Kristy leads us upstairs, but instead of going into a dorm room, she takes us into a kitchen at the end of the hall that opens up to a room with some couches. “Sit, sit. I’ll make you noodles in a bag.”
Charlie flops onto a couch, and Zack starts to help her, but I’m stuck somewhere in between. I just stand by a dented table while Zack and Kristy chatter.
“You’re on a road trip? Oh, wait, it’s your February vacation, isn’t it? Well, that’s cool. My mom never would have let me do that.”
“It wasn’t exactly a planned event,” Zack says. “And I didn’t exactly ask for permission.”
Kristy stops moving. “Wait, what? Does your mom know you’re here?”
“Not really, no.”
She shakes her head and pulls her phone from her pocket. “Call home now before I am killed from a remote distance.”
Kristy watches as Zack dials. When he says, “Hey, Mom,” I whisper, “Tell her to tell our parents we’re fine.”
“Connecticut,” he says. “With Kristy. Kristy, my cousin. The perfect one who gets straight As and never does crazy things like leave suddenly on a road trip.”
Kristy rolls her eyes. I point at myself.
“Lexi and Charlie Green are fine if their parents are wondering.” He is quiet for a while, nodding his head. Then he says, “Charles Green and Alexandra Green, I think.”
“Wait,” I say. “Did your parents ask for our names to report us to the police?”
Zack holds up a hand.
“Do they think we kidnapped you? That is hilarious! It’s your car. Oh—wait, do they think we carjacked you?”
“It’s fine, Mom,” Zack says into the phone. “It’s a spur-of-the-moment thing. You’re always telling that story about how you drove to Lollapalooza and scalped some tickets and—”
Zack nods a few times.
“His parents are pretty strict,” Kristy says. “They’re going to flip.”
“Mom, you need to chillax. I’m seventeen years old. And I’m with Kristy. Kristy!”
“Did he just say ‘chillax’?” Charlie asks from the couch.
“No, Mom. We’re not coming home right now. That would be foolish. We’ve been driving all afternoon and now you want us to drive home in the dark?”
“It’s a word,” I say.
Charlie lifts the top half of his body up so I can see his face, which is showing a mix of disgust and disbelief, but maybe also a hint of a smile? That could just be a smudge or something. “No, it isn’t,” he says.
“It’s vernacular,” I tell him, pulling out one of Dewey DeWitt’s favorite vocab terms.
“We’ll be home tomorrow,” Zack says into the phone. He’s turned so his back is to us now, his shoulders all scrunched up. “I promise.”
“It’s a made-up word,” Charlie says.
“It is of dubious word-ish-ness,” Kristy says.
“Word-ish-ness is also dubious,” Charlie says, and this time I am pretty sure he is actually smiling, and there is a possibility he is smiling at Kristy. She’s kind of cute, I guess, with her hair dyed a not-quite-natural red and her perky boobs. She is wholesome. And responsible, that’s what Zack said. Wholesome, responsible, and perky—in other words, the exact opposite of Penelope. I am taking this as a good sign, but then Charlie droops back onto the gray couch.
Zack clicks off the phone and hands it to Kristy. “The only thing that kept my parents from calling the Connecticut State Police is that I have landed here at the home of angel Kristy Ann Donovan, top ten of her class in high school, owner of an impeccable driving record and a varsity letter from the drama department.”
Kristy punches him in the arm. “Oh, sure, lay it on thick, cousin. Know what I hear about? ‘Zack makes his family dinner three nights a week. Zack has a store on eBay and has sold enough memorabilia to fund his own college education.’ When are you going to be an internet millionaire?”
“I’m not an internet millionaire. Yet.”
