Good and Gone

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  But I digress.

  And I am distracted from my Pop-Tarts mission by this guy. Well, really, his curls. Seth has curls, but not like this. I’ve never seen curls like this on a boy: blondish-brown soft cherub ringlets around his face with pink cheeks and full lips. We’re talking serious stepped out of a Botticelli and grew up to be a teenager.

  It makes me want to barf.

  I walk past the flowers into the produce section.

  The boy works here. He has a red apron on and he’s unpacking pomegranates into a bin. There’s another guy in a brown Carhartt jacket who I guess is trying to look tough, but he’s scrawny and antsy, so he’s like a jumping live wire. “Just cut out early,” he says to Angel Boy.

  “That would be nice,” Angel Boy replies, resigned.

  “So, come on, let’s go.”

  “Like I said, that would be nice, but I actually want to get out of this town someday. So I work.”

  Well, that at least I can relate to, but this trip seems to be showing me that one shit town is no better or worse than any other shit town along the way. They’ve got the same crappy chain restaurants, the same crappy stores, even the same crappy street names.

  The other boy gives a halfhearted “Seriously, Gabe, your dedication to this job is a little boring.”

  “Says the guy who takes on every extra shift he can get his hands on,” Gabe replies.

  I step between them and wrap my hand around a lush, red pomegranate, its skin still cool from the refrigerator it was stored in. “Excuse me,” I say as I pull the pomegranate close to me. “Thanks.”

  The boys both watch me as I back away, then pivot.

  “All right then,” I hear as I pass the banana display. “I guess I’ll just catch up with you at the diner after.”

  “Sure, man. Maybe. Snow’s supposed to come in pretty hard, though.”

  I leave the produce and walk through the deli and meat areas. The Good Feelings Book is pressing into the flesh of my hip, so I pull it out and put it in my hoodie pocket. But then I think that maybe this is a store that could use some good feelings, so I leave a slip—Art is the artist’s way of highlighting our world’s small beauties—in the cheese case. And another one by a display of pretzels.

  When I round the corner, I find Charlie and Zack. Charlie’s hat is pulled down so low you almost can’t see his eyes, only the dark circles underneath them.

  “A pomegranate?” he asks.

  “Yeah, sure. Why?”

  “You’re lecturing us about a budget, and you pick out the most expensive fruit, and the most difficult one to eat.”

  I look at the red fruit in my hand. I don’t think it’s even ripe yet. “This way,” I say. I lead them down the cereal aisle. We find the Pop-Tarts and buy the store brand. Strawberry frosted. I leave the pomegranate in the empty space on the shelf, a Good Feelings slip beneath it.

  Back in the car Charlie switches on the radio and rolls the tuner back and forth. Country, country, classic rock, religious, country, talk radio, country, talk radio, and then, finally, a pop station where the DJs are talking about, who else, Adrian Wildes. “Still no word,” the woman’s voice, scratchy from cigarettes, says. “So sad.”

  “You know what I think,” a man says, and you can practically hear the laugh track in his head. “This is all one big publicity stunt. He is, like, holed up somewhere with some nice booze, some ladies—”

  “Oh, stop.”

  “No, really, hear me out. He’s a smart guy, right? A clever guy? So he’s in some bungalow on the beach with the ladies and the booze, and he’s just going to stay there. He’s going to hang out and then, just when we’ve forgotten about him, back he’ll come.”

  “You don’t really think that,” the woman DJ says. “Come on, Dirk. You think he’s that manipulative.”

  “Here’s what I know. I know that he’s number one on the iTunes album and singles charts. He’s got two albums in the top five on Billboard. And this from a guy whose sales were slumping. That’s all I’m saying. Just putting the pieces together.”

  “It’s not an awful theory,” I say as the DJs stop talking and roll into one of Adrian’s lesser-played songs, “Sleepheart.”

  “It’s a terrible theory,” Charlie says. He has those circles under his eyes and his hair is all crazy, but something about him looks a little less tired.

  “Twenty miles, they said?” Zack asks.

