The Girl with the Wrong Name

by Barnabas Miller

  “Max, I need a session. Like, real bad. And a bed. Or a couch. Or a crib.”

  He pulls my arm around his neck like he’s dragging me from battle. My feet don’t even touch the ground as he carries me swiftly to his room.

  “What happened to you?” he asks as I float.

  “Too much,” I say.

  He sweeps up my legs and cradles me, and I don’t even resist. I just want to be lowered onto my rightful spot on his bed.

  “Max, I’m sorry,” I mumble. “I’m sorry about the way I ran off. That was very unprofessional of me. I can explain in the session.”

  “It’s okay,” he says, “but this might not be the best time for a session.”

  “Why? No, I don’t even care. I just need to close my eyes for a minute. Just put me down on my spot.”

  But when we get to the foot of his bed, I see that my spot has been taken.

  By Lou.

  She pops up to her knees on the bed, her face slack with shock. I’m drenched in sweat, there’s street soot all over my dress, my feet are blackened and blistered, and I have a generally unconscious demeanor. I don’t blame her for being frightened. “What the hell happened?” she asks, her eyes flashing to Max.

  “Too much,” he replies, gently laying me down at the foot of the mattress.

  I lie back. Max and Lou lean in; their faces hover overhead like two pessimistic surgeons. Lou is fully clothed in one of her New-Lou floral skirts and a form-fitting black tank top, but despite all the insanity and confusion swishing around my brain, I can’t help asking. “Were you two just in bed together? Not that I have any problem with—”

  “No,” they bark in unison.

  Lou looks at Max and nods.

  “I called her because I was worried,” Max explains.

  “We both were worried,” Lou stresses.

  “We just needed to clear some things up,” Max says. “Lou told me what she thought was going on with you and me.”

  “And I owe you a big apology, Thee,” Lou says.

  “I told her you thought the letter was for Mike—”

  “Mike DeMonaco!” Lou laughs incredulously. “You must have thought I’d lost my mind! But then I remembered our talk about how stripper-pole obvious I was being. I thought you meant it was obvious that I was trying to make Max jealous by draping myself all over Mike.”

  “The point is, no,” Max says. “No, we were most definitely not in bed together. I mean, we were physically in the bed, but not—”

  “Forget it,” I moan to the ceiling. “I’m just glad you’re both here. I need you both here.” Summoning what little energy I have left, I reach out and grab their hands, squeezing firmly, feeling for one fleeting moment that glorious sensation of not being alone. But like I said . . . fleeting.

  “Thee?” Lou leans closer. “Are you crying?”

  “Probably,” I say. I blink. I feel wetness on my cheeks. So yes, I am crying.

  Max drops down on his knees next to me. “Okay, that’s it,” he says, wiping away my tears with his thumb. “You have to tell us everything. For real this time, Thee. Everything. I told Lou about your freak-out at the wedding, and she told me about this Andy guy—this new documentary subject. Was that Andy’s wedding we were at?”

  I try to smile through my tears. “Yes and no,” I say. “It depends on which Andy you mean.” My eyes move from side to side, watching their expressions.

  “Are there . . . two Andys?” Lou asks hesitantly. Her eyes flash to Max again.

  I hold my breath, waiting. I just need Andy to say something in my ear. Anything. I’ve kept my earpiece. I’ve kept my button cam feeding into my phone, but I haven’t heard a peep since I bolted from the car. I just hope he can hear my next question and maybe begin to understand.

  “Do you guys believe in ghosts?” I ask, forcing my eyes to stay open.

  They share another inscrutable glance. “Maybe,” Lou says.

  “Better question: do you think you have to be dead before you can be a ghost? I mean, do you think a younger version of someone could be a ghost, even if his older self is still alive? Because I think that’s what’s happening. I think I’ve been with the ghost of Andy’s younger self, and we’ve spent all this time trying to find someone he’s never going to find.”

  This elicits no response. No answer, not even an attempt to try to maybe look for an answer.

  I stare up at them. They stare back.

