How Will I Know You?

by Jessica Treadway

  “Like what?” Tom decided to humor her. If a few hours of his time could make her feel less anxious about the tension between him and her father, it was worth it.

  On Alison’s face then he saw the expression he’d always found most appealing—a smile both animated and mysterious, containing the promise of something she knew he would like. “Well, Dad and Hal came and tried to arrest this kid in school today, for possession of steroids, but it turned out he had a prescription so they had to let him go. The kid is Delaney Stowell’s boyfriend. Her father’s a psychiatrist, so she has access to a prescription pad. Anyway, it got me thinking.”

  Tom waited, not connecting the dots. “Thinking what?”

  “Well, what if Delaney’s part of that drug ring?”

  They’d been hearing about it on the news: a well-oiled and elusive black market for painkillers and anxiety meds, covering multiple counties in upstate New York. The state’s narcos had arrested a couple of people for possession with intent to sell, but they’d both clammed up, even when offered a break for cooperating, and the dope cops had failed to trace their source. “No way,” Tom said. “Those are pros, not some high school girl.”

  “But she’s the type that would think she could get away with it. Overconfident. Snarky.” The opposite of the things Alison herself had been in high school. “She bugs the hell out of me.”

  “Does Delaney have pink hair?” Tom asked. “And a snake tattoo?”

  Alison sat back, surprised. “Yeah. How did you know?”

  “I’ve seen her. She comes into the shack.” Overconfident, snarky—they were the perfect words for the girl who’d called him a perv. Was it possible she was involved in the drug business somehow—a shrink’s daughter dealing as a lark? It was the kind of thing rich kids liked to do in this town. Anything to combat boredom, especially with winter coming.

  To keep Alison in a good mood, he agreed to check it out. The next day, when Cliff showed up for his first three-thirty–to–midnight shift at the shack, Tom drove to the school and waited for Delaney and two of her friends, who flanked her like bodyguards, to come out. She unlocked a Volvo with a vanity plate (VENOM GRRL) and let the other girls in, then took off from the lot without—as far as Tom could see—even looking the other way. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, and by the time he put the truck in drive and got on the road behind her, there were two cars between them.

  He guessed they’d go to the mall, and he congratulated himself when it turned out he was right, even though it was a no-brainer—where else would teenage girls go, with the weather this cold? Inside, he followed them, hardly daring to hope (but hoping anyway) that he’d witness some obvious transaction, maybe even one he could film on his phone to show Doug. When it didn’t happen—when the girls just spent the next couple of hours sauntering around, sharing a bag of cookies from Mrs. Fields, flipping through clothes racks but not buying anything, occasionally reaching into their back jeans pockets for their phones and letting their thumbs fly across the screens—he thought to himself, Douche. What did you expect, they’d stand in front of Aéropostale and hand some dude a bag of Oxys in exchange for a wad of cash? As far as he could tell, none of them even went into a dressing room. They were in plain sight at all times. And they didn’t do anything more sinister than pocket a couple of lip balms from CVS.

  The next day, exactly the same routine, and the same the day after that. At dinner each night Alison asked if he’d caught Delaney at anything, and Tom was about to tell her he was giving up when Alison said, “I know you’ll find something. That girl’s up to no good.”

  He told her he’d keep trying but made a private resolution to give it only through the weekend. On Friday night, the night before Halloween, he caught a break. Delaney led him in the Volvo to the abandoned condo development (Lakeview Arms was the official name, but ever since the financing had collapsed and construction stopped, people had taken to calling it Broken Arms), where a dozen other kids were already hanging out on the stoop in front of unit 11. Delaney moved ahead of them, their queen, and Tom took out his phone to snap a photo of her breaking into the condos to party.

  But Delaney pulled a key out of her pocket to let everyone in. Which meant she might have permission from someone, which would mean it wasn’t breaking and entering. Maybe trespass, but that wouldn’t score him any points with Doug. Who owned these places? Some of the individual units had been sold before construction began, but there was no way of knowing which ones.

