Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

  Toward the far end of the barn was a ladder leading to the hayloft, and in the dim light I saw January already halfway to the top, the rungs giving little squeaks of protest under her feet. Frustrated, I called out, “Are you gonna tell me why we have to stop off in this haunted shithole first, or what?”

  She didn’t answer. She disappeared from sight, and then I heard her feet scraping through dirt and straw above my head, boards thumping and creaking until she came to a stop near the front of the barn. After a moment, I ascended the ladder and found her huddled in a little nest of hay near an open window that looked out toward the meadow and the woods, beside a stack of crates pushed up against the wall. The bright moonlight made a platinum halo of her pale hair.

  “Sit with me for a little while, okay?” Her voice was scarcely above a whisper. “I’m cold.”

  I was still annoyed, but she sounded … fragile somehow. It was so unlike her, so out of character for the girl who had never had a sentimental word to say about anyone or anything, that I forgot to be wary of her motivation. I crossed the hayloft, skirting the weak spot in the floor, and settled next to her. She was shivering, so I opened my coat and let her move into my lap, then closed the coat around us both. We were silent for a moment, looking out the window at a sky rendered into a pointillist masterpiece by limitless stars, the moon shining like a beacon through the diaphanous lace of barely-there clouds.

  “This is nice,” January said at last. She looked up at me, the light picking out an icy reflection in the blue of one eye. “I’ve missed you, Flynn. I feel like … like we don’t even see each other anymore.”

  “We kind of don’t,” I answered bluntly. It sounded rude, so I added, “I mean, we go to different schools now, you’ve got drama club every afternoon, you work every weekend—”

  “It’s not just that. I feel like—” She stopped abruptly, then changed gears. “I miss you,” she repeated. “I want for us to be happy again, like before.”

  “We’re not happy?” I asked carefully. “Or you’re not happy?”

  “You know I’m not happy. Not anymore.” Familiar bitterness was in her voice, a rush of bile so strong I could almost taste it. “I fucking hate it here. I hate Jonathan, I hate Dumas, I hate fucking robo-mom.… I hate that you and Micah and Tiana and everybody else are all having your old lives and doing fun things, while I’m out here in Narnia with my brand-new wax museum family and nobody fucking cares.”

  “I care,” I assured her automatically.

  She was silent for just a moment. “Tell me about California, okay?”

  This was a little game we played. We’d played it since before we started dating, but neither of us got tired of it. She rested her head on my shoulder and I looked out the window at the moon. “When we graduate, we’re both going to California. I’ll go to UCLA for English, but only until I figure out what I really want to do; your parents will make you apply to Stanford and you’ll probably get in, but you’ll choose Cal Tech instead just to prove a point. You’ll major in astrology—”

  “Astronomy,” she corrected, and I could hear the smile in her voice.

  “Same thing,” I teased. “We’ll go to parties every weekend, alternating whose friends we hang out with, but pretty soon you’ll join a sorority—”

  “Fuck you!” She laughed, and I realized it was the first time I’d heard her laugh in weeks.

  “—and I’ll make friends with all these film school hipsters, and they’ll get me to start drinking organic, fair-trade coffee and bitching about the Establishment. Your sorostitute friends won’t like me, and my hipster friends won’t like you, and nobody will understand how we ever got together in the first place—”

  “—but we’ll go to the beach every Saturday afternoon, the Sunset Strip every Friday night, and a different, trendy café-slash-bar-slash-restaurant every Sunday, and all of our faux-cool friends will wish they were those two awesome kids from Michigan,” she finished with a giggle, but her voice was quiet. “I really want that to happen.”

  “Me too.”

  She turned again, tilting her face up to mine, and then she kissed me. Her lips tasted like vanilla gloss and spiced rum, and I was surprised that I hadn’t smelled the alcohol earlier. The kiss went from tender to serious in nothing flat, her tongue sliding between my teeth, her mouth pressing against mine with unmistakable urgency. Her right hand slipped underneath my sweater, moving over my stomach and up to my chest, and I jerked backward.

