by Jen Doll
Fortunately, I’m rescued from answering this impossible question about love and marine life. Doris and my dad are walking toward us, and between them, holding their hands and swinging back and forth, is a kid in a yellow merman mask.
“Jack!” I scream, and run to them.
21
Doris
Afterward, everyone asks me how I knew. How did I go straight to Nell’s dad, who, unlike some adults, actually listened and believed me enough to go along with my suggestion? What magic was it that gave me any idea, having met Jack only once, where he would be? (Duh, my greatest power, as discussed.) But how had I possibly known that Jack wouldn’t be at the water park at all, which is why he wasn’t responding to the announcements on the loudspeaker? How had I known, immediately, that he had gone … home?
We found him in his room playing a video game. One of those noisy fantasy parables in which cartoon characters compete to do something underwater, collect gold coins, save a princess. (Could a princess ever save a prince, for once?) You could hear the music from down the hall, the bloop-bloop-bleep of canned gaming noise. Mr. Wachowski’s shoulders loosened, and he got a big smile on his face.
“Of course,” he said to me. “Doris, you’re a genius.” I grinned, too, because even though I’m not a genius, it does feel good when I can use my talent to help someone else.
There Jack was, sitting in his room, his small hands manning the controls, his swimming mask dangling around his neck. We walked in, and he casually held up one finger, like, no biggie, he’s in the middle of something, right? As if there hasn’t been a search party called out for him?
“Just a sec, guys,” he said, placid as pie. “I’m about to make it to level ten.” We waited for a second or two, and he did. Then Mr. Wachowski picked him up in a laughing-crying hug, and Jack put his head on his dad’s shoulder and patted his back and said, “Hey! It’s OK, Dad. It’s OK.”
“How did you find your way back here?” asked Mr. Wachowski. “How did you get inside?”
“Remember, I have a really good memory. And the back door was unlocked,” said Jack.
Mr. Wachowski shook his head. Now that Jack was safe and sound, it was time to lay down the law. “This will not happen again, son.”
I walked out of the room to give them a second. Across the hall was Nell’s bedroom. I wandered inside. She’d told me that before they moved, her parents said she could have it painted any color she wanted. She picked navy blue with glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.
“If I couldn’t live where I wanted, I wanted to feel like I was living in the sky,” she said. The dark blue and faint pinpricks of light gave the room an otherworldly feeling, like I was orbiting outside of myself. There was a big collage hanging over her bed—printed-out photographs of Nell with friends she’d told me about, and a photo-booth strip of her and Ashton, cheek to cheek in one, kissing in the next, gazing at each other in the third, and laughing hysterically in the last one. Around those images were bubble-letter messages saying things like “MISS U ALREADY” and “Don’t ever Change! xoxoxo” and “I u pony, ash” and “#teamhashtag #teamblessed #teamteam.” I didn’t know what it all meant, but it was clear she left behind something important.
* * *
We’re in the car driving back to the water park, and Mr. Wachowski is giving Jack another lecture about the rules, along with a stern eye in the rearview mirror.
“No more taking off,” he says. “You cannot do that. You have to tell us where you’re going. You cannot just leave because you feel like it. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” says Jack.
“Do you know how worried we all were? That we thought something terrible might have happened to you? Do you know what your mom said when I called her to say you were at home?”
“No,” says Jack in a small voice.
“She said, ‘Tell him I am never letting him out of my sight if he does anything like this ever again.’ Do you want to be under supervision for the rest of your life?”
“No,” says Jack. His voice is getting wobbly. “I didn’t mean to scare everyone. I just wanted to play my video game.”
“You do not get to just play video games without asking,” says Mr. Wachowski, and his voice is quiet, but so intense I almost jump out of my seat. “It is not safe for a little boy to walk home alone. If you need to leave, you tell us, and we will go with you. We are a family, and we stick together. Got it?”
Jack nods. “I’m sorry.”
“Good,” says Mr. Wachowski, his voice softening. “I know moving has been hard, on all of us. I love you, buddy. Your mom and sister and I wouldn’t know what to do if something bad happened to you. We need you!”
Jack and I both breathe deep, relieved that the scary part of the conversation is over, and Mr. Wachowski turns into the parking lot of the water park. We pass my car, still there from this morning, which now feels like a thousand years ago.
“Doris, tell me the story about the wave pool?” Jack asks me, reminding me of my promise to him earlier.
“You really do have a good memory,” I tell him. As we walk into the park I share the tale of how Aunt Stella and her friends used to dive to the bottom of the pool after the park closed each night to collect stuff that had been lost by visitors. They found so many things, ranging from swim trunks (how did someone leave the pool without their swim trunks?) to a deflated unicorn floaty to a pair of high heels (what? how? why?). One time she found a diamond necklace, and the next day a rich lady from Birmingham came to the park to claim it and thanked her personally with a check for five hundred dollars.
“Wow,” says Jack, his eyes big and round. “That could buy a lot of ice cream.”
