The Girl with the Wrong Name

by Barnabas Miller

  “Nice try.”

  “No, I’m serious. Point the damn camera over there!” Suddenly, he’s not laughing anymore.

  “Dude. It’s just a camera.”

  “All right,” he says, barely turning to me. “You want the truth?”

  “Always.”

  “I mean, what the hell, you’ve already seen me cry like a baby. The truth is . . . I’m camera shy,” he declares.

  “That’s ridiculous. There is no possible way you’re camera shy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Have you looked in the mirror lately? People who look like you and claim they’re camera shy are liars. Are you a liar?”

  “I am not. But let me tell you something about people like me. People like me couldn’t drop their first deuce in the toilet without their folks turning it into a feature-length film. It’s called Andy’s First Deuce on the Toilet. I can send it to you if you don’t believe me. It has its moments, but it’s nothing compared to Andy’s Second Deuce on the Toilet or Deuce Three: Caribbean Vacation. Shit literally did not happen in my house unless someone took a pic or a video of it happening. Literally.”

  At least he’s smiling again.

  “You are a liar,” I say.

  “Theo, I’m begging you. I’d rather this moment not feel like I was dropping a deuce for my mama’s video scrapbook, okay?”

  I shove the phone back in my pocket and curse myself for taking it out in the first place. But inside my pocket, my fingertips find the tip of the button cam cord and guide it carefully back into the phone connector.

  Yes. Still recording.

  “Okay, it’s off.” Now I’m a liar, too.

  “So what do you think?” he says. “To ring or not to ring?”

  I climb the stairs and jab the button before he can argue. There are muffled chimes inside.

  “Theo!” he whispers.

  My heart thumps as I take my first good look at the building. Sarah isn’t just a Pretty Girl; she’s a Pretty Rich Girl. The double doors are carved antiques. But as I look closer, I notice the signs of age. A crack running down one of the second-story windows that any self-respecting Brooklynite would have repaired. Dead leaves and twigs piled up in the window boxes. Every other window box on the block is bursting with colorful flowers or at least a few splashes of green.

  I feel a hole growing in the pit of my stomach. It’s not a specific thought or emotion, just a rush of vague anxiety: loss and time and neglect. I might not have even felt it on a sunny day, but here in the darkness, with the rain trickling down the red bricks, it looks like the building is in tears.

  “Wait,” Andy says. He does a wet golden retriever shake of his head. “She didn’t want me to come in through the front. She wanted me to give her a few minutes and then meet her at the second-floor window around back.”

  “Oh, isn’t that so Romeo and Juliet,” I mumble.

  “Shut up.”

  “Okay. So Rapunzel?”

  “Just stay here.” He jumps down the stoop, snatches up his backpack, and steps up to the wrought-iron gate that guards the maintenance alley next to Sarah’s house. He peers through the bars. The next thing I know, he’s tossing his bag over the spikes and scaling the gate. Maybe he did jump all those turnstiles?

  Then he’s gone. “Andy?” I whisper into the alley.

  No response, just the sound of rainwater pouring down from the gutters on the roof. The hole in my stomach expands. It’s dark outside. The trees on Bergen Street are huge and leafy. They block the streetlamps. This isn’t the East Village, where the streets are lit up like a film set. Night actually looks like night in Brooklyn, and the moon is nowhere to be found. I unplug the button cam and pull my phone back out of my pocket to keep me company. If camera-shy Andy wants to disappear, at least I can shoot some quality HD footage of the house. I pan along the red bricks, up to that long crack on the second-story window, then back down to the arched window over the front doors, where I zoom in on the address. Two-Twenty-Four spelled in wrought iron—

  “Excuse me. What do you think you’re doing?”

  I nearly fall down the steps.

  A thirty-something mother and her child are standing at the bottom of the stoop. The mother has slim, pinched features and pointy cheekbones. A black headband keeps her hair firmly slicked back, and she wears a full-length tailored black coat—The Matrix by way of Boerum Hill. Her little girl wears a red rain hat, purple raincoat, and aqua galoshes. Her mother holds a Disney’s Little Mermaid umbrella over her head.

