“Bobby,” he said quietly. I cranked the heat up as far as it could go, even though the hot air blew my hair back and made my eyes feel dry. I could tell he was so chilled that getting warm again would be an ambitious project, with hot showers and soup and an evening spent huddled by the radiator.
“What grade are you in?” I asked, feeling like the awkward mother of a teenager, driving one of her children’s friends home.
“Nine,” he said.
“Oh. I’m in eleven,” I said, even though he hadn’t asked.
“What instrument do you play?” I asked.
“Trumpet,” he said. I nodded and the conversation promptly stalled.
I stared straight ahead at the road as we inched along. I knew how to find the reserve. It was down a twisty road off the highway, on a patch of land randomly cut out of the woods. My mom had taken me along a few times when she wanted to pick up cigarettes from the reserve store.
I drove down the road and over the train tracks. A few more miles of icy roads passed before we finally arrived at the reserve. Little beige houses with ramshackle porches rose from the ground along the road while the trees receded behind them. Looking at this little clump of homes in the wilderness, I couldn’t help feeling lucky that I lived right in town. At least we had a beach and a movie theater.
Bobby pointed at a little house up the road. I noticed that there was no car in the driveway. We slowly cruised past the store with its billboard advertising “Cheap Smokes.” The neon yellow letters seemed jarring against the gray-white landscape of winter. When I pulled up in front of his house, I saw a curtain flick shut. I wondered if Bobby’s mother had spent the afternoon nervously peering out at the road, unable to do anything but worry about her son. It was comforting to know that she would feel better because of something I had done. Now she could spend the next hour babying her son instead of praying for him on that unforgiving highway.
I put the car in park and looked at him, the car silent despite the background noise from the heater.
“Thanks,” Bobby said.
“No problem.”
“Why’d you stop?” he asked. I shrugged and looked out the window at the snowflakes collecting on the windshield, settling for just a second before the wipers violently pushed them aside.
“It’s dangerous out there,” I said. I could have been talking about the weather, but I wasn’t and he knew that.
“It always has been,” Bobby said stiffly.
“Did you know her?” I asked, almost certain that he would bristle and tell me that not all Natives knew each other. Bobby opened the door of the car and got out, the cold air washing over my flushed cheeks.
“She was my cousin,” he said simply. Then he shut the door and trudged up the driveway, still holding his case.
Chapter Nine
February 27, 2006
On the Monday morning after I gave Bobby a ride, I woke up disappointed to find that my life was still the same. I sat up in bed and decided that today I couldn’t be bothered to go to school. I went back to sleep, knowing I could convince my mom to give me a sick note for tomorrow. I woke up again around eleven and decided to make a McDonald’s run, the perfect complement to an afternoon of watching daytime TV.
I was just pulling out of the housing complex parking lot when a truck rolled up in front of me. It was Tom Grey, his eyes obscured by black Ray-Bans. I swallowed hard, feeling a sickening flip in my stomach. Was I happy to see him? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know him well enough to be totally comfortable with him. Yet somehow his presence seemed to make everything a little more exciting, a little less predictable.
I rolled down my window and he did the same, looking down at me in my tiny car.
“Hey,” he said, his mouth pulling up in a smile.
“Hey…what’s up?” I asked. He shrugged, the movement exaggerated by the black snowboard jacket he was wearing.
“I have something that might be useful. Can we go to your place?” he asked. I nodded hesitantly.
Anxious thoughts flickered across my mind as I parked my car. What did he have? Was it a clue about Helen? Was it drugs? Was this all a clever way for him to suggest we hook up?
I unlocked my front door while he stood behind me. I tried to breathe normally and open the door the same way I always did, regardless of his presence. It worked…sort of.
My house was the middle column of a row house divided into three segments. It was like a novel on a tightly packed bookshelf. I didn’t know where Tom lived, but I felt ashamed as my eyes drifted past full ashtrays, yellowed linoleum with curled edges and a faded floral couch. Our house wasn’t dirty but it was untidy, and there was an undeniably dingy quality to the interior. It was a home full of secondhand things and second-rate lives, both of which we couldn’t afford to replace.
