The Stories You Tell

by Kristen Lepionka

  Topless in the shower of her apartment.

  A completely nude shot taken from behind, hands on her hips.

  A selfie in bed, headphones over her ears, a sulky smile on her lips, the hand that wasn’t holding the camera resting casually on her torso, fingertips just under the lace trim of her underwear.

  “She’s so pretty,” Rick said mournfully.

  “So tell me what happened when you told Mickey about her.”

  “It’s the hosebeast’s fault. She snooped in my email when she was cleaning down here, even though I told her not to clean down here because I have my own way of doing it. But she told my dad and he said she was making a fool out of me. It was right before bowling one week. So when Mickey got here, I was mad and I told him about why. And that was when he said my dad was right and that Addy wasn’t my girlfriend and she was just taking advantage. But look.” He flipped to another photo, this one of Addison clutching a box and beaming. The box said PIONEER on the side. “I wanted to get it for her, and she has it now, so how is anyone taking advantage? Mickey was so mad about everything though. Because of his surgery. He thought everyone was out to get everyone else. He said not to use the app anymore.”

  “And did you?”

  “No, because the hosebeast changed my password on the app that night and now I can’t access it anymore.”

  “That’s totally fucked up.”

  “Yes! It is!”

  “So you kind of ghosted Addy.”

  “I guess. But by accident. Default ghosting due to hosebeast.”

  “What did Mickey do?”

  “He told me he found her address but she was never home.”

  “When was that?”

  “Last month. Then on the last bowling night he said he figured out where she worked and he was gonna go there. I told him to just leave her alone but he said no, he was going to get my money back.” Rick shrugged. “He said he felt so useless and worthless, because of his back. He wanted to do something good. I said the good thing he could do was buy me another game of bowling but he’d already had too many beers and was just not in a place to listen to me.”

  “Do you know how he figured out where she worked?”

  “He said there were pictures on her profile and he figured out what bar they were in.”

  I remembered the image of Addison onstage. It didn’t have a giant flashing sign that said THIS BAR IS CALLED NIGHTSHADE or anything, but it was distinctive enough. I pictured him visiting every bar in the Short North, trying to find the one from the picture.

  Rick dipped another cracker in the hot sauce. “Pretty sure I got the better end of the deal here,” he said.

  “I don’t know. This is very interesting, Rick.”

  He shook his head. “It’s just stupid. I wish we’d stayed at the bowling alley longer that night instead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t have gotten so sad. Maybe he would still be here. He would love this, you know.” Rick pointed at the plate. There was only one cracker left.

  I said, “All you.”

  * * *

  Wyatt’s mother was asleep in a chair in the corner of Wyatt’s room, a blue blanket draped over her frame. Wyatt’s eyes were closed as well, the room still and silent except for the beeping heart monitor. But he was no longer attached to the ventilator. As I stood there, he opened his eyes, closed them, opened them again, and focused on me. “Shh,” he whispered. “She needs rest. I keep telling her to go home, that it’s okay.”

  “Glad to see you awake,” I whispered back. I quietly lifted a visitor’s chair from its spot under the television on the wall and moved it next to his bed.

  “I should have listened to you. I should have told you.”

  “I agree, but no judgment. Wyatt, why don’t you tell me now?”

  He lifted a hand to wipe his eyes, wincing slightly.

  I said, “It’s not too late to do the right thing. A guy came to the bar, looking for Addison. Right?”

  He closed his eyes and nodded. Finally, he started chatting. “I thought he was just some drunk creep. And he was. I mean, drunk. But he kept grabbing her and saying, ‘We need to talk, we need to talk.’ I was going to throw him out after he tried to follow her into the back room. But then he left.”

  “Did she know who he was?”

  “No.”

  “So what did he want to talk about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But he left?”

