Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

  SEVEN

  I WAS STILL staring at him. Once again, nothing he was saying made any sense. January quit her job? It didn’t compute.

  I thought back to three weeks ago, Saturday, when Tiana and some of the drama kids at Riverside had organized a hayride at one of the many apple orchards in Washtenaw County. It was kind of a hokey fall tradition, but it was also kind of a fun hokey fall tradition. You sat on bales of gamy-smelling hay, bumping around on dirt roads in frigid air through row after identical row of trees; you picked shit-tons of apples, drank shit-tons of cider, and ate more powdered-sugar doughnuts than the human body was designed to withstand; and then you capped it all off with a bonfire where you made s’mores and sang dumb songs and somebody distributed crappy beer or wine coolers or a flask of bottom-shelf booze they managed to smuggle in under their coat, and someone barfed. It was awesome.

  I’d texted January, asking if there was any way she could take the day off and join us, and she’d answered with a single, terse line of text: the store is shorthanded this week and they need me sorry.

  Just under two weeks ago, five days before our showdown in the barn, one of the cable channels was running an edited-for-TV horror-movie marathon—basically, one of the things January and I used to live for. I’d invited her to come over to my house after rehearsal was over so we could laugh at the dumbed-down, fake-swearworded absurdity of it all, and she’d again demurred with another impersonal text: rehearsal then work tonight sorry but have some popcorn for me.

  If Kaz was telling the truth, and January hadn’t been working those nights, then where the hell had she been? And why had she lied to me? To all of us?

  “She couldn’t have quit,” I contradicted Kaz, examining his perfectly structured face for proof that he was mistaken. “I mean, she told me she was still working here.”

  “She wasn’t,” he answered simply.

  “Well, if she quit, then she must have given some kind of reason,” I insisted. “You don’t just quit your job and not say why.”

  “The lady who talked to her when she called said she wouldn’t explain.” Kaz ran a hand through his glossy dark hair. “I mean, obviously I asked her, too, when I saw her again, but she just said it was a long story, quote-unquote. She wouldn’t give me any more than that.”

  “What do you mean, when you saw her again? I thought you said she quit and never came back.”

  “I said she never came back to work,” he corrected me, “but she still had to come to the store to pick up her final paycheck. I was here the day she and that friend of hers dropped by to get it.”

  “What friend?” I was flipping through my mental Rolodex of January’s known associates, wondering why no one at school had bothered to mention this particular errand.

  “January didn’t introduce us,” Kaz said with a shrug, “and her friend barely said a word the entire time they were here. She was Asian, with bright pink hair. Sound familiar?”

  “Not really,” I murmured, which was mostly true. It sure didn’t sound like anyone from our circle at Riverside, but the description rang a bell nevertheless.

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

  Pink. As nicknames went, it wasn’t especially telling. Considering that a girl could be branded “Sparkles” forever after having worn a spangled top on a single occasion, “Pink” could refer to a girl who’d worn pink shoes or a pink dress, drove a pink car, or was a great big stan for Pink. Kaz seemed to believe that January had actual friends at Dumas, however, and I knew of no one at Riverside who answered to the description of an Asian girl with bright pink hair.

  I pressed Kaz for more information—any information—but he wasn’t able to tell me anything illuminating. After I’d asked all the questions I could think to ask and gotten all the information I thought I would get, I started for the door again. Behind me, Kaz said, “Do you really think she just ran away? That she might come back?”

  Without turning around, I answered, “I don’t know.”

  The bell jingled above my head again as Kaz called out, “If you find her, let me know, okay? I’m … I’m starting to get kinda worried, too.”

  “Yeah, sure. You’re first on my list,” I returned sarcastically, and the door banged shut behind me.

  All that night and for the rest of the next day, Kaz’s words ate at me. The way he’d talked about me, the way he’d said January talked about me, had left me stunned, angry, and a little shaken. The real problem was that there was a grain of uncomfortable truth at the root of each ugly accusation. I had made fun of the Dumas kids—of course I had—but January had done so first; ironically enough, I’d played along because I thought it would cheer her up. Hearing Kaz describe it as if I’d been psychologically abusing my girlfriend was like looking into a fun-house mirror reflection of reality, the image so distorted that it might as well have been of something else entirely.