  “Hello,” I croak, trying to smile. “Is this your house?”

  “Can I help you?” the mother asks sternly.

  I sense it in her voice immediately. Fear. There’s a soaking-wet stranger with a weird-ass haircut skulking around her doorway. Probably a homeless meth-head casing her apartment for a box of Sudafed or a few Adderall from her medicine cabinet. I need to ease her mind.

  “Oh my God, where are my manners?” I giggle. “Might Sarah be home, by any chance?”

  Her eyes zero in on my phone. “Why were you filming my house?”

  “Oh, no, I was only—”

  “Are you filming me now?”

  “No, no, I was just . . .” I shove the phone back in my pocket and feel around to plug the button cam back in.

  Still recording. Still a liar.

  The girl gawks at my ghostly pale face. All I can think of is myself at that age—maybe five or six—before I’d read any Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, before I’d wanted anything more in life than the rare gift of Ho Hos from my mother as an after-school snack.

  I try to smile. Her ruby lips part in what looks like horror. She dives back behind her mother’s coat.

  Now I feel the same horror, a moment of realization: all that time in the rain. It had washed away the concealer and foundation—even the extra-firm gel in my hair. I’d spread the curtain wide open, and she’d seen the monster. The Phantom of the Opera unmasked. The only thing missing was the booming thunderclap when you cut to my gruesome close-up.

  “Sorry, I’m Emma,” I manage, turning back to the mom. I shuffle quickly down the steps and distance myself from them on the sidewalk. “Emma Renaux,” I add as they bound up the steps. “I’m a friend of Sarah’s from school—”

  “There’s no one here by that name,” the woman says, rifling through her purse for her keys. “You have the wrong house.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure this is the place.”

  “There are plenty of other houses like this one.” She shoves her daughter through the doorway. “My husband is right upstairs. Dale, can you come down here, please?”

  I wonder if Dale is actually home or if there even is a Dale. I also wonder if Dale has just found Andy Reese toppling through his bedroom window from the fire escape.

  “No, ma’am, that’s all right!” I assure her. “I really didn’t mean to bother you. It’s my mistake. I must have the wrong address. I am so sorry to disturb—”

  She slams the door, turning all three locks so I’m sure to hear them.

  I wonder if she is still watching me through the shutters. I wonder if I’m about to hear her little girl screech when she finds the imposing Texan boy in her living room.

  “Psst, Theo,” Andy whispers from the alley, “are they gone? You think she’s still watching through the window?”

  I storm over to the gate. “Where the hell were you?”

  He finally emerges under two pale slivers of streetlight, gripping the wet bars, his face jutting out like a prisoner’s. “I was searching the courtyard, trying to find a way in,” he whispers. “Then I heard y’all talking outside.”

  “So why didn’t you come out and help me?”

  “I told you. Sarah doesn’t want her folks to see me.”

  “This isn’t even Sarah’s place. That wasn’t her mother.
We have the wrong house.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Andy, that woman would have to have given birth at fourteen to be Sarah’s mother. We have the wrong house. There are plenty of other—can we not have this conversation here, please? If she sees me standing here, she’s going to call the cops.”

  “Okay, chill, woman.” He scales back over the gate and lands on the sidewalk, quickly dusting himself off.

  I hurry us down the block, trying to get as far from the house as possible before he says another word.

  The rain finally stops, but we’ve strayed from the more populated half of Bergen Street into “the other half” of Brooklyn—the sketchier half, where abandoned buildings and empty lots pop up on every other block. Some part of me knows to turn around and walk back toward Not-Sarah’s-House, toward a subway that will take us home. But the other part wants to keep moving in the direction we’re going.

  “I mean, that was her place,” Andy says, as if I’ve been arguing. “I mean, I get that it’s not her place, but it was. Shit, I don’t know what I’m talking about. What’s the matter with me?”

