The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

“And you can quote us on that,” the first girl says, and the two of them start to laugh.

  “Hey,” the boy says, “why don’t you write a story about my band?”

  Enough. Leela ignores the boy, turns all her focus on the first girl, says she will quote her on that, and what is her full name? The girl stumbles, caught off-guard. The other says her parents told her not to talk to the media. The air cools. A few tourists in shorts and golf shirts enter, the door behind them jingles. The boy says loudly he’s not even supposed to be talking to people like her, she needs to leave or he’ll call the manager.

  Leela expresses her gratitude and dangles her business card over the counter.

  “Anytime you want to talk,” she says.

  And on her way out she turns off the record function on the audio app on her phone.

  Outside, in the midday heat, she frowns to herself. She texts the boy at the bed-and-breakfast from her car. He writes back immediately: the person she should really talk to is Emily’s BFF, Alex Rosenthal. He doesn’t have her number, but he can get it.

  Rosenthal, as in Meg Rosenthal?

  Lol wha?

  In the late afternoon, she drives back to her parents’ condo to take a nap. The house is quiet. Both of them are out. The fact that the Body, Meg Rosenthal, may be her next stepping-stone is met with relief and aggravation. She’s about to fall asleep facedown on the couch when she gets a text.

  Hey Leela what’s up. Lol so I don’t know what happened the other night but my dad says he found you wearing his work shorts???? That is SICK I totally need to hear all about it, let’s get a beer. Also I really want to get your thoughts about my book. Just in case you didn’t finish I’ve got a pdf, I’ll email you in a sec. I can also drop one off if you prefer a print-out haha. I don’t need your edits written, we can just meet up. Btw I meant to ask do you have a literary agent? Looking forward! Rob

  * * *

  After twenty or thirty shutter clicks, Emily shuts her eyes and takes a deep breath. She’s full of irritation. She’s been uncomfortable the whole time. She wants to wake up in another world, make the delirious moment go away. But when she opens her eyes, the man is still there, waiting, staring impatiently.

  “Can we continue now, please?” he says, with a heavy German accent, and an undertone of crabby irritation.

  Click, click, click.

  People watch from the sidewalk, gaping from a distance. She goes along, drops her chin to her shoulder the way he asks and looks slightly to the side, at the sporting goods store across the street.

  Click, click, click.

  The night before, she dreamed of Nick. It made her whole body warm, like her circulatory system was smiling. She’d woken up so happy, she reached out for him. He was gone. A note on his pillow said his boss wanted him in early.

  She’d planned to tell him that morning about Media Day, the thought had filled her with nervous fear. She took his early departure for a sign, that it was okay to let him know later.

  The German newspaper is the first booking. The photographer’s an older man, with a white mustache and camouflage shorts. He arrived with a young woman, also German. He takes a few more pictures, stops, mutters bitterly to himself, then walks in a small circle with his neck cranked back, as if watching something in the sky.

  The initial idea had been a portrait with the courthouse for backdrop. Five hundred bucks, Meg negotiated, one outfit, one setting.

  Cars drive around the square. Some drivers gawk.

  “This is not working,” the photographer announces in English.

  “What’s not working,” Meg says.

  He ignores her. “What about the idea you were having,” he says to his companion. Until that moment she’d been silent, standing five feet from Emily, holding a collapsible silver disk to reflect the light.

  “What other idea?” asks Meg loudly.

  The woman and the photographer step away. Meg stands with her arms crossed, annoyed. The woman comes back to confer with Meg, and the two of them step away. Emily watches the whole thing. She wants to ask loudly if anyone plans to consult her, ever.

  Meg jogs over. She says in a rush under her breath, “They want to do a shot in a bathing suit.”

  “A bathing suit? Like at the beach?”

  “Yeah, no. They want to do it here. Against a tree or something. Or in the grass.”

  She feels like a child, like someone’s toy.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Oh, come on. Think about it.” Meg exhales, looks away. “I told them it could only be a one-piece.”

