“Really?” he asks, dropping the tin with a clang.
“No. Jesus. What’s with the weird food weirdness?”
He glances down at his stomach. “It’s not weirdness. Weird weirdness or regular weirdness or any weirdness.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“For what?”
“I didn’t know you had food issues.” Another game we used to play while waiting for the bus was Last Meal, and Zack was always the best at coming up with the most elaborate meals. Porcini ravioli with a truffle-oil cream sauce, baguette, spinach and roasted beet salad, and key lime pie for dessert. Or a super-deluxe cheeseburger with gorgonzola, bacon, and caramelized onions with a mint chocolate milk shake. I knew he liked food, but I didn’t know he was also weird about it.
“I don’t have food issues.”
“You looked at your stomach.”
“Well, it’s big,” he says. “It’s hard to look anywhere else.”
“See. Food issues.” I pick up the tin of raspberry candies and drop them in the bag. “We’ll be back tomorrow, right? We just drive him down to Pennsylvania and then drive him back in the morning, right?”
“That sounds about right. Sure.”
“You definitely want to come with us? I mean, if you say no, we can’t actually go or anything, so I hope you won’t say no. But I also don’t want you to feel like you’ve stepped into this and now can’t get out.”
“No, I want to go. For real.”
“Good.” And I’m glad he doesn’t ask me why it’s so important to go because I’m not sure that I can explain that this is the first time Charlie has expressed interest in anything other than the TV or the couch or his bed or the cat since December. And, sure, I’ve been bogged down in my own stuff, and maybe a complete break from our real world feels like it could be good for me, too. So, yeah. I need Zack to say yes to this and not ask too many questions.
Charlie clomps into the kitchen and thrusts a piece of paper at me. “Here,” he says. I read what he wrote. It’s succinct:
MOM, DAD —
WE WENT TO LOOK FOR ADRIAN WILDES.
BE BACK EVENTUALLY.
C&L
I add a postscript:
Just so you know, for once Charlie was the one who had the crazy idea. I’m going with him because he’s acting nutso and someone needs to watch out for him. Ergo [I love throwing in the word “ergo”] while you may feel the need to punish me, please take into consideration my motivations.
And then we leave. Zack and Charlie sit up front. I take the back and sit with my legs stretched out across the seat. I stare out the window, at the trees without their leaves, while Charlie directs Zack to drive south in the direction of the place where Adrian was last seen.
The back seat of Zack’s car is foul. Like, third-level disgusting. The armrests are sticky and there’s a layer of fast-food wrappers that an archaeologist could mine for information about our declining society. I try to make myself as small as possible, something I’ve gotten good at, and I pull my sleeves down over my hands so I don’t touch anything.
Gwen once said that if I got a ride in with Zack my stock would rise. Not as much as hers did for getting a ride from Katie Archer, a senior girl who lived on her street, but it would definitely get a kick from not riding the bus. If she saw Zack’s car, she might reevaluate.
“Do you guys even know where you’re going?” I ask.
“Ninety-five runs all the way from Maine to Florida. We’ll take that to Pennsylvania and figure it out from there,” Charlie says.
“Um, actually, I think we might want to cut off before then,” Zack says. “Ninety-five through New York City is a no-go.”
They start talking about highways and side roads and all of it just kind of glosses over me and then I realize we’re driving past Gwen’s neighborhood. It’s this new development right by the highway. They planted like a million trees between the highway and the houses so the people who live there don’t have to see the four-lane road, and people who live there still want the town to build a sound-canceling wall. I mean, buy a house by the highway and what do you expect?
We breeze right by the development and Zack pulls the car up onto the highway. The little sedan shudders and shakes as we get up to speed.
“High-quality piece of machinery you’ve got here, Zack,” I tell him.
“Miss Ruka gets where she needs to go.”
“But does she get where we need to go?”
I look out over the trees and tell myself I can see Gwen’s pool, but it could be any of a dozen pools in that schmancy neighborhood of McMansions.
Stupid pool.
