“I know, I know,” he said. “But fifteen isn’t enough. If you wanna do business, it’s at least eighteen.”
As Candace listened to his response, she thought, Man, Toby really knows how to negotiate to get what he wants. I need to learn how to do that. I need to look at everything as a negotiation, without emotion, and stay calm. That was the hardest part—staying calm.
Then Candace had another idea. If she couldn’t narrow down which adoption agency her mother had used, maybe there was some type of service or software that could. She decided to search “help me find my biological mother.” A list of private investigators specializing in locating estranged family members came up. Some had photos of themselves and looked cheesy—like those old type of PIs with mustaches and big potbellies from noir movies where the investigators refer to themselves as “private dicks.” She giggled a little, the thought of private dicks lightening an otherwise serious moment. Others had portrait-style photos of themselves with their families or pictures of them sitting behind desks, hard looks on their faces and framed photos of themselves in cop uniforms, much younger, turned toward the camera.
With renewed interest, she started clicking through the websites until she came to one PI who listed his fee. His name was Mike Foster, and he charged a thousand dollars to find a biological parent or child. From the photo of him on the home page, he looked honest enough—a little weathered and rough around the edges, but honest.
As Toby hung up, he seemed happy with the results of the conversation, so Candy turned the tablet around. “Look,” she said. “Private investigators who figure it out for you.” Before she could say more, her cell phone rang. She looked down at the display and smiled. “Oh, it’s Avery.” When Candace had returned earlier with her phone charger and was finally able to plug her cell in, she saw she’d missed six calls from Avery, eight from her mother, and two from her father. Ugh! Leave me alone! “Hey,” Candace greeted her best friend with a chipper note in her voice.
“Where have you been?” an angry Avery blurted out. “I’ve called you, like, fifty times!” Candace could tell she was at school; the sounds of kids laughing and talking filled the background.
“Just hanging out with a . . . friend,” Candace said, and threw a little smile to Toby. He didn’t notice. He was looking at the results she had found online.
“Who?” Avery demanded.
“You don’t know him. He’s a new friend.” Candace saw Toby glance up at her and raise his eyebrow flirtatiously. She winked at him. She really wanted to refer to him as her new boyfriend, but that was a bit presumptuous.
“Well, your mom and dad are really worried about you. Your mom even came by the school to talk to me.”
“She did?”
“Yes! And she talked to Ms. West and the principal and she even talked to Ian.” She talked to Ian? Good god, Candace thought. Now he probably thinks I ran away because I’m heartbroken that he’s dating Miss Varsity Volleyball.
“I can’t believe she did that.” Candace sighed, exasperated. “How do you know my dad’s worried?” she asked, prompting Toby to look up again, mildly interested in the answer.
“He drove up here from San Diego. I just got off the phone with him. They reported you missing to the police. You need to call them and let ’em know you’re okay!”
Candace was stunned, but she couldn’t help but laugh. The police? “Oh my god . . . they’re psycho!”
Avery didn’t seem amused. “Everyone’s worried, Candy.”
Suddenly defiant again, Candace exhaled. “I’m not going home, so, I don’t know, just call and tell ’em you talked to me and I’m fine.”
“You need to call them.” Avery was stern.
“Well I’m not going to,” Candy retorted. “I guess they’ll have to worry, then. Look, I gotta go. For all I know they’ve got the FBI tracing my phone.”
“That’s not funny,” Avery replied. Candace could tell she wasn’t impressed by the joke.
“Don’t stress. I’ll call you later.”
“Candy! This is—” Candace tapped the button on her phone, ending the call before Avery could finish her sentence. She looked at Toby and shook her head.
“You just hung up on your best friend?” Toby asked.
“She does it to me, too. She’ll get it over it.” Candace felt a little guilty about hanging up on Avery but that conversation was going nowhere. She knew Avery wouldn’t stop until Candace agreed to call her parents and there was no way she was doing that. Especially not after they’d decided to turn it into a major production.
