by Joy Preble
“Maybe,” Max says. “But aren’t you at least curious?”
What is it with this boy?
“Max. You seem like a nice guy. But I don’t know you. You don’t know me. It’s three in the morning. The last thing I want to do right now is explain my sister.”
I snag the note from him, my hand bumping the Atomic Testing Museum name tag slung over the mirror. It swings back and forth between us on its twisty blue lanyard.
I edge toward the door again, hands pressed to bare knees, legs pale against the dark seat. “Why are you helping me, anyway?”
Max looks startled, brows rising over those gray eyes. But his answer comes quickly.
“You’re the first girl who’s ever offered me coconut cream pie,” he says. “It’s not the kind of thing a guy takes lightly.”
I know I’m blushing and that makes me blush even more, the burn shooting to the tops of my ears. But if I’m going to believe a lie it might as well be one like this.
I tell him our address.
The Mazda is nowhere in sight when we pull up to our house—paint peeling, lawn brown and scraggly. Mom’s car is still gone, too, which makes sense, but so is Tommy’s Tahoe. Was it even in the driveway? Sometimes he wedges it into our crap-filled garage. It’s been such a crazy night, I don’t remember.
“We can drive around to casinos if you want,” Max says, and I realize he’s watching me. “I’ll wait for you.”
“And do what? Look at every roulette wheel in Vegas?”
Max purses his lips. “Maybe,” he says slowly. “That’s the thing about mysteries, right? You don’t know until you start solving them.”
“My sister is unsolvable,” I tell him. He nods, but doesn’t respond.
We eyeball each other. He is still cute. The sexy, mysterious scar over his eyebrow in particular. But I tell him, “Thanks for the ride,” and shove open the passenger door. Our house looks empty—the windows like blank faces.
Somewhere beyond the house, the sound of a train whistle ropes long and low through the air. My chest tightens.
I hesitate, half in and half out of the truck. This whole thing . . . But still I don’t walk toward the house.
“I’ll go in with you,” Max says. The offer hangs in the air with the train whistle.
I don’t know why I consider it. But I do.
“If you want,” I say, not looking at him.
We sit in silence for a few beats, desert heat pressing like a hand, the last of the train whistle barely audible.
Not until he locks the truck and follows me inside do I realize that I’ve been holding my breath.
SIX
TOMMY’S GLASS, A SWIRL OF AMBER-COLORED BOOZE AT THE BOTTOM, is sitting on the kitchen table as we walk in, but the house is quiet, cat clock ticking and the broken icemaker in the fridge making a useless groan.
“I’m back,” I call. No one answers. I say it again, louder, just in case. Sometimes Mom gets off early if it’s slow at Vegas Mike’s. But it’s just me and Max.
My stomach clenches. I think of telling him to leave—that I’ll deal with this—but I don’t.
No other note from Paris anywhere I can see, just a deck of playing cards stacked cockeyed on the table near Tommy’s glass.
I catch Max’s gaze flick from the cat clock to Tommy’s glass to the cards. My face heats again as I wonder what he’s thinking. That we’re boozy cat-clock lovers who gamble and tell the occasional physics joke? Of course that last part is just me.
“My stepfather plays poker,” I blurt even though Max hasn’t asked.
Max says nothing, just nods. The clock, a little slow, hits three and the cat meows, making us both jump.
Max laughs. I try to and fail. Then he announces: “I play poker.”
“Like tournaments?” I ask, unimpressed. “But you’re not old enough.” You have to be twenty-one to sit in the casinos and gamble. Everyone knows that.
He grins sweetly, fishing for his wallet. “Fake ID,” he says, showing me two different pieces of plastic.
Maxwell Sullivan of Bozeman, MT, is twenty-five.
Maxwell Sullivan of Houston, TX, is eighteen.
Max leans against our grimy kitchen counter. I study the IDs. “Pretty authentic, right? That’s what you’re thinking.”
Actually I’m thinking no way would anyone believe he’s twenty-five, but people fall for all sorts of scams, even here where they should know better.
