Good and Gone

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  Charlie doesn’t say anything. He stares out the window. He is probably imagining where Penelope is at this very moment, and who she is with. He will calculate that it is three hours earlier in Walla Walla, Washington. He will picture the sun glinting off her dishwater blond hair while we are surrounded by gray mist. He will picture the perfect boy who is making her laugh. The perfect boy with straight white teeth and wavy hair. The boy doesn’t have a goatee and Penelope doesn’t care. Charlie shifts in his seat, frowning. It’s a sucker’s game, this imagining, and we both know it.

  There’s a minivan in the lane next to us. We take turns pulling ahead as the traffic inches forward. In the middle row of seats there’s a little girl. She waves to me and I wave back. Then she flashes a peace sign, which I also return. Each time we pull up alongside each other, a new gesture. Of course it devolves rapidly and as we putter up next to the minivan this time, I see her face pressed against the glass, nose pushed back, mouth open, cheeks puffed out like some kind of demented deep-sea fish. It’s the ugliest thing. I try to ignore her, but she becomes insistent, crossing her eyes. I wave her away with my hand like I’m swatting a fly and she presses her palm to the glass. I’m not sure what she expects me to do. I frown and shake my head. Game’s over, little girl. She slaps the other hand against the window. I turn away and when I look back she’s sneering at me. I casually give her the finger, barely even lifting it all the way, at the precise moment her mother turns around. Her mother registers shock, then her eyes narrow. I watch her explain to her husband at the same time I’m pointing at the little girl, trying to shift culpability. The father is shaking his head and actually wags his index finger at me.

  Charlie looks from the car and back to me. “Lexi, what did you do?”

  “Nothing. She started it.”

  “What did you do?” he asks again.

  “She was making an ugly face. I gave her the finger.”

  “Jesus, Lexi.”

  “What?” I demand.

  Charlie is mouthing “Sorry” to the parents in the minivan while turning his finger next to his temple, the universal sign for crazy, which is pretty funny considering how he’s been spending the last few weeks.

  “I have to pee,” I announce.

  “Hold it,” Charlie says.

  “I can’t.”

  “There’s an exit up here,” Zack says, sliding over a lane behind the minivan. “Maybe it will give traffic a chance to ease up.”

  I shift in my seat. Now that I’ve said it, the need to pee is overwhelming. “Drive in the breakdown lane.”

  “That’s for breakdowns,” Zack says.

  I roll my eyes. “It’s an emergency. Seriously. I will pee all over your car fire-hydrant style.”

  Zack hesitates, but then drops into the lane, which gets us to the exit quicker. At the bottom of the ramp I see a Total-Mart. “There,” I say.

  “No way,” Charlie says. “I’m not patronizing that store. Do you know the way they treat—”

  I interrupt. Anti Total-Mart was one of Penelope’s big things and I’ve heard it all before. “I’m not going to buy anything. I’m going to use the bathroom. I’ll pee on the floor if that would make you feel better.”

  “It’s not going to make me feel better. Why would that make me feel better? It’s not like the CEO would have to clean it up.”

  Zack is wisely ignoring our conversation. He turns into the parking lot and finds a space near the entrance.

  I run through the sliding doors with Charlie and Zack close behind me. Inside, we are greeted by an old man. “It’s so you feel eyes on you,” Charlie whispers. “So you don’t steal anything.”

  “Bathroom?” I ask the old man.

  He smiles and says, “Back corner,” pointing to the far end of the store.

  “They want you to have to walk by more things. To tempt you to buy. This whole place is set up to get you to purchase cheap crap that you don’t really need.”

  I start hustling toward the back of the store even though I want to tell Charlie that for someone so concerned about workers’ rights, he’s being awfully rude to the greeter.

  The bathroom is plain, sanitized, boring, but it is a bathroom, and I am relieved.

  I wash my hands with the foamy soap and then dry them in one of those super powerful hand dryers that make your skin move and show all your veins and bones.

  Back in the store, I can actually look around. We never go to this kind of place. Mom and Dad agree with Penelope that these big box stores are bringing about the death of small town America and that they signify all that is wrong with modern society: everything has to be quick, cheap, and easy.

  But the store itself doesn’t seem so bad. It’s bright and there are colorful displays of things like volleyballs and archery equipment. I try to imagine myself with a bow and arrow like something out of a fantasy novel. It doesn’t quite work with my old sweat shirt and stained jeans.

  I jam my hands in my pockets and feel a wad of paper, which I pull out, wondering if it’s maybe a note from Gwen or a test from the fall, but instead it’s the Good Feelings Book that Seth got me. What it drums up in me is, of course, the opposite of good feelings—that was his point, I think—and so I push it back into my pocket and try to forget about it.

  I pass the toy section, where there’s a little kid having a full-on meltdown over some Matchbox cars. They’re on sale two for a dollar and the kid just wants one, but his mom keeps telling him no. The dad is standing next to them, scrolling through his phone. The mom is trying to explain in this rational voice that he has enough cars at home. I’m thinking that the car is only fifty cents. I pull the wad of money out of my pocket and walk out of the aisle then around and come up behind them. I drop a dollar, wait a beat, and then pick it up. “Excuse me,” I say. “Is this your dollar?”

