Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

  I was just starting to move, aiming to get in front of January, when she darted past me and in the next instant placed herself directly between the two furious combatants. Her expression calm and her voice low, she gently pushed them apart, forcing them to acknowledge her. Their chests heaving, they stared daggers at each other over her head, but as January continued speaking, the destructive energy that had erupted with such abruptness began to dissipate just as quickly. Other volunteers rushed in then, converging on the scene urgently if already too late, and led the two angry pugilists away from each other.

  January sauntered back over to me, giving her hair a casual toss, acting like someone who’d just finished sorting out a mildly frustrating paper jam in the printer rather than stopping an honest-to-goodness bum fight in its tracks. I goggled at her, impressed. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

  “Somebody had to, and I was the closest,” she said with a verbal shrug, as if it were really that simple.

  “They were huge and trying to kill each other,” I pointed out. “They were, like, four times your size—you could’ve been stomped into the linoleum!”

  “Please, me and the girls could’ve taken ’em easy,” she blustered jokingly, flexing her biceps so I could see which girls she meant. “Fear is for suckers!”

  “Seriously, though.” I couldn’t quite let the subject go. I was still worried about her safety, even in retrospect, and wanted her to admit she’d been reckless. “You can’t honestly pretend that you weren’t a little bit scared.”

  January gave me a bemused look that might or might not have been genuine, a knowing glint flickering in the depths of her placid blue eyes. “Flynn, haven’t you figured it out by now? I’m not scared of anything.”

  * * *

  The next day at school I learned that Wilkerson and Moses had wasted no time in following up on the names I’d given them: At least five of January’s closest friends came up to me in the halls to tell me they’d received visits from the cops the night before. None of them knew anything, just as I’d surmised, and most of them tried to pump me for more information. The only person I’d held out any real hope of January’s having confided in was Tiana Hughes, her best friend and—not coincidentally—Micah’s girlfriend.

  I caught Tiana at her locker after first period, where she was trying to fix the hinge on a heart-shaped locket that Micah had given her for their two-month anniversary the previous summer. She seemed to sense my arrival because, without even looking up from what she was doing, she groused, “This fucking heart keeps breaking and it’s starting to make me homicidal.”

  “I hope that’s no reflection on the state of your relationship,” I said, and she smirked.

  “Please. It’ll take way more than Micah’s questionable taste in jewelry to drive us apart,” Tiana said, “although you might want to tell him, for future reference, that just because something’s an antique doesn’t mean it isn’t also a piece of crap.” Giving up, she tossed the necklace into her locker and slammed the door shut. Then she turned to face me for the first time, her brown eyes wide and frank. “Dude.”

  With just that one word, I knew the cops had spoken to her as well. Without any real hope, I asked, “You don’t happen to know where she is, do you?”

  “No.” Tiana tossed her hands up and let them drop to her sides. “Do you?” When I shook my head, she bit her lip, looked away, and then met my eyes again, her brow furrowed worriedly. “Flynn … how freaked should I be here? Honestly.”

  The fact that she even had to ask sort of upped the Freak-Out Quotient automatically for me. “The cops told me they think she’s probably, like, hiding out somewhere, trying to scare Tammy and Jonathan. I mean, it kinda sounds like her, doesn’t it?” I received a noncommittal hitch of one shoulder from Tiana, and continued, meekly, “I thought maybe she might’ve talked about it with you.”

  “She didn’t, or I’d have told her it was a stupid-ass idea,” Tiana replied in a level tone, and she was clearly being honest. The girl was not exactly known for keeping her opinions to herself for the sake of diplomacy.

  “When is the last time you talked to her?”

  Shifting her weight unhappily, Tiana made a strange face. “I don’t know. Maybe a couple of weeks ago?”

  “What, did your iPhones melt down from overuse or something?” I asked, only half kidding. January and Tiana sort of famously couldn’t last five whole minutes without one of them texting the other; January once drowned a phone in the shower because she was trying to write Tiana something she’d forgotten to tell her when they’d been Skyping ten minutes previously. “I thought you guys talked, like, constantly!”