  “Yeah, about that. I don’t think they measured it or anything.”

  “Because strippers aren’t good at math?” Charlie challenges.

  “No”—I sigh—“because strippers don’t go to summer camp.”

  This makes Zack laugh his guffawing laugh. “That would be a pretty fabulous summer camp, though,” he says. “I mean, even I would like to go.”

  Charlie shakes his head.

  “Do you think these are still Penn’s Woods?” I ask.

  Charlie looks back at me. He has a great big gob of crust in the corner of his eye. Sleep, my mom calls it. Like it seeped out of you in the nighttime.

  “Wipe your eye, crust lord,” I tell him.

  He uses his thumb to wipe the sleep away. “William Penn no longer owns these forests, no.”

  “No, I mean, do you think they are still the same trees?”

  “We could cut one down and count rings,” Zack says, still wearing his jolly smile. I wonder if he does this at home when his parents are arguing.

  Charlie turns back around and watches the road go by. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he is just as tired as he always was.

  “There!” I say. The street sign is crooked, as if it was hit by a plow, but I can still read it: Winsacondor Way.

  Zack slows the car, but not quickly enough, and as he makes the turn onto Winsacondor Way we fishtail around until the side of the car is pressed firmly into the snowbank. It’s not rough or violent or even all that dramatic. We are sliding and then there is a soft thud and our bodies rock to the side. Then, still. Out my window is a wall of white. I put my hand up to the glass and the cold burns.

  Zack opens his door, and I slide across the back seat to get out the driver’s side. Charlie has to crawl over the center console and out the door after me.

  There’s three fresh inches of snow on the road on top of another six or more that have been packed down since previous storms. “Look,” I say. “Tracks. Under the snow.”

  “What are you, some kind of crime-scene detective now?”

  But I bend over and brush away some of the powder and underneath there are, indeed, tracks. “I bet the car would be fine since it’s all packed down underneath. We could push it out of the snowbank and drive down the road and see what we can find.”

  Zack shakes his head. “I don’t know. She’s a fickle kind of car. This might be asking too much of her.”

  “Why are cars always girls?”

  “Not with this right now,” Charlie says.

  “You know, this is the type of thing we used to agree on.”

  Charlie turns, but he looks past me instead of at me. “We’re here for a reason.”

  “Yes, sir! Won’t stray from the mission, sir!”

  “We could walk,” Zack says. “We can just walk down, check it out, then walk back and push this nongendered vehicle right out of the snow. Okay?”

  I bet Charlie and I would have actually killed each other by now if it weren’t for Zack. Not like the fights we had when we were kids, rolling and pounding each other. I scratched. It was one of the only defenses I had. We’d always reach a point where it was like it was too much, too hard, and we’d fall apart from each other. But now, I’m not so sure we’d stop.

  “Fine,” I say. I open the car, reach in, grab an old sweat shirt of Zack’s, and pull it on top of the clothes I’ve been wearing for what seems like days and days. It’s long enough to cover my hands, which I ball into fists. I step over the snowbank and onto the road, which twists away from the highway and into the woods. I start walking away from the car. “We
ll, come on then, let’s go.”

  EIGHT

  Once upon a time, a princess was born in a kingdom on a cliff. The view of the sea was so magnificent that no man could go to the edge of the cliff without throwing himself from it. Many great men were lost, and so the king issued a proclamation: any man who could go to the edge of the cliff and resist its pull would have his daughter’s hand in marriage. Princes and commoners traveled from near and far to test their will, but not one could pass the test. The princess could not bear the loss of life another day. At the break of dawn, she marched out to the cliff’s edge. She had passed the test. When she turned, she saw beside her a bold knight. Filled with envy and rage, he charged at her. She tumbled backward off the cliff and down into the water. She sank down, down, down into the dark and swirling ocean until she found herself in the home of the sea witch.

  NOW

  Lake Condor looks deep, like it’s the kind of lake that when you swim in it, your feet are swallowed up in murky green water. It’s iced over, or so we think, with a layer of snow on top of it. It gleams in the sun like a diamond mirror, reflecting back nothing but itself.