  “What?” she asked, that one illuminated eye darting back and forth as she read my face. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just—I mean, your hand is freezing cold!” I laughed awkwardly.

  “It’ll warm up,” she promised, and she moved into me again, kissing harder, her left hand joining her right under my sweater. Her fingers clutched at my abs, the cold searing my skin, and then dropped down to the waist of my jeans. She’d managed to get the button undone before I realized what she was doing and pushed her back.

  “Wait,” I said, a little panicked.

  “The time is right,” she insisted breathlessly, her hands twisting out of my grip like eels, and she reached for my crotch again. “It’s finally the right time, and I want … I want you to be the first. I want you.”

  She was kneading me, tugging at my jeans, and I should have been enjoying it—I really wanted to be enjoying it—but the panic had escalated to a screaming tornado siren in my brain, and I pushed her back again. “Stop! Stop it!”

  “Why?” Her voice was bleak, almost challenging. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not ready yet,” I exclaimed, grappling my pants back into place and fastening the button like it was the seal on a bomb shelter. “We talked about this! I—. It’s too early, and it—it needs to be … special.”

  It was the stupidest thing I could’ve said, and that fact did not escape my girlfriend. She drew away from me, her face disappearing into the inky blackness of the hayloft. Caustic as acid, she snarled, “And I’m not special enough for you, Flynn?”

  “That isn’t what I meant, and you know it,” I snapped, nerves making me irrational.

  “We’ve been dating for four months. You’re supposed to want to do this.”

  “And you’re supposed to be glad that I respect your body and stuff!”

  “Is that what this is?” Her voice was completely hollow. “Is that what this is really about?”

  My first instinct was to demand, What are you talking about? But I knew exactly what she was talking about, and I didn’t want the words to come out of her mouth. I’d have given anything to keep the words from coming out of her mouth. Sweat like ice water streaked down my spine as I retorted, “Sorry I’m not enough of a man-whore for you. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned.”

  “But I’m a regular, modern whore, I guess.”

  “I didn’t say that!” I let her make me angry, because anger was safer. An objective listener would identify me as crazy, but I let wrath crowd out my guilt, my shame, and my rationale; I let it take over. “Don’t put words in my mouth just because I’m not ready to have sex yet!”

  January was quiet for a moment. “Are you afraid I’ll be disappointed?”

  “Huh?”

  “In the size of your … you know?”

  “There is nothing disappointing about my … size!” I exclaimed, offended and horrified by the delicate tone of the question, as if she truly believed I might have a tiny cock. Thing is, it felt like bullying, too, like she was trying to embarrass me as punishment for not wanting to get carnal in a haunted barn, or to goad me into whipping it out to prove my manhood.

  “It’s just that … Kaz said guys worry about stuff like that, and that maybe you—”

  My anger swelled like a thunderhead as I interrupted her. “Why the fuck are you talking to fucking Kaz about my dick? Why are you talking to him at all about us? I don’t talk about you behind your back!”

  She leaned forward then, her face appearing again in the moonlight, a
nd I was startled to see tears glimmering in her eyes and shining on her cheeks. Her expression was anguished, and in the blue-white illumination, she looked like a marble saint. “Can we not fight? Please? This isn’t how I wanted tonight to go.”

  “Well, too bad. Guess you fucked up.” I didn’t sound balanced even to my own ears. I was being an asshole, but I wanted this to be over so badly that I didn’t care.

  If anything, January’s marble face hardened further, anguish turning to resentment like milk curdling before my eyes. “You know what? I’m sick of pretending we don’t both know the reason you freak whenever I touch you.”

  “Maybe it’s because you always say stuff like that.”

  Her baleful glare was resolute. “I’m done letting you make me feel like it’s me, like it’s my fault. It’s never been about me. It’s always been about you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I hugged my coat a little tighter. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “If you won’t be honest with me, you should at least be honest with yourself.”