  Tiana shifted again, and her strange expression became more pronounced, a mingling of unhappiness, embarrassment, and vulnerability. I had never seen Tiana—a girl who once chased a guy built like a linebacker across a Burger King parking lot, loudly and publicly denouncing him as a dick for knocking the cup of change out of a homeless man’s hand—look the least bit vulnerable. “Actually, Flynn, she’s kind of been … I don’t know, icing me out lately.”

  “Did you guys have a fight or something?”

  “No!” Tiana looked up at me, puzzled, more worried lines appearing on her forehead. “That’s just it! I … Flynn, did she say anything to you? Did I … do something to piss her off?”

  “Not that I know of, but … to be honest, she’s kind of been shutting me out, too. It’s like, we would text for a bit, but then she’d blow me off whenever we’d try to make plans.”

  “Same here.” Tiana slumped against her locker, her dark hair falling into her face. She brushed it back with fingertips painted a lilac hue that contrasted against her flawless sienna skin. “I mean, at the beginning of the year we made this huge pact that things would be exactly like always, that even though we were going to different schools, we would still talk all the time and that nothing would change. But, I don’t know … it’s hard to keep that up sometimes. It’s one thing when you’re just hanging out at rehearsals or whatever and talking shit, but it’s another to write texts while you’re supposed to be paying attention to other things. I guess I got lazy and sort of let things drift a bit.”

  “I can relate,” I admitted.

  “But for, like, the last few weeks or something, it’s like she’s barely bothered to respond to any of my messages. I was worried that maybe she was pissed at me.” Tiana was looking at me with a doubtful expression. “It’s weird, because Jan’s the kind of girl who tells you to your face when you’ve crossed the line, you know? But she never said anything to me. Never even called me out for dropping the ball on our pact. I was always getting into it with her dipshit stepbrother, and for a while I thought maybe he’d gone crying to Mr. Walker and had me put on the Do Not Fly list, but Jan wouldn’t have put up with that. So I don’t get it.”

  “Me neither,” I mumbled.

  Tiana gave a nervous laugh. “I guess I also kinda worried that maybe she was starting to go native over there at Dumbass. You know? Like, she was spending all day rubbing designer elbows with her new rich-bitch classmates, and maybe it went to her head. Like suddenly I wasn’t good enough for her anymore.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said comfortingly. I couldn’t think of a single nice thing January had ever said about her “rich-bitch classmates” that would lead me to believe she’d decided to cross over to the dark side, even if Jonathan Walker had forced her to socialize with them from time to time. “But while we’re on the subject, what do you know about the people she hung out with at Dumbass?”

  “Jackshit,” Tiana answered promptly. “I know Mr. Walker forced her to go to some parties, but she never actually liked the chicks that threw them. I guess she might have made some friends over there once she joined the drama club?” Tiana’s tone was skeptical. “I mean, she spent hours every single day after school hanging out with the same group of people, and she mentioned a few of them to me more than once, but that’s about it.”
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br />   “Who were the people she mentioned, specifically?” I was genuinely curious. January had never told me much about the drama club, except to say that the actors sucked, their play was incomprehensible, and the drama coach was a freak.

  Tiana made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know any of their real names, because she always used nicknames that she’d made up. Like, at the first meeting January went to, she texted me that this one girl was wearing a sparkly crop top that was apparently straight out of an eighties music video, so she called her Sparkles. It just kind of stuck, and after that, every time she talked about this girl she was just ‘Sparkles.’ ‘Sparkles wants to know if Jonathan is hiring interns for his senate campaign,’ and ‘I wrote the quadratic formula on the back of my hand in math, and Sparkles literally just asked me if it was a tattoo.’ Stuff like that.”

  “Sparkles,” I repeated with deflating hopes. There went my plan to scrounge up new leads for the Missing Persons Unit.