That’s when old stories are forgotten in favor of current reality, which also happens to include soft serve. Nell and Grant—who I’d almost but not quite forgotten in all the drama—shout and start running toward us when they see Jack with me and Mr. Wachowski. Nell hugs her little brother in a tight embrace, and Grant shakes his hand solemnly. Then Nell peppers Jack with the same sort of questions their dad has already asked him, but Jack just answers patiently as we head for his mom, who’s waiting by the ice cream stand with tears in her eyes. She wastes no time laying into her son for leaving the park.
“I will not let you out of the house until you are fifty years old if you ever do a thing like that again, Jackson Augustus Wachowski!” she says so loudly that people at a nearby picnic table turn and stare. “We were so worried!”
“Yes, Mom,” he says, looking at her with big eyes. “I’m sorry, and I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she says, getting weepy again.
Gradually, the tension starts to fade, helped along by another round of ice cream, compliments of Mr. Wachowski. Jack is sitting on his mom’s lap, and Nell is wearing her brother’s merman mask like a headband and tickling his feet, and Grant is licking his own mint-chocolate-chip cone and not even turning his head when Chassie Dunkirk and a group of her friends stride by in teeny bikinis, their boyfriends in tow. The girls glance at us and huddle to whisper who knows what. I don’t even care. I just feel happy.
How did I know where Jack would be? All I can say is, I had a feeling. I know that sometimes all a person wants is to go home.
22
Nell
After we found Jack—after Mom and Dad and I took turns hugging him over and over again until he started laughing and yelling, “Enough!”—we were all kind of ready to get out of the water park. My parents invited Doris and Grant back to our place for pizza. (I think they’re hoping I’ll just forget about Ashton if I’ve got friends here, as if I’m not capable of feeling more than one thing at the same time. But I’ll take the pizza, anyway.) Mom insisted on making a salad, and Grant beamed and ate three helpings and told Mom it was the best arugula he’d ever had. For dessert, we had ice cream. It was my third ice cream of the day, but it tasted as good as the first.
After dinner, Doris and Grant and I head out t
o the backyard to hang out, and there’s the pink playhouse looming in front of us.
“What’s this?” asks Doris.
I give them a very short tour. “It’s kind of silly,” I’m saying, leading the way, “but at least it’s a place I can go and be by myself sometimes.” Grant nods like he totally gets it, and Doris acts like she’s just walked into a mansion full of velvet couches and fridges of mini cupcakes rather than an eight-by-ten glorified shed with a couple of blankets on the floor, books and magazines strewn about, and a half-empty water bottle I forgot to throw away steadily generating its own colony of bacteria. It’s anthropology, a look into a previous time of Nell.
“This is the perfect clubhouse,” Doris declares.
She’s walking back and forth inspecting everything, while Grant ducks to fit inside the doorway and takes a cross-legged seat on the wooden planks of the floor. “This is pretty cool, Nell,” he says. “Your own private spot.”
“It makes me want to start something, just so we can meet here!” says Doris, sitting down next to him. I join them, and we’re all facing one another in a small circle. “A website. A zine—aren’t zines back? Something! What can we start?”
“A babysitters club?” I used to love those books. “Not that I want to babysit.”
“A bar,” says Grant, and when Doris and I give him funny looks, he laughs quickly. “Just kidding.”
“A detective agency? Like an Unclaimed, but for lost people!” I say. “You’re the talent, Doris; Grant and I are your humble employees.”
“Ha,” says Doris, but she grins, and I can tell she’s proud she found Jack. “Say what you will, but I can find a kid, usually.”
I reach over and touch her arm. “I’m serious. Thanks,” I say, and her eyes get a little damp.
“No problem,” she says. “It’s what friends are for.”
She looks at Grant, but he’s staring down at his hands. I remember what she told me at the water park. Are we all really friends? I’m hers, and I decide to do something about it.
“Hey, Grant, why did you text Doris, anyway?” I say. “Why did you want to come and meet us at the water park? You never told us.”
Doris gives me the tiniest thumbs-up. Grant is oblivious.
“Oh, I dunno,” he says, picking up the water bottle and inspecting it. “This should be a science project, dude.”
I take the bottle out of his hand. “Grant.”
“I just wanted to see what you were up to. Seemed like it might be fun. I didn’t have anything else to do,” he says. None of this is particularly convincing.
Doris gives him the eye. “Really? All of a sudden, after years of pretending I don’t exist, you work with me for a couple weeks and then you decide you want to text me? Am I that irresistible?”
“You’re my boss,” he says. “You gave me your phone number.”
“What can I help you with, then, employee? Do you want to know your schedule for next week?”
She’s being sarcastic, but it’s working. He puts the water bottle down.
“Would you like an explanation of your benefits?”
He opens his mouth and closes it.
“Or a tutorial on how to unpack a suitcase? We can go over that again in the store, no need to interrupt your Sunday,” she says. “Though I do appreciate your dedication to the cause.”
“Stop.” He looks pained. “Look, I texted you because…”
Doris and I lean forward, as if that will help him get it out faster. “Yes?”
“I texted you because I was scared I was going to start drinking. OK?” He seems mad, but I don’t think it’s at us. He’s still looking at the floor of the playhouse. “I needed to do something. I was going crazy in my house. And I don’t really have any other friends right now, not friends I trust myself around. OK? Is that enough? Do you get it? I just needed to be with people and not drink!”
