Worth a Thousand Words

by Brigit Young

  Tillie burst out laughing. “Google was a dead giveaway.”

  “We’ll go there tomorrow. Right?” he asked her, not laughing along with her.

  Tillie clicked the directions icon and saw that it would take nearly half an hour to reach Pins and Whistles on the edge of town. Still, she told him yes, and they made a plan.

  But first … school.

  The day went by excruciatingly slowly. At lunch Jake didn’t even talk to her about any of his theories. They both just listened to his friends’ discussion (about what they’d do to survive an alien invasion) and continually glanced up at the clock. If this bowling alley was a place his dad went, they might be incredibly close to finding him. There was nothing to discuss. They’d meet at the flagpole after school.

  In art class that day Tillie told Ms. Martinez her conclusions about the glasses.

  “The day we finished with the clay sculptures, huh?” Ms. Martinez said. “Quite specific. Okay, well, hmm…” She looked up and to the left with her lips pursed. She had on a mauvish-pink lipstick and her lips made a perfect oval.

  “I think before I went home that day I may have stopped at the little deli on Main Street, two blocks from my house. I only guess that because I go there almost every day, for milk and bread and things like that. But other than that, I can’t really remember. I was probably home.”

  “And you’re sure you’ve looked everywhere in the classroom and your house?” Tillie asked.

  “Yup,” Ms. Martinez said. “Haven’t seen any trace of them.”

  “They must have been lost at the deli, then!” Tillie exclaimed. “Or on the street, but let’s hope not, because the deli is our best bet at finding them.”

  “You’re my Sherlock!” Ms. Martinez smiled at her. The two nearly miniscule crinkles on the side of each eye tilted upward with her cheeks.

  Tillie blushed.

  “Okay,” Ms. Martinez continued, “I’ll go ask the deli manager if he’s seen them. Thanks so much.”

  “No,” Tillie jumped in. “No, I’ll get them. It’s, like, my job,” she said, feeling silly immediately.

  “It’s okay,” Ms. Martinez said as the bell rang and class was scheduled to begin. “I’ll grab them later this week. The grandma glasses are fine for now. You just enjoy your afternoon, okay?” She winked, patted Tillie’s arm, and went to the front of the classroom.

  * * *

  As soon as school ended, Jake and Tillie met at the flagpole and headed to the bus stop.

  “The bowling alley opens at two on weekdays,” Jake said as he checked his phone to look at the time, “and it’s almost 3:30.” They had a long journey, and the bus was late. “Hopefully he wasn’t in there already today, and we haven’t missed him.”

  “Bowling alleys open at two?” Tillie asked. “Why so early? Don’t people have work?”

  Jake shrugged. “Lots of people out of work, I guess? Retired, maybe. My dad and his buddies have on-site visits sometimes, but I think once in a while they just say that and go do fun stuff instead.”

  He tapped his foot, staring off down the road in the direction the bus would come from.

  A booming vroom could be heard in the distance, and Jake leaned his torso so far away from the bench to look down the street that he almost tilted over and fell. But it was just a moving van, and it passed them by.

  “Did you tell your mom that your dad called?” Tillie asked.

  “Nope. ’Course not. She thinks I buy her little business trip story about Dad. Happy-go-lucky Jake. Nothing wrong with him, ever,” Jake said bitterly. “The bus is here!” He jumped up.

  Tillie took a window seat and Jake squeezed in beside her.

  “So, I was thinking,” Tillie began carefully. “Maybe it’s time to really confront your mom about all of this. Make her tell you the truth, if she knows it, or tell her the truth, if she doesn’t.”

  “She’ll just lie to me more, or to herself.” Jake shook his head.

  Tillie’s dad’s spy story came to her mind. Maybe Jake’s mom was entirely innocent. Maybe she was married to a person she actually knew nothing about.

  “No. No, we’re going to find him today,” he said. “And we’ll figure out how we can help him.”

  Jake said nothing more. Tillie could tell he was done with that conversation.