  “We’re in a park. I’m not putting on a bathing suit.”

  “It’s five hundred bucks.”

  “I know that.”

  “No. Another five hundred bucks.”

  “Really?”

  Meg sighs, irritated, nothing coy.

  “But that’s a thousand bucks.”

  “Maybe it’s a German thing. What’s your size?”

  “I want one thousand two hundred,” Emily says. She stares at the mountain above town. “I want twelve hundred bucks.”

  Meg eyes her for a long moment, then smiles and jogs back to the German woman. They walk away and chat some more. From the distance, with a different kind of interest, the woman stares at Emily over Meg’s shoulder. She knits something into her stare and doesn’t look away. Emily doesn’t look away either.

  The woman barks something snappish to the photographer. He responds with a grunt, he doesn’t even look up from his phone.

  The woman walks briskly away toward the sporting goods store.

  “You got your twelve hundred,” Meg says.

  While they wait, Meg runs down the schedule listed on her phone. Up next is an interview, on camera, with a Canadian true-crime program, to be filmed in a motel room near the beach. Then two interviews, forty-five minutes apiece, with journalists from American gossip magazines. Then lunch. After that, another photo shoot, maybe two, depending, then another interview, in a diner, then photographs at a barn dance that evening in Rinehart.

  Plus there were foreign inquiries still being tended by Alex, but time zones made it difficult to lock appointments. Also, a Lifetime producer was interested in talking as soon as possible.

  “And everyone’s paying for this?” Emily whispers.

  “Of course,” Meg says, laughing, suddenly an old pro. “They don’t care. That’s what I figured out: it’s not their money.”

  The German woman comes jogging, with a red one-piece, scalloped white ribbon along the top. Emily changes in the public restroom next to the gazebo. Inside is a brown-spotted mirror screwed to the cinder blocks. She brushes out her hair with her fingers. She looks like a flower someone just yanked out of a garden bed. Her legs look like vanilla ice cream cones. What will Nick think when he finds out? Meg calls for her to hurry up. She stuffs her jeans and T-shirt in the shopping bag from the store and walks out slowly.

  The photographer is next to her before she even has a chance to think. His instructions come with a different tone, more commanding, faster. He compliments her, he says she looks “very beautiful,” and now he wants her over there, doing this, then doing that. Her first reaction is to recoil, instant shame—except then it evaporates. This was all her idea. She understands exactly what he wants, what’s happening. She does what he says, translated through the female assistant. She is to remove the shoes. She is to stand at the old tree, back to trunk, then grasp the trunk, lean forward, and step up on her toes so the feet arch.

  He smiles, ducks back behind the camera, raises one of his hands—and in an extraordinary way that Emily can’t explain, but that she senses down to her toes, she feels like she’s the one who put him there, that she’s the one positioning him.

  “This is beautiful,” the photographer says.

  Click click click.

  “Now more, more, please.”

  “So the chest is out,” the woman says.

  “Like this?” she says.

&n
bsp; Next, stand more on the toes. Next, smile, look to the side. Next, direct the chest toward the lens. Emily smiles, she responds, it’s just play, it’s her play. Next, lie down on her side in the grass, knees together, legs slightly bent, one hand behind her head with her elbow pointing to the clouded sky—so it would appear that, if she hazards an interpretation, they’ve caught her out sunbathing on the lawn, in a little red bathing suit, the way American girls do.

  And when she yawns, reaches back to fix her hair, she exposes her décolletage in the process.

  Click click click.

  A pair of older women in running outfits stop to watch the show. Kids near the gazebo pause, run over toward them, come close enough that the German woman shoos them away. All eyeballs on her, her public display, her public disorder. But Emily doesn’t recognize them, none of them. She’s sure they know her name, or can guess, and have opinions of what she’s doing, and she doesn’t care, she must not care. She sucks in her stomach and their foggy gazes and tries to push all that tension straight into the camera lens. A satisfied flush rises in her face when she remembers Alex’s advice from a text she received that morning, when she and Meg had left in the car.