  The same went for the claim that I’d made January feel bad for going to Dumas in the first place, when in fact I’d done everything I could think of to make her feel better about it. Micah, Ti, and I had put together a care package for her before the school year started: pictures of the four of us she could hang in her new locker, a mix for her iPod of songs that would remind her of things we’d done together, and special ringtones of our voices she could program into her phone. I’d told her a million times how much Riverside would suck without her, how much I would miss her when she went to Dumas, but I hadn’t said any of it to make her feel guilty; I’d done it because I thought she’d want to know that it would be hard for me, too, that I wasn’t happy to see her go.

  How could she have misinterpreted my actions and intentions so extremely that when she talked about them to Kaz, I came across as a selfish, manipulative jerk? Could I have really made her feel so self-conscious with my lame joke about throwaway ponies that she believed I would judge her for making friends at Dumas? Clearly she had made friends there, and, just as clearly, she’d kept them from me with the same ease that she’d lied about still having her job at Old Mother Hubbard’s. Or was Kaz the manipulator? Had he talked her into seeing my actions in the worst possible light as a way to drive a wedge between us?

  Either way, I was beginning to learn there were a lot of things my girlfriend had concealed from me recently, and it was making me start to wonder if I knew her anywhere near as well as I thought I had.

  When January was still missing on Monday morning, the halls of Riverside decorated with fliers bearing her brightly smiling face and a plea for information, I decided I needed to track down the girl with pink hair. Something must have prompted January to quit her job, and I was determined to find out what it was. “Pink” was starting to sound like the only one who might have the answers I wanted.

  Micah and I had only one friend who could drive, Mason Collier, and even though he was a total asshelmet, I had no choice but to beg him for a ride to the Dumas Academy after school. Mason was one of those guys who believed firmly in a social hierarchy predicated exclusively on athletic accomplishments, and he considered the fact that he was built like the Incredible Hulk to be a sign from God that he was meant to be at the tippy-top of the pecking order. If it weren’t for the fact that I’d broken Riverside’s record in the 200-meter dash for the men’s JV track team the year before, I doubted Mason would even bother speaking to me.

  The trip out to Dumas took only twenty minutes, but it felt like forever. Mason filled every second of the drive with a running monologue about how awesome he was and about how, if I wasn’t a total faggot, I would join the snowboarding club that winter. He said it in a joking way, like he wanted me to laugh and promise to join the club in defense of my manhood, but a cold, dreadful feeling slithered out of my heart and up into my mouth nonetheless.

  If and when Mason learned the truth about me, what would he say then? Would he remember this moment with embarrassment? Would everyone remember the times they’d said stuff like “that’s so gay�
�� and “don’t be a fag” in my presence, and suddenly be unable to look me in the eye anymore? Would they even care how it made me feel? Just how different would my life be if the truth got out?

  When Mason pulled to a stop outside the massive brick pillars that marked the entrance to the Dumas Academy, I threw five bucks at him for gas and then fled the vehicle. From the gate to the front doors of the school was nearly a quarter mile, but I enjoyed every minute of the brisk air and total silence.

  For an institution with a small and highly selective number of students, Dumas turned out to be a rather enormous complex of buildings. The campus sprawled over several acres of rolling, manicured lawns, with a main building that housed the administrative offices and cafeteria, and a handful of outbuildings that contained classrooms, segregated by subject matter. The architecture was spare and modern, all glass and travertine, and a network of walkways crisscrossed the landscaped green that stretched between the various destinations. A handy map outside the main office showed me where to find the theater, and I headed off to look for it.

  It was a bit of a gamble, assuming the pink-haired girl would be there when I found the place, but I didn’t really have a better strategy. I knew from Tiana that January had met the girl through the drama club, and I knew from January that the play they were working on had rehearsals every day after school. It was reasonable to think the girl might still be there—and if she wasn’t, someone else would be, and I could at least get her name.

