The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  Then, seeming to make some inner calculation, the girl gave him a sealed envelope, wrapped in clear packing tape, with strict verbal instructions to pass it to Nick, only Nick. She made Martin swear on his life not to open it himself, and under no circumstances should he allow it to fall into other hands.

  An envelope, he’d discovered, perfectly sized to slide into a newspaper.

  The midday sun warms the window, the table, the room. Nick stares at him from the other side of exhaustion.

  “I hate baseball,” he says.

  “I doubt that,” Martin says. “I sincerely doubt that in this case.”

  * * *

  So it happens that on a balmy Sunday late afternoon, while the sky turns rose pink to the west, Martin Krug finds himself driving fast, north into Maine, escorting a silent middle-aged woman he doesn’t know well to nowhere that he can picture accurately. What the hell is he doing? He carefully strokes his thinning hair. He needs a run, he needs a meeting. He doesn’t need this.

  Nick’s mother lights a cigarette and holds the tip out the window. The smoke blows back into the car, whirling around their heads.

  “Do you have to smoke?”

  “Can we listen to some music?”

  The road hugs a coastline fringed with fjords. He turns on the radio. Classic rock. Suzanne stares out the window. He watches for a moment in the rearview mirror. She’d elected to sit in the back. He is the chauffeur, he is the appointed domestic. For a second there’s a conspiratorial smile on her lips as she glances out at the ocean. Then the face is drawn again, pale and serious.

  She’d been weirdly compliant when he showed up. He told her that he needed to take her away, at Nick’s request; that was the extent of the information he possessed. Which wasn’t a problem for her, for some reason. Had they discussed it, the two of them? Was that why she seemed so unconcerned? Suzanne didn’t ask questions, didn’t even want to drive her own car. He smelled booze. He said they could always rent her a car later. In her brow the sea was calm, the opposite of the spirit he’d encountered last time. Here she relinquished the decision, any decision. Like someone being sent to surgery.

  Finally they get there, the Boothbay Inn & Cottages. A tumbledown motel he’d found online. She pitches her cigarette butt out the window. The parking lot’s half-filled. Deciduous trees on either side, and a dozen tiny cabins like identical row houses, like a showcase of two-room garden sheds. A swimming pool in the middle glows blue, ringed by a white picket fence and weeds.

  She gets out of the backseat and crosses the gravel smoothly, even elegantly, while wearing heels. Something his wife had never quite pulled off.

  “Are you coming or not?” she calls.

  “Why would I?”

  “I’ll tell them you kidnapped me.”

  At that moment, all he really wants to do is to turn around, get back to the kid, figure out what the hell is going on. His stomach burns, his mind’s doing backflips with implausible scenarios. Brenner had been equally surprised when he called her, just as confused, but she couldn’t do anything, she said, she was in Boston for a family gathering. By that point it was nearly eight p.m.

  Nick’s mother is inside before Martin can answer. He watches through the lobby window. She smiles at an old clerk. She does have a nice figure, he can’t help but notice.

  Something his sponsor once told him after a meeting: to monitor yourself, to keep tabs on yourself, is like hiring unskilled labor.

  She returns with two keys.

  “I assume you’re staying,” she says, and tosses him one. He catches the key with his left hand. His right hand clenches his sobriety coin in his pocket. He walks around the car and opens the hatch.

  “For future reference,” she says, “I hate checking into hotels alone.”

  She struts away without her luggage.

  * * *

  Alex’s rapping sex buddy, Jersey Mike, is the one who finds the naked pictures of Emily Portis on Meg’s computer.

  Alex is the one who finds Jersey Mike looking at the pictures an hour later, pictures she hasn’t seen before, hadn’t known about. She subsequently flips out, first at Mike, and kicks him out of the Sisterhood in a rage, then Meg, who leaves for work in a huff, and finally Emily.

  Emily is the one who sits timidly on Alex’s bed while being lectured, informed that she’s a doofus for becoming a Headdress disciple, complete with sexual objectification and neediness and cannabis tincture, for being not much better than your typical slutbag on the Zeta princess council.