  “I thought so. She thought so. I went on break. I was in the staff room and I heard shouting, like, from the dock. So I went back there and—Addison just goes flying past me, like to the back door of the building and then outside. And I looked around, like, to see who she was yelling at. Then I saw that the fence was open. By the loading dock. It’s where trucks pull up to unload kegs or whatever. There’s a garage door back there, then a big concrete ledge, so if you’re standing there, the back of the truck, it’s kind of even with the ledge, right?”

  I nodded. My chest was tight.

  “And the gate isn’t supposed to be open, because the fence is, I don’t know, it’s what keeps the dock from just being a giant concrete ledge for people to fall off.”

  Here Wyatt shook his head. He glanced over at his mother; she was still asleep.

  “So I went over to it, to close it. But I looked down, like over the ledge. And he—the guy—he was down there, just splayed out—and blood—and he was just gone. I jumped down there and checked but there was just nothing.”

  “He was dead.”

  Wyatt nodded.

  That wasn’t true, though, because Mickey Dillman’s official cause of death was drowning.

  “I was freaking out. I texted Shane, like, ‘Yo, there’s a problem back here.’ And he came back and—” He stopped talking as Gwen stirred in the corner, shuffling the blanket off her lap.

  “Oh, hi,” she said. “Wyatt, hon, how long was I asleep?”

  “Just a few minutes,” her son said. “Hey, could you go see if they have mints in the vending machine? I just still have this nasty-ass taste in my mouth.”

  Gwen got stiffly to her feet. “Sure.” She met my eye. “You want anything? Your choices are pretzels and pretzels. Well, and possibly mints.”

  “Thanks, but I’m fine.”

  Gwen squeezed Wyatt’s ankle as she went by his bed. “I’ll be right back.”

  Wyatt’s eyes were on the ceiling.

  Once his mother was out of earshot, he said, “Shane said we had to get the guy—his body—out of there. Because the guy was coming, from the bank.”

  “The guy from the bank?”

  “He comes every night, to get the deposit.”

  Oh.

  “Big guy, blond?”

  Wyatt nodded.

  I didn’t bother correcting him about Bo’s provenance or Shane’s involvement with someone like Vincent Pomp. “What did you do?”

  “Well, I was worried about Addison. I mean, she ran out of there like she was not okay. And I didn’t know what he did to her or—but Shane said, if I didn’t help him with this guy, he’d tell the police I had something to do with it. So we put the guy in my truck and dumped him in the river. That was Shane’s idea. After that, well, I didn’t want to face my mother. I just wanted to lie low for a day or two. I dropped off my truck to get a new liner put in the bed, in case, you know, there was some trace of him back there. But then we heard on the TV that the guy was a cop. So what was I supposed to do then?”

  I had some ideas; do nothing was not among them. “Tell me about the night you messaged Addison. I read the messages. So I know she asked you to go over to her house. But what happened when you did?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know. She wasn’t home. No one was there. So I was just sitting in the dark in the little screened-in porch thing she has, and I heard a commotion but I had no idea—it all just happened so fast, then. I was scared. And I thought—that she set me up, that she told them what ha
d happened. I wasn’t thinking straight, and I couldn’t see what was going on—” He stopped talking as Gwen walked back into the room clutching no fewer than five different types of mints.

  “You take your pick, baby.”

  “Thanks.”

  Gwen sat down in her chair in the corner. “Don’t let me interrupt you talking.”

  “No, we’re done,” Wyatt said.

  “We are?”

  He nodded, his eyes pleading with me.

  I dropped my voice to a whisper. “You need to tell the police about this. If for no other reason than to get ahead of whatever Shane or Addison might say to them. I’ll have a friend of mine stop by. It’s not up for debate.” Then I stepped away from the bed and said, at a regular volume, “I’ll check in with you two soon.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Rick had emailed me the photos of Addison that he had saved on his phone, and when I got home I fired up my computer and spent some time looking through them. Brock Hazlett had said sexy too, but somehow I hadn’t imagined the photos being like this. From what I knew of Addison, this was very unlike her—and yet, here she was. Young, fearless, self-possessed.