Truthfully, that day at Gwen’s pool wasn’t the first time Seth and I spoke. And it certainly wasn’t the first time I noticed him. The amount of time I spent noticing him before I actually interacted with him is pathetic. I noticed the way he slung his messenger bag across his chest so that it crossed right below his breastbone, which protruded just enough that I could see it beneath his T-shirt. I noticed that he was left-handed and wrote with his arm curled around the paper. I noticed the day that he stopped to help Tyler O’Leary, a kid so out there that even the nice kids didn’t pretend to be nice to him, when Tyler dropped his pencil case and sent stubby colored pencils rolling across the floor. I noticed the way Seth looped his arm around Remy Yoo’s waist back when they were still dating. And then one day, it seemed, he noticed me.
BEFORE
May
It was spring and Gwen and I were looking at a sign for the freshman car wash. It was printed on fluorescent pink paper. They used Comic Sans font and a terrible clip-art picture of a dirty, broken-looking car. CAR WASH was in all caps, and the rest was in lowercase, and I wondered which of my horribly sad classmates had made it.
“So what do you think?” Gwen asked. She wanted to go, and she wanted me to suggest we do. She wouldn’t actually say this out loud, but I knew it was true. Gwen wanted it both ways. She wanted to be a joiner, to be one of those golden Type-A overachievers, the kind that teachers like and boys like and coaches like and everyone likes except maybe themselves. But she also wanted to be outside edgy, on the fringe.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Seems like a lot of work, but I guess it helps our class?”
“The thing of it is—” Seth appeared and started talking as if we’d been in conversation for minutes, days, weeks already. As if the million conversations I’d had with him in my head were real. “It’s just a way to get girls to dress in bikini tops and short shorts and spray water at each other. It’s disgusting, really.”
“Sure,” I said. I was the opposite of Gwen: I didn’t know what I wanted. I just knew I wanted none of those things she strived for. I guess I wanted the spaces in between. I wanted to just exist. Even before everything with Seth, I wanted to just be in the background, to be not too much one thing or another.
“Have you ever been to one?” he asked. He spoke to just me, that’s what it felt like. Gwen might as well have not been there.
I shook my head.
“My mom brought her car when my brother’s class did it,” Gwen said. “She says they did a terrible job and she had to bring it to the regular car wash after.”
“Just you wait and see. It’s all old men who come. And middle-aged men. And young men.” Seth leaned in closer to me. “Mr. Whitehall went through three times when our grade did it. Even Mr. Tompkins got his car washed.”
“Maybe his car was just dirty,” I said.
“Maybe. Or maybe that whole geeky guy is just an act.”
“Or maybe he is a geek and this is, you know, his—” And this was when I actually turned away from the poster and looked at Seth Winthrop. He had his thumb looped through the strap of his messenger bag and I couldn’t quite see his breastbone, but I knew it was there and I wanted to run my hand over it to know what it felt like.
I had been watching Seth Winthrop for most of the year. Now here he was, two inches away from me, and I was acting like
a relatively sane person even though I felt like falling right back against Gwen and having the floor just swallow us up.
“His what?”
Except I couldn’t make a sex joke like I would with Gwen or Hannah. I couldn’t talk like that to Seth. So I said, “Maybe this is the only way he has to spend his weekend.”
“Huh. You’re a freshman, right?”
“Yes.”
“We both are,” Gwen said.
“Are you going?”
“We haven’t decided yet. But given your description of it—”
“Oh, don’t let me dissuade you.” He smiled at me, wide and toothy.
“It just sounds a little gross,” I said to the floor.
“True, but if you want to fight a problem like sexism, you have to stare it right in the face.”
“That makes sense,” I said as I tried to figure out what he meant.
“So you’ll go?”
“I guess so. Maybe.”
“I hope so,” he said. Then he smiled and I knew he knew what it did to me. “Because my car is really, really dirty.”
He wasn’t even around the corner of the hall before Gwen started giggling. “Oh my God, Lexi, you should see the way he looked at you!”
“What?” I asked.