  Say what you want and do what you want and most importantly JUST DO YOU. And if any biotch has a problem we’ll feel bad for her later that it bothers her so much

  The photographer gets closer to the ground.

  “That’s good, your smile,” he says, so only she can hear him. He raises the camera to his eye. “Now, please, more of the chest?”

  * * *

  And that’s how it is. Nick keeps himself occupied all day, feels his days are full enough as things stand, between work, keeping his head down, attending to Suzanne’s needs when asked, or when not asked but the need is obvious, such as a night he finds her passed out in front of the computer and decides to change her passwords on certain internet forums, to prevent any further drunken posting. But overall he does a first-rate impression of someone who’s so busy he doesn’t have a moment to think. Though he thinks a lot. Worries constantly. Endures the vivid dreaming. Sometimes his throat closes and he gets choked up, feeling fooled despite whatever hard look’s on his face.

  The fact is he doesn’t like Emily’s struggle with him lately, or with herself. Because that’s what it is. When she tries to talk them out of reality, sway him away from thinking about what’s really happening, or pretend nothing’s happened at all.

  As far as he’s concerned, days start bad and get worse. Unpredictably. So he stays as busy as possible, otherwise his mind gets way too raw. He’ll see the Ashburns’ faces in his dreams like they’re wallpaper in his skull. He thinks sometimes, So this is what it’s like to be insane.

  But then sometimes with Emily it’s randomly better. Like with sex. One night, he’s up at the house, her family’s old house, and nearly everything he proposes doing she refuses. Movie, TV, reading. Stupid comments, stupid fights, they fight from room to room. But then they start to kiss, making out while also moving, and she puts his hands on her chest, uses his fingers to squeeze her own nipples, and soon he’s naked, she’s naked, hooking herself on top of him so she can rub herself into him, then turn around and keep doing the same thing, only backward—it makes him explode.

  A couple times, she takes a nap, he stares at her face, and she looks like a total stranger to him at certain angles. Like some random girl he just met.

  He doesn’t have a clue what she’s thinking half the time.

  He tries not to provoke her. Sometimes she cooks, but mostly their meals are scavenged, microwaved, eaten on paper towels in front of the TV. He tells a joke, she snuggles into his body. It’s not just good, it’s great. And he feels for a moment like they’re on equal footing. After a frustrating day, or a call with the lawyer, when he feels like he can’t bear all the pressure for one more minute, it’s amazing when they can just be like that, boyfriend and girlfriend, normal people. For whom anything seems possible. She lays her cheek on his shoulder. Donut sugar glitters on the surface of her lips.

  He’s gotten in the habit of thinking that what’s worst about him is what needs her so badly: his lack of resolve when she has plenty. It’s just the truth. Nick Toussaint Jr. comes up with big plans, then doesn’t follow through: that’ll be his life story.

  He’s not even conscious of the first time he wants to be with her forever, until it sits in his brain like simple fact.

  But now he knows a new type of pain: what arrives when someone does or does not take out the garbage by a certain point, and this is pointed out to him as indicative of bigger things. Or something else too stupid to fight about. They fight as if nights were made for fighting. If only he had her on camera! So Emily could see every time she’s being nuts, saying she did one thing when she did another. He feels lost half the time. Like he’s lost himself somehow.

  He remembers reading Hunter Thompson in his old bed, he can’t believe he’d ever been so naive. Love is the worst. And lying? Lying’s essential.

  Sometimes they even fight about why they fight. It makes him want to yell at the ceiling. Her words fly in and bang around his head for hours. All worked up, he has to go for walks to keep from exploding. He trudges up the mountainside in the dark, kick-stepping mulch, and tries to outdistance the stress, the ghosts. He returns sweaty and wiped out. He takes a shower. He still can’t sleep. He’s not angry anymore, he’s not scared, but he’s something, he just doesn’t have a name for it.

  Then by the morning, while he’s gone over every word they said twice, she barely remembers if or why they’d fought at all. It makes him furious all over again.

