224 DAYS AFTER
HOME SICK
Now that Christmas vacation is over, I have to find creative ways to stay home from school. I’ll pretend I have a sore throat, a fever, a stuffy noise, and when I’m feeling really creative, I’ll throw in a disease from the Middle Ages, something like the King’s Evil or the Bubonic Plague.
I’ve been out of school most of the week with Water Elf Disease, an affliction from the Middle Ages said to be caused by a witch stabbing you—at least that’s what I told my mom. She’s finding my jokes about random diseases less and less funny.
I hear a knock at the door.
Expecting my mom, I yell out, “I’m still under quarantine.”
“Ray?”
But it’s not my mom’s voice. It’s a voice I heard through a very different door a little over a year ago. Tommy Beddington.
“Come in,” I say, not sure what to expect. This had to be the work of a school guidance counselor or some sort of community service program for popular kids.
The door creaks open. Beddington has on his letterman jacket and is wearing the same stone-faced expression as his grandfather Earl. He scans my room, taking in the full view of my little world.
“How’re you feeling, man? Your mom said you had some incurable disease from the Middle Ages?”
“Don’t worry, I’ve already ingested a lot of different plants and prayed for a cure, so it’s probably not contagious.”
Tommy nods, like he can’t quite figure out whether I’m kidding or not. “Can I sit?”
“Go ahead.”
He takes a seat on the edge of my bed. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while now, but I didn’t know what to say.”
He rocks back and forth like a person on a mattress commercial trying to spill a glass of wine.
“Jane was the first person I came out to,” he says after an awkward pause. “Well, except for Steven, obviously.”
“You’re still together?”
“I love him,” he says. “I know it shouldn’t matter, but I don’t know, I’m afraid of what everyone would say. Sometimes I even worry about what my grandfather would think.”
“He thought he saw a green mutant cow. I don’t think you have to worry about him judging you.”
“Well, it is possible he saw one.”
“I guess,” I say. It’s kind of heartwarming to hear the Beddingtons still defending their patriarch.
“But that’s not why I’m here,” he says. “I came here to talk about Jane.”
Was my face on the front page of the newspaper or something? A big picture with the caption: Lonely Teen Seeks At-Home Friend Visits.
I turn around to face my computer, fall into the comfortable glow of a pixelated world.
“I’ve been going through all our conversations thinking about how I could have done something different.”
“Me too,” I say.
“I feel guilty,” he says.
“You shouldn’t.” But it doesn’t sound convincing.
The mattress squeaks as he gets off the bed.
When I turn around, I realize he’s looking at my spelling bee trophy, holding it in his hand, straining to read the inscription. His jacket is open in the middle, revealing a V-neck T-shirt and a gold chain hanging around his neck. His hair’s slicked back, each strand perfectly in place, the kind of look only attainable through copious amounts of gel.
“This thing’s got some weight to it,” he says before placing it back down.
“Thanks,” I say. “My crowning achievement. That and being born.”
“A trophy is a trophy,” he says.
“I spelled hippopotamus.”
“That’s a tough word.”
I nod. An awkward pause.
“I miss her,” he says.
“Me too,” I say.
“We can’t forget about her,” Tommy says.
Without warning, he walks toward me and wraps his arms around me. A big bear hug. I sit frozen in my computer chair, counting the seconds until it stops.
Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .
But around five, I let myself melt into the hug. And it feels . . . nice. Like he understands what I’m going through. And we didn’t have to talk about history or sports or Puddinggate.
I pat him on the back. He pulls away. His face is red, puffy, snot dribbling out of his nose. I wasn’t the only one hurting. Jane had left her imprint on Burgerville.
“I’m glad I came,” Tommy says. “If you’re feeling better, you should stop by the game.”
“Game?”
“Big basketball game in Centerville. I actually gotta go catch the bus.” He looks in the mirror, wipes his eyes with his jacket sleeve.
“Good luck,” I say. “I’d go, but . . .” I look around my room, trying to think of an excuse, but nothing comes.
Tommy must realize I’m trying to find a way out, because he lets me off the hook. “Maybe next time.”
Once he’s gone, I open the drawer where I’ve stashed all of my Jane memorabilia: the folk CD, her folded-up drawings, random objects from our tour of Burgerville. That’s when I see the crushed fortune cookie from our night at O’Reilly’s, still unopened. It’s like a secret message from Jane.
I carefully open it and fish out the little strip of paper.
If you think you’re going to sum up your whole life on this little bit of paper, you’re crazy.
“Jane,” I say out loud. I start to laugh. I say her name again, laughing even harder, like it’s the funniest joke I’ve ever heard. Jane mocking me through a fortune cookie.
My mom hesitantly walks into the room. “Ray? Is everything okay?”
But all I can do is laugh.
“Ray?”
She takes a seat on the bed and puts her arm around me.