  I’d pitched my list of crappy theories, but I mentally added to it now.

  6. Multiple personalities.

  7. Secret twin.

  8. Evil doppelganger.

  9. Something else I still wasn’t seeing.

  I couldn’t sit still. I kept coming back to the image of her with the Pioneer box. It stuck out from the rest of them. She was fully clothed, for one thing. There was nothing sulky or sexy about her expression in this one. Instead, she was beaming, a pure, effervescent joy. Her face was bare, her hair pulled up in a half-pony, bangs swept to the side. She wore a purple-and-blue-plaid flannel unbuttoned over a white V-neck tee and she held the box on her lap, her elbows balanced on the top of it, hands clasped with her chin resting on her knuckles in a classic picture-day type of pose. The other images were all artfully composed selfies or, in the case of the nude rear shot, relied on the auto-timer. But this one had the look of a snapshot, her posture as if someone had just said, Hey, say cheese.

  I heard a knock on my door—faint, so not a cop knock. I parted the curtains and saw Shelby’s friend Miriam out there, a heavy backpack throwing her posture off-balance. I opened the door quickly, afraid there was more bad news. “Miriam, hey,” I said, “is Shelby all right?”

  “Oh, yeah, she’s fine, she’s at work,” Miriam said as she stepped into my apartment. “She told me I could stop by your place. Hope that’s okay.”

  “Sure, what’s up? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Well, other than this,” she said, pulling up the hem of her sweater to reveal a massive tear in the hip area of her SpinSpo leggings. “I have class so I don’t have time to go home and change.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Um, that’s unfortunate. I’m sure I have another pair in your size here.” I flipped through the leggings hanging on my garment rack. “Wait. Did those just spontaneously rip like that?”

  Miriam tossed her backpack onto my sofa and nodded. “When I put them on this morning I thought they seemed, like, not as thick as they usually do. But then after my photo class I—sorry, TMI here—I went to the ladies’ and, you know,” she said, pantomiming pulling the leggings down over her hips, “and my thumb just like went right through it. So I was like, shoot, that’s bad, and I was super gentle with them when I pulled them back up, but it just kept ripping and now I’m afraid that by this afternoon…”

  “Yeah, I totally get it.” I handed her a hanger with a pair of stone-colored black leggings. “Better?”

  She tugged at the waistband. “Oh yeah, this is the good shit. Can I use your bathroom to change?”

  “End of the hall, just like upstairs.”

  While she was changing, I stared at my rack of leggings. The whole reason Gail had hired me in the first place was that someone was knocking off her brand, making subpar leggings and selling them under the SpinSpo name. But my investigation, such as it was, hadn’t turned up any counterfeit tights; they all bore the signature metallic squiggle on the hip and the brand’s special tag. Sure, someone could fake that too but it would require a lot more effort.

  As Miriam walked back down the hall, she said, “Your place is trippy. The paint colors? Did you do that?”

  “No,” I said, “it was like that when I moved in. So these busted leggings, let’s see them. Was this the first time you wore them?”

  She nodded, holding out the anthracite pair. “They looked great and the fit was perfect, as usual, but the fabric is just flimsier or something.”

  “Could it be just that color?”

  “I have another pair of anthracite ones that I got at Goodwill,” Miriam said, “and they’re amazing. Well, except for the part about how I ripped the knee open riding my sister’s hoverboard. Roxane? What’s wrong?”

  “Yeah, it’s just—” I was studying the squiggle on the busted leggings, trying to figure out if it was any different than the rest of the pairs. They looked the same, felt the same, until I tugged on the fabric and then I noticed it too, the extra give that made them seem structurally unsound. I looked at the inside of the waistband, where the so-called inspirational sayings were printed. This one said: Do more than just be.

  “Well, I gotta get back to campus, though, hopefully that’s not rude?”

  “No, no, do what you need to do. May your leggings stay in one piece.”