  An old Silverado pulled up and five teenage boys got out, three of them carrying cases of Genny. No way they were twenty-one, but Tom sensed there’d be more to the evening than underage drinking or even B&E by a bunch of kids having a party. Was it possible that one of these guys was Delaney’s partner? That he’d meet up with her in a corner of the condo and pay her for a prescription pad she’d stolen from her father, or that Delaney, having filled the false scrips herself, would hand over a stash of pills concealed in a Burger King bag?

  Despite the fact that he’d only agreed to follow Delaney to appease his wife, Tom felt a stir of exhilaration at the prospect that he might actually be onto something. It was the same feeling he got when he saw some guy who’d applied for workers’ comp, saying he’d thrown his back out at his job, torquing down the advanced slopes at Bristol Mountain. Nothing like popping people who thought they were getting away with something.

  But there was no way he could go inside the condos and find out what these kids were up to, so he wouldn’t catch them in the act unless they came outside to do their business away from the party. The guys who’d toted in the beer came back out to unload a space heater from the truck, which they carried inside and then plugged into a generator on the flatbed via a string of extension cords. Dangerous, but not illegal. Tom watched and waited. The party swelled, including a girl dressed like Marge Simpson and a guy who might or might not have been trying to be the Joker (it was hard to tell). He saw the uncostumed kids snicker and point without bothering to try to hide it. Jesus, Tom thought. In his memory, he’d enjoyed high school. But now all the crap and the cruelty (never directed at him, but still painful to witness) came rushing back.

  Sitting in the truck bed, he read dive manuals, played poker on his phone, and drank black coffee from the Thermos Alison had sent with him. He heard loud music and at one point a couple of shrieks, but they were happy ones—drunken, exuberant. He saw nothing of the type of activity he was looking for. He left just after midnight, the party still going strong.

  “Anything?” Alison called out to him when he came through the door, and he swore to himself; he’d felt sure she’d be asleep by now. He told her it was just a party, that’s all, and could she remind him again why it was such a big deal? Why it mattered to her so much what her father thought of him? They knew the truth—the two of them—so what difference did it make if Doug thought Tom was a douche?

  “You don’t understand,” she answered him, shaking her head, and he said, “You’re right, I don’t. You’re twenty-six years old, for God’s sake. The daddy’s-little-girl thing is getting a little tired.”

  She turned her back on him, freezing him out before falling asleep, and he was just as glad not to have the conversation continue. In the morning they woke up to the news that there’d been a fire overnight at the empty Lakeview Arms condominiums, and forgetting their fight of a few hours before, Alison slapped him excitedly and said, “So who did it? You must have seen something,” but Tom shook his head and said they’d kept it all inside.

  It was a lie; he’d recorded the license plate of the truck carrying the space heater, and he would have been able to recognize those kids.

  But those kids had been him and Alison not so long ago, and though they may have been stupid, they hadn’t intended to start a fire. If Tom was going to find anything Doug could “use” the way Alison wanted him to, he decided in that moment that it would have to be something about illegal drug trafficking, and nothing less. He sensed what an effor
t it was for his wife to contain her disappointment, and even though he knew it was not only a lost cause but a foolish cause to begin with, he told her he’d keep looking for a way to make his father-in-law hate him a little less.

  Dark Knight

  Despite Joy’s help in studying, Harper had gotten only a seventy-nine on the test. How is Odysseus able to listen safely to the siren’s song? Joy, of course, got a hundred and ten, including extra points for the bonus question (How does Odysseus cleanse the palace of the scent of blood?).

  That was the last time they’d studied together. It was also the last time she and Joy said anything real to each other. Joy had already started hanging out with Delaney Stowell, whom she’d promised to hate ever since the day in fourth grade when Delaney slapped a Post-it Note saying Looser on the back of Harper’s gym suit, pretending to congratulate her on a kickball catch. “She’s the loser,” Harper remembered Joy saying, after she peeled the sticky off and folded it in her fist. “She can’t even spell it right.”