  Alex is the one who says things to Emily like evidently she’s too dim to understand the sickening truths that squirm between the photographs’ pixels, that those photos demean her, demean women, punish women when life for women is increasingly worse these days, and doesn’t Emily know, doesn’t she know, that part and parcel with being cis female, any female today, is the certainty that trivial mistakes can produce dire, lifelong search-result consequences for anyone involved?

  “I’m so lucky you’re my friend,” Emily says finally, sullenly.

  “What’d you just say?”

  She stares into Alex’s bewildered look, stares back forcibly. There’s a lot inside her that agrees, even sympathizes with Alex’s position. But then a much greater sense of outrage takes control.

  “You’re such a hypocrite,” Emily says quickly, to get the words out as fast as possible. “It was your boyfriend who was looking at them. Your boyfriend. That’s disgusting. Did you even stop and think how that makes me feel?”

  “I already apologized about that,” Alex says. “Obviously I’m angry about that. That’s not the point.”

  “Really? What’s the point?”

  “Those pictures are porn.”

  “No they’re not.”

  “You crossed the line.”

  “He’s in jail. For murder. Do you even know what that means?”

  She hears herself shouting, she balls her hands into fists.

  “Why does that mean you have to take pictures of your bush? That’s such a slutty thing to do.”

  “You did not just say that.”

  “What were you doing with her costume anyway?”

  Alex goes on, layer upon layer, regarding things that Emily can’t bear to hear. After a moment she can’t even hear them anymore. The tone is enough, it starts to blanket her thoughts. She feels suffocated, shoved down into places she thought she’d climbed out of permanently. But this is a totally new situation. She doesn’t know how to defend herself.

  “You’re saying it’s my fault,” she says quietly. She feels trapped in the tiny room. “It’s my fault that Mike saw them. I put you in this situation.”

  “That’s not what I said. Why are you speaking like that? You’re not listening.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.” She falters, truly nauseated. She slumps down to the floor. Alex waits, grimacing. She turns to the window again. When nothing else is said for a moment, Alex paces by the door.

  “I swear to god I’ll kill him. It’s so gross.”

  “You mean I’m gross,” says Emily. “How ugly I look, that’s what you’re saying.”

  “Please. You know I’m not.”

  Now Emily is the one to stand. She doesn’t know how she manages, her whole body shakes. An emptiness fills with righteous anger, a dark tornado, because she isn’t stupid, she isn’t at fault. The sickness is suddenly gone, and she feels far worse in a way, to an extent that pushes her beyond her self-control: she becomes the sickness. If Alex were to touch her, she’d smack her. And in the center of the whirlwind she’s still baffled and hotly ashamed. Her heart thuds in her chest. Her worst thought: what if it all gets back to Nick somehow?

  “Did you ever stop and wonder,” Alex says quietly, “if maybe there’s a reason Nick’s in jail?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I love you, you know that.”

  “No, what do you mean? You’ve been totally awol.”

  “That’s not
true.”

  “Your new job? And that asshole?”

  “I was scared, okay? God, I’m sorry.”

  “You were scared?” Emily laughs. “You were scared?”

  “Fine, I’m horrible,” Alex says. She squats in her chair. “I let you fall under my sister’s influence. It’s all my fault. Whatever.”

  “You’re being stupid.”

  “Don’t you think I wanted to be here for you?”

  “How would I know?”

  Alex pauses longer, goes inside herself. Sincerely scared about something.

  “The things they say he did…”

  “Alex, what are you saying?”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “No. I’m not wrong.”

  “But what if he is guilty?” Alex asks flatly. “What if he’s guilty. Even a little?”

  “He’s not.”

  “So you haven’t even thought about it.”

  “Of course I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Well, someone killed those people.” Then Alex is up again, enraged all over again. “I’m going to murder my sister. Honestly, I think you should just go, I need to be by myself.”

