“You have to see where I’m coming from on this.”
“But I thought—” I looked at him. His face was stern. Expressionless. “I thought you loved me.”
“Rory.” He sighed. “Look, you’re a great guy, and you’re a lot of fun in bed. And I do—I care about you, I really do, I like you a lot. But this is getting way too heavy for me. Look, we’ve talked about this before—you think you want a long-term, serious relationship, and you’re still just a kid. I just got out of a marriage. I’m not ready to take on all this . . . baggage and drama. It’s not where I am in my life right now. And now, with the police and everything, it’s just too much for me. I’m sorry it didn’t work out, and I hope your friend comes home, but right now I really need you to go.”
“You need me to go,” I echoed. I nodded slowly. “My best friend just disappeared, and you need me to go.”
“Rory—”
“Huh. All this time, I thought you were the grown-up in this relationship.” I felt a tight, rough-edged knot at the back of my throat, like a little rock made out of anger and sadness and fatigue. I swallowed, but it stayed stuck there. “Andy. You never did love me, did you?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s just bad timing. I’m not good for you right now, and you’re not good for me. And I’m sorry, sweetie. I really am sorry about your friend—” Andy put his arm on my shoulder. I shrugged him away.
“I’m not your sweetie,” I said. “I’m your employee. That’s all. And I quit. Effective immediately.” I grabbed my book bag and walked out, the bell clanking dully behind me. Exit What’s His Name, stage left.
I LOOKED UP COACH MORRIS’S NUMBER in the phone book, and dialed him at home. A little kid answered. I asked her to put her dad on the phone.
“Coach Morris?”
“Yeah?”
“This is Ro—. This is Theodore Callahan.”
“What can I do for you, son?” His voice was clipped. “It’s late.”
“I know. I just wanted to say that if you still want me on the team, I want to play. I’ll do the summer practices and everything.”
“All right. Come by my office tomorrow and we’ll get you started.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Son, I’m sorry about your girlfriend.”
I wanted to say: She’s not my girlfriend. I’m an unrepentant queer and a former nice guy who really wants to shove some guys’ faces into the mud all of a sudden. But thanks for the sentiment. Instead I just said, “So am I.” And then I hung up. Wishing all these assholes would stop calling me son.
ten
MRS. LIDELL ASKED ME TO SEE her in her office the next afternoon. She came in from outside smelling like tobacco. I knew what this was about.
“Rory, you’re an excellent writer.” She sat down at her desk and started in right away. “But I don’t know what to make of this.” She held up the two blue books I’d ended up using to write my midterm essay. I nodded.
“I know.” I was kind of expecting this.
“I’m sure there are some places where an in-depth analysis of the platonic bond between Mulder and Scully will go a long way. But this class is not an AOL message board from 1997. And your midterm exam isn’t the place to wax rhapsodic about old episodes of The X-Files.”
“I fulfilled the assignment, didn’t I?”
“Rory.” I thought she was going to give me one of those looks and keep lecturing me about how I was supposed to be writing about literature. But instead, she looked away, blinking. Was Mrs. Lidell starting to cry?
“I know you’re upset about Lula. I’m upset, too. But I don’t know how to grade this. I’m going to give you another chance. If you can stay late tomorrow and rewrite this essay, I’m willing to throw this out. But if I start letting students get away with writing midterm essays on television shows . . . you see where I’m coming from, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You can retake this tomorrow?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Here.” She handed me the blue books.
“What for?”
“Save those for when Lula comes home. I’m sure she’d like to read them.”
I STAYED LATE THE NEXT DAY and wrote what I knew was a passing essay for Mrs. Lidell. Afterward, as I was walking across the parking lot, I heard someone call my name from far off, and for a weird second, I thought it was Lula. But it wasn’t even a girl. It was Sexy Seth.
“Hey,” I called back. He was walking toward the school from his pickup truck, big headphones hanging around his neck, a raggedy one-subject notebook in his hand. The notebook had the word STUDY! written on the bright yellow cover in heavy black marker. He had on a black T-shirt with another random saying. This one announced, in big white letters: BOSTON SPACESHIPS IS REAL!