  My body is shutting down—demanding sleep in return for everything I’ve put it through. I ride that fine line between mumbling to my friends and mumbling in my sleep. “He still thinks it’s 2003. He knows something happened to her, but he can’t remember what. He can’t let go of her. So he just keeps waiting. Every day, waiting and waiting for her to come back. And isn’t that really what a ghost is? A spirit who refuses to let go, who refuses to stay in the past?” I allow my eyes to close. “Andy, if you can hear me, please say something. Do you understand what I’m telling you? You have to let her go.”

  “Theo,” Max’s voice chimes in gently, “it’s going to be okay. You just need to sleep. Just let yourself sleep for a while, okay?”

  Warm darkness begins to carry me away. But I can still hear them. They think I’m already asleep, but I can still hear their voices.

  “God, you’re right,” Lou mutters. “She’s hallucinating.”

  “I know,” Max says. “It’s bad. She needs help.”

  “I knew something was weird when she told me about the Andy thing,” Lou says. “Jesus . . . ghosts,” she adds sadly. “She thinks she spent the last week with a ghost.”

  But I did. Lou, you know me. You have to trust me. Just check the footage. Check the footage on my phone, and you’ll see him. You’ll see he’s the same as he was in 2003. He hasn’t aged a day in twelve years.

  “I wasn’t sure until she said that thing about the gash,” Max says. “I’m telling you, she thinks she still has some kind of cut on her face. Or a scar or something.”

  What are you talking about? Of course I have a scar.

  “Oh, God, that’s why she got her hair cut like that,” Lou gasps. “To cover her face. That’s why she’s been wearing all that makeup. That’s why she keeps pulling her hair down like that.”

  What are you guys talking about? You know I have a scar. Why are you pretending? I need to force those words from my mouth, but I can’t. I’m fading. It’s like counting backward from ten when they prep you for an operation on the surgical table. You don’t remember losing consciousness; you just . . . slip away.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I woke to the sun burning my eyes. My throat was parched. I could hardly swallow. I pulled the sheet up over my head and caught a familiar whiff of Tide detergent.

  This is my bed. How did I get back to my bed? How long did I sleep? Is it the next day?

  I threw the sheet off my head and sat up, scowling in the glare. My mouth felt cottony.

  I was still in my wedding dress, now gone the way of the funeral dress: stained with dirt and sweat, crushed in ugly folds, the collar drooping down like two withered daisy petals. All that was missing was the puke. I was ’70s Elvis impersonator in drag after a night in prison.

  Who brought me back home?

  I looked over at my coffee table and saw Andy’s loaner phone, right where I’d left it before the wedding. Had he come back to my room last night? Was he the one who brought me home?

  Closet. Check the closet.

  I felt so many kinds of unpleasantness when I stepped out of bed. The sting of my blistered feet, shooting pain in my shins, dizziness from standing upright. But I shambled to the closet door and threw it open. Nope. Nothing but stacks and stacks of Sunday Times. Andy had abandoned his nest.

  I sat down on my couch to get a better look at his phone, but when I landed, I saw my phone next to hi
s, propped against a stack of composition notebooks. A Post-It was pasted to the screen.

  PLAY ME IF YOU WANT THE TRUTH.

  I knew the handwriting; it was Max’s. Had he brought me here? He must have had a very good reason for swiping the phone from my dress pocket while I’d been passed out. Maybe Andy . . .

  Oh, please don’t let it be some kind of final message. Don’t let this be Andy’s last goodbye.

  I could sit there for another hour speculating, or I could just press play.

  The jittery white screen comes to life. It’s blank, white. A shade of white I can’t recognize at first. Not white paint, not a cloud, not a ceiling, not a piece of paper. It’s as pale as tissue paper, but with pink undertones. It’s not flawlessly smooth like paper, but imperfect and textured, almost like . . .

  Flesh. Oh, God, it’s human flesh.

  I shrink farther into the couch as the camera zooms out. I don’t want to see any more. I want to press stop. I know it’s a body. I can tell by the skin that it’s female. Hairless, smooth, female flesh. How old is this video? Is this Sarah? Some dreadful swath of her body, stripped naked?

