by Jen Doll
“Hi, sweetie, how are you? How is your friend doing?” she says. “I’ve been praying for y’all.”
Prayer may not be my method of bringing peace and hope to myself and others, but in this moment, I appreciate her effort—I know it’s her way of saying she cares.
“Thanks,” I say. “They set his arm and now we’re going back to the Wachowskis’. Is it OK if I spend the night? I’d like to be there for Nell. Then she can take me to get my car in the morning. It’s still parked at the restaurant.”
“OK, but be back for lunch, please. I want to see you, and I’ve got an afternoon catering job.”
“Will do,” I say.
“I love you, honey. I’m so glad you’re safe.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
After we get back to Nell’s and help Ashton inside and tuck him into her bed—he smiles groggily at both of us and whispers, “Nice to meet you, Doris,” before turning to Nell and saying, “Good night, Pony”—we head out to the playhouse to talk.
The new plan is for us to stay out there, since Ashton’s in Nell’s room. So we bring sheets and blankets to put on top of the air mattress and set everything up for a sleepover. We curl up and talk about what happened to Ashton for a long time, and about what it means to do something about it. I’m still racking my brain trying to figure out who the guy is, and Nell is outlining her best revenge schemes. Then we try to figure out what we should do about Grant. All our calls are going straight to voice mail. I don’t even know if he has his phone. I don’t know where he is, or how hurt he might be. I think for a split second that maybe the person my mom should have been praying for is him.
“I’m scared he’s drinking,” I confess to Nell.
“Me too,” she says. “Did you see the look in his eyes when he held that guy against the wall? I’ve never seen him like that before. It was so intense.”
“I’m going to call his mom,” I say. “I think it’s time we told her everything.”
“Are you sure? What if he hates us?”
“I think we have to.” I’ve been pondering this all evening. “If something bad happened to him, I’d never forgive myself.”
“You’re right,” Nell tells me, and she and I call Grant’s mom on speakerphone. Even though it’s super late at this point, Mrs. Collins, like my own mom, picks up on the first ring. There’s panic in her voice, this time not even concealed.
“Doris, I’m so glad you called. Have you seen Grant?”
“Not since this afternoon,” I explain. And then we tell her everything.
46
Grant
Muscle memory is a weird thing. After I do what I have to do at the police station, the next thing you know, I’m on autopilot. I go where I’ve always gone before. The place I can count on in a crisis. Or the place I used to be able to count on.
There’s Brod on the couch, a bong in front of him and a six-pack of icy cold Bud, condensation dripping onto Brod’s mom’s coffee table. In Brod’s dad’s La-Z-Boy, there’s a guy I’ve never seen before, older—maybe in his thirties—with a perma-scowl on his pinched face.
“Hey, bud,” says Brod, lifting an arm in the air as if to high-five me, but not getting up from the couch. “You know Mercer,” he says. She giggles and pops a fresh beer open. “You’re a wreck,” she tells me. “Did you fall on your face again?” Her giggle isn’t nice.
“And this is Dave,” says Brod.
Dave lifts his eyebrows at me and looks even meaner. “You the big football star?” he asks. “’Cause you don’t look like it. You look like you got your ass whupped.”
“No,” I say. “I’m not the big football star.”
“Yeah, you are.” He squints at me like I’m trying to play a joke and he’s not having it, not at all. “You Grant Collins? Why you gonna lie?”
“I’m not lying,” I say. “Yes. I’m Grant Collins. I’m not a football star.”
“I’ve seen you play,” he says.
“I’m not playing anymore.” I reach for my own beer, which I open and chug, mostly so I don’t have to talk to him. He keeps a beady eye on me, gesturing at Brod to pass him the whiskey, which Brod silently does.
“If you ain’t playing, you ain’t a star,” he finally says, drinking a huge swig straight from the bottle. He hands it to me, and I take it, but I don’t want to put my mouth right where his has been, so I put the bottle gently on the table next to Brod. Mercer watches us, her eyes going back and forth between me, Brod, and Dave. I feel sick to my stomach.
“You too good for us?” Dave asks.