“You in for this SAT Prep thing?”
“Me? No, I was just . . . rewriting a midterm essay. For Mrs. Lidell.”
“Oh, shit, man. I’m supposed to have her next year. I heard she’s impossible.”
“Nah, she’s possible. I just goofed it up, is all.”
“Dude!” Seth slapped me on the arm with his notebook. “I heard you’re on the team! Right on, man!”
“Yeah, I—” My voice hung up. It was the weirdest thing. The way Seth said “Right on, man,” drawing out the “on.” Lula used to say that all the time. Probably imitating Trey the Burnout Yard Guy, but I thought of it as a Lula Saying. It took me a second to remember what Seth was talking about. Oh yeah, football. “I guess I am. On the team.”
“Coach Morris was freaking out. He says you’re a football progeny. He couldn’t believe you never played before.”
Progeny? I started to ask, but there was a weird lump in my throat.
“Man, it’s gonna be righteous,” Seth went on. “Friday nights, five thousand people all going apeshit in the bleachers. Talk about a rush. We are gonna have a serious GT, I promise.” Seth gave me his sexiest of Sexy Seth grins.
“A GT?”
“A good time,” he drawled happily. “Hey, listen, though. Seriously, uh. I wanted to say sorry. About your girl Lula. I heard about her. Going missing and all. I know what that’s like, man. I lost my brother. He passed on, a few years ago. I know it’s tough.”
“Lula didn’t pass on,” I said. “She’s just missing. She’ll be back.”
“I hope she will, brother.” Seth gave me one of his squinty, serious smiles. Like he’s George Clooney or Sawyer from Lost or some shit. Like he’s Mr. Charm and he feels so sorry for the rest of us because we aren’t him. “I truly hope she will.”
“Seth.” I threw open the driver’s side door to the Beast, which gave a horrific rusty metal squeal. “I’m not your brother. The word you’re looking for is prodigy, not progeny. And your T-shirt is grammatically incorrect.”
I got in the car, slammed the door, and drove away. In the rearview mirror, I could see Seth, just standing there in the parking lot with his stupid notebook that said STUDY! One hand in his pocket, his floppy hair in the breeze. I didn’t have to be so mean. Seth was trying to be nice. At least he remembered Lula’s name. But I didn’t want to be nice. I wanted somebody to blame. I didn’t care who. If this really was The X-Files, this would be the part where I turned into Action Mulder, and I put on my bulletproof vest and went after Duane Barry or Krycek or the Cigarette-Smoking Man. But I wasn’t Mulder, and there was nobody I could beat up and threaten to bring Lula back. Putting a masking-tape X on my window wasn’t going to lure any secret operatives to my house to give me clues in the middle of the night. I didn’t have any Lone Gunmen to help me uncover any secrets. Maybe there weren’t any secrets to uncover. Lula was gone. Just gone. And whoever had taken her was gone, too. Or she was gone by herself. Because she didn’t want to be around anymore. And if that was the case, I was useless. I had been useless from the start. Or, worse than useless, I was the monster Speed Briggs said I was. The liar, the deceiver, the damage. I had this thing inside of me that she was right to run fr
om. This black fear, this anger I couldn’t keep down. I thought about the things I said to her that last night, and it made me sick inside. Lula was right. We were supposed to be in this together. I should have told her about Andy. I should have trusted her, above anyone and everyone else. But I failed. And now there was nothing I could do but sit around and wait for her to come home.
THOSE FIRST FEW DAYS HAD BEEN little marathons, dividing up the town with Janet and Leo, taping up MISSING flyers in every shop window that would let us. At home, it seemed like the phone was always ringing, or about to ring. Then it wasn’t. Almost two weeks had passed since Lula disappeared, and there was still nothing I could do but wait. There was no job to go to after school. No Friday nights watching X-Files with Lula. I finished my homework early and studied football strategies. I stayed home and had uncomfortably quiet dinners with my mom. I stopped going to the gym—Andy had probably dropped my membership, anyway. The school gym was uncomfortable, the older guys on the team either making halfhearted attempts at hazing me or acting all sympathetic about Lula when we both knew that, two weeks ago, they would’ve been calling her Weird Girl just like everybody else. I built homemade weights and worked out in the garage. Whenever I left the house, I saw the flyers Janet had posted on telephone poles, Lula’s picture getting faded and tattered from the rain. I went for long runs, looping past the woods that the police had combed again and again when Lula first went missing. I kept thinking how stupid that was. Lula hated the woods. She hated camping. Then I realized they weren’t expecting to find her living in the woods.