This detail about Zack’s internet entrepreneurship is interesting, but I am distracted by something sticking out of the wall: a phone charger. I step over and hook the end into my phone. It buzzes to life: a message from Mom, a text from Dad. Dad doesn’t really like texting, but he likes talking on the phone even less. The fact that he wrote to me means it’s something major. Something important. I open the text:
be safe
Be safe. It’s what Dad always says to us. We’re going out to catch the bus to school: “Be safe!” Going on a ski trip with friends: “Be safe!” Running toward the biggest roller coaster at Six Flags, the one with a nine-paragraph-long warning message: “Be safe!” No matter the degree of actual danger we are encountering, that’s the message.
I guess it’s one less word than “I love you,” and more or less says the same thing.
He never told me to be safe with Seth, which is weird if you think about it. There’s this whole idea of the dad who meets the potential suitor with a shotgun. The dad who is waiting up in the living room with just a single table lamp to cast an ominous glow on his face. But it was never like that with Seth and Dad.
BEFORE
November
They only met once, Seth and my dad. We’d already been dating almost three months by then. Seth came over after school. He drove us and we went into the kitchen to cook some bagel bite snacks in the toaster oven. I squirmed a little because I was all embarrassed by them, like they were little-kid food. We brought them into the living room and sat on the couch—this was before Charlie moved back home and set up permanent residence. Seth slipped off his shoes and pulled up his legs to sit crisscross applesauce. He was wearing his feminist T-shirt. His sister who went to Barnard got it for him in the school store. Not afraid to say the F-word. It was purple and the bottom hem was unraveling, and I desperately wanted it.
We had the television on but weren’t really watching it. Dad came in from a run. He had on old sweatpants that rode up around his ankles, and his gray hair stuck out from behind the headband he always wears on his jogs. He stopped in the middle of the room, between us and the television. “Hello there, young sir,” he said. And he chuckled. Then he looked at me, then looked away just as quickly. I think maybe he wasn’t prepared for this state of affairs. Like he knew Lexi growing up and getting interested in boys would come eventually, but he still wasn’t quite ready for it.
“Hello, Mr. Green,” Seth said. “I’m Seth.”
“Seth!” Dad said. “Call me Philip.”
Seth smiled and said, “Okay.”
Then Dad smiled back and said, “Well, off to the shower. Don’t want my stink to ruin a moment.”
I bit my lip to keep from groaning, and then Dad disappeared up the stairs.
“I guess that was only mildly mortifying,” I said.
“He seems nice,” Seth replied.
“He is nice. Anyway, I like your shirt.”
He looked down. “Yeah? Me, too. You’d look good in it. That’s kind of your look, isn’t it? Disheveled professor’s disheveled daughter.”
I blushed hard, but how could I tell him that I spent twenty minutes this morning looking at a stack of choices before finally deciding on a Quidditch team T-shirt.
“That came out wrong. I like you this way. I mean, this is what I like about you.”
“You like that I’m a mess?”
“You’re not a mess. You’re beautiful. What I’m saying is, more girls should be like you. More girls should care about the things that matter and not give a fuck about the things that don’t.”
“Remy is like that,” I said. I wrapped the purple thread from his shirt around my finger.
“Remy? I guess so.”
There was a scented candle burning on the coffee table. Apple pie. My mom bought it from one of the neighbor kids who was doing a fund-raiser.
“I thought she was right, at Halloween. The way she dressed and what she said—” The tip of my finger turned white as I cut off the circulation to it.
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Seth sighed. “Are you and her going to be BFFs now?”
“Yeah, sure.” I laughed. “We’re going to get one of those necklaces and we’ll come to school in matching outfits, but pretend we didn’t plan it.”
Seth rolled his eyes.
“Remy hates me,” I said.
“She doesn’t hate you,” he told me. “She hates me.”
“She hates me because I have you and she doesn’t. It’s that simple.”
He looked down at my finger and unwrapped the thread. “You shouldn’t do that to yourself.”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“Still, you shouldn’t.” He put his arm around me and I leaned into him. It was the smell of the shirt I wanted, the smell of him. “And girls shouldn’t be that way to each other. All competitive. It’s society that does it. It makes you hate each other, when really you should be supporting one another.”