“Chill, dude,” Brod says in his placating way. “We’re all friends here.”
“I don’t want to chill,” says Dave, who’s apparently about to get way less chill. “I want this piece of shit who comes here and drinks all your beer and takes whatever he wants because he thinks he’s some superstar football player to settle up what he owes.”
Mercer giggles in a freaked-out kind of way.
“I don’t think I’m some superstar football player,” I answer. “I just told you I wasn’t. What’s your problem, man?” I reach for another beer because, what the hell, this stranger is not going to tell me what to do, and I chug that one down as they watch me.
“My problem is that you’re a user.” Dave stands and points at me. “You’re a user and a loser. Hey, do me a favor, buddy?”
“What?” I say, and regret it immediately.
“Ask your girlfriend whose dick she likes better, mine or yours.”
You know what’s funny? I can tell from the way Mercer sucks in through her teeth that she thinks he’s talking about her. But she’s not my girlfriend. She never was. And Chassie’s not my girlfriend, either, not anymore. No, now when I hear “girlfriend,” I think of the person whose face I’ve been watching all summer. Her dark hair and eyes. How she tells it like it is. How she’ll fight for people who are weaker or who need help. How she never took my shit, but also was there for me when I needed her, even when she didn’t know if she could trust me. It’s Doris. The person I’m least likely to ever be with romantically. And the person I want to be with the most.
“Or are you too busy hanging out with those nerd bitches to have a girlfriend anymore? I hope you’re at least doing them both,” says Dave, sneering at me. “The whole damn town is laughing at you.”
“How do you even know Nell and Doris?” I ask.
“Chassie told everyone,” he says. “She says you’re dating that lib-tard snowflake who doesn’t believe in God. Or are you dating them both, her and her Yankee friend? Are they lesbos, like that other girl she’s friends with?” He makes this grotesque face.
Then I’m punching him, and he’s punching me, and Brod is trying to separate us, and Mercer is saying, “Oh my God,” over and over again.
I vaguely remember running out of Brod’s apartment, through the back door, and I definitely remember grabbing a liter of Jim Beam that was there on his kitchen counter, and I remember running some more out into the night, drinking and running and running and drinking, grass squishing under my feet, cicadas calling each other around me, wondering who was invading their private nighttime space, and then stopping when my sides hurt so bad I couldn’t run anymore, and touching my face and looking at my hand and seeing blood. And I remember finding a door, and opening it and going inside, and falling onto something surprisingly soft, and that, I guess, is when everything went black.
I wake up.
There’s a drumbeat in my head like the entire high school marching band is outside. The fog clears a little, and I start to panic because I realize I’m in Nell’s playhouse, of all places. I’m on an air mattress. Around me there are blankets tangled up like a tornado has made its way through here and piles of books lying around, mysteries and some dog-eared paperbacks and The Maltese Falcon, which I remember Nell mentioning. MacGuffins, what’s a MacGuffin, again? I wonder if football is my MacGuffin. Or maybe it’s my albatross. It’s something bad. My fingers have
been making a pillow for my head, and I raise myself and look at them, and see that all the fighting has left my nail polish a mess, black flecks on my fingers. And that’s when I remember. I put my head down again, and I close my eyes.
There’s a scraping noise, and the door to the playhouse is being opened, and I try to gather myself, shielding my aching eyes from the sunshine streaming in. There she is, as if I’ve conjured her. Doris is standing in front of a backdrop of morning light, and she looks like someone sent from heaven or somewhere even better. Maybe I’ve got a concussion. But she looks … beautiful, her dark hair tousled from sleep, her expression confused but also expectant, as if it’s not even unusual that she might find me here. As if she’s sort of happy to see me.
“Grant,” she says, light and a little nervous and filled with so much want it almost embarrasses me, “we’ve been trying to find you all night.” I stare at her and she starts talking fast, the way people do when they’re trying to fill an awkward silence. “Nell and I were sleeping out here, but, well, she went inside to see how Ashton was in the middle of the night, and I woke up and didn’t want to be alone, and I ended up sleeping on the couch inside. I just came out here to get my phone. And … what happened to you? Did you get our messages?”