  A wave of exhaustion consumed Tillie as she looked out the window and saw how far away they were getting from the center of town, from their school and both their neighborhoods. They were headed out toward the strip malls and side-of-the-road fast food chains and away from the coffee shops and residential areas dotted with tree-filled parks and moms strolling around the block with toddlers. Tillie hated to admit it, but it made her nervous to leave her college-town cocoon.

  Jake started softly singing “Piano Man.”

  Embarrassed, Tillie glanced around the bus to see if any passengers had noticed, but no one had even looked up from their phones.

  Jake started playing air-piano. Tillie let out a small snort.

  At this, Jake’s worried expression melted to his usual mischievous grin and he began to sing louder. He drummed on his knees, and then on Tillie’s, and continued on this way until the bus arrived at Pins and Whistles.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry, but you can’t sit here,” the bartender said.

  “It’s not like I’m buying beer! For the love of God! I just want a Coke!”

  They sat on high stools by a bar that looked over at a scattering of bowling lanes. Over to the right of the bar was a tiny wooden stage with a karaoke screen in front of it. A microphone lay on the wood, held together by duct tape. Jake had burst through the door, looking around wildly for his dad. But there were only three people there, bowling and scowling in Jake and Tillie’s direction. Jake had headed over toward the bar and Tillie had followed.

  “Kids aren’t allowed at the bar. Those are the rules. They teach you about rules in school, right?” the bartender said.

  “Okay, okay,” Jake said. He leaned over to Tillie and grumbled, “Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bar this morning, am I right?” Then he looked back to the bartender, who had clearly heard him and was not amused. “Alright, then, we’d like to buy a couple games. And some shoes. Where do we go to do that?”

  “I—” can’t bowl! Tillie almost said, before she felt Jake give her a light kick, and it was her bad leg, and she kicked him back with her good one.

  “Do you have a guardian with you?” The bartender sighed.

  “No,” Jake said.

  The bartender raised an eyebrow.

  “But my dad’s coming soon,” Jake added quickly. “He’ll be around any minute now. He hangs out here a lot, maybe you’ve seen him. Light blond hair? Well, maybe red, if you get it in the right light, my mom says. He’s kind of got a small belly.” Jake patted his stomach.

  The bartender glanced toward the phone behind the bar. For a moment, Tillie wondered if he knew who they were, and if he remembered Jake’s dad using that phone the night before. But it was more likely, she imagined, that he was about to call security, or ask for their parents’ numbers, or just kick them out.

  Jake was messing this up. And if this didn’t lead to anything, he’d be devastated, and they’d have traveled all that way for nothing.

  Tillie took a brave, deep breath. In her best impression of a confident, polite young woman, she said, “Sir, is it possible to start a game now, or should we wait until our guardian comes?”

  The bartender softened as he turned to Tillie. “Sorry, sweetie. I can’t let you guys play.”

  Tillie knew that adults could get fired easily, for all sorts of reasons, and that they couldn’t just make their own rules in their workplaces. Her dad had been laid off once for breaking a work rule, back when Tillie was a baby and they lived in another town. He’d let a local newspaper run a story his boss had told him he couldn’t, so they let him go. Jake couldn’t expect this man to change the rules for him.

  �
�Okay,” she said. Jake sat up from his slumped posture, ready to argue more. “Thank you so much for your time.” She spoke with the voice her mom used when she dealt with health insurance people on the phone right before she hung up and cursed.

  “Well,” the bartender said, looking around the sparse bowling alley as if he were being followed, “you can definitely use the karaoke machine without a guardian. But it’s eight bucks for each half hour you use it, so…”

  Tillie turned to Jake and they locked eyes. Did he have money? She didn’t.

  “Yeah, sure, okay, we’ll pay right when my dad comes, thanks,” Jake said. He grabbed Tillie’s hand, almost pulled her off the stool, and hopped over to the stage.

  “What’s your master plan here?” Tillie whispered.

  “Look, all we need is time,” he whispered back, keeping one eye on the bartender. The bartender kept one eye right back on Jake. Tillie looked back and forth between them as they arrived at the karaoke stage.

