and a bad idea to keep me company: BusPass. I was hoping that enough swiping would show me the Affliction douchebag’s picture, and I could leverage that into figuring out who the hell he was. The app was a Tinder rip-off, right down to the “swiping” motion, though of course the app referred to it as “passing.” There was no way to search for a specific user; you had to create a profile and the app matched you with potential fuck buddies based on literally nothing but your age, as far as I could tell. I made a profile under the name Rose Warner and assigned the young lady a birthdate close to Addison’s—1992; how was that even a real birth year for adults?—and for a profile picture, I snapped a photo of some blonde in an ad for laundry detergent in a magazine that was left on my table. With a couple filters applied, Rose looked sort of artsy and cool. I wrote her a one-sentence bio that read, “Travel, good beer, red meat, let’s chill.” Essentially meaningless, but it was not lost on me that this app buried the bio under a little “info” icon at the bottom of the picture for a reason—the reason being that whatever Rose had to say wasn’t anyone’s top priority.

  It only allowed her five hundred characters anyway.

  The whole thing was pretty silly. Matches were no more significant than “any men between twenty and thirty” within fifty miles of my current location. Everyone’s five-hundred-character bio had about as much thought put into it as Rose’s. But I could sort of see the appeal, the anonymous act of judging someone based on their picture alone. Yes. No. Right. Left. It was almost the automated diversion of a slot machine, but for people.

  My sambusas were gone by the time I’d swiped through a hundred pictures and I unlocked a feature called “Express Bus,” which allowed users to only see profiles of people who were looking for a fuckbuddy right now—for the low low price of one token, which equaled two dollars. Or I could pay $7.99 a month for the “Metro Pass,” which unlocked all the premium features, including Missed the Bus.

  I groaned a little and typed in my credit card.

  There was still nothing happening across the street at CleanSweat.

  The missed-connections feature was about as deep as the rest of the app. A user would post a short, five-hundred-character shout-out with a date, time, and location; if you passed to the right, it meant you thought the post could be about you. Then the app would show both parties each other’s profiles the next time you were going through the stack, and if you both passed right, it would announce that you’d made a match. Because it only did so if both the poster and the subject of the post were interested in each other, it ensured that the experience was still based on nothing but looks.

  Maybe it was the detective in me, or maybe it was the cynic, but either way, this app sounded like a whole bunch of crimes waiting to happen.

  I scrolled through Missed the Bus and wondered how many of these “connections” were actually connections—versus how many were just people preying, maybe subconsciously, on the hopeless romantics of the world, the ones who wanted nothing more than to find meaning in the meaningless.

  I imagined Addison seeing a post about her tattoo and passing right on the Affliction douchebag. Why? Out of boredom? Was that her type? Did she look into his brooding eyes and imagine a future with him, a story to tell the grandkids about how they met? “Well, Grandpa thought I was hot, and he posted on the internet about it, and I thought he was hot too, and we lived happily ever after.”

  It appeared that once the “connection” was made, the post disappeared from the app. So even if the content had gone back far enough—which it didn’t—the post would’ve been gone anyway.

  Technology: only so useful.

  When it got close to eight o’clock, my waiter came over to gently advise they were about to close. He glanced down at my phone and said, “You lonely?”

  “No,” I said. “No. This is for work.”

  He laughed. “Do not be ashamed of wanting someone to love you.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. “Someone does love me,” I said, although that someone still hadn’t sent so much as an ironic emoji since she left for her trip. I gave him a twenty and told him to keep the change.

  “Thank you, sister,” he said. “Maybe I see you on there. You pass right for me, okay?”

  “You got it.”

  I sat in the car and continued my “work” for a while. Aiden, 24. Jared, 28. Milo, 33. Out of curiosity I clicked on the “info” icon under his picture to read the bio: Just looking for a cool chick to send nude pics. Im married so be cool with that.

  The state of straight people was troubling.

  I braved the cold long enough to root through the back of the Range Rover for a blanket; I found two, plus a hat that I didn’t think was mine—stuffed with a roll of duct tape and a coil of nylon rope. The previous owner of my vehicle had no doubt been a charming individual. I shook out the creepy items and turned the hat inside out just in case and got back into the driver’s seat.

