Tag Along

by Tom Ryan

  “Oh my god, what a jerk!” says Candace.

  “Okay, this is stupid,” I say. “We’re not going to shake him. I’m going to take the truck home and get my mom’s car. Then we’ll go back and get Andrea and Roemi. I’ll deal with the ladder later.”

  I pull out of the parking lot and the cop follows, creeping on my bumper all the way to my street. When I get to my house and pull into the driveway, he slows down and watches as we get out of the truck.

  Finally he drives away, with a brief honk and a wave.

  Candace gives him the finger. “Hasta la vista, asshole!”

  My mom’s car isn’t in the driveway, and the door to the porch is locked. “I don’t know where they are,” I say as I unlock the door. I stand to the side and hold the door open for Candace. “Come on in.”

  CANDACE

  You can tell a lot about someone by seeing where they live. Until that point, the only information you have to go on is the way a person dresses and talks, maybe the music they listen to. But being inside someone’s house, it’s intimate or something, like all of a sudden you have a whole new set of clues.

  I remember the first time I saw Rick’s apartment. He lived with his dad, who worked night shifts, so we would go there a lot. The first time he took me there, I remember noticing how dingy everything was. Not much furniture, dirty dishes in the sink, an overflowing ashtray in the middle of the coffee table. When he opened the fridge to grab us some beers, I noticed that there was almost no food. But it was his room that really caught me by surprise. The walls were covered with a giant graffiti mural in progress—he’d actually spray-painted the walls of their rental apartment. I’d never even heard of a thing like that.

  Obviously I knew that graffiti was his thing—that was how I had met him, standing around in the shadows, watching him and his buddies throw up a huge burner underneath an overpass. To see how seriously he took it though—living in the middle of it…It was inspiring to see that kind of dedication.

  Paul’s house, by contrast, is more of a standard suburban two-and-a-half-kids kind of place. In the porch, hooks are overflowing with coats for all seasons, and shoes and sports equipment jockey for space with full recycling bins. I stand in the doorway and look around as he walks into the kitchen and reads a note stuck to the fridge.

  “They’ve all gone to a movie,” he says. “Shitty. Guess we won’t be taking my mom’s car after all.” He opens the fridge. “You want something to eat?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  He pulls a bowl of potato salad out of the fridge, grabs a fork and starts eating. “I’m starving. Just give me a minute.”

  “Sure.”

  “Hey, come on in, you don’t have to hang out in the doorway like that,” he says, his mouth full of food. “Sure you don’t want a Coke or something?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  He points at the fridge. “Grab me one too, will ya?”

  I get the drinks and then stand for a minute, looking at the pictures that are plastered all over the fridge door. A few random pictures of babies and some wedding photos. Paul with people who must be his parents. Paul with two younger boys who look almost exactly alike. They’re posing on bikes, having a water fight, sitting for school photos.

  “Twins?” I ask.

  “Yeah, my brothers. They’re thirteen.”

  “Oh my god,” I say, pointing to a picture of a short scrawny teenager in a suit, standing next to an old man. They’re both grinning broadly. “Is this you?”

  He laughs. “Yeah, me and my granddad at my aunt’s wedding. A couple of years ago.”

  “Holy shit,” I say. “You must have gone through one hell of a growth spurt after that.” I stop at a more recent picture of Paul with a tall healthy-looking girl with a confident smile and long strawberry-blond hair. Paul is standing beside her, smiling awkwardly.

  “This your girlfriend?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says, reaching past me to open the door and put the potato salad back in the fridge. “That’s Lannie.”

  “She’s hot,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, that’s Lannie. Listen, I’m gonna run to the bathroom. Make yourself at home.”

  While I wait, I walk into the living room and look around. On one long wall, next to more family pictures, is a shelf full of trophies and ribbons, most of them with Paul’s name on them. I was right: total jock.

  Paul comes bounding back down the stairs, two at a time.

  “So,” he says. “What do you think we should do?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Your friends must be wondering what happened to us.”

  “Yeah, no doubt. They’re probably long gone by now.”

  “Yeah.”

  Then there’s silence. It fills the room, and we both just stand there, looking at each other with no idea what to say.

  “Well,” I say, turning toward the kitchen and breaking the moment, “I should leave. I’ve got to go get my backpack.”

  “Why don’t I come with you?” he says. “I have to figure out what to do about that ladder anyway. It’s not that far to the quarry, if you know the right shortcuts. Besides, it’s only nine o’clock. I’m not ready for bed yet.”

  I shrug. My plan of lurking around town by myself has already gone to shit. Besides, I don’t mind spending time with Paul. He isn’t someone I can imagine being friends with in my real life. He’s the perfect teenager, all clean-cut and rosy-cheeked. The kind of guy who scores the winning goal in the important soccer game, says his prayers before supper and is always nice to his parents. He’s the exact opposite of Rick, in other words, but there’s something about him that makes him easy to be around.

  He’s right about the shortcuts. He leads me through backyards and across parking lots and before I know it, we’re back at the Ledge. Sure enough, Roemi and Andrea are nowhere to be seen.