“Well, sure,” I said. “Capitalism is based on women hating themselves and each other.”
He had the string then and wrapped it around his own index finger, though not tight enough to press into his skin. “You two would actually get along if you gave it a chance.”
“Do you want me to be friends with her?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably not. It could be awkward. But she’s smart and she would be a good friend to you.”
“I have friends. I have Gwen and—”
He rolled his eyes.
“Anyway,” I said. “Remy hates me.”
“Let it go,” he said, and I realized that he thought that Remy hating me—which really I was not sure she did—I realized that this was something he thought I should not care about. This hatred between girls was petty, beneath me.
Maybe he was right.
Maybe.
But I would still box her up and send her to Timbuktu if that were an option. On a more charitable day, I might send her off to that Oberlin conservatory she wanted to attend—Ohio was far enough away. I would vanish her from the school any way I could if it meant that Seth would never realize that she was about a thousand times cooler than me.
I unwound the thread from his finger, then laid our index fingers side by side and wrapped the purple thread around them both. I made sure not to do it too tightly. I didn’t want it to hurt him. “I think in some cultures this means we’re married.”
“Don’t be a cultural relativist,” he said. But he didn’t undo the thread.
“Ah, but what you don’t realize is that I meant cultures in other realms. Fantasy worlds where a thread has the magic to bind two people for life.” I grinned up at him like a dork. I felt the dorkiness all over my face and my body.
Maybe that thread was magic, because the dorkiness spread from me to him and he kissed me right on the lips, right in my living room even though my dad could have walked in at any time. He kissed me like he really was bound to me, and I to him.
NOW
“I thought I smelled noodles in a bag!” A boy pushes through the door of the kitchen. He is Asian American, with shaggy black-brown hair and an easy smile. He’s followed by a freckled and pale-skinned girl who has her long red hair in two braids like some kind of Pippi Longstocking or something.
“My cousin and his friends showed up,” Kristy tells them. “I’m feeding them.”
The boy looks over at me and Charlie on the couch and waves. I wave back. “I’m Lexi,” I tell them.
“Troy,” he says.
“Annie,” the girl pipes in. She talks in a baby voice. I hate when girls talk in a baby voice.
“Hold on,” Troy says. He goes back through the door, leaving Annie frozen. I wonder if she’s his girlfriend or just wants to be. I wonder if that’s how I looked whenever Seth left a room. I dig my fist into my thigh.
When Troy comes back he has a big bottle of red wine, which he pours into paper cups. “We’ve gotta offer a drink to our new friends.”
I grab a cup before anyone can say anything about it, but when I take a sip it tastes sour and sweet, nothing like the stuff my parents get. “Mmm,” I say. “Interesting.”
“Ha!” Troy laughs. “It’s from the bottom row of the bargain shelf.” He smiles at me. I glance over at Annie. She’s watching the television, which isn’t turned on, probably only because Charlie hasn’t found the remote yet.
“So where are you visiting from?” Troy asks.
“New Hampshire.”
“New Hampshire? You just popped in from New Hampshire? How long did that take?”
“They’re on a road trip,” Kristy explains. “How cool is that?”
“What’s the destination?” Troy asks.
I glance over at Charlie, who still appears comatose. Zack answers for me. “You hear about Adrian Wildes?”
“How he threw himself in that river?”
I see Charlie tense.
“Well, that’s one theory,” Zack says. “We’re thinking he might have just gone off somewhere and we’re trying to find him.”
“Huh,” Troy says.
“I don’t think he killed himself either,” Annie says. “He’s not that kind of guy.”
This causes Charlie to sit up. “What kind of guy is that?”
Annie leans against the counter, her paper cup of wine close to her lips. “I’m not saying he wouldn’t want to kill himself, or that there’s a certain type of person who’s suicidal or whatnot. He just seems fairly responsible, you know? Like he’d tie up loose ends before he did anything?”
Charlie lies back down. “Maybe,” he says.
“Charlie’s really tired,” I explain.