  No, it’s a cheek. A pale white cheek.

  The camera pulls out farther to reveal an ear, and then strands of dark hair pulled behind the ear, and then finally a face.

  I know the face, but I don’t.

  It’s my face. It’s the left side of my face, couched in my pillow, lit up bright white by the sun as I sleep. But it can’t be the left side of my face. There’s no scar. There’s a tiny pink nick just below the ear. That’s the only blemish. Not even a zit. Just smooth, sunlight-deprived skin. My skin. This must have been taken before I was disfigured, before The Night in Question.

  The shot zooms out farther still.

  I stop breathing. I’m wearing my filthy wedding dress. This was filmed this morning. The camera swings over to reveal Max and Lou. Lou holds the camera as they stare into the lens together.

  “Thee, I hope this works,” Lou whispers, careful not to wake me.

  “If it works,” Max says, “then please come out into the living room. And remember, we all love you. I mean, not like—”

  “Ugh, Max, you’re a nightmare.” Lou slaps his shoulder. “Don’t make me shoot another take.”

  “Sorry,” Max whispers. He looks back into the lens. “Sorry.”

  “Thee, we all love you,” Lou says. “We just want to talk to you and make sure you’re okay. I hope this helps you see things a little more clearly.”

  Her finger dives into the lens, and the clip ends.

  I sat there, motionless, feeling just like Andy had so often looked. But I felt more than just lost. I felt behind. Like I was stuck on a satellite delay.

  I stuffed the phone in my pocket and bolted for the bathroom mirror, half sick at the thought, half praying for it to be true. Could I wake up from a two-month nightmare and have the slate of horrors wiped clean? Like Dorothy clicking her heels? When I grasped the edge of the sink and leaned into the mirror . . .

  It was still there. As huge and gory as ever. Maybe even worse than before. It was punishing me for even entertaining the notion. I couldn’t understand it. I believed in video nine times more than I believed in myself; Lou knew that. She knew the words would have meant nothing to me, but the image meant everything. So why the hell was there no scar in the video? Who was the girl in the video? Who was the girl in the mirror? Something inside me roared to the surface, and I cried out. “Lou!”

  There was a patter of footsteps, and she was through my bathroom door in seconds, her arms wrapping tightly around me. “I’m here,” she said. “I’m right here.”

  “It’s still there,” I whimpered, clutching her back with one hand, pointing at the mirror with the other. I touched my face and felt only that smooth skin. “I mean, it’s there, but it’s not here. It’s not . . . I don’t understand what’s happening.”

  Lou gently shushed me and caressed my matted hair like the mom I’d always wanted. “Thee, sweetie, it’s okay.”

  Max appeared in the doorway but didn’t cross the threshold. I waved him in urgently; I needed him, too. He swept us both into an embrace, and I rested my head between their shoulders. He was the one who’d carried me home. I was sure of it.

  “Max, why is it here but not there? I don’t understand.”

  “Thee, this happens,” he said. “This happens to people all the time.”

  “What happens?”

  “People get sick. They take too many meds, they stop sleeping, they see things, they hear things.”

  I lifted my head.

  “Don’t be scared, okay?” Lou said, her voice breaking. “You’re just having a little problem separating reality from fantasy right now.”

  I swallowed. I’d heard those words before. I’d heard them out of Lester Wyatt’s mouth. “Who told you that?” I demanded, shaking free of their dual hug. “Who said that to you?” I backed out of my bathroom.

  Lou watched me back away, her eyes bleary and pleading. Her right hand was clenched in a fist. “Thee, please,” she said meekly. “Please don’t get mad at us.”

  If she didn’t want me mad, then she shouldn’t have quoted Lester Wyatt. I began to stammer. “You—you’re saying I’m just ‘imagining’ the scar. I’m just dreaming it up out of thin air.”

  “Among other things,” Max said.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Lou held out her right hand, unclenching her fist. “This.”