  It takes us almost twenty minutes to walk the long driveway from the road to the camp, but it’s almost worth it because it’s just so pretty. Camp Winsacondor sits like a crown atop the lake, and the central jewel is the big dining hall: a giant log cabin with a huge stone chimney climbing up the side. The roof has a good foot of snow on it. It’s hard to tell with all the fresh powder, but the camp doesn’t look completely abandoned. There are all sorts of divots in the snow, spaced like footsteps, and what looks like a cross-country ski trail. There is no car, though, and no smoke comes from the chimney.

  “Dead end,” Charlie says. “There’s no one here.”

  “Come on, let’s look around. He could be anywhere.”

  We walk along the central path of the camp toward the lake. On the far side I can see another shore with big houses. The lake itself on that side is dotted with ice fishing shacks. “I don’t really understand ice fishing,” I say.

  Charlie sighs. “They cut a hole in the ice and drop their line down that way. It’s not like fish hibernate or anything.”

  I stop walking. Charlie’s feet crunch a few more steps in the snow. “Do you really think I’m stupid?” I ask. “Like monumentally moronic?”

  He turns around. His cheeks are pink and his breath puffs in front of his chapped lips. “It had occurred to me,” he replies.

  “Well, I’m not. I know how ice fishing works. It’s not, like, a rod and reel. It’s an actual line. And they check it every once in a while. They sit in their huts and drink beer and check the lines and some of the huts even have satellite TV. What I don’t understand is, what’s the appeal? Because you can drink beer and watch dumb TV at home.”

  Charlie tugs his hat down. “It’s not up to you to decide. You’re not the supreme arbiter of what leisure activities are acceptable.”

  “I’m not saying they can’t do it. Or that they shouldn’t do it. I’m saying I don’t get it. And you should know that about me.”

  “I should?”

  “Sure. Watching dumb sitcoms for hours on end. Laughing at the shitty, lazy jokes. I went along on this stupid adventure to look for some crappy singer who probably is holed up somewhere doing coke like the guys on the radio said. Do I say anything like, ‘Hey, why don’t you read a book?’ or ‘Gee, shouldn’t you be back at school?’ No, I do not.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  I’m about to say that it’s because I’m not a judgmental waste of air like him or Penelope (gack), but there is something in his eyes that stops me. It’s probably just the cold, but it looks like he is crying. So I say, “Because I’m not the arbiter.”

  Zack is right behind me. I can hear him shifting from side to side in the snow.

  A blue jay lifts off from a tree and flies toward the lake.

  “There’s still a lot more cabins this way,” Zack says. “Let’s keep walking.”

  “Fuck this,” Charlie says. Charlie doesn’t normally swear. Not the F-word, anyway. That’s my domain. “Fuck this,” he says again. “Let’s just go.”

  “Go where?” I ask.

  “Home.”

  He walks past me back in the direction we came from. Zack still stands right behind me. “Well, I guess our stupid adventure is over.”

  I don’t answer. I look out over the lake, and then I look at the cabins perched on platforms over the water. It would be nice to go to summer camp, I think. You have your set schedule. You get to do things like macrame and archery, and drink bug juice and sing songs. You can swim in the cold, cold water at dawn. But we aren’t summer camp people.

  “I guess so,” I say.

  Zack puts his arm around my shoulder while we clomp back through the snow to the road out of camp. It’s an unexpected gesture, but I like it. This is what a brother should do, I think: put his arm around you when you least expect it and just when you need it. So I lean into him and put my arm around his soft waist. It’s a little hard to walk this way, like we are in a three-legged race. His feet sink into the snow deeper than mine, with a satisfying crunch. It would be nice to be that sturdy. When you said “No, thank you,” people would know you meant it.

  “No,” I say.

  Charlie sighs and turns around. “No, what?”

  “We came here for a reason. Your reason. We aren’t going to just leave.”

  “We need to find a phone, anyway,” Zack says. “I think we need to call a tow truck.”

