“I had counseling when my father died. No more—I can’t take it.”
Well played: Headmaster Enright looks like something’s stuck halfway down his throat.
“If I call up your teachers, they’re all going to tell me your final papers are in?”
“One left. I’ll have it on your desk tomorrow.”
“And you’ve got this camping trip planned out—we’re not going to find you stoned and playing video games somewhere?”
Insult me some more. Six years of honor roll, and you think I’ve been waiting for the day I could get stoned and play Call of Duty Black Ops II for a month in my room? Yes, sir.
“No, sir. Zion. Then Yosemite. Then Mercer freshman orientation.”
I watch him balance the pain of doing me a favor against the pleasure of getting me out of his school. I watch him start to beam as pleasure wins.
15
Cat
Now that I’ve got the burner, the whole time I’m planning my field trip to South Texas Tech, Galkey, I’m distracted by terror (good) and obsessed with how easy it would be to call Olivia (bad).
Back when the broken pay phone by the Five Star was front and center in my fantasy life, the fact that I couldn’t call home was a lot clearer. Half the little silver number buttons and the entire receiver on that phone are gone.
End of story.
Plus, according to Law & Order, you can trace pay-phone calls to a shed in a field full of sheep in Romania if you know what you’re doing.
But it’s a different episode of Law & Order that clinches it.
I sit on the saggy king bed I’m supposed to be making, wanting the police not to be able to track the villain’s burner so bad, I can hardly bear to watch.
The villain gets away.
I tear out of there in broad daylight, pedal the red bike as far into the ranchland on the edge of town as I can go and still get a couple of bars. I’m clutching the phone so hard, I’m afraid it’s going to crumble into black and silver plastic shards right in my hand.
I have to squeeze the words out individually. “Are? You? Alone?”
My heart is blanched white, the blood wrung out of it. Not because of my situation, for once, but at the realization of my complete lack of self-control.
“Nick!”
“Shhhh!”
Her voice drops to a whisper. “Where are you? What’s going on?”
Collapsing lungs. Constricting throat. Eyes full of tears that sting worse than at the eye doctor.
“I just want you to know I’m okay. I’m sorry. Then I have to go.”
“You can’t do that!” Olivia yelps. “Why are you in rehab? Steve’s acting like you were cheering on crack.”
I’m where? Steve’s acting like what? Rehab because why? Three hits of marijuana in Ann Arbor last summer and maybe too much party beer? The only thing I did in the backseat of the Camaro that wouldn’t make Steve go ballistic is I turned down a whole pharmacy.
Before I remember that it doesn’t matter what Steve says.
Before I remember that even though Olivia is rattling on as if everything’s the same as always, nothing is the same.
She’s the person I talked to about everything—cheats-before-spring-formal Connor, and Steve’s antiquated ideas of how girls should act, and what I was wearing to school the next day. Now she can’t know anything.
I never, never, ever should have called her.
“Nick! Come on. ‘Hello, I’ve been kidnapped by aliens, but I can’t talk about it, bye.’ Where are you? Did you run away from rehab?”
I might not have told her one or two things before, but never in my life have I lied to Olivia. Not when she got breasts before anyone else and she wanted to know what people said (only she’ll never know the worst bits—vow of silence). Not when we both liked Zak Myer, and she held his hand, and I wanted to slap her. Never.
Until now.
“All right. I ran away, but if Steve finds me, he’ll drag me back there. They made me sleep on a cement floor when I wasn’t cooperative.”
This could happen. If someone stuck me in rehab, I wouldn’t cooperate.
“Do you need me to send you money? You’re not, like, living under a bridge, right?”
Hearing her voice, it’s like there’s the possibility I could sit next to her in history again, close enough to pass her notes, and hang out with my friends by my locker. I’m not sure if the actual impossibility makes it better or worse.
“Can you delete this number?”
She says, “Why can’t I call you back?”
“Liv! I can’t be found!”