  Alex opens the door. It makes everything seem even more terrible: she’s being kicked out.

  Emily says quietly, “Do you realize how selfish you’re being?”

  “Please, just go.”

  On her way out, she can’t help but say, with her throat jammed with poison, “Why are you being like this?”

  “Being like what?”

  “Like such a bitch.”

  A moment later, totally lost, flung equally by Alex and herself into no-man’s-land emotionally, she leaves and slams the bedroom door behind her. The sound’s a violent clap. Her face tightens in the hallway. Alex’s words sink down into her body. From prude to slut. She staggers out, down the stairs outside, a girl to be ashamed of, to be shamed, another part of the filth that is her.

  Emily runs down the jangling staircase, gets in the truck, and turns the key. Where it occurs to her that a piece of what just sent her racing outside is the conviction that her best friend, her former best friend, is somehow right, about all of it. Which means now Alex and Nick are lost to her forever. She has no one.

  JURY SELECTION

  Another pastoral Sunday morning in New England, irregularly sun-rich and honeyed, and yet it offers no inspiration, no gain in yardage, while all day long, over a period of many days, between pauses only for toilet, jogging, and other forms of self-torture, does Leela Mann attempt to remain in stewing calm above her keyboard, refuse to budge from her squatter’s nest in Madbury, until she may claim to have found something, anything, about which she can type ten thousand words.

  The web’s a snail’s-pace connection, tethered off her phone to a single bar of service. Still, she double-fists her motivation! In full possession of her senses. And sniffs up angles in paragraph-length attempts that seem great for forty minutes but then perish from awfulness, die quickly from vapidity, and are buried in potter’s fields of cloud-based files.

  Files that she spends even more time organizing, an effort she will admit is the most idiotic procrastination.

  But she only leaves the house for groceries or exercise. And barely registers in the world. No social media, no news websites outside her research. Her walks to the convenience store are the extent of any connection to society, partially because she’s horrified of running into her parents somehow, or a kid from back in the day.

  It’s only when she’s safely bundled back inside her hovel does Leela relax her guard and return to the matter at hand. How not to quit. How not to give in. How to land this goddamn job.

  Though by Sunday morning, all efforts seem futile. She wakes at six, half-light. Summer chill seeps through the house’s cracks. She stares around the cluttered floor. She still hasn’t moved her possessions into other rooms. Energy bar wrappers and her mini collection of metal water bottles are nearly the sum total of her kitchenware. Laundry she washed in the kitchen sink, underwear and T-shirts and her running shorts, hang off the staircase to dry. The floor is warped, she notices, angling toward the empty fireplace. Should she tell Sandra? She hasn’t sent a single note since she arrived, except to say she got in okay, to confirm her continuing existence.

  She works up the nerve to log into her bank account. She turns away just as the balance loads.

  But this is her normal routine, how she writes. From the bank website Leela moves closer to actual work, by watching fifteen minutes of an old episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race that she’s already seen probably three times. Though today she doesn’t even enjoy that. Because if she can’t come up with this story, then what? Likely the Magazine will need to evaluate her on coding skills, against dude bro’s. Skills that, she is the first one to admit, aren’t much more than copy/paste. Between a good Jane Austen novel and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python? In the end, does she even care about computers? Algorithms are things she uses, has been reasonably good at using since fourth-grade Mac lab, but nothing more.

  And yet Leela Mann must become the perfect algorithm for this job.

  By noon, she’s stir-crazy, she can’t sit inside any longer. She definitely can’t eat another energy bar. She starts up the car and drives half an hour to Durham, the main campus of the University of New Hampshire, if only to escape for a little while her turgid mind.

  Growing up in Claymore, she and Sandra always talked about sneaking out, to crash a frat party. Of course they didn’t, but they’d visit campus on autumn Saturdays, drink cappuccinos, pretend they were college students. She parks outside a newish-looking coffee shop. It could just as easily belong in Brooklyn. Inside, there’s even a cute little barista girl with sleeves of tattoos, for whom the line to be attended is six guys long. And look at the menu written on butcher paper, so it can be torn off and rewritten on a whim. Look at the baklava croissant! Look at the identical tea tins arranged in rows, like a conquering Bushwick army!