  The mom turns around. Her face is tight around the eyebrows and the lips. I feel the tension in my own face and try to relax it. Hannah’s yoga teacher says you should relax your tongue and that will relax your face, because of course Hannah does yoga, and of course she’s always talking about her stupid, traitorous tongue. “Um, I don’t think so,” the mom says. “Did you drop a dollar?” she asks her husband.

  He kind of grunts, and I’m thinking that maybe those sitcoms aren’t all that wrong. Maybe there are couples that exist in a constant state of antipathy. This makes my stomach drop. “It was on the floor back there,” I say.

  The boy is watching this conversation from the seat of the cart. More precisely, he has his eyes trained on that dollar bill.

  “It’s not ours,” the mom says.

  “Not mine either,” I say with a shrug. Then I hand the dollar to the little boy. “Guess it’s your lucky day, buddy.”

  Before the mom or dad can say anything—though, in all honesty, it would’ve been the mom because to talk the dad would have to take his eyes off the screen—but, anyway, before she can say anything, I stride down the aisle away from them.

  It’s so easy to do a nice thing every once in a while.

  Seth would think I was being sweet and stupid again, but it’s the truth. A simple little truth that no one bothers to remember.

  I pass through the cosmetics. There are mirrors everywhere, and images of models look down at me with their perfectly smooth, rosy skin and dewy eyes. I run my hand across my own face. My chin is littered with small pimples. I pick up a bottle of concealer and wonder briefly if it would actually help me, and then remember my promise not to buy anything here.

  When I find Charlie and Zack, though, they are the ones who have made a purchase. They are sitting in the so-called café, Charlie with a hot dog and Zack with a soft pretzel, each with a slushy, and are poring over a stained and ratty map. “No slushy for me?” I ask.

  “Get your own,” Charlie replies.

  “I thought we weren’t supporting the patriarchy or whatever,” I tell him.

  He ignores me and points to a spot on the map. “Narragansett, Rhode
Island. That’s where he grew up.” Zack circles it.

  I look down on the map, which has several small circles around towns in the Northeast. “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Circling key places in Adrian’s life,” Zack says.

  “Zack’s right. He’s probably not where they last saw him, not anymore. He’s probably gone to one of his important spots.”

  Zack has his phone open and he’s looking at the Wikipedia article about Adrian. “We’ve got where he was born, where his grandmother lives, where he went to college.”

  “What is that thing anyway?” I joke. “It looks like Google maps, but on paper.”

  “You’re like one of those fish with the glowing light only you’re entranced by your own light and just swimming in circles,” Charlie tells me.

  “What?”

  “You’re pathetic is what. It’s a map.”

  “I was joking,” I say. “Of course I know what a map is.”

  Charlie just raises his eyebrows at me.

  “Where’d you even get it?” I ask.

  “It came with the car,” Zack says. He taps his pen against the map.

  “What about where what’s-her-name lives?” I ask. “The love of his life?”

  Zack nods and circles New York City.

  “We should go there,” I say, because then at least this trip could get interesting.

  Charlie shakes his head. “She’s on location in India.”

  “Boston,” Zack says. “He used to busk in the subways there.”

  “He’s got that song about Burlington, Vermont. About building a little farmhouse and having a quiet life. Maybe that’s what he’s doing,” Charlie suggests.

  Zack’s pen hovers above Vermont, searching for the city. I put my finger down right over the B. “But we’re not going there,” I say. “Boring. And in the opposite direction.”

  “This isn’t the road trip of fun places that Lexi wants to go,” Charlie says.

  “It’s not? When are we going on that trip?”

  “We have a mission.”

  “Aye, aye, captain.”

  “What about that amusement park?” Zack asks, still deftly ignoring our bickering. I know I wouldn’t want to go on a road trip with me and Charlie, and I figure it’s only a matter of time before Zack calls the whole thing off.

  “Shangri-La?” Charlie asks.

  “Yeah. Where’s that?”

  “Pennsylvania, I think. But it’s closed now.”

  Zack checks something on his phone, then looks back to the map. He circles a tiny town that seems closer to New York than any city in Pennsylvania. Far. If we go that far we’re definitely going to need to find a place to stay for the night. The wad of bills in my pocket suddenly seems smaller.

  They look at the map. “Burlington makes a lot of sense, if he just wants to disappear,” Charlie says.

  I groan. I didn’t leave one tiny, snowy college town to go to a slightly larger, snowier college town. “Right, but it’s also kind of obvious. I bet people are already looking for him there.”

  “So then why don’t we just keep heading south,” Zack says. “Narragansett is the closest.”

  They nod and it’s agreed without any input from me. I would have told them it seems unlikely that he’d be going home.

  We walk back toward the exit, and the old man tells us to have a nice day. “You, too,” I say, because I realize that maybe being the greeter at this store is not how he intended to spend his last years, and because my brother was a jerk to him, and because I bet a lot of people are jerks to him.

  We get back into the car, with Charlie driving now. I think maybe I will get to sit in the front, but Zack flips the front seat forward, then steps aside so I can crawl back into my cage in the back seat. “How gallant of you,” I say.