  “He came here yesterday, we know that,” Jake went on. “But for what? Who knows? Maybe he’s been coming here to meet with somebody who’s helping him. Or maybe if someone’s got control over him, they bring him here. Maybe he needed me to hear this place, to know where he was. I don’t know. But we just need to wait out the night and see.”

  “You know I have to be home, right? I have to be home by like five. Five fifteen, at the very latest. They think I’m at Art Club on Mondays.”

  “We’ll worry about that later,” Jake said. “For now, we need to stall.”

  Jake went over to the karaoke machine and grabbed the big black book sitting on top of it. He sat cross-legged on the dusty carpet floor next to the stage and flipped through the song lists.

  “What are you doing?” Tillie said, twisting her way down to him on the floor. She glanced up at the bartender and gave a little wave.

  “I’m going to spend as much time as I can picking a song,” he said. “To buy us time for my dad to show up. And then … and then we’re going to see how many ‘half hours’ we can sing through without paying.”

  “How did you think we could stay here without money?” Besides bus fare, Tillie only had about three dollars and change.

  Jake didn’t answer her. He just moved through the pages of the song lists, muttering to himself. “No. Maybe. Too annoying. Too hard. No. Maybe.”

  Tillie knew Jake would have to sing pretty soon or the bartender might get annoyed with them and ask more questions. She watched the door, in case Jake’s dad came through, and the bartender, in case he started to come over and see why they were just sitting around.

  The group of three bowlers kept looking over at them and laughing. She wondered if they’d seen her limp. Or if they figured she and Jake were some kind of couple and thought it was cute. For half a second, she considered the idea that maybe they were kidnappers and were hiding Jake’s dad somewhere.

  “Jake, come on, you have to buy a song and sing something or we’ll have to leave. We should probably just leave now anyway, this place is creepy!”

  “Shhh. Just let the calm wash over you. Shhh.”

  “Oh, now look who’s calm. All weekend you were—” Tillie took a breath. His faith that his dad would come there seemed to have given him a jolt of confidence. “Okay. Fine,” she said. She’d do her job, fulfill her purpose. She lifted her camera up from her chest and snapped a picture of the sunken-eyed men watching them.

  “We want a song!” one of the bowlers, scruffy and scrawny, yelled over, his words slurring a little.

  “Yeah!” another one said, this one just as ragged-looking but rounder, with a too-tight shirt that exposed a slice of his large stomach. He chuckled and hit his friend’s arm like he had said something hilarious. “Entertainment!”

  “Yeah. Sing,” the bartender added drolly from over at the bar.

  It had only been about fifteen minutes since they had arrived, Tillie guessed, but other people had begun to pour in, and none of them were kids. This was not a place for kids at all, she noticed. She wondered what kind of birthday party Jake had been to there.

  The cries for singing mounted. Even though it was really only a few stray voices taunting them, to Tillie it felt like a stadium.

  “Okay, we have to do this.” Jake picked up the small remote on top of the karaoke machine. Tillie heard a click as the machine turned on.

  “You up for some Bob Dylan? The best of the best?” he asked her, clicking away.

  “What?” Tillie rolled her eyes. “I don’t really know any!” She tried not to sound as panicked as she felt.

  “Okeydokey.” Jake hopped up onto the stage. “That’s a real shame, though. Alright, I got it.” Jake pressed some more buttons before dropping the remote and picking up the microphone.

  Tillie moved back, inching along the floor, her eyes shifting from one person to another to see who was looking. The three bowlers were still watching, along with an amused-looking man and woman in denim jackets sitting at the bar. The woman had a streak of hot pink in her bleached hair. Tillie moved toward a chair by the stage, nervous to watch Jake act foolishly. Committing a crime by stealing a karaoke song type of foolish. Tillie stared at the door looking for any sign of a dad of any sort as hip-hop beats began to rumble over the speakers.

  “Jake Hausmann and Tillie Green, everybody,” Jake said into the microphone. “Here we go!”