She clucks. “I’ll tell Steve on you. I have so much on you. You and the creepazoid in that Camaro burning rubber out on Bayside Road.”
“Liv!”
“You know I wouldn’t! I’ll smash my cell at the landfill in Kerwin if you say to. Just don’t disappear. Please. When are you coming back?”
I let her pretend that we’re still girlfriends like before.
I pretend to myself that I’m going along with her because I’m afraid she’ll break down and spill to Steve or the police or the Pastors if I don’t. When she says she’s buying herself a burner, too, I pretend I don’t stop her because I’m afraid she’ll get upset and tell someone.
But I know that isn’t why.
16
Jack
Thursday.
I grab the phone out of my mom’s hands before she can say hello.
I carry the phone into the dining room and shut the door. “Fuck you, Don.” I have to tell him yes, save him and my mom, get Yeager off my back, and become a monster in a single syllable: Yes. But my mouth tastes like puke, and I can’t stop picturing my mother’s hair in flames. “We had a fire.”
Nothing.
“Did you consider at least giving me a warning about . . . fire prevention?”
Don snorts, as if I’m amusing him. “Do you think I knew?” he says. “Am I God? Can I read minds?”
“What’s wrong with you? What kind of moron gets in bed with people who’d do this?”
He ignores this.
“I told you everything you needed to know about fire prevention,” he says. “Just do what I told you and . . . you know, Jack . . . find yourself a girl.”
Then he chuckles as if this were a real conversation, big brother encouraging me to get a prom date on Tinder. It’s like he thinks if I set the range at four thousand miles and swipe fifty million times, Nicolette Holland will turn up, mine for the taking in her cheerleader skirt. It’s amazing how reasonable he sounds if you don’t know what he’s actually saying.
“Think about the fire,” Don says. “Life is short. Anything can happen.”
I picture myself pounding the punching bag in the garage, bare-knuckled, running at the bag and kicking, bruising the outer edges of my feet.
“Threatening me isn’t going to help me find a girlfriend.”
“Are you listening? Do this for me. Like we’re one guy in two bodies.”
“Don’t fucking say that to me!”
“Be cool!” Don says. “Find the girl.” There are more chuckles, as if he’s morphing from a lowlife thug to a drooling psycho with phone skills.
“I’m doing it! I get the point. I’m hitting the road. I hope all your friends with an interest in my social life know that. But”—I go for menacing without a hope in hell of success—“you’d better make sure there aren’t more fires. Or anything like a fire. That would distract me. I can’t look for a girlfriend if I’m distracted.”
Don goes, “Mmmmmmmm,” smooth and ambiguous.
By this point, I’m yelling at him. “What does ‘mmmm’ mean? Did you hear what I said?”
“Like I said, I’m not God.” There’s a new tone, raw and even scarier maybe because he sounds scared himself. “I don’t control natural disasters.”
“So you didn’t have anything to do with—”
“Moron! Shut up! You need to get this done. Because someo
ne controls lightning—but it isn’t me.”
Part 2
17
Jack
I slide the gun into the trunk of Don’s shitmobile, between the rucksack and the cooler.
Then I drive nineteen hundred miles east, playing music so loud, it blocks out rational thought. It takes two and a half days. There might be scenery, but all I see is a loop of Nicolette’s face, Yucca Valley Correctional, Connie Marino shooting hoops in the driveway of my dad’s spread, and my mother’s house on fire.
In the middle of this, there are flashes of my dad coming at me, going, Think, Jack. But I’m too busy trying to stay awake in a peeling-plastic bucket seat to think.
Anyone, anywhere, anytime. The world ends. I whimper like a little girl. Connie dies. Bang.
At the point when I realize my mind has turned to the kind of mush that steers cars into the center divider, I pull off and sleep in the front seat, parked at a desolate rest stop in Kansas. I don’t have any real dreams, just reruns of what I did to my mother right before I left, and the promises I made that I’m not going to keep.