  “Yeah. I remember Sparkles for sure, and there was also Pube-stache, Pink, and FBA.”

  “FBA?” I asked, not caring for an explanation of “Pube-stache.”

  “Fake British Accent. Like, this bitch apparently lived in London for a year when she was twelve, and pretends it permanently made her sound like Kate Middleton or some shit.”

  Great. I could tell Detectives Moses and Wilkerson to head to Dumas and round up Sparkles, Pink, Pube-stache, and Fake British Accent. January would be home again by bedtime.

  The bell rang for class, and the hall started pulsing with activity, people streaming in both directions while Tiana and I stayed right where we were.

  Warily, I looked at Micah’s girlfriend, my girlfriend’s best friend, and watched her eye the passing crowd. I’d had no idea a rift had formed between her and January. I’d always thought of them as scary-close—the kind of close where I would tell January something in confidence and then hear it repeated back to me out of Tiana’s mouth. It always made me wonder if January had told Tiana she suspected that I might be gay. Almost undoubtedly she had, which meant that, by extension, Micah had almost undoubtedly heard about it, too.

  The three of them were closer to me than anyone on the planet, outside of my actual family, and for a moment my face burned and my heart twisted as I thought of them gossiping about me behind my back.

  Over the rush of chaotic foot traffic, I finally asked, “Ti, what do you think happened to January?”

  She didn’t answer me right away—she didn’t even look at me right away—and I felt a weird thrumming start up in the pit of my stomach. I wanted her to tell me not to worry, that it was no big deal, but her silence stretched out, unnervingly. Finally, Tiana sighed. “I don’t know, dude. I want to believe she disappeared on purpose, and that everything’s okay, but … I can’t stop thinking about how rich her stepdad is. I mean, guy’s money has money. That freaking palace they live in isn’t even the biggest house he owns!”

  “You think she was kidnapped?” Even though I’d thought of it already, it sounded almost surreal spoken out loud, a plot point from a soap opera, and I didn’t like the way it made my palms feel cool and slippery. “The police didn’t say anything about a ransom note, though.”

  “Maybe there hasn’t been one,” Tiana said, as if it were a significant point. “Don’t forget her stepdad is probably on his way to Washington. People might want things from him that aren’t money, and maybe he doesn’t want the police to know what those things are.”

  “You think it might be political?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know what I think.” She looked like she did know what she thought, however, because her expression was even bleaker than it had been a minute earlier. Just then, the second bell rang, and Tiana straightened up, grabbing her bag from the floor. “I gotta get to class. Let me know if you hear anything, okay?”

  “Sure, yeah,” I answered mechanically as Tiana started down the emptying corridor, but I was distracted, thinking. January’s classmates at Dumas came from families that Jonathan Walker had been eager to exploit for political gain; couldn’t that street run both ways? As far as I knew, January had last been seen at school. An adult might have offered her a ride home on Tuesday, and then made demands of Walker after the police had already been called.…

  I was so lost in thought that I didn’t realize Tiana had doubled back until I turned and almost ran right into her. Her mouth tensed and her eyes troubled, she blurted, “Look, I didn’t want to say this before, but you asked what I think happened to January, and the truth is … Flynn, there was something going on that she wouldn’t tell me about, I know it. I could feel it in the way she responded to my texts. The way she didn’t respond. She was keeping something from me. If she ran away, maybe she had a reason. And if she didn’t … I think something bad happened.” Tiana was shaking now, her voice a whisper. “And I have this awful feeling that … that we’re never going to see January again. That she’s just … gone.”

  And with that, Tiana turned and fled down the hallway.

  FIVE

  I SPENT THE rest of the day with Tiana’s words ringing ominously in my ears, even while I tried not to let them get to me. I couldn’t just give up and believe that January was never coming back. Like the cops, Ti had avoided using the M word—murder—but I knew she must have been thinking it. Kidnapping only ends one of two ways. I was still convinced that January had run away to freak out her parents, and that she hadn’t bothered to let Ti and me in on the plan for two very good reasons: First, we would have spoiled it by telling the police, and second, she had obviously not felt like confiding much of anything in either of us lately.