I knew Lula wasn’t dead, though. I didn’t have any proof, but I was becoming more and more convinced that if something bad had happened to her, I would’ve felt it in my bones, like a disturbance in the Force. I went to Janet and Leo’s almost every night, to check up on them. Leo smoked too much and studied maps and bus routes and talked about getting in touch with some of his buddies in army recon. Despite the endless stream of casseroles and Crock-Pot dishes brought over by friends and neighbors, Janet cooked massive amounts of Polish food and sent the leftovers home with me. Dark gray roots showed in her brassy blond hair. Her white lipstick was often smudged and she took up smoking again. She kept a box of Benson & Hedges in the back of the silverware drawer and taught me how to mix Manhattans. They would answer the door by saying, “No word yet,” and I never knew if they were asking me or telling me.
I stayed up nights, thinking about Lula. Laughing at things she’d said months ago. Her impression of Mrs. Dalrymple, the librarian. The way she’d put down this smartass senior in the cafeteria one day. I became obsessed with the late-night radio show on the community college’s station, the one Lula used to listen to, hosted by a guy named Midnight Steve. I called Midnight Steve every night to request Lula’s favorite songs, the ones she’d burned for me once on a mix CD. I requested “Teenage FBI” by Guided by Voices and “This is Hell” by Elvis Costello. I requested “Walking After You” by the Foo Fighters. I requested “Man of Steel” and “The Marsist” by Frank Black. I requested “Love is Nothing” and “Fantasize” by Liz Phair. I requested “View of the Rain” by Urge Overkill and “Do You Love Me Now?” by the Breeders. I requested Laura Nyro. Midnight Steve never had any of the songs I wanted to hear, but he told me how ’bout if he played some Dashboard Confessional instead. I finally told Midnight Steve that he and Dashboard Confessional could go fuck themselves.
For a while, I kept up my visits to the XPhilePhorum. Mainly because I was looking for her. All the regulars on the message boards knew about Lula, I guess because the police investigated all her online comings and goings. But pretty soon I got tired of waiting and waiting for the next comment that popped up to be from BloomOrphan and getting some dumbass rant about supersoldiers or whatever from MrsSpooky82 or LordKinbote instead. I got tired of their crackpot theories. I finally blew up at everybody in the chat room one night and said it was total bullshit; Lula didn’t get abducted by aliens, or members of a shadow government, or Bigfoot, or some run-of-the-mill psycho. She ran away. Plain and simple. She ran away to some better place. To be with her mother, to live some fun, bohemian life in New York. To find some new best friend who wouldn’t keep secrets or run around with older men behind her back.
Lula was always talking about the places she wanted to live when she finished school. She wanted to live in Seattle, or Vancouver. The rainy, romantic Pacific Northwest. She wanted to go to Paris, like Mrs. Lidell. Have adventures and lovers and smoke Gitanes. Why wasn’t anybody looking there? Why were they wasting their time combing the goddamn woods?
eleven
“JANET MONROE CALLED YOU. TWICE,” MY mother announced when I came in from running. She was sweating, but she was sober. Rearranging the furniture again. This time, though, it kind of made sense. At least, the coffee table was at a normal angle in front of the sofa.
“Did she say anything about Lula?”
“She said not to get excited. But they found something they hope is a clue, and they want you to look at it.”
I didn’t even shower or change clothes. I ran all the way over. When I got there, I saw a blue Chevy Cobalt with an Enterprise Rent-a-Car sticker on the back, parked in the driveway behind the white Cadillac. I knocked hard on the door.
“Rory, honey, come in. I guess you got the messages.” Janet pulled me inside.
“My mom said you had something you wanted me to look at.”