  “Thanks for the advice, Dr. Phil, I’ll think about it.”

  She stared at me for another moment or so, and then hissed, “Fuck this! I’m tired of holding your hand and waiting for you to make friends with yourself, Flynn! I’m here, too—you’re not the only one.” She drew back again, into the darkness, and I heard her scrambling to her feet. “I’m done. I shouldn’t have called you. It was a mistake.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, catching, and I realized that she was crying again. “It was all a big mistake.”

  I shifted uncomfortably, suddenly freezing on the bed of hay in that pool of moonlight. “January—”

  “I won’t be your safeguard or your excuse or your problem anymore,” she spat suddenly, venomously. “Either admit the truth, or find a new place to hide, because I’m done!”

  Her feet pounded across the shadowy hayloft, then descended the ladder, and then crossed the barn underneath me. I heard the door creak open, and caught a glimpse of her glowing blond hair as she jogged from the barn back into the trees, heading toward the meadow.

  It was the last time I saw her. Those were the last words she spoke to me.

  THREE

  I SURE AS hell couldn’t tell Wilkerson and Moses about all of that, not in front of my mother. Well, we had this huge fight, because she wanted to have sex and I didn’t, because … because … A trill of fear spiked through me, my head whirling and my stomach turning over just at the thought of it, and I announced in a haphazard way, “We broke up.”

  Moses remained impassive, Wilkerson shifted his jaw thoughtfully, and my mother looked at me in utter surprise. “You two broke up? Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Because,” I said, tempted to roll my eyes in spite of everything. My mom was acting as if it were a given that I should share news bulletins about my relationships. I couldn’t think of anything that would make a breakup more awkward than having to dissect it after the fact with the help of my parents, like some kind of postgame analysis for the whole family. “It wasn’t that big of a deal. It just kind of happened.”

  “Did you have a fight?” Wilkerson asked, like it was his business. All three adults were staring at me now, waiting for an answer, and I almost laughed.

  Instead, I lied, dry-mouthed. “No. Like I said, it just kind of happened. I mean, we hardly ever see each other anymore, and I guess we both kind of realized that it wasn’t working out.”

  “So it was mutual.” Moses sounded as though she were trying to humor a loose-cannon conspiracy theorist. It was aliens, hmm? Interesting point.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, sort of.” I was getting flustered, and my body temperature rose about a million degrees until I was sure I was about to spontaneously combust.

  Mom came to my rescue. “Does it really matter who broke up with who?”

  “We’d just like to get a sense of her state of mind,” Wilkerson explained soothingly, and then turned to me again, back in Avuncular Mode. “If you broke up with her, and she took it badly, it might be … illuminating.”

  It took me half a second to add that up. “You think … you think maybe she … hurt herself?”

  There was an awkward, horrible silence before Moses stepped in, sounding kinder than I’d have thought possible. “Not necessarily—we just don’t want to rule anything out until we have all the information. Was she upset about the breakup?”

  I thought about January’s tears, her angry, veiled accusations, and swallowed again. My tongue felt like a lump of sand in my mouth. “Maybe a little. But she wouldn’t have killed herself because of me.”

  That much was true at least, I was certain. Our relationship hadn’t been casual—we’d been inseparable for about a month before we’d even started dating—but we hadn’t quite reached the Three Little Words phase before we’d started drifting apart; and even though she’d clearly been emotional that Friday in the barn, she hadn’t exactly been devastated. She had dumped me! If that’s indeed what had happened. “I’m done” had a pretty final ring to it, but she hadn’t so much as changed her relationship status on Facebook.

  “We understand there’ve been some problems at home for her,” Wilkerson continued delicately. “Did she happen to confide in you about that?”

  The phrase problems at home caused my mom to suck air in through her nose, and I was quick to say, “It’s just normal stuff. She was annoyed because her parents made her leave Riverside and go to Dumas, and they argued about it. Plus, she doesn’t really like her stepdad, and her stepbrother is a burnout and an assh—uh, a jerk, but it’s not like … I mean, there’s never been any violence or anything.”