It started off practical. I said I was leaving. She said my car wouldn’t make it.
“I could use Don’s car.” His uglier-than-shit car was mounted on blocks in our garage, waiting for him to finish up his two-to-five. “He has no use for it.”
Pain flashes across her face. Very fast, she turns away so I won’t see it. I see it, her sorrow and her mother-love for my thug brother.
“Why are you doing this?” she says. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m eighteen. Guys my age are in the Marines.” This is lame and nonresponsive, but at least it’s true.
The reaction on her face is bad enough, and then she starts to talk. “Jackson, Marines are grown-ups. Grown-ups don’t waltz out of town on a whim. Grown-ups are responsible.”
“How can you say I’m not responsible? In this family, isn’t it enough that I don’t hold up convenience stores? You act like it’s a felony that I want to take a road trip. Don commits felonies, and you treat him like the Second Coming.”
“Don doesn’t have your gifts. Jack, sit down. Be good. You’re a serious person. Now act like one.”
I feel like the exploding guy I pretended to be in Enright’s office.
“I want to skip graduation, so I’m Public Enemy Number One?”
Even as I sleep by the interstate in Kansas, be good be good be good pounds against the inside of my skull like the clapper of a deafening bell.
“No, wait, didn’t you marry Public Enemy Number One? Maybe you’d like me better if I screwed up big. Maybe then you wouldn’t be so obvious about worshipping Don—”
“I left Don with your father,” she says in her unnaturally calm voice. “It was the worst decision of my life. And don’t you ever talk to me like this.”
Naturally, her worst decision was a Don-decision.
“Don wasn’t the one he was trying to mold. I was. You sat there for ten years and let him do it.”
She reaches out to pat my arm, but I’m two feet back before her hand can touch me. “There are no words for how sorry I am,” she says.
This would be my opportunity to be decent, forgiving, kind. I could dream a different outcome and wake up without my gut braided like a Boy Scout lanyard. But it’s as if I’m turning into the hard guy everybody always thought I was no matter how good I was.
“If you’re that sorry, maybe you should have found some words.”
She sits down on the couch as if I’d pushed her. “Don’t try to get back at me by demolishing your own life, all right? I understand you’re furious. I understand why. But I’m not about to roll over and say this is all right. This isn’t just monumentally stupid—what about memories you’ll want later? Grad night, marching with your class at graduation—”
“I want the memory of seeing Las Vegas in the rearview—tonight.” I say this with so much conviction, I almost believe it. “I’ll use Manx money if I have to.”
This would be the money my father left. My mother thinks of it as tainted. I see it as restitution. Before I turned eighteen, it was her choice. Now it’s mine.
“Jack, no!”
There, I’ve brought my mother to the verge of tears. I feel like warmed-over crap. “It’s mine, and he owes me.”
I’ve never said things this harsh or true to her before.
She hugs me, but she’s shaking. (Even in the dream, I feel her shake.)
• • •
I’m not getting back at her, I’m saving her.
• • •
She steps away, and her hands find their way to her hips as if she’s about to let me have it. “I’ll spring for the tent and all the gear. You don’t need his money. But I want your itinerary, and I want you to answer your phone. Do you hear me?”
I feel nothing but relief with her back in the mom groove and me in the kid groove—but for now, it’s all a lie. “Loud and clear. Thanks for the tent.” As for the gear, there’s no way she’s going to know about the gear I’ll need for this trip.
She half whispers, “These are the words. I didn’t see what I didn’t want to see. I was a terrible mother. I’m trying to make up for it.”
I’m not a guy who cries. I start to apologize, but she interrupts me. You would think that asleep in Kansas, in the realm of wish-fulfillment, I’d get to finish apologizing and feel like a stand-up son, but I don’t.
She says, “I think you wanted to tell me how angry you are.”
“I’m not an angry guy!”
She touches the side of my head. “I hope being in nature feeds your soul, Jack. Tell me what you need, and I’ll take care of it. Within reason.”