  “No problem,” he replies.

  “An hour and a half until Narragansett,” Charlie announces as he backs out of the parking spot.

  Whoop-de-freaking-doo.

  TWO

  Once upon a time, in a great and beautiful kingdom, a princess was born. The kingdom was built upon a cliff that looked out over the blue, churning sea. The view was so magnificent that no man could go to the edge of the cliff without throwing himself from it.

  NOW

  I keep thinking about the old man working the door at Total-Mart. I bet he wears a hat. Maybe a wool fedora or one of those ones that buttons in front. I bet he opens doors for people. I bet he has a handkerchief.

  And there he is stuck at the door of Total-Mart, greeting people who either ignore him or make snide remarks like Charlie did.

  “You were kind of an ass to that greeter, Charlie,” I say.

  “Lexi Green, champion of the downtrodden,” he replies.

  “I just think a little chivalry could go a long way, that’s all.”

  BEFORE

  September

  Seth picked me up at 6:20 a.m., just when he said he would. His hair stood up like he was a scarecrow and his straw was escaping his brain.

  We drove in comfortable quiet, the radio tuned to an old jazz station. He parked out behind Ruby’s, and before he got out of the car he said, “In old days—not like olden times, but our grandparents’ times—a girl would know to stay in her seat until the guy came around and opened her door for her.”

  “There were all sorts of rituals,” I said.

  “Do you think it’s silly?”

  “Yes,” I answered. Who needed some guy to throw his coat down in a puddle?

  Seth rubbed his hand over his hair, smoothing down the curls. “Because of course I know you can open your own door. I just think those things were kind of nice.” He smiled down at the steering wheel, sheepish. “Standing up when a lady leaves the table. Taking off your hat at all the right times. You open the car door for a girl, and then she gets in and reaches over to unlock your door for you. Gentle things. Polite things.”

  “I guess I’d never thought of it that way.” So when he got out of the car, I waited while he walked around and opened my door. He took my arm and we walked toward the diner. “It is nice,” I said. “It makes me feel special.”

  “See? Nothing wrong with feeling special. We should all try to make each other feel more special.”

  “What else did people do back then?” I asked as we slid into a booth.

  He said, “Guys ordered for girls at restaurants, I know that.”

  “Like chose for them?”

  “No. Well, maybe. But you should choose for yourself.”

  I knew what I was going to get, because it’s what I always get at Ruby’s, but still I looked at the menu. The waitress, whose hair was an impossible shade of orange, came to our table. Seth flipped over his coffee cup to indicate he wanted it filled, which she did, then turned to me. “You, hon?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “She’s more of a hot-chocolate gal,” he said. “With whipped cream.” I don’t actually like hot chocolate all that much. Not at Ruby’s, anyway; it was more sweet than chocolate. But maybe this was his way of saying he saw me as sweet.

  “Of course. Be right back.”

  When she left, I said, “I usually get the egg sandwich.”

  “A classic choice,” he replied. He was holding his coffee cup in one hand, the other arm draped across the back of the booth. “Remy always got that, too.” His face darkened for minute, then a smile cracked his face. “I’m glad you don’t think this is all hokey.”

  “Nothing hokey about good diner food.”

  “I meant you and me, sitting here, opening doors—all of that. You can be a feminist and still want to be treated right. I mean, it’s just chivalry. It’s been around since the Middle Ages.”

  “Right,” I agreed, but I wondered if being around since the Middle Ages was a good thing.

  He leaned across the table, eyes wide. “It was a whole code of conduct, you know. And it wasn’t just about being good to women. It was about looking out for other people.”


  “I see,” I said, and decided that in homeroom I’d ask Ms. Blythe to help me find a book about chivalry so I could have something good and real to say to him about it later, instead of just nodding my head. “You know, I’ve changed my mind. I think I’m going to have the chocolate-chip pancakes.”

  The waitress, Alison, returned with my hot chocolate, and Seth said, “I’ll have the egg sandwich with sausage and the lady will have the chocolate-chip pancakes. And we’ll share a coffee frappe.”

  “What a gentleman you are!” Alison said. I wanted her to be beaming, to be looking down at me like, What a lucky girl you are! But her face was drawn and she only looked down at her pad. When she turned to go, the old hag shook her head.

  NOW

  “‘Anyone lived in a pretty how town,’” Charlie mutters as we drive through the streets of Narragansett. We came in on Route 1A and passed through a quaint, touristy downtown—gack—before starting to drive along the water.

  The houses are big and set back from the road, but landscaped so that you can see just how grand they are. Some of them have brick pillars or stone statues or topiaries. The houses are not ostentatious. They are refined. Like little old ladies sitting on pink pincushion chairs.

  “No one who created anything of any artistic substance came from a place like this,” I say.

  “Because you’ve had such a trying life,” Charlie replies.

  “Can you imagine?” Zack tucks his hands behind his head like he’s reclining on a fainting couch. “You could have a different room for every day. I bet the floors are marble.”

  “You don’t strike me as the lap-of-luxury type,” Charlie tells him.