  “In what way is he an asshole?” Moses asked seriously.

  “I don’t know. The normal way?” In reality, Anson Walker was the dickhole equivalent of a kung fu master, able to be a miscreant in so many ways it almost defied human understanding. His transgressions had made the news a couple of times—once when he got into a fistfight with a parking attendant, and once for pulling the Do you have any idea who my dad is? routine with someone who had the gall to treat him like a normal human—but he was adept at playing to the cameras, and his father’s money frequently reduced criminal acts to “youthful indiscretions.” His worst behavior he saved for behind closed doors, when he knew he wouldn’t get caught. “He’s got an attitude problem. He’s nineteen and not in school, and all he does is sit in his bedroom playing Call of Duty and smoking po—” I caught myself in the nick of time. “Uh, ci-cigarettes.”

  “Okay,” Wilkerson said, picking up the thread, “so January was unhappy at home. How about school? You said she wasn’t thrilled to be going to Dumas?”

  “Not really.” Dumas was the most exclusive private school in the area, an institution accessible only to the richest of the rich kids. The January McConville I met at the beginning of freshman year would have laughed hysterically at the suggestion that she might someday attend the ivory-towered academy, but after Tammy married Jonathan Walker, they’d decided on January’s behalf that she would upgrade learning institutions when the next school year started. It had been a bitter skirmish. January derided the Dumas kids as spoiled poseurs who cribbed their behavior from Gossip Girl reruns, and she wasn’t interested in the least in leaving behind the friends she’d made at Riverside, no matter how prestigious the Dumas Academy would look on her transcripts.

  “Here’s the real fucking clincher,” January had fumed to me one night over coffee at Starbucks, while the battle was still ongoing. “Neither of them actually care about my education, or my college opportunities, or any of the rest of that shit. Stepdaddy Dearest wants to be a fucking big-shot senator, and he needs me to go to the fanciest school in town so we all fit the part. Perfect house, perfect wife, perfect stepdaughter!”

  “While Anson sits around the house jerking off and playing video games,” I’d snarked.

  “Anson is taking a gap year,” January retorted i
n a sickly sweet imitation of her mother’s newly acquired Stepford Wife speaking voice. “He gets to decide what he wants to do with his stupid, worthless life. Me? Not so lucky.”

  “So she wasn’t happy at home or at school, and her relationship had just gone bust,” Wilkerson summarized bluntly, jerking me back to the present.

  “Well, yeah, but she wasn’t, like, depressed about it all—not like that.” I shrugged helplessly. “I mean, she gets angry and unhappy about stuff, and maybe she blows up about it sometimes, but she isn’t suicidal or anything. I’m pretty sure I would’ve noticed.”

  “‘Pretty sure’?” Detective Moses repeated.

  “Well”—I squirmed again—“like I said, we’ve sort of been drifting apart. I haven’t really seen her much for the past few weeks.”

  The woman surprised me then by saying, “She told her parents she spent most of the weekend with you.”

  “What?”

  “They said that she’s been with you four to five nights a week regularly, since about June.”

  I stared at her in blank astonishment. January and I had been together only four or five days total out of the past twenty, and I told the detectives as much. “I stayed at home most of the weekend.”

  “He did,” my mother confirmed promptly. “He had a friend over on Saturday—Micah Feldman, who lives a couple of blocks over—and then we spent Sunday watching the football game as a family.”

  Ann Arbor was a college football town, and if there was a game on, my parents were guaranteed to be watching it. I’m sort of apathetic about the sport, as I said before, but I’m really into game-day festivities. Dad grills burgers, Mom loads up the coffee table with snacks, chips, and soda, and we spend the entire day pigging out. Even if it’s just the three of us, it still feels kind of like a party, and if the game goes well, my parents will get celebratory enough that I can successfully sneak a beer. I like beer even less than I like football, but that isn’t really the point of beer.