  I sneak a glimpse at his face. Confused and weary, that familiar hopeless set of his brow. I have to admit it was a little strange that he’d picked the wrong house after seeming so sure about 224 Bergen Street. But I’m beginning to develop a theory.

  “Andy . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t get mad when I ask you this question, all right?”

  “At you? I can’t even believe you’re still hanging out with me right now.”

  “Okay. How drunk were you on Saturday night?”

  He actually laughs. “A couple of beers, no more,” he says. “Believe me, nobody knows blotto better than I do, but I wasn’t even close. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself.”

  “Yeah, scratch that.” I rack my brain for another explanation. “I suppose there’s one other possibility.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well . . . what if it wasn’t her house?”

  “What do you mean? We know it’s not her house.”

  “No, I mean, what if it was the house she took you to, but it wasn’t actually her house?”

  Andy stops abruptly. I case the street; we’re in front of a decrepit old warehouse. There’s a collage of bright-yellow rat poison warnings pasted on the garage door behind him—big fat rat silhouettes with dark-red no symbols slicing through their stomachs.

  “You mean, like she lied to me?” he says.

  Seconds of ugly silence begin to stack up between us. This is the longest I’ve been away from my room in weeks, and I’m beginning to feel the side effects of cocoon-less living.

  “You know what? I have no idea what I’m saying—”

  “No. You’re saying she lied to me.”

  “No, no.” I wave my hands. “I didn’t mean it like that. Andy, I don’t even sleep at night. There’s nothing but scrambled eggs in my brain after six or seven. But I’m doubling up on my meds, so—”

  “Why would she take me to a house that wasn’t her house?” he demands. “Why would she send me off to the alley, break in, steal a sexy dress, and meet me at the back window for a quick getaway? Why?”

  “She so clearly did none of those things. Andy, I do the news at school. I’m always trying to find ‘the big story’ when there’s no story at all. I make documentaries.” I’m jabbering now, but I can’t stop. “After a while, you just start taking all your random footage and forcing it together into a story. It’s like my disease—”

  “No, but what if you’re right?” he says with a crack in his voice. “Oh, man . . . she took me to a fake house.” He backs up against the garage door and slides down its steel ridges until he’s crouched on the sidewalk, shoulders slumped. “She could have been lying about everything. What if everything she told me was a lie?”

  I crouch next to him, not wanting to get my butt wet on the rain-slicked sidewalk. “Just forget the house, okay? It could have been the next street over or a completely different neighborhood; it doesn’t matter. Let’s just move on—let’s keep retracing your steps. Where did you go after you picked her up?”

  He rubs his eye and takes a long breath. “We went out to a place,” he says.

  “Could you be a little more specific?”

  “It had flowers everywhere.” He stares vacantly at the empty lot across the street. “Daisies,” he says, snapping his fingers with a burst of new energy. “Daisies are her favorite flower.”

  I try not to smile. I know that loving daisies is far from unique, but the thought of having anything in common with Andy’s Golden Goddess feels like a shot of whiskey warming my chilled bones. “So you went to a park? Central Park?”

  “No, not a park,” he says. “There were flowers everywhere, but they were inside.”

  “Like the Botanical Gardens?”

  “No, not the Botanical Gardens, but . . . the Magic Garden!” He claps, giving me a start. “That’s what it was called, the Magic Garden.”

  “Like a club?”

  “A club.”

  I whip my phone out and Google “the Magic Garden club NYC.” I scroll through a bunch of hits for some children’s television show from the ’70s.

  On the third page, I strike pay dirt.

  “Here! This is it. The Magic Garden.” I read aloud from the club’s homepage: “Some of us spend our whole lives looking for paradise, never knowing that Eden was right beneath our feet. And only two blocks from the F Train! Get out of the Urban Jungle, people. Come and play with us.” Then, at the bottom, a rhyming couplet: “So come on in without a fuss, ’cause the Magical Garden is waiting for us! Well, that’s just adorable,” I deadpan.

  “I didn’t say it was a cool place.”