  In her palm was my earpiece.

  I brought my finger to my left ear. It was gone. It must have fallen to the floor in my sleep, and Lou must have found it.

  “Was Andy talking to you through this?” Max asked. “Is that why you kept holding your ear at the wedding?”

  “Yeah, I wired us for two-way com—”

  “Thee, it’s completely dead,” Lou interrupted quietly. “I tested it. The circuitry is shot. I’m not sure if it ever worked. It’s a piece of plastic. Unreliable junk, like Schaffler always says.”

  “No, it probably broke last night,” I said. “There was static . . . It probably shorted out. You have no idea what I went through last night.”

  “No, I do,” Lou said. “We watched all the footage.”

  “What footage?”

  “All of it,” Max said. “All the footage for your new doc. All the scenes.”

  “Ugh, thank God. Then you know I’m not crazy.”

  Both of them looked down at the bathroom floor.

  “Stop that,” I said. “Stop it.” I ripped the phone from my pocket and searched the cloud drive for all my Andy files, picking one at random. Wednesday, September fourth. I hit play . . .

  A shaft of sunlight illuminates an empty chair. I recognize it instantly as one of the chairs from the Harbor Café.

  “Andy,” my voice says from behind the camera, “not that I saw you crying, but . . . why were you crying?”

  There’s no response from the empty chair. It is a long, boring, static shot. It’s like watching one of those awful experimental Warhol movies. “Chair,” he might have called it.

  “Who?” my voice asks the chair.

  Beyond the silence, there’s only the ambient sound of chitchat. At tables. On cell phones. Or on their Bluetooth headsets.

  It was “Bluetooth or Psycho?” One of Max’s favorite games. Three seconds to decide if the annoying dude yammering to himself is an asshole talking hands-free on his phone or a raving lunatic.

  Everyone in that café thought I was the asshole. They assumed I was talking to my friend Andy on the hands-free. But they all had it wrong. I wasn’t the asshole. I was—I am—the raving lunatic.

  “Well, come on. She’s not even an hour late,” my voice tells the empty chair. “I’m assuming she’s a ‘Pretty Girl’?”

  I
can’t take it. I mash my finger down on the stop button.

  I began scrolling wildly through my video gallery, scrolling up and down, mumbling, “No, no, no . . .”

  “Thee,” Lou said, stepping closer.

  “No,” I snapped. “No, just give me a . . . Just wait.”

  “Thee,” Max said.

  “NO, Max! Just . . .”

  I picked another clip from the next day. Thursday, September fifth . . .

  Another Warhol movie. “Rainy Street,” he might have called it.

  The camera bounces up and down, left and right, but the star of the movie is rain. Pounding droplets, a shower drenching brownstones and leafy trees.

  “That’s ridiculous,” my voice says from behind the camera. “There is no possible way you’re camera shy.”

  I can’t watch anymore. There’s no need.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It’s a unique moment, knowing that the two people whom you know best are scared shitless that they don’t know you at all. And I loved them even more for letting me freak out in silence. Both of them. We stood there for I’m not sure how long. I glanced back toward the open closet. Andy’s empty nest.

  I wouldn’t have seen the footage for days. Maybe even weeks. Not until it was time to edit. But I didn’t even need the phone anymore. I had the playback in my head:

  The way Emilio stared at us—at me—from across the street. He wasn’t being a protective father figure; he was watching me, baffled, as I talked to thin air.

  The bouncer at the Magic Garden who refused to acknowledge Andy’s presence no matter what he said. The club rejects in the back alley who laughed as I talked to myself, swinging punches at no one. The way Max didn’t see Andy when he ripped open the closet that night, even though he should have been impossible to miss.

  No one had ever seen Andy Reese. Only me. I thought Emma and Tyler had seen him, what with the way they kept warning me to stay away. But they weren’t talking about my Andy, were they? They were talking about Lester Andrew Wyatt, Emma’s thirty-year-old fiancé. All this time, I’d been hiding Andy away from my mother and my friends for so many different reasons.