I threw my jacket on the easy chair and sat down on the couch. Tom lingered in the doorway for a moment. He was taller than the frame and was slouching almost unconsciously, as if he’d spent his whole life trying to make himself small enough to fit places.
“So, what’s up?” I asked as he settled next to me on the couch. Tom unzipped his backpack and pulled out last year’s yearbook.
“Helen was last seen in Birch-Bark Village,” he said, his large hands resting on the pebbled black cover. “So why was she here? Who was she visiting?” he asked, flipping his inky hair out of his eyes.
“It was probably another kid,” Tom continued before I had time to guess. “So, I got the yearbook. I thought we could pick out which people live in your neighborhood.”
“That makes sense,” I said. I cracked open the book, ignoring the stamp that indicated Tom had stolen it from the school library.
“There’s not a lot of teenagers around here,” I said, my face growing hot. “It’s mainly old people and young families. Most people move into bigger places before their kids are in high school.”
I pointed out a couple of freshmen, but the only older kids were Brittany Robichard and Jake Depuis. I couldn’t imagine Brittany knowing Helen. She was a star basketball player, and like any girl who was talented and pretty, Brittany seemed to stroll through life with an ease I hadn’t picked up in my sixteen years on the planet.
But Jake…Jake was in the school band. He played the trumpet, like Helen’s cousin Bobby. I only knew this because we used to ride the same bus to school. Every morning Jake would be standing in front of Birch-Bark Village, carrying a school trumpet in a battered and frayed case. Even on the bus, after he had aligned the instrument on the seat next to him, Jake would never let go of the handle, probably afraid to let the case slide off the seat. Someone in his family had no doubt made it clear to him that they didn’t have the money to pay for repairs if the trumpet was damaged.
I pointed at the black-and-white picture of Jake smiling hesitantly, his skinny shoulders hunched.
“I think that guy might know Helen’s cousin. Maybe that’s the connection?” I said. Tom furrowed his brow, examining Jake’s picture in the yearbook.
“I guess it’s possible. I mean, do you know if she was close to her cousin?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I just met him yesterday. I gave him a ride out to the reserve.”
“What’s up with that anyways?” Tom asked, his voice growing louder. “I mean, it was the same out in B.C. You always saw Natives hitchhiking, even when they knew people had been killed in the area doing that. You’d think they’d learn.”
“How else can they get around if they don’t have a car and the buses don’t run out there?” I asked, a little shocked that Tom would wonder about something so obvious. Then again, judging by his car and his clothes, Tom had never been short on money.
“Maybe, like, a carpool between them, where they all chip in and buy a car? I mean, there’s always a solution if you get creative,” Tom said self-righteously.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said. I didn’t actually agree with him. I knew that it was easy to demand that people
come up with clever ideas without acknowledging that being poor made you feel unable to change anything in your life. There was an overwhelming sense of powerlessness that was ground into your bones. Still, I wanted desperately to keep liking Tom, since he was the only person who had treated me like a normal human being since Chloe disappeared.
“Anyways, do you think you could talk to this Jake kid? Maybe see if he knows anything useful?” Tom asked, changing the subject abruptly. He must have known that I was being insincere but wanted his win intact.
“I can try. Jake’s pretty quiet, but it’s worth a shot,” I said.
“Good!” Tom said, taking the yearbook from me and dropping it carelessly on the floor. “What should we do now?” he asked, his eyelids heavy and his lips open.
“This,” I said hesitantly, leaning forward and kissing him. I wasn’t sure if I did it because he was good-looking or because he seemed as out of place in Thunder Creek as my best friend had been. Maybe I just didn’t want to be alone. Still, I felt a thrill of electricity when our lips touched, and some of the tension in my head melted away.