“I don’t know,” I say slowly. It’s not entirely a lie. I don’t know where my phone is, either. Consider that just another casualty of the last twenty-four hours.
She comes in and closes the door and kneels down next to me. She touches my face, and I wince. I haven’t seen myself, but I must be covered in cuts and bruises, even more than I was when she saw me last. I lean into her touch, and even though it hurts more, it’s a good kind of hurt. I feel her hands, and I see her soft mouth, real and right in front of me, and I kiss her.
47
Doris
This was not, I assure you, how it was supposed to go. This was not the plan. But when I’m lying in the pink playhouse with Grant’s arms wrapped around me, I can almost believe it’s the right thing. I snuggle in closer to him, breathing in the boy smell of his neck and feeling so safe. So the opposite of how I felt the day before.
That’s when the door to the playhouse swings open and I see Nell’s brother.
“Not now, Jack!” I say. Behind Jack is someone who gasps, the way that people gasp in soap operas when they find out so-and-so has been having a secret affair with so-and-so, and all the so-and-sos are also first cousins, or maybe brother and sister. Except it’s just Nell, and she loves love, and she’s been wanting this to happen for most of the summer. She’s not mad. She’s excited.
“Oh,” she says, pushing her brother away from the door. “Oh. Doris! Grant! Are you OK? Should I leave you alone? Oh my God, is this finally happening? Are you guys … are y’all … together?
“Holy shit,” she says, finally really seeing Grant. “You look worse than Ashton.”
“He was here when I came back out to find my phone this morning,” I say. “He must have come inside in the middle of the night and fallen asleep. He … surprised me. And then…”
I trail off, because there’s little room to hide the fact that I was making out with Grant Collins, who passed out drunk in the playhouse after God only knows what he did last night after the fight at La Casita. From the looks of it, ran amok through town getting into more fights and drinking his face off. His swollen eye is turning black, and there’s blood spattered across his white T-shirt, which is ripped at the neck and hanging off one shoulder.
He smells like a distillery, and I let him kiss me anyway. I kissed him back.
I’d do it again.
“Hey, what’s going on?” says Jack, who’s back in the doorway. “What are you guys doing? I wanna see. Hey, Grant, wanna play video games?”
Grant has lifted himself upright and all of a sudden looks yellowish-green. “I … I gotta go,” he mutters, and stumbles toward the door. I stand up to go after him, try to hold his hand, but he jerks away.
“I … can’t,” he says. “Right now.”
“Let me help you,” I tell him.
“Don’t leave,” says Nell. “We can have breakfast. Me and Ashton and you and Doris! My dad will make pancakes. You should eat something. And then you can tell us what happened to you. Are you OK? You don’t seem OK.”
Grant ignores us. He’s hobbling out of the playhouse, limping on one foot, and then he breaks into a weaving, wobbly run. Nell and I watch him disappear into the neighbor’s backyard. He was here, and now he’s gone.
“Why’d he leave?” asks Jack.
“Maybe he just needed to clear his head for a second,” says Nell, and I almost cry because there’s so much hope in her voice, but I’m scared that what Grant told me at the balloon festival is true: Wanting doesn’t change things. You can want and want and want, but that doesn’t bring your aunt back, that doesn’t prevent a racist from hurting your best friend’s boyfriend, that doesn’t get you the guy you want, even if you’ve spent most of your life telling yourself you don’t want him—only to realize one day how very much you do.
I try to turn my mouth up in a smile, to give Nell back a little of the hope she’s trying to give me, but nothing seems to be working the way it’s supposed to.
* * *
When people are scared or alone or threatened or sad or even bored, usually the place they most want to go is home. That’s what Jack did. That’s what I did, after the waterslide incident. But home isn’t always a house, or even the place you grew up in. It’s where you feel most yourself, most right in your own body. Is it any surprise that that place, for me, is Unclaimed?
The summer before, I’d spent so much time in the store by myself after hours. I’d stay late and organize things just to be by myself, and it was nice, a home away from home. This summer, surrounded by my two new friends, it was even better. At least that’s how it seemed. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe being alone is better than being hurt.