“Apparently, my parents called the police,” Candace explained as she took the tablet back, now more serious than she was with her friend. This fact concerned her. It was one thing for her parents to be calling around trying to find her, but now that the police were involved, she wondered if her plan to stay with Toby could be foiled more quickly than she anticipated. “I can’t stand them.”
Toby laughed. “The cops, huh? You little criminal. Maybe you should go home.”
“Sick of me already?” she asked playfully. He nodded. Giving him a little shove, she laughed too. “Screw you.”
“Please do,” Toby said, and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her closer to him.
“I told you. I’m not going back there. The next place I’m going is my birth mother’s. If I can find her.”
Before Toby could respond, they heard the door open and Keenan entered with a brown paper sack. As soon as he saw Candace, he smiled. “Hey there,” Keenan said as he pulled a six-pack of beer from the bag. “Want one?” He gave each of them a bottle, twisting the top off Candace’s before handing it to her like a gentleman.
“Thanks,” she said, impressed.
“Candy, this is my cousin Keenan,” Toby said, his voice a tad strained.
Keenan grinned, holding his gaze on her a little too long. “Nice to meet you. I came in to say hi last night but you’d already drifted off to la-la land.”
She smiled, a little embarrassed. “Yeah well, that’s Toby’s fault. He was trying to get me drunk.” She grinned at Toby to let him know she was teasing, but Toby’s face was expressionless. Candace, unsure why Toby seemed so tense, went back to perusing the website.
“I’m about to go grab a burger. You guys wanna come?” Keenan posed the question to Toby but didn’t take his eyes off Candace.
“We’re good, dawg. Thanks anyway,” Toby said abruptly. Keenan stood there a moment without saying anything, unspoken words passing between him and his cousin. Candace, uncomfortable, looked from one to the other. When she glanced at Toby, he looked down.
“Well,” Keenan finally said. “See ya later, then.”
As soon as he left, Candace asked quietly, “You didn’t wanna hang out with him?”
“No. He can do his own thing.”
Candace could sense that Toby was tenser than he was letting on. “How long have you two been roommates?” she asked, hoping he’d open up and tell her what was going on.
“Few months. Ever since he got paroled.” Toby picked at the label on his beer bottle.
“Paroled?” The shock in Candace’s voice was genuine. She had never met anyone who had been in jail before. It was sort of exciting in a weird way. “What was he in for?”
“The idiot knocked off a liquor store. Did three years.” Toby’s tone was wrought with judgment. Candace reacted, surprised and a little intrigued. Never in a million years could she imagine sitting around with her friends, seriously planning the best way to rob a store. Did he use a gun? she wondered. Was it just him or did he do it in a group? If it was a group, was Keenan the one in charge? She pictured him with a stocking down over his head, leaning over the counter and demanding that the cashier fill a bag from the register. That’s how it happened on those shows where they show surveillance footage from security cameras of mini-mart robberies.
“Wow. That’s crazy.” She didn’t mean for it come off like she was impressed, but it did. When she
saw the look Toby gave her, she instantly regretted saying anything at all.
“He’s blood, so . . . I gotta help him out, right?” It was a rhetorical question. He said it as if he didn’t have a choice. There was so much more Candace wanted to know about the situation between them but she didn’t get a sense Toby would be forthcoming. She didn’t want to press, but she couldn’t help herself.
“He seems nice enough. Not someone I’d picture robbing a store,” she said, hoping he’d elaborate on either Keenan or the crime.
“You don’t know him,” Toby said. “He’s not a nice guy.” Candace hated it when Toby would leave some vague statement just hanging in the air.
“Is that the only thing he’s ever been arrested for?”
Toby almost laughed, “Uh . . . no. He’s got a rap sheet that’s been following him since he was thirteen. Mostly petty stuff, but a few that were more serious.”
“Like what?” she asked, her curiosity soaring. “What’s the worst thing he’s ever done?”
“Done, or been arrested for?”
Candace paused, realizing that they weren’t one and the same. “Done.”
“Well . . . he and one of his brothers assaulted a couple of people one night when Keenan was . . .” Toby looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember his cousin’s age. “I think he was about fifteen. Yeah, he must’ve been fifteen ’cause Gage was, like, twenty.”