  And the depressive qualities that were already in his soul begin to grow over what had always been essentially a cheerful disposition.

  Tourists order pizza and insist he’s late so they get the discount. Bikers give him dirty looks at the tire center. He’s constantly on guard, and all the time wondering if they recognize him from the news. One night, during a fight, he says to Emily something like, “I can’t be afraid of pissing you off all the time.” And it’s true. But all at once, all the anger he’d kept in check was about to come flooding out. He’d thrown away his life on this girl. It freaked him out: how much resentment was in his blood; it couldn’t all be just about her. So he ran. Without a word, drove down the mountain, all the way to the beach. The water was black, the waves were silver. But the sight of it didn’t do anything for him like it used to.

  He couldn’t stop thinking, My life is insane. And yet he was heartsick, still in love. Deep down, did she feel the same way about him anymore? He’d never met anyone like her. He never would again. They just needed to get out of town.

  So he’d gone back to the house, planning to tell her they should leave in the morning, just drive, go anywhere, away from a situation that was stuck in lose-lose. But she was mad that he’d walked out and wouldn’t talk to him.

  The next morning, Nick wakes up early, nervous, climbs out of their mangy nest of old quilts in the living room. He glances at Emily’s sleeping face in the yellow dark while he writes a note to say he’s due at work. Which isn’t true, but close enough.

  He works the morning at the garage. His chin is dark and itchy. When was the last time he shaved? At lunch, he reports to the restaurant. First thing to do is turn a stack of flats into delivery boxes. He’s halfway done when his phone rings. It’s Brenner, the lawyer, saying that there’s a new scandal in Claymore. She needs to know pronto, is he at all involved in what his girlfriend’s been up to thus far that day.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “This morning.”

  “And she didn’t tell you about her plans.”

  “I just said that.”

  “Seriously, Nick,” the lawyer says, in an angry tenor, “you’re saying she didn’t share shit with you. No pillow talk or whatever.”

  She says something away from her phone, at so
meone in the office, then comes back and rips him a new one, tells him this was not agreed upon, not wise, not even well executed if it needed to be done for some reason. And how does Emily not see, she wants to know, that this Media Day stunt will only make things worse? The very thing to convince people that she disseminated those photos in the first place, that she’s some sort of narcissistic lunatic?

  He says nothing. He feels as alone as he’s ever felt.

  “This needs a couple things, ASAP,” Brenner says.

  “Like what.”

  “Control, to start,” Brenner says coldly. “Curtailment as soon as possible. Nick, this looks bad for everybody, I’m betting your full parole. You need to get involved in this up to your neck.”

  “Yeah, okay,” he says. And hangs up.

  On his arm is a rash from the heat. He stands at the door, scratching his arm, and stares out at the busy street, the crowded boardwalk, the summer tourists in beach gear walking between narrow canopies of shade. Typically, his former friend, what’s he doing at that moment? Typically hadn’t reached out once since his arrest. No visit, not a word. Even after he got out, Nick had texted him multiple times, called him twice and left messages. Even stopped by the Angry Goat. It didn’t make sense.

  He walks down the sidewalk, around the palisade’s thick bushes, up through the little public park where the burnouts sleep. The hell with Typically, the hell with them all. The sky’s vastly blue. He should probably call Emily, but that’s the last thing he wants to do. He hates the idea all the more for knowing it’s what he should do. He ducks his head in the wind. The nylon banners rustle. If she’s really doing what the lawyer says, maybe it’s for travel money, maybe it’s a good sign?

  He stops, faces the choppy ocean, impulsively texts Typically.

  WHERE R U

  Then he ducks down a side street, under a tree of stringy branches. Walks another sun-flecked block, across a rough, grassy park, and finds himself at the front door of the Crow’s Nest Inn. Realizing, with amazement, that he’d planned to go there all along.

  A big man with a crew cut stands on the porch, hard as nails, with big white teeth. There’s a trace of recognition in his face. Before Nick does anything, the guy says, “You’re looking for Martin?”