“If you hadn’t been looking at the poster half the time, I mean, seriously, Lexi. I was invisible, and normally that would really bother me, but it was actually just so intense I am vicariously on fire for you.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Really,” she said, throwing her arm around my waist. “And we are so going to that car wash!”
We did go to the car wash, and it was as awful as Seth had promised. And he didn’t show. So I was all cold and wet and sticky with soap and didn’t even get to see him. I didn’t have another conversation with him for three months—that day at Gwen’s pool.
BEFORE
August
We sat in the pool chairs with their plastic padded seats. At first my legs were tucked up under me, but then I stretched them out across his lap and he put his hands on my bare calves like it was the most natural thing in the world. All I could think about was how he had used those hands to save the mouse and it wasn’t gross at all—it should have been gross, right? I thought they were tender and caring hands, and I couldn’t believe how perfectly they curved around my calves. We were like a sculpture, I thought, chipped out of marble.
“The problem with musicians like Adrian Wildes,” he said, “is that they spawn the knockoffs. I mean, the dude can play a guitar okay I guess, but he should be like the guitar player in a band. Like he should be a Jimmy Page, I guess. Just go out there, rock the guitar, and get out of the way.”
“Right,” I agreed, still looking at his hands. He kept his fingernails trimmed neatly: no ragged edges, no loose cuticles. The only boy fingers I’d had much of a chance to look at were Charlie’s, and he was a nail biter. Seth was not a nail biter.
“But when you start thinking you can sing and write and, like, have the stage presence or whatever.”
“Right,” I said again. Maybe there was a hint of calluses on his palms, but they were the nice kind of calluses. Once at the movie theater, this man grabbed my arm and his hands were so rough and raw I thought his dead dry skin might peel off. When I shook my arm free I went into the bathroom and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. Seth’s hands were nothing like that, nothing you wanted to shake off.
“And anyway I don’t trust anyone who would date that chick from that crappy show. What was it? She’s hot and all, but, well, I’d rather date a girl like you.”
My body grew warm, and I guess I just wasn’t smart enough then to see he was insulting me.
NOW
Zack is listing the things he knows about Adrian Wildes: “He was born outside of Poughkeepsie, and his family moved to Narragansett, Rhode Island, when he was a baby. His real name is Adrian Pincetti. He auditioned for The Mickey Mouse Club, but was not accepted, something he considers the greatest bit of bad news he ever received. He got his start on YouTube. His idol is some blues guitarist that no one has ever heard of—Smoky Walker. He’s won six Grammys, and his top-selling single was ‘Nothing.’”
“How do you know all this?” I interrupt. “I thought you said you had no man crush on him.”
“Wikipedia,” he says. “And I said I had no big, gay crush on him, to use your totally dismissive terms. That is categorically different from a man crush, which I may or may not have on Adrian Wildes.” He turns back to Charlie. “As for his personal life, he has been linked romantically with a series of celebrity women, most of whom are widely considered to be less intelligent than he is. Except, of course, for Alana Greengrass, the love of his life, so to speak, whom he met when he had a cameo in her movie about the country music scene: A Beat of My Heart.”
“Terrible movie,” I say at the same time as Charlie says, “I saw that with Penelope.”
He looks over his shoulder at me. “I didn’t think it was so bad.”
“Is that what Penelope told you to think?”
He turns his head back to the road, which is flying by. Zack is a fast driver.
“Anyway,” Zack says. “I just wonder if instead of heading to where he might have last been seen, maybe we should try to anticipate where he’d be going.”
We’ve been driving down 95 for about an hour and are well into Massachusetts. Charlie tugs on the chest strap of his seat belt, which makes a creaking, sticky noise. “That could be anywhere. We need to go to where he left his bus.”
I look inside the bag of snacks, which is on the seat next to me. If we’re really going all the way to Pennsylvania, then we will need to ration this a little. I’m starting to hope, though, that this trip won’t go that far. That I can get us home before midnight. “I agree,” I say. “I think we need a better plan. Mom and Dad are going to try to be all cool about this, but you know they’re going to be flipping out inside. We should try to get home as soon as we can.”
“If they say they’re cool, they’re cool.”