“Oh,” says Doris.
“Oh,” I repeat.
“Yeah,” he says, and we’re all silent for a minute.
“Well, that wasn’t what I thought you were going to say,” says Doris.
“You really didn’t know, huh?” he asks. “I guess they actually managed to keep everything quiet.”
“I think you’re going to have to start from the beginning,” I tell him. “I’m new here, remember?”
“And I don’t know who ‘they’ is,” says Doris. “Is this about Chassie?”
“Partly,” he says. “I guess in a way everything is about Chassie. She and Mac were at the water park. Nell was with me when I saw them.”
I’m starting to realize there’s a lot more to Grant’s pain than a breakup.
“I saw them together, too,” says Doris. “At the store, a couple weeks ago. And at the water park, when we were having ice cream after we found Jack.”
“Yeah, they’re dating now, and she won’t talk to me, and all I want to do is say I’m sorry, but she won’t pick up when I call, and I know I should leave her alone just like I should leave everyone else alone and most especially leave booze alone. But I can’t.” He looks down at his lap, shaking his head.
“Why should you leave her alone, exactly?” prompts Doris. “Aside from the fact that if she won’t pick up, you should stop calling and harassing her?”
“I broke her arm! Crashing the car in a ditch, which is why she’s still got her arm in a sling.” His voice cracks like he’s near tears, but gets steady again as he flatly recounts what happened. “I did all of that the night of the last spring game. But that’s not all: I got drunk. I ran the ball the wrong way, then found myself at the bottom of a pileup. First wrong-way run in our team’s history. Luckily, when you lose consciousness, you don’t hear all the boos. Later, even though I probably had a concussion, maybe because I had a concussion, I insisted on going to a party at Brod’s, where I proceeded to drink more. Then I insisted on driving us home. Hence, the crash.”
I’m silent. I have so many questions, but I can’t think of a single right thing to say.
“Is that all?” asks Doris.
“Isn’t that enough? We lost the game, thanks to me,” he adds. “Oh, and did I mention that I ran from the scene of the crash? I don’t remember that part because I was blackout drunk. But I vaguely remember the cops finding me a few blocks away in a random backyard, and I definitely remember Chassie dumping me the next day from her hospital bed. I can’t really blame her for that, or for having a new boyfriend.”
“You really can’t,” says Doris.
“She doesn’t respond to my voice mails, but she calls my mom to talk about whatever they talk about—probably whether I’m getting help.”
“Are you getting help?” I ask.
“I’m going to a therapist. Coach says if I work with her this summer and she gives me the all clear, they’ll put me back on the team in the fall. They need me to win,” he says. “The other thing is, I’m not supposed to talk about any of this. Coach said if everyone knew about the drinking, I’d never be able to play in a state competition again. There’s a no-tolerance policy that the rest of the kids ‘aren’t dumb enough to get busted for,’ is what he said. He told everyone I was taking a leave of absence due to injuries, a concussion. He said that would explain my big mistake. Running the ball the wrong way is, like, moronic. You lose all credibility—no one wants that guy on the team.” He looks at us with fear in his eyes. “Y’all really can’t tell anyone I’m telling you this. Please?”
“What about the cops? Why weren’t you arrested for drinking and driving?” I ask.
“They wrote it up as a vehicular problem,” he explains. “So I can still play next year. That is pretty messed up, isn’t it?”
“It’s illegal,” says Doris. “But also not that surprising, given how this town feels about football. Once you get a taste of winning, it’s hard to give up.”
“Don’t say anything, OK?” he asks us again.
“But why?” I ask. “I mean, you did some really bad thing
s. But they’re doing really bad things, too. I’ve never heard of telling a high school kid to cover up a crime. All this for football?!”
Doris nods. “God, guns, and Alabama football. Welcome to the South. Or the most stereotypical version of it. Which doesn’t mean some of that isn’t all too real.”
“You know what the worst thing is?” he asks. “I still want to be on the team.”
“Why?” asks Doris.
“It makes me feel like I’m not such a waste of space, for a minute, at least,” he admits. “But then it also makes me want to drink.”
“You need to tell this to your therapist,” I say.
“I can’t.” He shakes his head. “If I say how bad I am, they’ll never let me play. And if Grant Collins doesn’t play, who is he?”
“Maybe he’s the better Grant Collins,” says Doris. “You know, in the last weeks of knowing you, I’ve been surprised. Sure, you’ve been a typical football jock jerk a few times. But mostly, you’ve been pretty cool.”
“And funny,” I add.
“And sweet. You even helped look for Jack,” says Doris.
“Well, you’re the best friends I have at the moment,” he says. “And I happen to like Unclaimed, too. My mom wanted me to have a job because I was just lying in bed all day. I thought the idea was stupid. But now that I’m getting out of the house to work with y’all, they think I’m doing better, and I am doing a little better. That doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been lying to everybody all summer. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve snuck out to go drink with Brod.”
“Oh, Grant,” I say.
“I don’t know if I can stop drinking,” he whispers. “Even if I wanted to.”
Doris is leaning forward urgently. “Do you want to?”
“I think so?”