by L. E. Flynn
Our kiss would have happened if the sprinkler system wouldn’t have chosen that exact moment to send freezing cold water spraying all over us, soaking our shirts and hair. Maybe he didn’t try to kiss me again after because he was thinking the same thing I was. That our first kiss would be the start of something neither of us was ready for. It wouldn’t just be a kiss, it would be everything that comes after. It would be like falling after you lose your balance and having no way of ever finding the ledge again.
The summer after sophomore year, he asked me if I was going to Alison’s party. Then he asked again. Both times, I told him I was. But at the last minute, I ended up with food poisoning. I didn’t worry about staying home, because there would be another night for me and Beau. A thousand other nights.
But that night, Toby disappeared, and whatever part of Beau that might have loved a part of me went with him.
22
WE RIDE BACK to the school in silence, like neither of us wants to make an effort to talk about what happened. And what didn’t happen. Or what happens next. I grip the wheel and Jasper stares out the window.
“Maybe that guy’s not here anymore,” Jasper finally says, and I can tell by the measured tone of his voice that he had been thinking of exactly what to say. It’s the total opposite of me, when I spill what’s in my head in big inky blobs and regret it afterward. “He could have got his life together and made something of himself.”
“It hasn’t been that long. But maybe he did leave … and maybe he has a reason for not coming back,” I say, forcing my lips to form the words, even though I know they sound ridiculous.
“What do you mean?” Jasper shifts in his seat, leans over the console.
“Like, maybe not being here was his plan the whole time.”
He presses his hands against the dashboard. “I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say. He just decided one day to become a magician and vanish into thin air?”
I let out a breath. “I know this might sound hard to believe, but what if he left on purpose? Like, he did what he was supposed to do. And took off because he didn’t want to be found.”
“Or maybe he’s just a junkie who’s on a bender somewhere. We can’t go chasing a guy who may or may not be homeless. If he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be. People are excellent at hiding when they need to.”
We don’t talk again until we pull into the Robson parking lot. The sky is darkening over the football field, casting the bleachers in tarry blackness. The grass is spiky and everything looks hard, like it was drawn too sharply.
Jasper undoes his seat belt and clears his throat. “I’m sorry we didn’t find him. But we can say that we tried.”
I know he must be thinking the same thing I am. That our one lead, our one chance to figure out where she is, has disappeared, and there’s no backup plan. No other foothold to grab on to. No other reason for Jasper and me to spend another minute together.
“I can drive you home,” I say. “I mean, it’s a long walk.”
He shakes his head. “Thanks. But I could use the walk. I do my best thinking when I do something else at the same time.”
I don’t know what I thought would happen. That we were in this strange place together, that we had shared something. I’m torn between the desire to cling to his skinny shoulders and never let him go and the urge to push him out of my car and never see him again.
He makes the choice for me. He gets out and shuts the door gently and doesn’t look back. I watch him walk away until he’s just another hard shadow in the dark.
I should start the car again and drive home. Mom must be wondering where I am, and I’m sure that if I were to look at my cell phone, I’d have a missed call from her. But I can’t bring myself to go back there. Instead, I undo my seat belt and open my car door and walk into the school.
Laughter echoes down the hallway. Most of the classrooms are dark, but the gym is lit up. The basketball team must be practicing, which makes me wonder if Jenny and Alison are there. I almost want to press my face against the foggy glass door and see what I’m missing, what I gave up. But I don’t belong there anymore. Besides, there’s something else I need to see.
I walk slowly toward the auditorium, where they held the memorial today. There’s a trophy case outside on the right-hand side of the double doors, a whole wall of shiny gold accomplishments. And on the left-hand side, in stark juxtaposition, the Dead Students Wall.
Of course, that’s not what they call it. They call it In Memoriam. Up until last year, all the students were from before my time. People who died of illnesses and in tragic accidents. People who died before I was even born. Then Toby Hunter’s picture was put up last year. Toby, with his gold hair and blue eyes and strong jawline. So much like Beau, but so different. I had read the inscription underneath his picture, and even though I didn’t know him at all, I couldn’t believe he was gone.
TOBIN BARTHOLOMEW HUNTER
April 3, 2000–August 31, 2017
I don’t stop in front of Toby today. I stop in front of her. I don’t know what I expected to feel. Sad, maybe. Angry. Alone. But instead, I almost want to burst into laughter because she would hate this picture so much. I recognize it as her yearbook photo when she was a junior, taken the year before we met. She never got a senior yearbook photo taken because she purposely missed it, so in the senior yearbook, she’s just a silhouette against a white backdrop.
Trixie in junior year was somebody I never knew. Somebody with shoulder-length brown hair and overplucked eyebrows. Somebody who you’d probably never pick out of a crowd. Plain, you might say. Unremarkable. No wonder I never noticed her at school until the day she jumped into my car and didn’t give me a choice.
PATRICIA ELISE HELLER
March 4, 2000–August 13, 2018
I stare at her, into her brown eyes, pleading with her to give me a hint. A clue. Anything. I hate that this is what’s left of her, a stupid picture that looks nothing like her and a name she hated. I hate that I’m standing in front of it. I wish that I could go back in time. I wish I had a car with doors that lock automatically, so nobody could just jump in.