“It’s just local tourneys,” he says, scraping a hand through his hair. “Small-time stuff. I know better than to try the Strip casinos.”
“Do you win?”
He shrugs in that way that guys who win do.
“Some. I’ve got a good memory. That’s all. You know Einstein played craps,” he adds as though this clarifies things.
“Well,” I say slowly, dragging the word out a few beats. “I guess you’re lucky then.”
I say the last part nicely, because I appreciate the Einstein reference as much as any other girl on the Academic Bowl team, but something sad shifts into his gray eyes.
“Poker’s not about luck. It’s about convincing the other guy that you’re lucky. Not the same thing at all.”
He follows me to Paris’s room, across from mine on one side of the house, our shared bathroom at the front of the hallway that spokes down to our rooms. My heart thuds a little even though I know no one’s home. Mom and Tommy’s room is on the other side, the kitchen and living/dining rooms in between. Far enough from them for some privacy.
We are four people in this house: Tommy Davis, my mother, Paris, and me—“Tommy and his three girls” my mother calls it, which makes Tommy chuckle.
Max stands awkwardly at the door, tapping his thumb on the frame, then finally enters.
I poke my head in Paris’s closet. I peer under her bed. Nothing seems out of place. But it’s hard to tell. Dishes of beads sit on her bed, on the floor. On the small desk under the window, a hot glue gun rests on top of British Lit Survey, the senior English textbook Paris never returned.
On the windowsill, more necklaces: Tiny red beads strung on black thread. Bright-red stones glued to an oblong piece of metal hanging from a thin chain. And the bin of bracelets like the one she was wearing tonight: piles of leather strands studded with sparkle. She’s been working a lot these past weeks.
My foot bumps something and I half stumble, stubbing my toe on what turns out to be one of her fake snakeskin stilettos, the sharp-edged heel pointing up toward the ceiling. Her black ankle boots with the cracked soles sit neatly together smack in the middle of the room. An ugly pair of brown platform heels rests heel to toe on the carpet near the head of her bed.
Okay then. Messy room filled with crap. But all her stuff—it looks like it’s still here. So she’s not gone then. Just temporarily misplaced.
But the room feels chaotic, which is not like Paris. Messy, yes. Random, not really. Weird.
“She made all this?” Max scoops up a red-bead necklace, turning it over in his hand.
I nod, thinking that I’m not sure how I feel about him touching her stuff.
“She’s good,” he says, winding the delicate chain around two fingers. “I had no idea.”
“How would you?”
Something I can’t identify shifts across his face like a wisp of cloud. He sets the necklace back with the others. “What I mean is, your sister’s really talented. This stuff’s amazing.”
“She’s not named after France, you know,” I say, and then regret it.
I have no idea why our mother named Paris what she did. Callie Hollings is big on impulse, short on long-term planning. I don’t know what she was thinking or if she was thinking anything at all. I’ve never met my father, but Paris has met hers. He took her to the circus once when I was five. She came home with a stuffed elephant with a Ringling Bros. headdress and a bellyache from cotton candy.
I cried because he didn’t take me, too.
But, I inform Max, the story Par
is often tells is this: Paris, Texas was Kurt Cobain’s favorite movie. “Not that she’s a Cobain fan,” I say. “But people always ask about her name and she’d read that once so it’s her story.”
“What’s that movie?” Max asks. “You know, the one with ‘We’ll always have Paris’?”
I roll my eyes. But I liked that he said it.
“It’s got a fake Eiffel Tower,” I say. “Paris, Texas, I mean. My sister looked it up.” Of course Vegas has a fake one, too. But Vegas has a fake everything.
“You ever been?” Max asks.
“Which one?”
He grins. “Either.”
I shake my head. “You?”
“Nope, not even the Texas one, and I lived there. No Eiffel Towers in Houston. Not that I know of.”
This time I feel the blush start from the hollow of my throat. Here I’m babbling about Texas and he’s from there.
I turn off Paris’s lamp. Max follows me into the hallway.