“Noodles are done!” Kristy takes down a stack of dining hall bowls from the cupboard and starts scooping short, flat noodles covered in some sort of pinkish-red sauce into them. “We’re kind of noodles in a bag aficionados here. This is my favorite kind: Parma Rosa.”
“Noodles in a bag and cheap wine,” Troy says. “We’re super classy.”
When I sit down on the couch, Troy takes the seat next to me. Annie hesitates and then sits down by Charlie’s feet. “So you’re in high school? What grade are you in?” Troy asks me.
Troy is so close to me that I can feel his leg brush against mine. I scoot closer to the arm of the couch. “Sophomore. Zack’s a junior.” I scoop up a big mouthful of noodles and jam it into my mouth. I make sure a few noodles hang out so I am as unattractive as I can be. They’re still hot, though, and singe the roof of my mouth.
“What about you, Charlie?” Annie asks. I don’t know if she is trying to be nice or to make Troy jealous or what. Charlie, pulling himself up to sitting, says, “I go to Essex College.”
“Oh,” Annie says. “I applied there, too.”
“Yeah?” Charlie asks.
“Yeah.”
It’s a totally scintillating conversation, right? But I mean, I guess it’s good that he’s talking to someone even if he did leave out the detail about not actually going to school anymore.
I drink some more of my wine. I can feel that it’s making my face hot and pink, but I don’t care.
“So why Adrian Wildes in particular?” Troy asks.
“It’s not like we had a whole roster of missing pop stars to choose from,” I retort.
He doesn’t even seem to notice the glint in my voice. “Right on,” he says.
I kind of wish I had given Charlie a chance to answer, though, because I’m still wondering what we’re doing out here chasing someone who doesn’t want to be found, assuming he’s even still alive. Which is a big assumption.
“Adrian Wildes isn’t a pop star,” Charlie says. “He plays his own instrument. He writes his own music. It has riffs and depth and substance.”
Kristy swallows a bite of noodles. “He played here once like ages ago I guess. But he signed the wall in the green room of the theater. People touch it now before they go onstage for luck.” She glances over at Charlie. “I have a work-study job in the theater.”
“What are they hoping will happe
n?” I ask.
“Fame, I guess.” She shrugs. “It’s actually getting a little faded now and there’s this big debate about whether someone should go back over it with a Sharpie or something. There’s been a real push to get him to come back to campus and sign it again, but now, well . . .”
Her voice trails off and Zack and I look over at Charlie, whose mouth is set in a thin line. I don’t think he’s taken even one bite of his dinner. Zack says, “When we find him, we will bring him here directly, Sharpie in hand.”
Troy bends over and picks up the giant bottle of wine and tops off each of our cups. “To Adrian Wildes!” he says.
We all toast and I drink a big gulp and he fills my cup up again. People keep coming in and out of the common area. Some stay and talk, and others just pass through. I learn that Kristen is double majoring in economics and French and wants to work for the United Nations after she goes into the Peace Corps. Troy is majoring in philosophy, of course. He keeps moving closer to me and touching my leg while he talks, and I keep pulling away. My face burns and I’m not sure if it’s the wine or him, but I feel like I want to run outside and suck in cold air. Why do boys always think they can just come into your space like that? Like your body is just a thing that’s there for them. I tried to say something about it to Seth once, but—whatever. That’s over. Troy thinks that I would probably like to major in philosophy, too, and then he spends a whole lot of time trying to figure out whether if I came to Connecticut College, he would still be there. “Well, you’re a sophomore and I’m a sophomore, so, unless you’re on the five-year plan, then, no.”
“Ha!” He laughs. “This is why I’m not a math major. Also, wine.” He holds up the bottle and starts to pour more in my cup, but I shake my head.
Charlie is snoring on the couch when Kristen says, “You know, we should all probably turn in. Zack, you can crash in my room, and Charlie, you can go with Troy, and Lexi can go with Annie. Does that work for everyone?”
Good and Gone Page 6