Maybe I am crazy, because for the first time in a long time, I feel like there really is still more to learn about Jane. More to cobble together from my fragmented sources. If I want to know the real Jane, maybe I just have to do more research.
229 DAYS AFTER
ROSETTA STONE
Rich thinks I’m lonely.
“No shit I’m lonely,” I tell him after I’ve recounted my visit with Tommy Beddington, what he’d described as “progress.”
“Why are you punishing yourself? You’re keeping yourself from moving forward.”
The inevitable stare-down follows. Rich waiting for me to acknowledge he’s right, me waiting for the awkwardness to become too much to handle.
Rich shifts in his chair, a clear sign he’s switching tactics. “How are things going with your mom?” he asks.
“Fine.”
“And Tim?”
“Okay, I guess.” I don’t want to say it out loud, but he’s kind of growing on me.
“It’s normal to have mixed feelings about Tim. A lot of the kids I see—”
“You see a lot of people my age?” I interrupt.
Rich nods. “I’m pretty much the only game in town.”
A thought occurs to me then, and I know Rich can tell what I’m thinking, because he starts flipping through his notepad, checking his watch, anything to avoid eye contact.
“Then you would have known Jane,” I say.
An uncomfortable silence settles over the room. The possibility that the entire time I’d been talking to Rich he’d also known Jane feels like a great discovery, no different from uncovering King Tut’s Tomb or the Rosetta Stone. Maybe I’ve finally found the key to help me unlock all of Jane’s secrets.
“You know I can’t talk about that, Ray.”
His voice sounds small, as if coming from underwater. Anger wells up inside of me. The excitement of discovery has worn off, and I’m left feeling betrayed; Rich has had the answers I needed all along.
“Did she talk about me?” I ask.
Rich’s face stays buried in his papers, his mouth closed. His head slightly moves up and down.
“That’s a yes?”
Rich steadies his head. “I can’t, Ray. I’m sorry.”
“Anything,” I say. “She must have talked about me.”
I spring out of my chair and rush toward him, stopping only a few feet away.
“Come on,” I say. “It’s not a big secret. Do sign language, burp, I don’t care . . . Just give me something.”
Rich gets out of his chair and puts his hand on my shoulder.
“There’s nothing new to find out,” he says.
The room starts spinning. I’m either on the verge of collapsing or ripping his office apart.
“But maybe there’s something I didn’t see before. I need to understand why she did it.”
“Take a seat, Ray,” Rich says, attempting to guide me to a chair.
I shrug him off. “Get off of me!”
“I understand you’re angry,” Rich says. “Let’s get in touch with that anger. Let’s give it a voice.”
But I don’t want to be angry. I want answers. I want things to make sense. I want Jane. I walk past him, into the waiting room, and down the stairs.
123–112 DAYS BEFORE
VALENTINE’S DAY
By February of last year, it was becoming hard to even go a day without seeing Jane. With my mom still sore about the whole episode with the police, I sometimes had to make up stories to get out of the house. I’d pretend to go to the library to work on school projects, act as if we were missing some essential food product that warranted a trip to the grocery store (“We have no pudding in the fridge”), or insist Simon urgently needed my help (“He thinks he’s been bitten by a vampire and I’m the only one who can calm him down”).
Sometimes I’d pick up Jane and we’d just drive around. Jane would look out the window, staring at her reflection, as we made loops around Burgerville, traversing centuries and miles in the span of only a few hours.
“Should I bring you home?” I’d ask her.
She’d squeeze my leg or shrug or I’d see an almost imperceptible shake of the head.
One night, I asked her what she was thinking about.
“You really want to know?”
“I really want to know.”
“In no particular order: I’m thinking about whatever happened to blue ketchup. How unfair it is that dolphins don’t have vocal cords. Something I don’t want to talk about. Another thing I don’t want to talk about. How much it would suck if I didn’t get to see you anymore. Where are the Teletubbies today? Are they like horrible drug addicts or just regular people walking around with this phenomenal secret that—”
I pulled the car over and stopped on the side of the street.
“Why wouldn’t you get to see me anymore?”
Jane turned away from her reflection. We were on the outskirts of Burgerville in the Shank, near the big farms. The faint scent of manure—Burgerville’s town smell—wafted through the car.
“Life is unpredictable,” she said.
“Hey,” I said. “A tyrannosaurus rex giving birth to Mr. Rogers.”
“Thanks,” Jane said. “I needed that.”
She leaned across the cup holders, held my face with her hands, and kissed me, accidentally hitting pretty much every button in my mom’s car. But I barely noticed. We continued to make out while the windshield wipers scraped back and forth, the hazard lights blinked, and the radio blared Burgerville’s local political station.
We took a break from kissing. “Seriously, though, you know I’m not going anywhere, right?”
“I know you’re not.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” My voice cracked. Was she thinking about breaking up with me? Was her family moving again? Or . . . I didn’t even let my mind go there.