—
We didn’t do anything more than kiss. After twenty minutes of making out on the couch, Tom told me he had to go. A strange mixture of relief and disappointment settled over me when he left. It felt good to kiss Tom, but I’d been worried about how far he might think things would go in an empty house in the middle of the day. Still, the house seemed particularly empty with him gone, and I found myself fantasizing about how we could have spent the day if he’d stayed.
Tom had dated girls before. When he was in grade ten, I would see him around school with this artsy punk girl in the eleventh grade. Her name was Vanessa and she was so pretty that she elevated dyed black hair and dark purple lipstick beyond the cliché. Tom and Vanessa would make out in the student parking lot, their hips pressed together. They had that ease with each other’s bodies that silently telegraphed the fact that they were having sex. To think that Tom might be unconsciously comparing me to Vanessa was terrifying.
I had never done more than kiss a boy. There had been a handful of moments at dances and parties, moments swollen with the potential of future romance, but they never developed into anything more. I’d never had a boyfriend. It was disappointing in a way; I had always assumed that I would have a high-school sweetheart. He would be someone who I could eventually marry and settle down with in Thunder Creek. It would have been so easy to wrap my future in the promise of love, but it never materialized. People occasionally joked that I was in love with Chloe, which wasn’t true. But maybe I had been waiting for a boy as exciting as Chloe, someone who could make my small life feel special.
Obviously, I was still a virgin. It hadn’t mattered initially, but as the years of high school trundled along, the ranks of virgins had begun to dwindle. I was petrified that eventually, I would be the only virgin left, and the fact that I hadn’t changed would be considered terminally bizarre. When we hit eleventh grade, Chloe began to refer to my virginity as embarrassing, and often told me that I just needed to find a guy to get rid of it. It wasn’t an appealing idea, especially after I saw how sex had hurt Chloe.
Many adults thought teenage drug use was perfectly harmless so long as you weren’t stupid enough to get caught. You could buy condoms and birth control in Thunder Creek, and plenty of couples had sex in high school. But you couldn’t be a whore. If you were a girl, you waited until you were dating someone before you had sex. You stayed with that person for at least six months, and if you broke up, you didn’t have sex again until the next relationship was firmly established. Having a boyfriend legitimized a girl reading Cosmo and playing confessional party games. As long as you had a boyfriend in the daylight, no one cared what you did at night.
Chloe had slept with a few too many guys in circumstances that were a bit questionable. Suddenly, she was soiled, and lurid stories of her depraved behavior began to circulate at school. The girls were the worst. Chloe had been so colorful and vibrant, so sure that she was better than Thunder Creek. In comparison, the third-generation Creeker girls had always seemed so dour and plain in their boyfriends’ oversized hockey sweatshirts. In other circumstances, it might have been comforting to see Chloe taken down a peg. She had always been better than me, her freckled Creeker sidekick. But there was nothing fun about the ugliness that Chloe endured.
They made websites about her. They told jokes. Boys called her house, wanting to know if she’d like to “party.” By the end, I couldn’t tell if Chloe’s true error had been having sex too casually or simply believing there was something out there better than Thunder Creek, better than the plain dreams of girls like them, girls like me.
It was safer to stay a virgin.
Chapter Ten
At the end of the school day, I went outside and walked down to the place where the school bus stopped. I was waiting for Jake when the bus pulled up. He walked out with his head down. Jake was a rock in the river of elementary-school kids clutching the straps of their cheap nylon backpacks. He trudged toward his place, his trumpet like a briefcase on the arm of a miserable businessman.
“Jake!” I called, my hand clamping down on his shoulder. Even through the canvas of his army jacket I could feel the surprising hardness of bone instead of the expected mix of muscle and fat.
Unfortunately, Jake was one of those people who had a bundle of unattractive features, the kind of ugliness that averaged out the unworldly beauty of supermodels. He was small and thin with an overbite so pronounced that it pulled his features forward and gave him a rat-like appearance. He wasn’t helped by a buzz cut that threw his features into sharper relief, as if he were standing under a fluorescent light.