The door to my room is closed and I know no one’s in there, but my heart stutters as I turn the knob anyway.
“Oh,” Max says, peering over my shoulder because he’s tall enough to do that. “You’re one of those.”
I swivel and look at him, both of us framed in the doorway.
“You know,” he says, waggling his dark brows. “Not messy.”
“Hey,” I say, but he’s looking beyond me to my posters, pausing to bark a laugh at There Are Only Ten Kinds of People: Those Who Understand Binary.
I follow his gaze—glad now that I made my bed before we left—and see him pause at the collage hanging over my headboard, a black-and-white landscape that Paris made me. The one with a woman in one of those veil things that show only her eyes.
Then he’s walking to my bookshelf where he picks up the small plastic skeleton that I bought at a flea market when I was ten. I cringe because it’s positioned between my Harry Potters and my old E. Nesbit paperbacks. Ones like Half Magic, which Paris and I loved because the kids find a magic coin and go on adventures. Books are private things until you get to know someone. But he’s focused on the skeleton.
Max runs a finger over its bare ribs. “Cool.”
“Don’t hurt Tiny Tim,” I warn him, resisting the urge to snatch it away from him.
“Tiny Tim? You named a skeleton Tiny Tim?”
It is the name on the box he came in, but I am not about to admit that.
“I’ve known you for an hour,” I say instead. “I think it’s a little too early for snap judgments.”
Of course I make judgments all the time. It’s when I forget to make them that I get in trouble. But sometimes I get tired of watching and paying attention. Sometimes I want to be the girl who people do things for, even when she doesn’t ask. There are girls like that, and I envy them.
“What did you do?” Max says. “Get mad at him?” He’s pointing to Tiny Tim’s left wrist, where I had to glue the ulna back in place. I guess I wasn’t careful enough because it’s just the slightest fraction off from where it should be.
“Bumped him with my elbow,” I say quickly. “You’re the only one who’s ever noticed.” I rub my arms. My index finger drags over the tiny cut Paris got so hyper about.
Max slides his gaze to my old dollhouse, the two-story wooden one Grammy Marie made me for my eighth birthday, each room painted a different color and wired with a matching tiny colored lightbulb that actually lights up when I plug it in. Even now, at night, I imagine stories for the rooms.
Paris still fashions miniature pillows and chairs and pictures for this house, placing them inside for me to find like treasures.
I don’t know what I’ll do if he mocks the dollhouse, but he doesn’t say anything because the beep of a car remote on our driveway makes us both jump.
Paris!
“Finally,” I say, rushing from my room and up the narrow hall, Max clomping in my wake. “See, I told you she’d get tired of this whole thing.”
The front door swings open.
I start talking even before Paris makes it into the tiny foyer. “You are one crazy—”
“Tommy?” says my mother’s voice as she steps inside. Her tone is a combination of anger and hesitation.
My heart falls, my brain still half expecting Paris to walk in after her, but my mother is alone, smelling of beer and cigarette smoke and a faint trace of Vera Wang Princess Night, the perfume Tommy bought her for her birthday.
“He went out,” I say.
She’s wearing her work outfit—a low-cut red tank that reads Vegas Mike’s across the chest, tight black jeans, and red stripper heels, which she kicks off now with a groan of pleasure, sending one of them sliding across the floor. It skids to a stop in front of Max.
In the following order, I watch my mother register: Me. Tommy’s almost-empty glass. Max. The cat clock, ticking past three. Then back to me, a variety of expressions flickering over her face. Just barely, I can see the vein in the middle of her forehead beating. It pops out like that when she’s tired or upset. Or both.
“It’s past three in the morning, Leonora,” she says. Her voice tightens as she acknowledges Max. “Who are you?”
“Paris is missing.” I dig in my pocket for the note.
“I’m Max,” Max says.
“What?” asks my mother, and I’m not sure if she’s questioning Paris’s disappearance or Max’s existence. At Vegas Mike’s she’s the best blackjack dealer on the floor. Quick, funny, good with the drunks. Mean when she needs to be. Tough as nails. On the other hand, she’s just worked a ten-hour shift.