“Relax,” Jane said. “I’m just saying that alien abductions happen all the time.”
“Don’t say things like that.”
“It’s true. Even though the government wants to pretend—”
“I’m not talking about the aliens.”
“I know.”
* * *
• • •
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, Jane warned me not to do anything to celebrate the holiday. “Whatever you have planned,” she said, “cancel it.”
“No horse-drawn carriage?”
“Don’t even joke about that,” she said.
“Can we at least go to dinner?”
“Only if we split the check,” she said.
“Flowers?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Chocolate?”
“We can share a non-chocolate dessert.”
“Deal.”
When Valentine’s Day finally arrived, Simon came over to my house to get ready. Even though we had separate plans, Simon thought it would be a good idea to meet up beforehand to talk “strategy,” which really meant he was nervous and needed something to take his mind off all the ways his date with Mary could go wrong.
But as Jane was proud to point out, it appeared we had made the perfect match. After our trip to the McCallen Mansion, Simon and Mary had gone on a couple more dates, first to the Renaissance Faire, where they jousted with each other, and then to a book signing by Simon’s favorite vampire author, a woman who always wears fangs and black-tinted contact lenses. After the signing, Simon and Mary kissed for the first time, fake vampire fangs and all. I’d never seen Simon so excited.
“Can you believe this?” Simon said, standing in front of my mirror, nodding approvingly at his outfit.
“Believe what?”
“That we both have dates,” he said. “It’s a miracle.”
“It’s not a miracle,” I said. “This is the way life’s supposed to be.”
I walked over to the mirror so Simon and I were standing shoulder to shoulder and began putting the final touches on my hair. I smoothed out my collar and sprayed myself with a bottle of something Simon had taken from his dad’s bathroom.
“The more of that stuff, the better,” Simon said, grabbing the bottle and spraying a suffocating cloud as he turned around in a circle. “Women can’t resist.”
My mom came to the door, choking a little on the cloud of cologne.
“Look at you two,” she said. “So handsome.”
Simon blushed. “Thanks, Mrs. Green.”
I glimpsed her in the mirror and realized she was dressed up as well: black dress, hair done up, the earrings she only wore when someone died or got married.
“And may I say you look beautiful yourself,” Simon said.
The little creep.
She smiled. “Tim will be here any minute.”
I thought I’d be angry. But I didn’t think about my dad in Florida or the divorce or the fact that this night felt somehow symbolic, a chapter closed on our old life. Instead, I just felt happy for her.
My mom placed her car keys on the dresser. “Be careful,” she said, an edge to her voice, a tone I’d grown used to ever since the police brought me home from the McCallen Mansion. “Back by twelve.”
I heard Tim open the front door. “Ready?” he called up.
“We’re in Ray’s room,” she yelled.
Tim climbed the stairs.
“Hey, Bud,” he said, appearing outside the doorway.
“Hey, Tim,” I said.
“I see you have your sidekick with you,” he said.
“This is Simon,” I said.
“The legendary Simon,” Tim said, coughing as he entered the room.
Simon looked starstruck. Tim, dressed in khakis and a nice button-down shirt, his hair gelled, did cut an impressive image. Simon gulped.
“We’ll be bac
k early,” my mom said. She walked over to me and straightened out my collar. “Have fun.” Her voice trailed off; she cleared her throat and sniffled.
“Are you crying?” I asked, watching her in the mirror.
Tim pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to her. She shielded her face with her hand.
“It’s just . . .” She blew her nose. The mascara started running down her cheeks.
“All right,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Not in front of the kids.” I motioned to Simon.
She collected herself, dabbing at her eyes with Tim’s handkerchief.
Something about how she leaned into Tim made me feel guilty. Just as she was about to turn around and leave the room, I heard myself begin to speak.
“Have fun,” I said. “And”—taking a deep breath—“I love you.”
My mom tilted her head, as if she wasn’t sure she heard me correctly. “I love you too,” she said. “See you boys later.” Tim put his arm around her, waved, then escorted her out of the room.
“Are you dying?” Simon asked.
“She gets weird like that sometimes. First day of high school, first B on my report card, you know, big life milestones.”
“Luckily she has Tim to comfort her.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Simon sprayed a little bit more cologne. “He’s the size of a football player,” he said, gazing off into space. “What size shoe do you think he has?”
“Simon!”
“Sorry.”
“How do I look?” I asked, turning around to face him.
“Like a million bucks,” he said, “adjusted for inflation. How about me?”
Simon had gotten rid of the T-shirt tux and was actually wearing a blazer.
“Looking smooth, Latex, real smooth.”
We traded a couple more compliments, then went our separate ways, two guys from the wrong side of the bone who’d finally found the right dimension.
112 DAYS BEFORE, CONT’D
AFFIRMATIONS
The History of Jane Doe Page 14