The Girl with the Wrong Name

by Barnabas Miller

  Plotwise, my and Max’s friendship had gone down almost exactly like the standard teen flick. Step 1) Cool Jock needs to pass Algebra II to stay on the team. Step 2) Teacher forces Geek Girl to tutor Cool Jock even though they’re from vastly different social circles. Step 3) Cool Jock and Geek Girl discover all their hidden commonalities and become unexpectedly close, etc.

  But there were a few key differences between our story and the cliché. For one thing, Cool Jock actually got tutored by two Geek Girls (me and Louise). Secondly, and most importantly, nobody fell in love in any way, shape, or form—so that thirdly, there were no shocking last-minute betrayals at “the big dance” or “the big game,” requiring any grand gestures like running through the rain or having surprise gospel choruses sing “our” song. Instead, we all just stayed friends, reasonably drama free.

  Point being: I don’t know where I’d be without Max and our late-night phone sessions. A girl can only play Dark Side of the Moon so many times without wanting to kill herself or go on a funnel cake bender. I am more grateful for Maximus than I could have possibly expressed—so, of course, I didn’t.

  “You answer my question, and I’ll answer yours,” I said as I chewed on his fries.

  “What was your question?” he asked.

  “What the hell is going on with Lou?”

  “Oh, that.” Max nodded with a knowing laugh. “Yeah, that is some classic A.B.O. right there.”

  “Classic what?”

  “A.B.O. You know, all bets are off.”

  “What bets? Who’s betting?”

  “Oh, come on, Thee, this is a well-documented senior year phenomenon.” He lowered his voice. “We’ve all been slaves to the same social structure since at least junior high, right? Mike could never hook up with a girl like Lou because the Sharks would have given him shit. Same for Lou. Imagine what the entire first violin section would have done to her—imagine what you would have done to her if she’d ever confessed her scorching pelvic desire for a dude who endorses butt chugging.”

  “Okay, ew.”

  Max laughed. “All I’m saying is, none of it matters now. We don’t have to pay the price for our secret interspecific crushes anymore, because we’re never coming back here again. We’re in uncharted territory. Black is white, and white is black. All bets are off. A.B.O.”

  When he said it again, I was struck by a vivid sequence: A bite-sized version of me is sledding down the Lost Boy’s freckly ski-slope nose. I’ve somehow gotten caught in a snowstorm on his face. I shut my eyes and brace for death, but his gigantic thumb and forefinger snatch me from certain doom. I slowly morph into Snuggle the Bear. He cups me in his hands and scratches my furry brown head and under-chin like a treasured pet—like Lennie from Of Mice and Men.

  How sick is that? What did it even mean?

  Max snapped his fingers in my face. “Theo? Come on. Please don’t make me say, ‘Earth to Theo’; we’re better than that.”

  “What?”

  “I said it’s your turn.”

  “For what?”

  “I answered your question; now you have to answer mine. Where the hell have you been since eight o’clock this morning?”

  “Asleep,” I said. “I just overslept. What’s the big?”

  Max smiled. “At least you haven’t gotten any better at lying.”

  I smiled back. “That’s why you trust me.”

  Chapter Three

  Lost Boy Project Notes, Wednesday, September 4th

  He’s BACK. Fourth day in a row.

  What am I doing? Why am I scribbling project notes when I should be . . .

  Nothing but pixels and jitters as my shaky button cam warms to life. I can’t get myself still today. I’m a mess—everything’s off.

  The second the lunch bell rang, I raced down to my Trek 7500 hybrid and pedaled my ass off to make it here by 11:45, but some mall-haired Real Housewife of New Jersey tried to run me over on Water Street. “Hey, Dragon Tattoo! Get a frikkin’ haircut!” Now I’m fifteen minutes late and covered in a sticky coat of bike sweat, and I’ve missed the Lost Boy’s first act at the window.

  He’s already grabbed his Times and is well into the forlorn gazing stage.

  Some yoga mom with a stroller the size of a space shuttle has taken my spot. She leaves me no choice but to grab a seat much closer to him than I want to be. I don’t even know how to position my collar for a shot from this table. I keep shifting around in my seat, leaning my head left and right, looking like a ten-year-old with ADHD on her first day of Chicken McNugget detox. I’m drawing too much attention.