“Yeah?” Jake said, turning around. His eyes widened when he saw that it was me. We had never really spoken before.
“Um, do you have a few minutes? I need to talk to you about something,” I said.
Nearby, kids were climbing the dirt-encrusted snow banks that bordered the curb. Their mothers were standing nearby, smoking cigarettes and gossiping.
“Uh, I don’t know…,” Jake said, glancing past my shoulder as if trying to come up with a reason to say no.
“Please, it’s important,” I said, taking a deep breath before going out on a limb. “It’s about Helen.”
Jake’s eyes registered pain as he stepped back in shock. Whatever he thought I wanted, it was clear that he hadn’t expected this. He stared down at the trumpet case clutched in his hand then slowly pulled his gaze up to meet mine. His eyes were a golden-brown and fringed with long, oddly feminine eyelashes.
“Okay,” he whispered, walking toward his house and beckoning me to follow.
—
Nobody was home at Jake’s so we sat in the living room. Jake was avoiding my eyes. It was obvious that he was speaking to me out of some sense of duty rather than any genuine desire to do so. That was fine with me. I was looking for information, not a new friend.
“So, Helen was visiting you the day she disappeared?” I asked, figuring that I should cover the basics before I launched into unknown territory. It was strange, morphing from the person who was always being questioned into the interrogator. Jake nodded tightly and fiddled with his watchstrap.
“How did you guys know each other?” I asked.
“My dad. Uh, he was in an accident on a construction site. He broke something in his back and was in the hospital for a long time. Helen volunteered there, in the children’s ward. One day we started talking in the cafeteria and we just, you know…became friends. We both had a parent die when we were younger so we kind of understood each other. She hung out here sometimes, but I’ve never been to her house,” Jake whispered, the story streaming out of his mouth in a confessional whoosh.
“What was she like?” I found myself asking. I was overcome with the need to understand a life I had only noticed once it was already over.
“Oh God, Helen…,” Jake said, a pained smile breaking on his face. “She was
quiet but she cared so much about people. Helen would always listen to your problems. She spent all of her time trying to make everyone happy. She didn’t really like school but she wasn’t dumb. We both loved historical movies, especially about World War II. We were actually watching Band of Brothers the day she…that day.”
“She sounds like a good friend,” I said. I realized I had used the present tense. Somehow, it seemed inevitable as Jake told me what made Helen a person and not just a crime scene. It felt like she was still there.
“She was,” Jake said quietly. He looked up and I saw tears brimming in his eyes, trapped in the web of his eyelashes. “She was one of my best friends, even though nobody really knew about it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. Jake sighed and wiped his face with the faded cuff of his army jacket.
“Well, we didn’t hang out together at school. I mostly hang out with kids from the band, and I invited her a couple of times but she was funny around new people, too shy. And…well, my dad’s a bit weird about Natives. He’s from Oka, in Quebec, and they had Native protests there, so I only invited Helen over on days when he wasn’t home.”
“Your dad didn’t know about Helen?” I asked. Jake shook his head.
“No, he didn’t. I mean…” He paused, trying to gather the right words. “My dad’s not, like, racist. He wouldn’t have flipped out if he found her here. He just wouldn’t have approved of us hanging out.”
Jake was looking at me anxiously, afraid that he had given me the impression that his dad was a bigot.
“Yeah, I totally understand,” I said. “What did he say when the cops came by to interview you?”
“What?” Jake looked confused. “The cops never talked to me.”
I frowned. When Chloe went missing, the police started interviews and searches right away. Granted, the cops wouldn’t have known Jake was her friend, but surely they would have wondered why Helen was last seen by Birch-Bark Village, clear across town from the reserve, the hospital and our school? Tom had noticed that immediately. Either he was an investigatory prodigy or the cops weren’t even bothering to ask the most basic questions. I flashed back to something Officer Trudeau had said: we have an officer who’s going to look into this. Had that officer even started yet?
The Lives of Desperate Girls Page 6