  I told myself this over and over, and by the time my mom was clearing dinner from the table, I had started to believe it. I met Micah at the skate park after, where we spent a couple of hours working on kickflips in relative silence. Micah had perfected his ollie the previous summer, and even though mine was still only about sixty-forty, my pride forbade me from letting him move on ahead without me. As a result, I spent more time rolling around on my ass than I did on my board, but the pain felt good in an elemental way.

  The dark, portentous mood that had been gripping me all day refused to release its hold, though, even after Micah and I split the last of the weed that had been stashed in my desk. We ate Doritos to cover the smell, called it a night, and went home. My mom was still up when I walked in, sitting in the living room and flipping channels on the TV, and we had a short conversation while I rooted through the fridge for leftovers. I was too impatient to reheat stuff, but I’d discovered that almost anything can be eaten cold if you’re open-minded enough. As I loaded a plate with chicken, potatoes, and macaroni that clung together in a congealed lump, my mom prattled on about “the decline of Western civilization,” which meant she’d watched an episode of Real Housewives.

  Finally, as I tried to leave the kitchen with my munchies, she moved in for the kill. I had a plate in one hand and a glass of water in the other, and no way to ward her off. She hugged me, hard, pressing her face into my hair for a long, awkward moment, and I tried to will any lingering trace of pot smoke to retreat into my scalp. If she smelled anything, though, she didn’t mention it. Instead, she pulled back, looked me in the eye, and said, “I love you, Flynn.”

  “I love you, too, Mom,” I mumbled. It’s not like I was uncomfortable with the sentiment, but the way she was looking at me—like one of us was about to be dragged away by armed guards—made me feel a little put on the spot.

  “I don’t know what I would do if something happened to you.”

  Oh. “Nothing will, okay?”

  “I’m sure Tammy thought the same thing,” my mom said quietly, and then face-palmed herself. “I’m sorry, that was a low blow. I just … you hear about a thing like this and it turns you into … I don’t know, a crazy person. The kind of hand-wringing helicopter parent you always swore you would never be.” She sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Just … promise me you’ll al
ways be careful, okay?”

  “I promise.”

  “Don’t just say that to humor me, smart-ass.” My mom gave me a shrewd look. “Promise me.”

  “Okay, I promise,” I muttered again.

  She didn’t let me go. She was looking at me super seriously now. “You can tell me anything, Flynn. You know that. You’re my son, and I will always love you and support you, no matter what. You know that, right?”

  My breath caught, and I could feel the paranoid mayhem of nerves shimmering through my high. Was she talking about what I thought she was talking about? I squeaked out some kind of acknowledgment, and then rushed ahead before she could continue, “I really wanna go up and change my clothes, okay?”

  “Okay, okay,” my mom allowed, stepping back. “Just don’t leave your dirty dishes in your room this time? You don’t even have to wash them yourself, that’s why we have that expensive machine.” She gestured to the dishwasher while I sidled quickly for the hall leading to the foyer. I made it halfway before she called out, “Oh, and by the way, Flynn? If you’re going to smoke pot, just please don’t do it somewhere you could be arrested, okay?”

  When I got up to my room, I texted Micah immediately about getting busted for the weed. I knew I hadn’t heard the last of it from my parents, but I was hopeful that the punishment wouldn’t be too draconian; Will and Kate Doherty were hugely pro-marijuana types, and there was a chance I’d get off with just a slap on the wrist. Still, I wanted to share the panic sweat with Micah a little bit.

  I scarfed down my food while watching an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia online, checked Facebook, jerked off, and went to bed. That last step usually knocks me out, but that night, I couldn’t get to sleep. Once again, January hovered in my thoughts, crowding her way into every corner of my brain like a catchy pop song, until I finally gave up and turned my attention fully to her.