  When I finally get him in frame, all I can see is a blurry mess of a man. Boy? Man? It’s one of the most compelling things about him: he looks like a man from one angle and a boy from another—it really depends on how you shoot him. I don’t think he could be much older than nineteen, but I can’t say for sure. His face is a blur on my screen, like it’s been rendered by a French Impressionist or a toddler with a tray of runny watercolors. The door swings open, and his head darts up.

  A girl’s voice shouts from somewhere off camera. “Oh my God, it’s you!”

  The paper falls from his hands. He lifts his head. It’s the first time I’ve seen his veil of sadness drop away. Now I can see what his face really looks like—what it’s supposed to look like. Now he’s the boy and not the man.

  He peers at the mystery girl. I tilt my chair back on its heels to get her into frame, feeling my heart rate spike.

  Steady, Theo, steady.

  I finally get her in the shot. She’s skinny and blonde with huge boobs. Of course she is. She’s the perfect vessel for his golden angel babies, and so chipper that I have to squint to look at her. Okay, cringe is the better word.

  “I’m at the Harbor Café,” she squeaks. “Where the hell have you been, girl?”

  Why is she calling him “girl”? Is the Lost Boy transitioning?

  I think he and I realize it at the exact same moment. She’s not talking to him. She has dragged us into a little game that Max dubbed “Bluetooth or Psycho?” (It’s a fun game, because it’s so hard to tell the difference in New York, given the uncommon number of both raving lunatics and assholes on hands-free calls—and that they both tend to wear huge, flowy scarves.) I lift my head from the screen and watch him turn back to his paper.

  Wait.

  Did I see a tear on his cheek?

  I tell myself that I can’t be sure. I even consider rewinding and looking back through the footage to confirm, but I’ve learned the hard way that I can never look back through the raw footage until it is time to edit. I just end up all-capsing the crap out of myself for the shots I’ve missed and the scenes I’ve lost forever.

  I don’t need to see the footage. Not really. I know what I saw; I just don’t want to face it. The problem is this: I suffer from a disease I call Self-Mutilating Empathy.

  That is to say, when I see a man crying, I literally want to marry him. At least for the next fifteen to twenty minutes. Usually I can overcome it, but the Lost Boy is different. Watching him hurt in turn hurts me, and it has since the moment I laid eyes on him. He ducks his head down. He’s trying to pass off the tear as an itch. He doesn’t want anyone to see his face. I know that feeling so well that it turns my throat bone dry—I can’t make myself swallow. I flip open my notebook and start scrawling rapidly.

  IMPARTIAL IMPARTIAL IMPARTIAL IMPARTIAL

  But it’s useless. It’s a fight I can’t win. Despite everything I know and everything I am, the pen falls from my hand, and I stand up out of my chair, stashing the phone in my jacket pocket. My fingers rise to my face, checking to be sure my hair is a curtain over my scarred cheek, and I begin what feels like the longest walk anyone has ever taken in an eight-hundred-square-foot café.

  Just go to the left and out the door, I keep telling myself. You have to leave. Left,
and out the door. Left, and out the door.

  “Are you okay?”

  I’ve startled him half to death. That was not the plan—I didn’t even have a plan. The plan was to leave, but I didn’t.

  Now he looks confounded and maybe embarrassed, I’m not sure. Either way, he is staring at me, not answering, and I’ve run out of things to say. Mostly because, God help me, he’s even more remarkable up close. The camera is still recording in my pocket, but a camera can’t do what my eyes can do.

  How can I explain it? He has no idea that he’s the star of my movie, yet this is the first time I’ve truly seen the star up close. It’s like that thing where you see a famous person on the street and you realize why they call them “stars.” They actually do shine a little brighter than normal people. It’s the shift from two-dimensional to three. Everything is crisper—his golds are golder; his angles are more angular; his skin is that much more, I don’t know, succulent? Ew, no, that is not what I mean.

  And then there’s that tear. I can still see its faint trace on his cheek.