  “Shit!” I say, realizing that my backpack isn’t where I left it. I look around frantically, but it’s gone.

  “Those guys must have taken it,” said Paul.

  “I sure hope so. My wallet’s in there, my keys—everything.” I sit on a rock. “This is turning out to be kind of a bullshit night.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he says.

  “No offense.”

  “Well,” he says, “there’s no way I can carry that ladder home, even if you help me. I’ll have to try and sneak out of the house and drive back to get it before my dad gets up for work tomorrow.”

  I nod, depressed about my backpack.

  “So why don’t we go see if we can find those guys?” he says. “They must be looking for us if they took your pack.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  Paul leads the way out of the woods, and we wander along quiet suburban sidewalks. It’s so different from being in the city, where every block has people on it, and every building is lit up.

  “So where are we going?” I ask.

  “Not really sure,” he says. “I figure we’ll walk to the strip and see if they’re wandering around or something.”

  The strip, no surprise, isn’t much busier than the back streets. A few cars drive past us, pulling out of fast-food drive-throughs, blasting shitty top-40 music. The more we walk, the more preoccupied Paul becomes. He’s just drifting along as if he doesn’t remember I’m with him.

  “Can I ask you something?” I say. He looks at me and nods.

  “Why did you help me back there? At the convenience store, I mean.”

  He thinks about it for a second. “I guess I could tell that you really needed help, and you looked like the kind of person who doesn’t ask for it very much from people. All I had to do was pretend to look at chips with you. And hold your hand. Not too tough.”

  I nod and we continue walking. “Why aren’t you at the prom with your girlfriend?” I blurt out.

  He stops in his tracks and turns to me. We’re standing at the bottom of a little grass embankment that rises up to a Walmart parking lot. It’s kind of
gross. A patch of matted dead grass, cigarette butts all over the ground. A crushed beer can sits next to a garbage bin.

  Paul doesn’t say anything for a second. Then he bursts out laughing and drops to the ground. He lies down on his back and stretches out, surrounded by little bits of garbage and bald patches in the grass. I sit down next to him and try not to think about how many dogs have pissed in this spot.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know, I don’t know.” He sits up and looks at me. “Okay, I do know.” He starts laughing again. I wonder if he’s having a nervous breakdown.

  “I do know,” he says again. He takes a deep breath. “It’s not like you know anyone around here, so what the hell. I have panic attacks. Do you know what a panic attack is?”

  I nod.

  “Well, I have them sometimes. I used to have them all the time, when I was a kid.” He pauses, chewing on his lip. “I usually had them the night before a test or during report-card week. Anything that was kind of stressful could set me off. My parents wanted to send me to a summer camp when I was about eleven, and I had such a bad attack in the car on the way there that they stopped and turned around.”

  He lies down again and puts his hands over his face. He laughs quietly but not happily. I check to see if there’s anything gross behind me, then lie down beside him.

  “So anyway,” he says. “I had these attacks for a few years, and so my parents sent me to a psychologist, and by the time I was in junior high, they were happening less and less frequently, and then they just kind of stopped. Which was great because they tended to get in the way of…I don’t know, everything. But then, this year, like literally over the past couple of weeks, they started up again.” He sits up. “I mean, what the fuck?”

  “What do you think brought it on?” I ask, standing up and brushing myself off.

  “Who the hell knows?” he asks. I reach down and give him a hand up. There’s a candy wrapper on his shoulder. I reach up to flick it off. We start walking again.

  “This morning I woke up to the sound of a text from Lannie,” he says. “It’s no big deal, she texts me all the time, but today…I guess it was the prom that set me off, maybe the pressure of it. It’s stupid, I know, but…”

  “You had another attack,” I say.

  He nods. “Yep. Luckily, my mom was around, and she’s been through it with me before, so she knew what to do. She called Lannie and made up an excuse for me, so I didn’t have to deal with it myself.”

  “How’d that go over?” I ask.

  “Like a ton of bricks,” he says, smiling. “I’m just happy that I didn’t have to talk to her.”

  “You don’t sound too worried about it.”

  “Well, Lannie’s a bit of a control freak, but she’ll come around. It’s not the end of the world. I’m sure I’ll be making up for it all summer though.”

  His face falls a bit.

  “What did your mom tell her?” I ask him.

  “Oh, that’s the best part. She said I had diarrhea, that I must have eaten some bad clams or something. Who knows how she came up with that.”

  He starts laughing. He has one of those laughs that is totally contagious, and before I know it we’re both doubled over, tears streaming down our cheeks.

  After a while we manage to calm down, and Paul wipes his eyes. “You know,” he says, “I think that’s the first time I’ve seen you laugh all night.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing about you,” I say.

  We’re standing there, and the traffic is whizzing by in both directions, and it’s that moment when the sun has gone down past the buildings but it still isn’t down over the horizon, so the air is totally clear and everything is vivid and colorful. Even the signs on the fast-food restaurants and the Walmart and the Canadian Tire across the street are kind of beautiful. I grin at him because it strikes me that this is so different than what I expected when I left Gee-ma’s house a few hours ago.

  “What is it?” he asks, smiling back at me.