  Tillie’s head shot back to Jake. “What?” she yelled over the music. “I’m not coming up there!”

  “It’s a duet!” he yelled at her, covering the microphone with his hand. “Well, I think Jay Z’s part counts as a duet…” he added, to himself. “And don’t make me sing a duet alone!” he accidentally bellowed right into the microphone, as the lyrics to the spoken intro to the song began to float across the screen. As Beyoncé and Jay Z’s “Crazy in Love” started, the screen played a video of cherry blossoms, a man reading a newspaper on an elevator, and a dog barking at the ocean. Karaoke was weird.

  Tillie stood up and moved another couple of steps away from Jake. She looked back at the bartender. He was staring.

  “You’re going to make me sing Beyoncé’s part?” Jake asked her with his mouth away from the microphone as the beat of the song’s intro continued. “Okay, fine,” he said. “I’ll be Queen Bey.” Jake shrugged. “Gladly, in fact.” And he lifted the microphone and began to sing.

  Tillie couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Or hearing. Jake had a voice that sounded positively church-worthy, Tillie thought with a snicker she didn’t let out. Was he singing up an octave?

  It was hilarious, Tillie had to admit. Watching Jake and the little side-step dance he was doing, listening to his soprano voice, she found it easy to ignore the hollers and hoots around them. Tillie absentmindedly inched close to the edge of the platform where Jake stood, and before she knew it he had pulled her up onto the stage next to him. Tillie faintly joined in the chorus along with him, her voice low and his high. She tried not to sing too loudly, to stay nice and quiet, but Jake moved the microphone closer to her mouth.

  A musical interlude began and Jake stepped away from the microphone, do-si-doed around her and said into her ear, “Okay, it’s your turn, Jay…” And though on a normal day almost nothing could possibly sound more terrifying than rapping Jay Z’s verse from “Crazy in Love” into a microphone in front of real live humans, Tillie looked into Jake’s laughing eyes and smiled. The fact that he managed to have laughing eyes even at a moment in which everything in his life was pretty much awful made her want to just forget all her hesitation, put her mouth toward the microphone, which smelled a little like horseradish and sweat, and do her best “Jay.”

  And she stumbled, but she made it through the whole verse.

  When the melody returned, Jake jumped right back in. He attempted an Elvis thing with his hips and gave her a thumbs-up sign as the final chorus began. They sang “crazy in love” over and over again as the music built to a joyful burst.

  A tiny c
rowd had formed in front of them, by the bar. The stragglers waiting for their drinks bobbed their heads to Beyoncé and Jay Z, Jake and Tillie.

  As they finished the last line, a couple of people whistled.

  The music began to fade. Tillie turned to look at Jake, but all she saw was space. The music stopped and the karaoke machine went static. Tillie spotted Jake making his way away from her and toward the bar.

  “It’s you!” Tillie heard Jake say, out of breath, his voice cracking, at the corner of the bar a few feet away.

  Tillie tried to move carefully off the stage, but in her rush to get to Jake she tripped off the small corner of the stage platform. Involuntarily, she yelled out in pain. The woman with the pink streak in her hair rushed to help her. On her knees by the wooden planks of the stage, Tillie felt an ache in her ankle creep up the back of her leg toward her spine.

  “Jake!” she called out. She still couldn’t see who he was talking to. Jake and whoever-it-was were hidden by the small group of people who had been bobbing their heads. Was it his dad? Had they finally found him?

  “What’s going on here?” She heard the bartender yell, and she tried to crawl a bit toward where Jake stood, but it hurt.

  “You know where he is and you’re not telling! What did you do to him?” Tillie heard Jake shout.

  As the woman rubbed Tillie’s back and pulled her hand to help her up, Tillie saw what was happening.

  Cubicle Man was at the bar.

  “I know about you! I know all about you!” Jake screamed. “You did something to my dad! You know where he is!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Cubicle Man yelled back, trying to get away from Jake, who had started pushing him. “Get this kid away from me!” he hollered.