I don’t know how long I stand there. Long enough for my feet to go numb. Long enough for me to stop feeling my heartbeat, hard in my throat. Finally, when I hear the sound of heels clacking in the hall, I turn away, guilty, like I have been caught stealing.
When I’m at my locker, I spin the combination. I figure I’ll fill my backpack with books and make it look like I was at school studying. Maybe I’ll tell Mom I joined a club, or that I’m thinking of starting to make clothes again. She would love that. Something normal for her to cleave to, something that shows I’m moving on. It’s a lie I’d willingly tell. After all, lies that make other people feel better must be kind of okay.
I’m just pulling the lock open when my fingers freeze over the dial and my fingertips go cold. I clamp the lock shut, then spin my fingers over each number again, lingering for longer than I need to as each one etches itself into my brain:
8-31-17
When the lock opens, I leave it that way and run back down the hall, even though I know what I’m going to find. I have to be sure. I have to be totally sure that this means something, anything.
I stop when I’m standing in front of his picture. This time I don’t meet his eyes. I focus on the bronze plate below with the numbers carved in:
April 3, 2000–August 31, 2017
I’m falling even though I’m rooted to the ground. If anyone were to walk by, I would fall down. I want to scream and cry and tell someone, anyone, but what would I say? Who would believe me? Who would even care? Panic washes over me in waves, hammering at my temples, making everything spin.
Mostly, I want to slap myself for not figuring it out sooner. I shared a locker with Trixie for almost a whole year. I opened that locker multiple times a day, and never once did I think that the combination was more than just random numbers. But I was wrong.
8-31-17 isn
’t just a locker combination. It’s a date.
It’s the day Toby Hunter died.
23
YOU WERE LIKE a sister to me, but that was different from actually being sisters. We had less than a year of history. Beau and Toby were brothers, actual brothers. They probably shared a wall growing up, had a lifetime’s worth of secrets and inside jokes.
They were close, not just in age and appearance but in other ways. You could tell they genuinely liked each other. When they played football games together, Toby would watch out for Beau, making sure he was safe, as if he had made a promise to somebody to protect him. Maybe he had.
I saw Toby lose his temper once, when Beau got badly tackled by a giant linebacker from the Tasker Titans. Toby shoved the guy, who was built like a wall of bricks. The guy shoved him back. Toby yelled something I couldn’t hear from the sidelines, not with the roar from the stands as loud as it was. In that moment, Toby wasn’t a golden boy. He was something more. He was a big brother.
I didn’t get it, because I didn’t have any siblings. I always hoped for one. When I was little, I wanted Mom to meet someone and get married so I could have a little sister, someone to play dolls with. But it never happened.
I wondered if Beau and Toby got sick of each other. They played on the same football team, went home to the same two-story every night. I wondered if they ever felt competitive with each other, like they were constantly dueling for one source of light. But it didn’t seem that way. There seemed to be plenty of light for both Hunters.
Beau went to all of Toby’s swim meets. I went too, with Jenny and Alison. They watched the race, but I watched Beau, on his feet, fists flying, screaming at the top of his lungs. I watched him pummel his arms in the air when Toby touched the wall first. It was his victory too, somehow. Maybe that was what it meant to be a brother
But the last time I ever saw them together was the last day of sophomore year, when Beau was getting into the passenger side of Toby’s car. He raised his middle finger at the back of Toby’s head, then slammed the door. I wondered what they were arguing about, what Toby had done to piss Beau off. Maybe that was what it meant to be a brother too. Arguments that seemed important, then dissolved like sugar in tea, because obviously they would get over it.
But maybe there were some things that couldn’t be forgiven.
24
OUR LOCKER COMBINATION stays in my head the whole next week. A week during which I avoid Jasper on purpose, ducking into bathrooms or turning down halls whenever I see a dark coat coming toward me. I almost want to tell him I’m sorry for kissing him. But then I can’t remember if it was the other way around, if he was the one who kissed me. I want to tell him about the locker combination, but I don’t know what it means.
I turn the three numbers over in my head, again and again. 8-31-17. I saw Toby’s picture in the hall a hundred times and spun the lock a hundred times more last year. How did I not figure it out sooner?
Except, I don’t know what I figured out. Or why Trixie would have picked the day Toby Hunter died as our locker combination. As far as I know, she had nothing to do with Toby Hunter. She never mentioned him in all the time I knew her. She certainly wasn’t part of his group of friends, the ones that used to hang around after football games and pick him up after practice, squealing into the parking lot with their arms hanging out of their cars. Trixie never so much as made eye contact with them in the hall.
More than once, I convince myself that I made it up. That the numbers are a coincidence, and there’s no point in thinking of them as anything different. I push them into the place in my brain where all the secrets are hidden and bury them there. But they keep breaking through the cracks, shooting up like blades of grass.
My phone vibrates when I’m standing in front of my locker at the end of lunch period, fingering the lock absentmindedly. I’m about to grab my phone from my purse, but a hand clamps down on my shoulder. I close my eyes, thinking it must be Jasper and feeling both nervous and relieved.