  “Nothing,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s just funny. All of this.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “It’s turning into kind of a weird night.”

  “Do you want to maybe go somewhere and get a coffee?” I ask him.

  “Yeah,” he says. “That’s exactly what I want to do right now.”

  ROEMI

  Oh, Andrea. Poor hermetically sealed, under-socialized, fashion tragedy Andrea. I’ve always thought the term nerd was outdated. You might as well call someone a hepcat or a wench. However, when the shoe fits, wear it. In this case, the shoe is a denim flat with a ribbon on it, which more or less proves my point.

  When Candace and Paul leave us to get the ladder, Andrea immediately starts asking me what I thought about our exams.

  “Andrea, please,” I say, after listening to her drone on about chemistry class. “Exams are over for the year. Do you really want to do a play-by-play recap? Can’t you save some of this for one of your online science-group chats or something? You’re going to bore me to death.”

  “Well, what do you want to talk about?” she asks.

  “Let’s talk about how this is the worst night of my life. Let’s talk about how I should be at the prom right now, bumping and grinding with the love of my life. Let’s talk about my very personal human tragedy.”

  “Yeah. That’s pretty crappy,” she says. She doesn’t sound nearly as sympathetic as the situation warrants.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Crappy like the end of the world, I guess.”

  “Oh, come on,” she says. “It’s prom, not your wedding. You have your whole life to meet guys.”

  “Yes, and I intend to meet lots of them,” I say. “But in the meantime, I’m supposed to be having the best night of my life. Instead I’m with you, in a wrinkly tuxedo, waiting for Paul York to sneak his dad’s ladder into the woods so we can help some weird goth girl paint the Ledge. Forgive me if I’m a little heartbroken.”

  “What do you think is taking them so long?” she asks, ignoring a second great opportunity to console me.

  “Who knows? Maybe they decided to drive to the hardware store and pick up some scaffolding.”

  “No, seriously,” she says. “They’ve been gone for a while. Let’s go see if they need help or something.”

  When we’re almost out of the woods, we come across a ladder lying beside the trail.

  “Weird,” we both say at the same time. Sure enough, the truck is gone too.

  “What do you think?” I ask. “Is your money on a practical joke, a torrid affair or an alien abduction?”

  “I doubt she would have left her pack behind without a good reason,” says Andrea. “Something must have happened. Maybe somebody showed up and they had to leave.”

  She has a point. “What do you think? Should we wait for them?” I ask.

  Her response is typically lame. “I think I should probably start walking home,” she says. “I might as well face the fire sometime.”

  “Oh my god, Andrea,” I say. “You ran away from home! You’re going to get punished anyway, right? So you might as well take advantage of the situation in the meantime. Otherwise it’s like stealing a Ferrari, taking it out to run errands and maybe do some volunteer work and then returning it.”

  “Well, what do you suggest?” she snaps. “Should I wander around behind you all night, listening to you whine about being stood up?”

  “Oh snap,” I say. “That was kind of harsh.”

  “Yeah, it was, wasn’t it?” She looks embarrassed. “Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I shrug. To be honest, it’s the first real sign of life I’ve seen from her all night.

  “Seriously though,” she says. “What should we do?”

  “Let’s get out of here and see if we can find them,” I say. “It’ll be like an adventure.”

  “Not much of an adventure,” she says.

  “Work with me here,” I tell her. “Who knows? Maybe they got arrest
ed and we’ll have to break them out of jail!”

  “Well, if we’re going to leave,” she says, “we should do something about Candace’s backpack.”

  “What do you care?” I say. “She was kind of a bitch to you.”

  “I don’t want her stuff to get stolen though,” she says. “Maybe we should take it with us.”

  “It’s pretty heavy,” I tell her. “Besides, we don’t even know where they are. If we leave it here, at least she knows where she last had it.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” she says. “But we should hide it, in case someone else comes along.”

  “You’re very moral,” I tell her. “If someone talked to me the way Candace talked to you, I’d probably put dog shit in her bag instead of putting it away for safekeeping.”

  We go back into the quarry and Andrea shoves the pack deep into a thick shrub. Then we start walking toward the strip.

  “You know,” I say, “I actually think I have a legitimate reason to be upset. I was really looking forward to tonight.”

  “I know,” she says. “I’m sorry I was such a bitch. Sometimes I think I take things too seriously.”

  “No shit,” I say. “Weren’t you looking forward to prom?”

  “I was,” she says. “Believe it or not.”

  “Getting dressed up and dancing all night is pretty much the best thing ever,” I say. “I bet Justin would have thought you looked hella hot.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asks, turning quickly to glare at me.

  “Ouch! Enough with the devil eyes,” I say. “Come on, Andrea, it’s common knowledge that you have the hots for Justin Sanchez.”

  “Well, I sure never said that,” she says, as a slow blush rises up into her hairline.

  “Oh, Andrea,” I say. “You have so much to learn. Okay, let me put this in terms you can understand. It’s like you’re the sodium to Justin’s chloride. For example, I sit right behind you in chemistry class, and I’ve noticed that every time Justin raises his hand to speak, your whole body shifts.”