Screw my soul, no one is going to touch her. No one is going to get so close, they can switch off the security and take her down in her own laundry room. I won’t let it happen.
I’m going to take a road trip and track down this killer bitch Nicolette and, one way or another, I’m going to solve the fucking problem. I don’t care if it takes my mother’s money and the Manx money—each dollar of which might as well represent a bullet through somebody’s head—and every penny I earned, and was forced to save, from three summers of lifeguarding.
I’m going to do this.
I wake up at dawn, hunched over the steering wheel, back aching, filled with nausea and resolve. A couple of goony little kids pound on my window. My first impulse is to slam the car door into them. Instead, I wave and make a funny face.
Between being awakened and yawning, I’ve imagined knocking little children over with a metal door.
I’m not that guy.
Nevertheless, my mind turns to destruction. Those are my thoughts.
A thousand miles from Nevada, and the beast is off leash.
18
Cat
Frat row at South Texas Tech, Galkey, is two blocks long but intense. Big wooden houses with torn-up lawns in front. Every one of them having a party.
People cutting across the front lawns, hanging off the porches.
I stash the bike and the zombie-apocalypse preparedness kit between a Dumpster and a broken bookshelf the frat boys are throwing out instead of fixing.
Back home, we fix things. Me, Olivia, and Jody, nine years old, in my room in pajamas after we collapsed my bed by jumping on it. Steve trying to figure out how to put it back together. Us telling him how sorry we are. Him telling us if this is the worst thing we ever do, there’s nothing to worry about. Only don’t do it again.
Must. Stop. Thinking. About. Home.
It’s been so much worse since I called up Olivia. I thought it would make it better, but it didn’t.
Must. Get. Head. In. Game.
Now.
All right, I’m in love with this Goodwill halter dress. It’s the exact kind I like. And these cute fake-leather heels. The whole outfit looks better than it was supposed to, but what was I going to do? Show up in grungy sweats and ask a guy to do me favors? Good luck, Bean.
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Everyone looks so far gone, I figure they’ll all be blacked out by two a.m. I won’t even be a dim memory.
That’s what I tell myself to quell the fear.
That I look like the Little Mermaid with this mass of red hair.
That I’m unrecognizable, only as cute as I have to be to get a couple of drunk frat guys to point me to someone who can scare up some nice-looking fake ID.
I pick Theta Chi. They’re the loudest. Lots of girls moving to the music inside, so you figure this is the cool party.
What they say about Texas girls with big hair? True. Only these girls look good. They look top-of-wedding-cake good, if brides danced down the aisle dressed in Forever 21.
The first guy to hit on me is dark and cute in an ROTC kind of way. He asks me if I need a beer (or some sentence with beer at the end; it’s noisy in here). I need to avoid beer, but I say yes just so I’ll get to follow him outside to the keg.
I’m not what you could call a party novice.
I take the red cup. “I wish I could get some Jose Cuervo, but I don’t have ID.”
“You want tequila? Come with me. I’ll grant your every wish. And we’ve got limes.”
I need to avoid tequila even more than I need to avoid beer.
He puts his hand on my waist and starts to kind of dance with me. People are making out all over the yard. I press my face against the guy’s neck so I seem friendly but with an unavailable mouth.
He says, “You’re so pretty.”
“You aren’t bad, either.” This makes him pull me closer, breasts smashed against his chest. Not a romantic feeling if you like to breathe. “What’s your name?”
“Clark.”
I don’t want to lose him, so I take his hand. I pull him toward the back porch, which opens to a room with guys playing pool. It’s a hundred degrees and smelly in there, like boy armpits and moldy Doritos.
“You play?”
“Prepare to be impressed.” He pushes up his sleeves and goes to work. Every time he drops a ball into a pocket, I act enthusiastic.
When he goes out to get more beer, I trot along next to him. It’s quieter in the backyard now. I say, “Hey, Clark, do you know where a person could get an ID?”
How to Disappear Page 5