  Self-Mutilating Empathy kicks in, and my scar suddenly feels like it’s roasting. I’m dying to scratch it. It’s as if I’m sitting too close to a campfire. I panic about my concealer—it’s going to melt away, and he’ll see me in all my repulsive glory. What have I done? This is New York. People don’t just walk up to you and ask if you’re okay. Even if you’ve just been shot, they tend to stand on the curb, craning their necks curiously, waiting to see if someone else will ask if you’re okay.

  “I’m sorry.” I take a deep breath. “I didn’t mean to . . .” I whirl around.

  “Wait,” he says.

  I freeze, then turn back. There’s a slight quaver in his voice. His accent is southern or western—maybe both. Texan? I think of the New York Times “Weddings and Celebrations” section, Sunday, June 3, 2012, page ST14:

  Elana T. Silverman, a daughter of John and Miriam Silverman of New Brunswick, N.J., was married Saturday to Brick Colton, the son of Ford and Louanne Colton of Temple, Tex. The Rev. Rudy B. Pickins (known fondly to parishioners as “Rev. Rudy”) officiated. Mrs. Colton, 22, was a graduate student in Political Science at New York University, but has opted to forego her academic career and join Mr. Colton, 27, on his sustainable sheep farm in Texas.

  “Ever since I met Brick, all I really care about is sheep,” Mrs. Colton said.

  “Yeah, I call her my little sheep,” Mr. Colton added.

  “To be honest,” Mrs. Colton said, “I was so in love with him, I would have raised Tibetan yaks with him.”

  “You just saw a grown man crying, didn’t you?” the Lost Boy asks.

  I stiffen, and my hair becomes a blockade between my eyes and his. “What? No, I didn’t see any—”

  “It’s okay. You saw what you saw,” he says. “And I’m not. I’m not okay.”

  Well then, I’ll marry you, I barely manage not to say. I’ll marry you, and we can fly back to Texas and raise a host of farm animals—pigs, cows, sheep, whatever—and slowly but surely, I’ll help you recover from whatever has happened to you. I already have the dress, which is vintage and kind of funky.

  I say none of that. All I actually say is (again): “I’m sorry.” The two emptiest, most meaningless words in history.

  “Don’t be,” he replies, his voice quiet. “I don’t even know how long I’ve been sitting here. You’re the first person that’s talked to me.”

  “New Yorkers,” I say with a pathetic excuse for a laugh. “I mean, I assume you’re not from New—”

  “Oh, hell, no.” He laughs. His laugh is warm and real. Not like my uncomfortable mouth farts. “I’m from Austin.”

  Texas. I knew it.

  “Austin, Texas,” he clarifies, perhaps reacting to my slack jaw.

  “No, I know; I’m just—”

  “I’m Andrew,” he says, putting out his hand. “Andrew Reese.”

  I look at his outstretched hand and go numb. The last thing I want to do is hurt Andrew any more than he’s hurting, but I can’t bring myself to shake.

  It’s not that I’m afraid to touch Andrew Reese. Not exactly. It’s because of my father.

  I have only two memories of the man who brought me into this world. One is of him wrapping a blanket around my shoulders by a fire in some gray, snowy campsite, whispering, “Don’t be afraid, darlin’. Don’t you ever, ever be afraid.” The other is of him gripping the lapels of my navy peacoat, shaking me too roughly, saying, “Don’t talk to strangers, darlin’. Don’t you ever, ever talk to strangers.”

  Yeah, thanks for the super-consistent advice, Pops. Not like you’ll turn me into a walking manic-depressive contradiction for the rest of my life or anything.

  The point is, while Andrew Reese waits five seconds too long for a simple handshake, I’m forced to face the harsh reality: he is a complete and total stranger. My inner five-year-old squeals at me to shut my mouth and run. But I slide down cautiously into the seat across from him, keeping my arms tightly crossed.

  “Theo,” I finally respond. “Theo Lane.”

  WHY did you just give him your real name?

  I jump at any opportunity to give myself a fake name. Doling out fake normal names is one of my few remaining pleasures in life, and Starbucks is usually my only outlet. Now I’ve given him the only Google tool he needs to find my address and plan my murder. Then again, sixty seconds ago, I was prepared to offer him my hand in marriage.