“Come here. My goodness, you’ve been out running in this heat?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Immediately, I felt like I should’ve showered and changed. There was a woman sitting in the kitchen, perched on one of the barstools. She was tall and thin and had cheekbones like glaciers. Her hair was the same sandy blond as Lula’s, the same sandy blond that Janet got out of a bottle. She wore silver bracelets, a silver ring on her long, tanned thumb. Dark blue jeans and a loose black T-shirt. Worn-out cowboy boots.
“Rory, this is Christine. Lula’s mother.”
I didn’t know what to say. She didn’t look like the bleached-out Polaroid that Lula kept. This woman was so beautiful, it made my chest hurt. She looked just like Lula. I wanted to put my arms around her. I wanted to believe that this was really Lula, somehow. Taller and transformed. Time-traveling Lula, returned from the future to tell me that everything was going to turn out okay.
“Hi, Rory. I’ve heard a lot about you.” Christine put out her hand to shake mine.
“I’ve, uh—me, too.” I didn’t know what to say. “It’s nice to meet you. Finally.”
“Rory, here,” Janet put a glass of ice water in my hand. “Now, take a look at this and tell us what you think.” Janet drew me away from the woman sitting at the kitchen bar, the one I had a hundred questions for. She put a piece of paper into my hand, a copy of a printout from a computer, stamped and numbered and signed off with looping initials.
“It turns out Lula had a diary she kept on the computer. This is the last entry—she didn’t date it, but according to the computer, she wrote it the night she left.”
I don’t know how Rory deals with it all. Even with Patty the Pickle at home and no dad, it’s like none of that bothers him. He totally just accepts who he is and he’s fine with all of it—with being gay, with not knowing his dad, with some coach wanting him to play fucking football. He just takes it all in stride. That’s what I love about him, and what’s so infuriating. I’m fucking drowning over here, and he’s leading a charmed life. But he’s so good about it. I don’t know how he puts up with me. I don’t deserve him. And I wish I didn’t love him so much.
Wait a second, I do know. I know exactly how Rory deals with it all. I understand now. He’s got somebody. Somebody he loves, somebody who loves him back. Somebody who isn’t me. Is it really just because I’m a girl? Or maybe I just didn’t love him enough.
I wish I could be like him. I wish I knew what I wanted. I’ve tried to get him to explain it to me. Like when we were doing my hair and talking about GA. But he
says it’s not like that for him. As far as he’s concerned, love only goes one way. No exceptions, no loose feelings flying around, no maybes allowed. So then how can I explain what happened tonight? Why I even went to Sam in the first place?
I don’t know why I did it. I can’t believe I did it. I guess I thought that if it worked for Rory, it could work for me. What was I thinking? I told Sam everything about Rory and me. About him sleeping in my bed the other night, about what I found out tonight. I thought Sam would get it but boy did I miss the target on that one. I’m so mortified. I guess I just wanted to be close to somebody, close like Rory was, but, as Janet and Leo have shown, it takes two to tango. I forgot the crucial element. That the other person has to love you back.
Fuck it. I’m sitting here in the dark, waiting on the sunrise. One thing is certain. I know I can never go back. I can’t go back to pretending like everything is okay with me.
I realized that all the stamps and the writing in the margins were from the police. Marking it as evidence.
“Rory, honey.” Janet touched my arm. I wasn’t even embarrassed that she knew I was gay. I was almost lightheaded with relief that Lula didn’t mention Andy. But I couldn’t believe this. Lula, in love with me? This had to be one of her jokes. I must’ve been reading it wrong.
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know how she felt. I didn’t know she—I thought everything was okay.”
“We all did, honey.”
“Everybody thinks their kids are fine,” Christine chimed in. “They all say they never saw it coming.”
“That’s enough, Chris. You want to get your digs in at me, fine, but we’ve been raising your child for the past fourteen years,” Janet said.
“And doing a bang-up job, Mom.”
“Hey, knock it off!” Uh-oh, I said that out loud. I looked at Lula’s mom, who looked surprised.
“Hey, yourself,” she said. “Who do you think you are, anyway?”
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