“What’d they do?” The hair on the back of Candace’s neck went up as she rethought whether she even wanted to know. Assault was a pretty serious crime.
“I wasn’t there so I don’t know what really happened, but according to Keenan, he and Gage were standing in the alley behind some bar one night when this girl comes out all drunk. She’s stumbling around on her heels and stuff and crying and yelling ‘Fuck you!’ and shit at the door. So Gage goes over and asks her what’s wrong and she says she got in a fight with her boyfriend or whatever and I guess she was super drunk. Like she could hardly stand up and all that, so Gage starts kissing on her and feeling her up and the girl’s telling him to get off her, leave her alone, and she tries to go back inside the bar but the door she came out of, it’s an alley door, right? It’s locked. So she’s basically stuck there with Gage and Keenan.”
“Okay . . .” Candace said apprehensively, knowing that the story was about to get worse.
“So Gage keeps going, even though this chick clearly isn’t interested, and suddenly the door flies open and her boyfriend who she’d been fighting with comes out and sees ’em. He attacks Gage, they start going at it, and Keenan picks up a two-by-four from a trash pile and smashes this guy with it. It had a couple nails sticking out of it, so it cut his shoulder up.”
“Wait,” Candace said, stunned. “Keenan hit the boyfriend who was out there trying to help the girl?”
Toby nodded with disgust. “Pretty much. Somebody must’ve told the bouncer what was going on because he came out and that’s when Gage and Keenan took off running.”
Candace waited for more, but there wasn’t any.
“The end,” Toby said. “I think that’s the worst thing he’s ever done . . . at least the stuff I know about.”
Candace exhaled, still processing the information she’d just learned. This was some serious shit. Assaulting a drunk girl? Beating up her boyfriend? Hitting someone with a two-by-four? When Toby said Keenan wasn’t a good guy, he hadn’t exaggerated.
“Why do you hang out with him, then? If he does stuff like that?” she asked, hoping Toby’s apparent disgust at what Keenan had done wasn’t an act he put on for her benefit. “I told you,” he said. “He’s blood. Besides that, we’ve always stuck up for each other. When no one had his back, I had it. When I needed something, he was the one who made sure I got it. I never said he was perfect,” Toby responded, almost defensive. Candace watched as he crossed his arms in front of his chest and seemed to get lost in a memory. His blue-eyed gaze softened, as if he wasn’t looking at anything in particular. She waited for him to speak again.
“I remember one time when I was living with him and my aunt and her boyfriend, Hank . . .” he began cautiously. “Keenan was eighteen and I was fifteen at the time . . . anyway, Keenan did something to piss Hank off and Hank beat the crap out of him. I mean, Hank did that a lot, but this time was super bad. So at one point, Hank picks up this heavy ashtray that Aunt Patricia used to have on the coffee table. It was big, the kind they used to have in the fifties, I think.” With his hands, Toby made a circle about seven inches wide to show how big the ashtray was.
“It was a really dense glass so it had some real weight to it. Hank grabs this thing up and just—wham!” Toby smacked his fist into the palm of his hand for emphasis. “He just clocked him right on the side of the head with it.”
“Oh my god . . .” Candace said, not even thinking about the words before she said them.
“Keenan drops to the floor, out cold. Hank stands there like he can’t believe he just did that. So I shake Keenan and try to wake him up but he’s not coming to and there’s blood coming out of his nose. The blood’s what worried me the most. So I grab the phone to call 911 and Hank won’t let me. He snatches it out of my hand.”
“Why?” Candace asked. She couldn’t fathom why someone would rather see a person die than let someone call an ambulance.
“Afraid he’d get in trouble, I guess. Anyway, I knew that if he was hurt as bad as I thought, he didn’t have much time, so I went after Hank. This guy was two hundred fifty pounds but I threw his ass up against the wall and told him that Keenan dies, I’d kill him. He knew I meant it, too, because he told me to take the phone. I called 911 and the paramedics came and got Keenan.”