  “Do you have a decent shirt in that backpack?” I ask.

  “I guess. Why?”

  “Why do you think? The Magical Garden is waiting for us.”

  “No way.” He shakes his head. “You’ve done too much already. I can find her on my own.”

  I realize in that moment that Andy knows even less about me than I know about him. He has no idea how far I’ll go to feed an obsession. He has no idea that he’s been my obsession for the last five days, or that a brand-new obsession has just taken his place.

  I have to find Sarah. I have to find her for Andy, no matter what. Even if it means facing one of my darkest fears: putting on a dress.

  Chapter Six

  At the time, I owned exactly two dresses. One was the vintage wedding dress I kept wrapped in tissue paper, creaseless and pristine, inside the cedar Glory Box at the foot of my bed. (I preferred the Australian term glory box to the more traditional hope chest. It just sounded ballsier.) The other was a little black cocktail dress—a sleeveless pleated funeral smock that my mom had forced me to purchase at Ann Taylor last year because she wouldn’t let me wear a black hoodie and matching jeans to Todd’s Distinguished Teaching Award ceremony at NYU.

  I’d argued that nothing said “New York University” like a black hoodie and black jeans. I’d even thrown the words of her favorite American transcendentalist back in her face. “Didn’t Henry David Thoreau tell us to beware all enterprises that require new clothes?” But Mom said that no amount of transcendentalism could justify a black hoodie at an awards ceremony. Then she threatened to put me in therapy if I didn’t get over my issues with my “perfectly normal-size derriere.” I told her my fluctuating ass had nothing to do with my no-dress policy, but she had already won the war. Ann Taylor funeral smock, black tights, and clunky sensible pumps all the way.

  I stood at the bathroom sink in my black bra, tights, and Beats headphones and stared into the drain. The Darkness’s “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” was blasting through my ears at max volume. It was loud, and it was funny, and I needed the distraction if I was g
oing to make it through this.

  It had taken me almost a month to perfect this, but I could now look in the mirror without actually looking in the mirror. The trick was to focus your eyes on an extreme close-up at all times and never zoom out to full frame. I could focus in and pluck an eyebrow, or trace my lips with lipstick, or smooth down a hair that had curled out of place. But one false move and I might catch a glimpse of my entire self—bony elbows, pale stomach, disproportionate ass, goose neck, and, of course, the red gash.

  It could all be avoided in the daytime. Sweatshirts, T-shirts, and jeans could be applied mirror-less. The scar cover-up was more of an art project than a makeup job. But “pretty makeup” and evening wear were a completely different story. You can’t apply “pretty makeup” strictly in close-up; you have to see it in context. You think you’ve got the blush and mascara right, then you zoom out, and you’re staring at a Goth circus clown with Egyptian mummy eyes—or worst-case scenario: you’re that ninety-year-old lady at the diner.

  The same with a dress. You can’t judge it all by feel. You have to look and see if it zigs where it’s supposed to zag, or if the tag is showing, or if the hanger straps are creeping out under the arms, and you have to look at the ass. You have to. No woman—not even one as allergic to mirrors as I—can leave the house without checking the ass.

  A notification alert buzzed through my headphones: Max’s tenth consecutive text. He’d been texting me at fifteen-minute intervals since 7 p.m., and I’d been forcing myself to ignore them. He clearly needed me, but I knew if I answered even one, I’d get sucked into a long conversation, at which point I’d lose my nerve to go clubbing with Andy.

  MAXCELL: Where u at? Need a session NOW.

  MAXCELL: Dude, please don’t do the Invisible Theo routine right now. NEED emergency session.

  MAXCELL: When I say NEED, I mean NEED. A session. Now.

  MAXCELL: Hello? Fine, I’ll say it. EARTH TO THEO! MAYDAY, MAYDAY.

  MAXCELL: Okay, u are beginning to suck now.

  MAXCELL: Now u are fully sucking.

  MAXCELL: Unprecedented suckage. Your suckage mocks me . . .