“Paris, Mom. I don’t know where the hell she is.” I fill her in on the rest of it—leaving out the driving-around part, obviously.
“Have you been out all night?” Mom asks. From the corner of my eye I see Max press his lips together. “Thought you were cramming for that SAT retake. Scholarships don’t grow on trees, Leo.”
I let the last part slide. “Um, no. Not all night.” Technically this is true. The sun isn’t up yet. “She’s playing some game, I think. Paris.” I wave the note.
People don’t think my mother is smart, but she is, in a street-smart way. She reads people like no one I’ve ever seen. One quick glance at someone who sits down at her blackjack table and she knows.
But when Paris broke her arm dirt-biking and got hysterical while we were camping in the desert near Ridgecrest back in Cali, I was the one who sat with her and let her squeeze my hand, hard, until the adults—Mom and her friends from the Harley place—sobered up enough to drive us to the hospital.
When I told my mother I was applying to Stanford, her first question was “What will it cost?”
Now, barely listening, she interrupts me with “Where’s Tommy?”
I shrug.
“Does he know you girls went out?”
“Yeah,” I say, surprising myself. “He does.”
Mom considers this briefly, pushes a strand of hair from her forehead. “God,” she says. “I need some wine.” She steps to the fridge, extracting a half-filled bottle of white wine and pouring some into a juice glass. Our wineglasses are all sitting dirty in the sink. She takes a long swallow. Then another.
“You brought home a boy in the middle of the night,” she says once she’s drained the faded floral glass. Her eyes drift back to Max, heavy lidded, roving.
“I’m helping Leo.” Max steps over Mom’s red platform and moves next to me. Somehow he looks even taller in our cramped kitchen. I realize I’m staring and look away.
Yawning now, Mom rubs a knuckle over her cheekbone—defined and high like my sister’s. Mascara is sprinkled like dots of mud on the puffy pockets under her eyes.
“Leo,” she says, looking at me sharper now, more careful. My heart thumps against my ribs. The cat clock ticks in the background. Max clears his throat. It is one of those moments when you think that something huge is about to happen.
We are like one of those still life paintings, I think absurdly. Mother. Daughter.
Strange boy. Glass of wine. A million unsaid things.
“Mom,” I say, then stop.
My mother pours the rest of the wine into her glass.
“It’s fine, Leo. You know your sister.”
That’s it? “Mom. Paris is missing. As in gone. Has she called you? She has the car. And my phone and stuff. And this weird note . . .”
I push the note at her and she scans it quickly, possibly reading, possibly just looking, while I tap my foot on the floor.
“See the roulette numbers,” I say, pointing. I wait for her to say something. Do something.
Mom gestures wide with her arms—a sudden, frenetic gesture that startles me, making my heart bump harder. A few drops of wine fling into the air. “Your sister is dramatic, Leonora. She’s always been dramatic.” Her gaze flits back to Max. She presses two fingers to her lips, like she’s holding a cigarette.
“Figure it out, Leo. Please.” It’s what she expects of me. “Tommy didn’t say where he was going?”
I tell her no. She asks if I’m sure. I don’t answer.
“Don’t bring boys home if no one’s here,” she says then, like this is something I do all the time. The tips of my ears heat because Max is standing right here. Mom digs in her purse and pulls out her phone, thumbs flicking as she texts something. She stares at the phone, obviously waiting. When nothing happens, she dumps purse and phone on the counter, then rolls her neck until the vertebrae crack audibly.
“It’ll be fine, Leo.” She leaves the stripper heels and takes the wine, disappearing through the family room toward her bedroom.
The cat clock meows. Three thirty.
Max pushes at the sleeves of his blue button-down.
“Sorry,” I say, not really sure what exactly I’m sorry for.
“So,” Max says after a few awkward beats. He purses his lips then un-purses them. There’s a tiny freckle on his forehead not far from that eyebrow scar. Like a little satellite to the half-moon. “Why would your sister make a roulette reference?”