Candace could hardly believe the story she was hearing. She couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Toby to see his cousin lying there on the floor, the fear he must’ve felt believing he could die right then and there. Nothing like that had ever happened in her house. Her father had never hit her mother, or her, or Andrew. Fights consisted of slamming doors and the silent treatment, not smashing someone in the head with an ashtray.
Her heart went out to Toby. She was grateful he’d finally opened up to her a little, given her a tiny window into his past, helping her to understand who he was. She could tell that this was just one of many dark stories Toby had about his childhood. She could see it when she gazed into his eyes, but hadn’t understood what it was she was sensing. Now she knew.
Candace rested her hand on Toby’s. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I guess you saved his life.”
Toby instinctively pulled his hand away, retreating from their connection. “He’s done the same for me,” Toby said. “That’s why he can live here as long as he wants.” Then, Toby abruptly stood up and walked out of the room, leaving Candy there alone.
Nine
Darkness Brings the Unforeseen
The vast Los Angeles cityscape stretched out for miles and then seemed to suddenly disappear into darkness. That was where the Pacific Ocean met the city’s sandy coast, a chaotic mass of lights and freeways—and then nothing but deep, black ocean for as far as the eye could see. LA is an easy place to get lost, or to vanish if that’s what you preferred, and many did. It was a mecca for dreamers—beautiful people arriving by the busload every day to become actors, models, screenwriters, and movie directors. They all come armed with a vision of their future and the willingness to risk it all. Most of them fail. They eventually give in to the flash and floss, or the drugs, or the fast lifestyle, while others give up and go back to wherever they came from to live the lives they tried so desperately to leave behind. Los Angeles is in fact, a city full of risk-takers who suck at calculating odds.
“This is really good,” Toby said, and looked up. Candace had been anxiously awaiting his response. “I love that last part—‘LA is a city full of risk-takers who suck at calculating odds.’ That’s completely true.”
Candace grinned, soaking in the compliment. “Really?” she ask
ed. “You like it? Or are you just saying that?”
“I have nothing to gain from kissing your ass,” he said, and playfully grabbed the waist of her jeans, flipping her over on her stomach. “Although I will if you want me to.” She laughed as he pretended to tug her pants down.
“I’m serious!” She laughed again. “I’m trying to understand why he gave me a seventy-three percent. I thought it was pretty good. Did you read what he wrote?”
Toby read the scrawled comment from her teacher on the front page in a deep, booming voice with a terrible British accent. “‘This is an interesting foray into a character that needs to be better developed. Go deeper. Explain who she is and why she does what she does.’”
“Is that your literature teacher voice?” she asked.
“It’s my stuffy, know-it-all teacher voice,” he quipped back.
“You sounded so much like him, I thought he was in the room,” Candace teased, and widened her eyes.
Toby chuckled, amused. “In all honesty, though, I think you’re a great writer. Maybe this prick is just jealous.”
“I doubt that. He’s written two books that got published. What do you think he means by ‘a character that needs to be better developed?’”
Toby pulled her on top of him and kissed her. “I think,” he said while playing with a lock of her hair, “that some people have a hard time understanding what’s right in front of them. People want you to do things a certain way, be a certain way, act like they want you to act. . . . There’s nothing wrong with what you wrote. You’re very talented.”
Candace was touched by his words. So much so that she felt her heart expand in her chest. It didn’t matter what her Lit teacher thought about her writing. Toby thought it was good; he got her writing and he got her. And he was right that everywhere you go, people are trying to mold you into what they want you to be. Her whole life had been that way. If it wasn’t her parents, it was her teachers. They all wanted her to change what she did and how she did it. Toby never did that. He let her be herself and that’s all she really wanted—to be free to explore life and who she was and to figure out what she wanted. Candace could be moody when she wanted, angry, impulsive, or sweet and loving and vulnerable. It didn’t matter to Toby. No matter what she did, it didn’t feel wrong. He never criticized her or tried to change her. And yet, he still called her bluffs. He saw through all the filters and it gave her permission to be herself. She couldn’t get that feeling at home or at school or anywhere else. The only people who understood her were Avery and now Toby. And he got her even better than Avery did.
Missing at 17 Page 8