  He pulls his hand back under the table. “Theo,” he says, trying to move on from the awkwardness. “That’s a cool name.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s not even a name, it’s an address.”

  “What?” More than ever, he looks capital-L Lost.

  “As in, ‘Driver, take me to Number Nine Theo Lane.’”

  “Oh, right.” He nods with a forced smile. “Right.” His eyes drift back toward the window, and my heart sinks. This isn’t the first conversation I wanted with him. Not even close.

  “Andrew, I’m sorry. I really just wanted to make sure you were—”

  “Andy,” he says. “All my friends call me Andy.”

  “Oh. Well, Andy—not that I saw you crying, but . . . why were you crying?”

  His smile disappears. The silence lasts long enough to make me regret having asked. “I’m waiting for someone,” he finally says.

  “Who?”

  “A girl.”

  Of course it’s a girl. Deep down, didn’t I know that already? Hadn’t I put it all together? Besides, what’s to put together? He’s a boy, and he’s sad. Why is he sad? Because of a girl.

  “Her name’s Sarah,” he says.

  Of course her name is Sarah.

  “Well, where is she?” I ask. I wish I hadn’t. The look on his face . . .

  “I don’t know. She was supposed to meet me here at eleven forty-five.”

  “Well, come on, she’s not even an hour late. I’m assuming she’s a ‘Pretty Girl’?”

  “She is pretty.” He frowns at my air quotes.

  “An hour late is nothing in Pretty Girl time. That’s, like, ten minutes.”

  He almost smiles again. “Well, it’s been longer than an hour,” he says. “She was supposed to meet me at eleven forty-five on Sunday.”

  This is the part where I feign surprise. “You’ve been waiting here for four days?”

  “Oh, man, has it been four days?”

  I bite my lip, feeling a little bewildered. “I don’t understand. Is Sarah your girlfriend or—?”

  He lets out a single, joyless laugh. “I guess not. I don’t know. What do you think, Theo? Can someone be your girlfriend if you’ve only known her for a day?”

  I’m not qualified to answer that question, so I don’t.

  “I was just bumming around New York before school. I was supposed to head back to Aust
in on Saturday morning to start at UT. I met her as I was walking out of here. She was sitting right at this table. She’d just come from helping her friend plan a wedding at some place near here where they do weddings. Battery Green or Battery—”

  “Battery Gardens,” I say. “Yeah, I know it.” This didn’t seem like the best time to tell him about a) my wedding announcement obsession or b) how I’d been coming here all summer to shoot footage of the newlyweds walking in and out of Battery Gardens’ forbidding ivy gates. Besides, that project is a thing of the past. He’s been my new project for exactly four days. My star. Not that he needs to know that, either.

  “Yeah, that’s it!” He smiles, truly and fully, for the first time. Star, I think again; the smile is that bright. “Battery Gardens. Anyway, we just hit it off, you know—it was just one of those things. We talked, and we talked some more, and then we walked, and we walked some more till we were up in, like, Harlem or something, and we just ended up spending the whole day together. And Theo, believe me, I know how corny this sounds, I do, but we just . . .” He turns away and shakes his head.

  “You just what?” I press.

  “We fell in love; we just did. Love at first sight. It’s real, you know? And she asked me to stay in town another week and be her date to her friend’s wedding next Sunday, and I was like, hell, yeah. Then we went out that night till whenever, and she told me to meet her back here for brunch the next day at eleven forty-five. I got here at exactly eleven forty-five, and she just . . . didn’t. She never showed. And being the total fool I am, I never got her number—I never even got her last name.” He shoots me a glance, probably regretting sharing so much with a stranger. “So I just keep coming back. Hoping she’ll be here this time. All I know is, this is her favorite café.”

  “It’s a good place,” I say, not even sure what I mean.

  “She said she liked to watch all the newlyweds coming out of Battery Gardens—you know, just starting the rest of their lives together, just beginning like we were. Like I thought we were. And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘Hey, Dumbass, she’s just not that into you.’ But you want to know what I think?”