  “You’re the best.”

  Do more than just be.

  It had been painted on the cinder block wall of Gail’s warehouse, or used to be; the mural artist I’d encountered when I met with her the first time was putting bold flowers over it. I scanned through my collection of leggings. They all had some type of inspirational saying screen-printed in the back of the waistband.

  Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.

  Strength is beautiful.

  You’re tougher than you look.

  I sat down at my desk and pulled up my research file, clicking through my screenshots of social media posts where people had complained about the sudden decrease in quality of SpinSpo garments.

  Ninety bucks later and my thumb goes through the waistband like a pair of drugstore pantyhose? Trash!

  The fit and length are right-on as always but wtf is this new fabric?

  I was so excited to try these but they aren’t well made at all. I love supporting local/women-owned businesses but come on. At least take returns!!!

  Every post was accompanied by an image demonstrating the rips in the seams, which ranged from an inch or so to the entire thigh region. They appeared to be different colors—though the black vs. anthracite was still a mystery to me—but every single post had something in common.

  They all had Do more than just be printed along the inside back of the waistband.

  I remembered what Brock Hazlett had mentioned in passing the day before, about reading an article on SpinSpo in the paper. I found it on the Alive’s website, Gail’s perfect blond hair and brilliant white smile, beaming in front of her brand-new floral mural. The headline read: “From Rip-off to Right-on: The Amazing SpinSpo Comeback.”

  I skimmed the article, my eyes sliding past the buzzwords and platitudes that seemed to make up most of my client’s lexicon. But in the fourth paragraph, two words caught my attention.

  Detective agency

  To get to the bottom of the fraud, Spinnaker even resorted to hiring a local detective agency to investigate the influx of imposter leggings. “They did really wonderful work,” Spinnaker said, “and were able to find the source and put a stop to it. I just want customers to know that they really can feel empowered to buy the brand. If, somehow, anyone still winds up purchasing a knockoff pair, which definitely shouldn’t happen, but if it does—just hit us up on social media and we’ll take care of you.”

  Aside from the fact that I was hardly an agency, the quote got something else wrong—as far as I could tel
l, there was no source. Until Miriam stopped by, I didn’t even think I’d gotten any of the counterfeit leggings.

  Gail was jumping the gun in saying the situation was resolved.

  Unless they were all counterfeit, or none of them were.

  Maybe Gail was using me not to track down a source of knockoff merchandise, but to get old or subpar merchandise off the shelf, so to speak? That would explain why she was so liberal in authorizing ten grand in purchases.

  “Damn it, Gail,” I said.

  It wasn’t hard to picture, really. The age of social media meant that everyone had a platform from which to share their opinion. The brand had exploded in popularity and then, just as quickly, the poor-quality leggings had entered the marketplace and the social media verdict was swift and harsh. So maybe, instead of issuing a mea culpa and trying to make things right, Gail had cried knockoff, the retail equivalent of my account got hacked, in an effort to make it appear that she was blameless.

  I slammed my laptop closed and stalked into my room and flopped on the bed. The pillow on the side next to the door still smelled faintly like Tom, like his cologne and Coast soap and a little like bourbon and I pressed my face into it for a second, breathing it in. I had half a mind to go over to the SpinSpo warehouse and confront my client, but I suspected the conversation might end up with me not getting paid. So it was probably best to save that for a moment when I was feeling a bit more clear-headed.

  I wondered what had made her do it. Cheaper materials? Faster labor? She was obviously fine with those things until it changed how other people saw the brand.

  Perception was everything.

  Not just in social media marketing, but everywhere.

  Dating profiles.

  The way we present ourselves to the world.

  I dragged myself out of bed and returned to my computer to look at the images that Rick Dillman had sent me.

  Addison in the shower.

  Addison in bed, her hand provocatively placed.

  These images were the way she wanted someone to see her; her agency was evident in every aspect of the pictures. Her pose, her makeup, the lighting, the angle.