  By the bakery case is a newspaper stand, and the only paper available is The New York Times, weekend edition, four inches thick.

  Though if she’s being honest, all of these things do give her a sprinkling of pleasure at a moment when nothing else does. To be in a slightly fashionable space, fantasizing that she still lives in New York. Is she superficial, or is she superficial and other things, too? Naturally she understands, of course she does, that everything in that room, including her, if it were back in New York, would be merely one drop in a big pool, a reservoir of a mega fortunate essence, a temporary, extremely privileged status quo—though a “quo,” perhaps, that is still possibly the New as of This Now?

  Wait, what?

  Because, surefire, this quo will be disappearing soon, New York or not, right? What’s the half-life of a quo? At that moment, at every moment, it was already slipping off the front pages of the indiest publications. The cool, the edge, the juju, the quo—veritably nothing in the bigger scheme. And yet, for its exceedingly brief existence, was it not still self-aware and competitive, therefore alive? Wasn’t there some value in that … essence?

  And therefore was not such a point of view, the view from inside the quo, itself a flame to light the present moment?

  In which case: To be an ingredient in a juju is better than not being at all?

  Wait a second, was this bullshit a story idea?

  The bulb in her brain illuminates to half-dim. There was something here. About how a kid who grew up in New Hampshire, and munched on an unexpectedly delicious baklava croissant—but was still stuck in Durham while said kid did the munching—would have envied a Brooklynite’s perch on the edge of newness. Would have wanted to get the hell out of town. A kid to whom something felt due, the same way she’d long ago desired to fly from Claymore County.

  So that could be the personal-essay component, open in medias res. And then …

  Then pivot to generational analysis with regard to other avant-garde eras in New York City … />
  Then pivot to a brief history of global urbanism and sex, w/r/t gentrification patterns over time matched to romantic inclinations … E.g., wave patterns of where to find the gentrifier types, i.e., the fashionables and the financial types they were fucking; heretofore the fashionables and the mostly white cools; heretofore the mostly white cools and mostly nonwhites they knew (and were probably fucking); heretofore the artists and the mostly nonwhites known by mostly white cools, fuck, suck, or no; heretofore the gays and the nonwhites unknown to whites; heretofore the gays and the nonwhites unknown to whites who were fucked; heretofore the nonwhites unknown to whites, gay or straight …

  Plus possibly an interview with whichever chef invented the baklava croissant?

  Finally, pivot to a conclusion, first-person POV, whereupon the metaphorical baklava croissant—whose doughy inner layers could mirror Leela’s own inner life, never mind her experiences of the NYC hustle-struggle and those of kids her age, those overnurtured meh-llennials whose life/work balance was so out of whack, so unfair, so podcast-able—whereupon the metaphorical croissant crumbles into some rich dude’s flat white, and then …

  But all of this occurs so rapidly to Leela while she waits in line that she instantly knows it’s stupid. And likely previously written. Because the idea is too easy, plus dumb. “Outer boroughs” + “expropriation” + “soulful inquiry by college-educated person born in 1990” equals already done, proof-positive that she is similarly if not more cliché than the café around her.

  And it’s not just her ideas that are flawed, but her native algorithm, the program that brought her to that moment: Leela Mann, broke-down semi-narcissist in expensive leather, who brews light beer intellectually and produces think pieces instead of thoughts.

  Because, shit: Is she not this girl? Is she really, honestly anything more?

  “Can I help you?”

  “The Merguez sandwich,” she says. “And a New York Times.”

  “Excuse me?” says the sexy cashier a moment later. “Your card’s busted.”

  She holds it up. The magnetic strip cracked.

  “I’m so sorry,” says Leela. “Can I write you a check?”