“Hey,” Alison says, sidling up next to me.
I gape at her like a fish. She’s taller than me and has the same perky blond ponytail she always wears to school on game days. She’s wearing a shirt that rides up to her belly button, and I fight a pang of envy for when I used to be able to wear stuff like that.
“Hey,” I say.
“Look, I know we haven’t talked in a while,” Alison says. “But I just wanted to say I’m sorry for what happened to your friend. And I’m here, you know, if you ever want to talk. Or anything.”
I force myself to smile and hug my books to my chest. I don’t deserve Alison’s sympathy. Not after how I pushed her away last year when she tried to pull me back, and not after what I did at her party. If she knew about that, she wouldn’t be standing in front of me right now.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Maybe if you’re not busy sometime, we can…,” Alison starts, but she never gets to finish the sentence because Jenny comes up behind her and grabs her elbow.
“We’re late for geometry,” Jenny says without making eye contact. My face is on fire. The bell rings and Alison waves, walking in the other direction, arm in arm with Jenny, her ponytail bouncing against the small of her back.
In this moment, I hate Jenny more than ever.
Jenny never tried to stay friends. We drifted further and further apart until we got to that stage where we not only didn’t talk, but we each pretended the other didn’t exist. At first, I conjured the highlights of our friendship in bits and pieces, like a cheesy movie montage, and missed her a lot. I would remember her fearlessness and her ability to make fun of herself and the fuzzy cat slippers she wore at sleepovers. Then I thought of all the things about her that bugged me, like how controlling she was and how she always had to be the center of attention, and eventually I knew I was better off without her.
Then she purposely started flaunting Beau in front of me. Making out with him in the hallway, where she knew I could see, and draping herself all over him. And I hated her.
I consider skipping my last two classes of the day. English has always been easy for me. It’s not like one missed day will mean anything. But then I remember we’re supposed to be dissecting a frog during AP biology and that if I don’t show up, Brett Fillmore will be stuck doing it on his own. Brett, who ended up with me as a lab partner because of where his last name falls in the alphabet. If he doesn’t hate me already, he’ll definitely hate me if I don’t help him with the frog.
It’s not until I sit down behind my desk in the lab that everything hits me. The stench of formaldehyde, the dizzying reality of what I should have figured out days, weeks, months ago.
I had this thing with my lab partner.
I want to get up and run away, but Brett is sitting down beside me, giving me a tight-lipped smile, which I return, grateful he doesn’t know what’s going on inside my head. Mr. Thorpe clears his throat from the front of the classroom and tells us it’s time to pick a frog.
After class, I wait for Jasper in front of the school, knowing he’ll walk home with his earbuds in. When I see him barge through the double doors, I jog to keep pace with his long strides. “I have to know something. You said you met Trixie back in freshman year. You had class together. What class was it?”
Jasper’s face flashes with an expression I haven’t seen him wear before. It’s so foreign to me that I can’t pinpoint what it is. Annoyance, probably. Frustration.
“French,” he says. “It was French class. Why?”
“So, you weren’t her lab partner?”
Jasper shakes his head. “I hate science. My brain doesn’t do well with facts. I’m better with words.”
“She told me she had a thing with her lab partner,” I say, picturing the frog’s soft belly, the way its skin was swollen and bloated like it had been underwater forever.
“Well, I wasn’t her lab partner.” Jasper stuffs his hands in his pocket and pulls out his MP3 player. “And what does i
t matter now?”
“I think I know who was. And I think he had something to do with her disappearance.”
25
YOUR FUNERAL WAS the second one I went to where there was no body to bury.
I didn’t want to go to Toby’s funeral. Not because I knew it would be sad, but because I didn’t feel like I deserved to be there. I wasn’t at the party. I wasn’t there for Beau.
I wrote him so many text messages after I found out what happened, but didn’t send a single one. None of them seemed right. None of them were enough. I wasn’t his girlfriend. I wasn’t around.
Jenny, Alison, and I went to the church together. Beau was a pallbearer, along with five other blond guys who must have been cousins. They all looked somber, serious. I waited for Beau to cry, because I knew he was sensitive like that, and I knew how much he loved Toby.
But he didn’t cry. His expression didn’t change during the entire service, or at the interment, when Toby’s coffin was lowered into the ground. I wondered what was in it, because there was no body.
Later, at the reception, Jenny and I approached Beau together. She put her hand on his arm. He stared at it.
“I’m sorry,” I said, choking back a sob. “I’m so sorry.”
He wouldn’t look at me, but just kept looking at Jenny’s hand on his arm, tiny and white like a little doll’s. When he did speak, it was something incoherent. I smelled the alcohol on his breath right away. Beau wasn’t a drinker, but his brother had just died. He needed some way of coping.
After that, Beau wasn’t Beau anymore. He never biked to school and never offered me rides and his eyes were permanently fixed on the ground, not on the stars, where they used to be. I should have tried harder to get through to him, but I didn’t. I was scared of who he was becoming.