  I shake my head. “No,” I say again. I feel something swelling up in me. I am like a fire-breathing dragon whose stove has been turned back on. I also feel like I am going to cry. Water works and flames battle inside my chest.

  I turn, slipping out from under Zack’s arm, and walk back toward the lake. The sun shining off it is so bright that, like an Antarctic explorer, I am blinded by all the white, the vastness of it all.

  But I keep walking down to what would be a beach if this were summer, but instead is just more snow, its surface brushed by the wind into wafting hills.

  My feet crunch through an inch, but the snow holds me up.

  I don’t know where the beach ends and the lake begins. I walk out and out. Feet crunch behind me. “Lexi,” Charlie calls. “Lexi, he’s not out there.”

  I turn around.

  From above, I am a speck of red and blue—or maybe muted grays—on the white, white landscape. Just a fleck. An accidental brush of paint on a canvas. And I feel it. I feel that way.

  Zack and Charlie stand on the beach. They are the same height, I realize, which is funny because Zack seems so much bigger, so much more solid and present and alive.

  I lean my head back and look up at the blue. “Adrian!” I yell. “Adrian Wildes!”

  A flock of sparrows rises up from a nearby tree. That’s all. The rest of the world is silent.

  “Adrian!” I yell again. “Olly olly in free! Come out, come out wherever you are.”

  Nothing. If he was ever here, he’s gone now, but most likely he was never here. We were chasing a ghost. A deliberate ghost.

  I look back up at the sky.

  A crack like a bullet rings out. Is someone shooting at us? Do they think we are trespassing?

  We are trespassing.

  Another shot. And another. But where are they? I don’t see anyone else and anyway they sound so close. Like I am the one firing shots.

  And then I am gone.

  The sky pulls back into a fuzzy haze, like a storm blowing in above me.

  The cold is instant and so severe that it comes and vanishes almost in half a moment. My bones freeze. My heart freezes. My eyes freeze open and I watch the world pull away from me through a little hole, barely bigger than me and getting smaller all the time.

  The world turns green around me and I feel silky fronds grabbing my ankles.

  Fern fronds. Fern fairies.

  I am going home.

  And th
en I am nowhere at all.

  BEFORE

  October

  Seth took me back to Gwen’s house because that was where we first met. Not really, but that was what we said. Maybe he’d forgotten that day in the hall. Maybe Zack was wrong and he was never drawing me. Whatever the case may have been, five weeks after we got together—before Halloween, before Debbi and Vaginas of Steel, but after Remy stopped me in the bathroom—we went back to Gwen’s house.

  “She’s a bitch,” Seth said. “She’s a jealous bitch and that’s all there is to it.”

  I didn’t know what he had planned. Were we going to toilet paper the trees in her front yard? Write Gwen Osterlow is a virgin who can’t drive in big chalk letters on the front of her house? Maybe we would just sit outside flashing the headlights of his car in her window.

  But no. He parked on the road and we snuck through the woods on the side of her house, back down around by the pool, which was covered up for the season. It looked like a big black gaping mouth—a maw like Grendel’s mother down in the bottom of the ocean.

  Seth slid the lock open on the pool house door and we slipped inside. There was a high window and clear moonlight streamed in. Enough so that after a minute or two my eyes adjusted and I could see the room and Seth. Maybe we were going to do something to the deck furniture. Gwen’s parents were crazy about their deck furniture. But no. We weren’t going to do anything to Gwen, not really. Seth said what we were doing was rubbing it in her face, but that wasn’t true because she didn’t know. She’ll never know.

  The deck furniture was all pressed against the back wall inside the pool house, the chairs piled on top of the table. A huge chaise longue that Mr. Harper made took up most of the floor space. Everything smelled of chlorine.

  “In the summer, when all this furniture wasn’t in here, Gwen and I used to come out here for sleepovers.”

  “Kinky,” he said.

  “Not like that.” I swatted at him, and he grabbed my wrist, quick as a lizard’s tongue. He tugged me and we fell on the chaise.

  There was a cricket trapped in here with us, chirping a steady beat.

  “You’re pretty,” he said.