It’s still so early in the morning the store hasn’t opened yet, and I’m the only one there. It’s so quiet! I open the door and lock it behind me and listen to the low hum of the fluorescent lights coming on. Then I walk slowly from the front of the store to the back, pausing by racks of clothes and goods. I reach out and touch some of the things I remember unpacking, like they’re old friends. The fur coat with the raccoon-tail collar (that coat is not a friend to raccoons!), the four-book collection of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a sequined ball gown that appears to be made by Versace but is probably a knockoff because the a on the tag looks like an i, the pile of stuffed animals with the furry owl, the weird dog that kind of looks like a bear, and the manatee. Wait, who put the manatee out here? Like a toddler, I think, The manatee is mine. I grab him and carry him back to the safety of the stockroom.
My phone beeps. Nell.
Hey, u there? Worried about u. Pls write back
I text her fast.
Don’t worry. I’m OK. I’ll b in touch soon. Is Ashton OK?
Her answer comes immediately.
Yeah. Still sleeping. Call if u need me, K?
, I write back. Same.
I look again at my incoming messages. My mom wants to know if I’m still at Nell’s and if I’m OK; I text back and say I’m at the store for a little bit and will be home soon.
There’s nothing from Grant. I didn’t really expect anything. I turn my ringer off and slip my phone into my bag. I need time to think.
I head to the stockroom. I walk through the stacked shelves, looking at all the old familiar items that have been there so long, and the new ones, and the boxes of stuff we have yet to unpack. Another shipment just came in. There’s no end to what people can lose.
I pick up the Magic 8 Ball and I ask it the question I’ve been wondering ever since Mrs. Stokes told me there was something I should know about Aunt Stella, and maybe even from before that. There were clues about Stella’s life beyond our town. I knew she had adventures, she traveled, she had a million boyfriends—but
she’d always remind me never to get stuck on one. I’d ask questions, and she’d say she’d tell me everything when I was old enough. I’m old enough now, but she’s not here.
I think some more. Maybe the real question is DO I REALLY WANT TO FIND OUT THE TRUTH? I think of the line from that ’90s movie, A Few Good Men. Can I handle the truth? I’m not sure. I can never hear her side of the story, so why, like Nell would say, open up this can of worms, anyway? What if it ruins my belief in Stella—and in some ways, my belief in myself? What if the truth is about … me?
I shake the 8 Ball and look down at it. Ask again later is what it says. Stupid toy. I set it back on the shelf, and that’s when I notice that right next to it, waiting for who knows how long, are Red’s master keys. The ones we’ve been looking for all summer. I put them in my pocket and shake my head.
“Universe,” I say, “clearly, you are trying to tell me something. But what?”
I pace back and forth for a while, and then I sit down at the table where we used to eat our doughnuts and drink our coffee when life seemed so much simpler. I grab the manatee—he feels like a final reminder of that more innocent time—and I hug him to my chest, hard, squeezing him tightly, clinging to him like he’s an inflatable life raft. Which is when his stuffed-animal guts make a strange noise, like paper crinkling, the kind of noise a stuffed animal generally does not make.
There’s a zipper at the back of the manatee’s neck that I’ve never noticed before. But now I unzip it. I reach inside and feel around, grab ahold of something that’s not just the usual plush stuffing. It’s something smooth, something paper. It’s a note, wrinkled and yellowing, and the writing is smudged and messy, but the name is unmistakable.
If found, please return to 555 Pomegranate Street. He is my best friend. I love him.
Chassie Dunkirk, age 8
P.S. You can keep the flashlight. This is only my third favorite.
Here’s the thing about the truth, I realize. It’s always there, waiting. It might be hidden away, somewhere you least expect it, ready to pop out at the worst—or best—possible time. It might be stored away in a secret compartment, which you’ve got to figure out how to open. It might be covered up by whatever people keep shouting is the truth instead, grown so faint you can barely hear it whispering. But wherever it is, sooner or later, it’s there, and it’s going to be found. So you might as well go after it.