Mom and Dad haven’t said anything yet. They might not even realize we’re gone. It’s only one o’clock. Dad might be home in an hour or two, but Mom doesn’t usually get home until four, even on the days she doesn’t teach. I twist my finger around through the straps of the bag and try not to let the little worm of guilt make its way inside. This is the right choice. Going with Charlie is the right choice for sure.
Zack scratches his head. “I guess I’m just saying that he left, you know. He left. So he must have been going somewhere. Unless, well, you know—”
“He didn’t kill himself,” Charlie says, as if they are close personal friends and he knows exactly what’s going on in Adrian Wildes’s mind. I, for one, don’t care where we go. I’m just along for the ride. Which would make Seth laugh, if he heard me say it. Which in turn is funny because I would have followed Seth anywhere.
Charlie pushes all the buttons for Zack’s presets, but we’ve driven out of range and all we get is fuzz. So he starts turning the dial back and forth so fast the voices zip past like they’re riding bullets.
“Enough!” I say.
“I’ve got it,” he says, and takes his hand off the dial.
“. . . the latest on the Adrian Wildes story right after this,” comes the DJ’s voice before cutting to a pop song that was super popular when I was in eighth grade. Gwen, Hannah, and I used to dance to it in her kitchen while we ate cookie dough right out of the tube. Hannah wouldn’t eat the cookie dough at first. She said we’d get salmonella. But Gwen pretended to check Google and said that packaged cookie dough didn’t actually have raw egg in it, so it was safe.
Zack taps his fingers to the beat as he drives. “Best pop song ever?” I ask him.
“Ever?” he replies. “You really expect me to pick just one. I mean, there are so many factors to consider. Memorability of lyrics, danceability of beat, not to mention the performance.”
�
�Well, it’s obvious you’ve given a lot of thought to it—”
“I mean, of course I have an ongoing list, but I usually organize it by decade and—”
“One song, right now.” I feel myself grinning.
“How about of the last ten years?”
“Ever. One song.”
“Aghh—”
“Come on, Zackster—”
“Let him be,” Charlie says between his teeth.
“It’s a simple question,” I say. “Right, Zack?” But I know for Zack it isn’t. He’s a ranker and a sorter, and not a one-and-done kind of a guy.
“No, it’s—”
Charlie presses his fist against his window. “You always have to just push and needle and, like, claw under everyone’s skin and—”
“Beyoncé!” Zack cries out. “‘Single Ladies.’ It has to be, right?”
“See, so simple.” But the game isn’t fun anymore.
The DJ comes back on. “Adrian Wildes,” he says. “Okay, let’s get to the bottom of this. He was last seen at his tour bus north of the tiny hamlet of Frenchtown, which is west of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.”
“Hamlet?”
“Shut up, Lexi, I’m trying to listen,” Charlie says, and turns up the volume.
An old car passes us filled with teenaged guys with scruffy hair and beanie caps. One of them turns to look at me and I sink down in the back seat. I can’t stand the weight of his eyes on me, not even for the half second it takes for the car to pass us.
“Since then authorities have searched a ten-mile radius, including the nearby Delaware River, but so far there has been no sign of him. His publicist released a statement thanking fans for their concern and asking for thoughts and prayers.”
“Ah, yes, the always-powerful thoughts and prayers,” I say.
“Fans have been leaving comments on Wildes’s YouTube videos, especially the early ones that made him a star. A search party will comb the woods around where the bus last stopped with the hopes of finding Wildes or some sign of his whereabouts. And now, back to the music.”
“That wasn’t much of an update,” I say.
The song is by one of Adrian Wildes’s old girlfriends—like a blink-and-you-miss-it, barely together girlfriend, but she milked it into two songs, and this is one of them. It’s about how she knew what he was up to all along, that she was no fool. But I figure she is a fool for falling for him in the first place. She said she just wanted to take a chance, because you have to keep falling if you ever want to fly or something asinine like that. But it seems like if you just keep falling and falling and falling you aren’t going to start flying. Eventually, you won’t get back up.
Good and Gone Page 2