  But ever since the beginning of the school year, Joy and Delaney appeared to be best friends—which meant, of course, that Joy had to retreat from Harper. A few days before Halloween as they pulled their jackets out of their lockers, Harper sucked in all the courage she could manage and said, “I heard there’s a party on Friday at La-La. Do you think I could come?”

  La-La was what Delaney and her friends, including Joy now, had taken to calling the empty condos at Lakeview Arms, because of the ornate L and A towering over the other letters in what people called the “fancy-ass” Lakeview Arms sign. They routinely trespassed in one of the unfinished corner units to drink beer and smoke pot and whatever else it was they did there. Rumor had it that the development might even be being used for some of those drug deals on the news.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Joy told her, tossing her copy of Othello to her locker floor.

  She was right, of course, and Harper felt a small flash of comfort: Joy still understood her. “Yes, I do,” she lied, before saying something truer. “I want to stop being—the way I am.”

  Joy’s jaw gave a quick pulse the way it always did when she was pained. Then her features readjusted themselves into a deadened, blank expression that chilled Harper and made her unable, in that moment, to recognize her friend. “Come if you want to,” Joy said. “It’s not up to me.”

  In the girls’ bathroom at the end of the day, Delaney blew perfect smoke rings as she watched Harper exit a stall. “I heard you want to crash our party,” she said, dropping ashes into the sink. When she saw that Harper didn’t know how to respond, she held up a hand to say Don’t bother. “Sure, whatever, knock yourself out. Just a warning, though, the costumes are going to be epic. For your own sake, don’t come in something lame.”

  Harper didn’t know whether to trust Delaney; her instincts told her not to. And she was afraid to ask Joy, but after she checked with Eric Feinbloom and he said he’d been told the same thing, she tried on a high blue wig, green dress, and red bead necklace she hoped would make it clear she was dressed as Marge Simpson. Standing in front of the mirror, she knew how ridiculous she looked, but she did her best to persuade herself that that was the point. Marge was a ridiculous character, right? And didn’t a person have to be confident to wear a costume like this? Anyone who dresses like that in public is a confident person. It was inductive or deductive reasoning, she couldn’t remember which from her practice SATs. She just hoped people would draw the conclusion and maybe think something different about her, this time, than what they always had.

  She gave her brother ten dollars to drop her off at the condos and to participate in the lie she told her mother, which was that she’d be watching a movie and sleeping over at Joy’s. They pulled into the Lakeview Arms lot, and she climbed into the backseat to change into the costume. “Oof,” Truman said as she got out of the car, shivering in the sleeveless dress. “That’s a sub-optimal look for you.”

  Harper ignored him, or tried to, and said she would borrow someone’s phone to call him to pick her up. On the way into the corner unit Joy had described to her—no. 11—she saw two kids from her Euro History class headed to the same door, both wearing regular clothes and no masks or other accessories that Harper could see. Same with three classmates from Chemistry: they had on jeans and jackets and sneakers, and their own familiar faces and hair. For a moment she paused, not wanting to continue. But then she saw Eric, having been dropped off by his mother, approaching with a long purple coat over a green vest, his face grotesque with black raccoon makeup around the eyes and a garish, lipstick-red smile lifting from the corners of his mouth. “Oh, you didn’t,” Harper whispered to herself, but it was all too apparent that he had. Though he was her friend, she knew she didn’t have what it took to tell him he couldn’t pull this off. “It’s the Joker,” Eric told her. “From Dark Knight. Heath Ledger. You saw that, right?”

  “Yeah,” Harper said, and then because she felt she had no choice, she added, “Cool.” She did not want to walk in with him, but it seemed she had no choice about that, either.

  “Nice Marge,” Eric said, nodding at the high stack of blue hair rising from her head. He steered her out of the way of an extension cord running from the truck parked by the front stoop to inside the condo somewhere, and she mumbled her thanks, hoping he’d be able to hear it; if he hadn’t alerted her, she would have tripped.