  I flipped through the “stack” for another thirty minutes. The hat and blanket kept most of me warm, but my feet were frozen and all the twentysomething men of Columbus were starting to look exactly the same. I switched over to Facebook; a mistake. The first story I saw was a news clip with the headline “Reward for Info on Missing Clintonville Woman.”

  When I pushed play, Jason Stowe’s commanding frame filled the screen.

  “My daughter Addison has been missing for four days,” he said. “She was last seen going into an apartment on Fourth Street, owned by a local drug dealer. No one has seen her since—”

  I relished interrupting him for a change and closed the app and called Peter Novotny. “Are you really retired yet?” I said. I’d met the old private investigator on a case a year or so ago, and he kept threatening to really retire but so far hadn’t managed it yet, at least not when I asked him if he wanted some work.

  “For you? No. What do you need, doll?”

  “I need some help. Overnight. If you know any young guns looking for work, that would be fine too.”

  “No, I got you.”

  “It isn’t fun.”

  “Is it sitting in a car in the freezing cold?”

  “You know me so well,” I said, and he laughed. “Feel free to say no, on account of your old bones.”

  “Eh, I’m Norwegian on my mother’s side. How much is this endeavor worth to you?”

  I didn’t really have a paying client, so that didn’t especially matter. “However much,” I said. “Feel free to bring in reinforcements if necessary, within reason.”

  “Oh, so I have to do the work and provide the reinforcements?”

  “You know you’re my only reinforcement, Petey.”

  “Well, that’s tragic.”

  I sat with that for a second. I guessed it kind of was. “So do you want to do it or no?”

  “Text me the details, honey, you know I can’t say no to you.”

  * * *

  Once CleanSweat was squared away in Peter Novotny’s capable hands, I headed home. I didn’t want to go home. But I didn’t have anywhere else I wanted to go, either, so home I went.

  At least I had whiskey there.

  I helped myself to some and curled up in bed with BusPass and a vague sense of determination, which lasted for about an hour before I grew tired of this particular tactic. I wasn’t getting anywhere, anyway, and it felt like I had already looked at approximately a million faces. Out of curiosity I pulled up some statistics on the app.

  There was no shortage of press about it. Thirty thousand active monthly users, which meant, according to the app’s own website, one in six millennials in Columbus was on it. That seemed a little grandiose to me, but at thirty-five I was too old to count myself among them, so what did I know? The app was created by a twenty-one-year-old computer science student at OSU and sold to a software development start-up for forty grand—a decision the creator no doubt ca
me to regret after the app blew up. Most of the press was good press, though a data breach six months earlier had caused a sharp decrease in downloads. But it was only temporary, and since then, the active monthly user numbers were higher than ever. I was deep in the weeds on the provenance of funding for the start-up when I saw a familiar name:

  Kenny Brayfield

  “Hi buddy,” I murmured.

  He was a bit old to call himself a millennial too, though he had the money to call himself whatever he wanted. It appeared that in the two years since I’d met him on a case, he had gotten into venture capital funding and had pretty good instincts; his portfolio included a hip Skee-Ball bar that had opened downtown, along with a mixed-use building in the Short North that was getting buzz because, it was rumored, a Shake Shack was coming to town.

  I wondered if my acquaintance with Kenny would be enough to get some insider information about BusPass’s users.

  He did owe me, after all.

  TWENTY

  I took a tray of vegan blueberry crumb cake by the office of Next Level Promotions in the morning. I was not above purchasing people’s affection, or cooperation, with sweets and in fact found it a valuable strategy. The hipsters working for Kenny Brayfield went for it anyway. Kenny himself was a little more wary but I supposed he was entitled to exercise some caution; I’d pointed a gun at him the last time we spoke in person.

  But when I advised that I wanted to talk about BusPass and not his decades-old high school indiscretions this time, he relaxed. “You use it, right? Damn, it’s cool! Did you know that the average user spends forty minutes a day up in there?”

  I did know that, because I’d read it on the app’s website last night. “I’m more curious about the group that runs it.”

  “Transit Tech, yeah.” He lifted a bottle of gold-flake vodka out of a box behind his desk. “You want some?”

  I was acquainted with the sickly-sweet cinnamon flavor of the liquor, which was produced by Next Level’s only client. “You know any of them?”

  “Know them? Sure. I got their dream off the ground.”