  Before they could enter, Zach Tully demanded ten dollars from each of them. Harper had always felt nervous around him because he was the star of the football team, but now she felt nervous because of what happened in school the week before. Heading toward her locker after Chemistry, she noticed a commotion in the hallway and saw that two police officers—the chief, Mrs. Carbone’s father, and a gray-haired guy whose cheek bulged with something he was sucking on—had pinned Zach to the announcements board outside the music room. It took two of them because Zach was so strong, a linebacker who was counting on playing for a Division I team and then going pro, even though nobody from Chilton had ever even come close to such a thing before.

  It was like Law & Order, Harper thought. She knew that what the cops were doing was shaking Zach Tully down.

  Delaney Stowell grabbed the chief’s arm and shouted, “You can’t do that!” A gasp passed through the collected crowd, even from the kids who never showed a reaction to anything. Delaney had touched a police officer—actually yanked at his uniform sleeve. They waited for him to grab her back, place her up against the wall beside her boyfriend, and shake her down.

  But the chief only tossed her hand off, then wagged a finger in her face. “Away,” he said, and though she kept glowering at him, Delaney retreated a step. The candy-sucking cop held Zach’s arms in place as the chief went through Zach’s pockets. He pulled out a chain of keys, a cell phone, a folded-up piece of paper, and a small ziplock bag containing capsules of some kind, which appeared to be the target of his search. He jiggled the bag and whistled, giving his partner the go-ahead to handcuff Zach. “Zachary Tully, we are arresting you for possession of a controlled substance without a prescription.” He went on to say the further sentences Harper and everyone else knew from every police show they’d ever seen on TV.

  “I have a fucking prescription!” Zach twisted his body as if he thought he might be able to wiggle out of the cuffs. He flicked his fingers toward the piece of paper the chief had confiscated along with everything else.

  “You mean this?” The chief flapped the piece of paper in front of Zach’s face. “You think I believe this is legit, you little prick?” He shook the paper open and squinted at it. With the swiftest of movements he glanced at Delaney, then motioned to the gray-haired officer to take a step back from Zach.

  “You sure?” the other cop said, and when the chief nodded, he let go reluctantly of Zach’s shoulder but remained close enough that their faces were only a few inches apart.

  The chief cleared his throat and held both arms in the air to command everyone’s a
ttention. “There’s been a mix-up,” he announced. “We’re sorry for the disruption, you probably all heard about the prescription drug problems we’ve been having, we got a tip and we were following it up.” He handed Zach everything he had taken from his pocket, including the pills. Harper could tell that the other cop didn’t understand what was happening but was hesitant to ask in front of everyone. “Thanks for your cooperation,” the chief added. “We’re not always right, and when we’re not, we try to admit it as soon as we can. Thanks, folks. We’ll leave you all to your day.” When he turned toward the exit, all the machinery he wore (gun, belt, radio) created a weighted, jiggling noise. The other officer followed him out of the building, making ferocious sucking sounds. Harper expected the chief to at least acknowledge his daughter as he passed by, but he didn’t even seem to see Mrs. Carbone standing there with the other teachers. His face was red, not with embarrassment but anger.

  If Joy had still been her friend, Harper could have asked her what she thought the scene was about. As it was, she remained silent when Joy turned to make her way to the cafeteria, cocooned between Delaney on one side and Tessa and Lin on the other. I knew he was on roids, Harper heard a football cheerleader say, and another one snorted: He can kiss D-One good-bye.

  At the Halloween party, Harper kept her face averted and pretended she didn’t recognize Zach as he demanded money for admission. She hadn’t known about the fee and she’d given all her money to Truman, so Eric paid for them both and they put on the wristbands Zach handed them in exchange. Staticky music pulsed from the corner. They walked toward the back of the room, where candles flickered above a row of open coolers brimming with cans of beer. This is a mistake, Harper thought. In every way. I shouldn’t be here. Even through the murky light, she could tell that she and Eric were the only ones in costume.

  For a moment, she entertained the idea of borrowing someone’s phone right then, so she could call Truman to come and get her. But Truman didn’t have a cell phone himself, and he wouldn’t even be home yet to get the message. There was no way she could ask for a ride from anyone else. Stuck, she thought, I’m stuck, and she fled toward a closed bedroom door seeking a place to hide.