  The theater was in its own building, it turned out: a fancy-looking, two-story edifice with a fountain out front composed of three bronze nymphs frolicking in a birdbath. A plaque on its base honored a couple called Harmon and Eugenia Davenport, presumably for having the most upper-crusty white-people names in the history of Michigan, and I wondered how much cash they’d donated to Dumas.

  I passed through an immaculate lobby of gleaming white stone and followed the sound of voices into a vast auditorium. Cushy scarlet chairs swept down a gentle grade to the apron of the stage, which was set with ornate furniture, freestanding French doors, and empty picture frames that seemed to hover in space. It was a little abstract, maybe, but it looked expensive and professional, obviously meant to suggest a sitting room in some rococo palais somewhere. Meanwhile, over at Riverside, the drama club was struggling to build a set for Hamlet out of last spring’s set for The Glass Menagerie.

  The voices I had heard were coming from a clutch of students draped over chairs at the back of the theater, gossiping excitedly with one another in an overlapping cacophony I couldn’t decipher. The second they took notice of me, however, they quieted and stared, making me feel self-conscious and unwelcome. Not one of them matched the description of my quarry. Clearing my throat, I ventured, “I’m looking for an Asian girl with pink hair … you guys know her?”

  “Reiko?” A girl in a cashmere sweater blurted the name with a confused inflection, but I couldn’t tell if she was surprised I was looking for Reiko, or if she wasn’t sure which pink-haired Asian girl I meant and had guessed one at random.

  “She’s probably backstage,” offered a boy with an effeminate voice. His eyes probed me from head to foot, like sonar equipment searching for sunken treasure, and I mumbled an awkward thanks before heading off. He was cute, and his obvious interest in me was simultaneously exciting and unnerving.

  In the end, I literally almost stumbled over Reiko. Pawing my way around a velvet curtain that extended into one of the wings, I stopped just short of crashing into a low, moth-eaten sofa on which three girls were sitting and talking. Once again, the conversation died the second I appeared, and the trio stared up in surprise. The girl in the middle had bright pink hair and black nail polish, and when she saw me, her eyes first widened and then narrowed suspiciously.

  “Are you Reiko?” I asked. She nodded but said nothing, while the other two stared at me vacantly. “Um … can I talk to you for a minute? In private?”

  For a moment, she didn’t react, as if she hadn’t even heard me, and then she abruptly pushed herself to her feet. Speaking to her friends, and pointedly not to me, she announced, “I’ll be right back, you guys. Don’t go anywhere.”

  Still not acknowledging me, she marched straight to a door in the wall, shoving against a crash bar and pushing it open. Bright light from the hallway beyond skewered into the dim, cavernous space of the wing. When she turned and glared at me impatiently, I finally realized I was supposed to follow her.

  “What do you want?” she demanded when we were face-to-face under the bright fluorescent lights in the quiet corridor, a huge poster for the fall show looming beside us. They were doing Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire—in the original French, of course. Dumas was so fucking pretentious.

  “My name is Flynn Dohe—”

  “I know who you are,” she cut me off abruptly, her voice cold enough to drop birds out of the sky. “You’re the boyfriend.”

  “Well … yeah.” Why did everyone say it like that? “How do you know me?”

  “Well, let’s see.” She cocked her head and stared up at the ceiling, making an exaggerated performance out of pretending to think. “It wasn’t from any of the parties you didn’t come to, and it wasn’t from the charity dance you made your girlfriend go to by herself … oh, wait, I’ve got it! January showed me some pictures to prove she wasn’t lying when she said she really was dating someone!”

  There was so much hostility flying at me that I actually took a step back, blinking in surprise. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m saying that maybe if January ever got any real support from the people she depended on most in her life, she wouldn’t have gone off like this!”

  I tried to ignore the aspersion. “So you think she ran away?”

  “No,” she returned condescendingly, “I think she disappeared because she was so fucking happy she just exploded.”

  “Hey, could you cool it for a second with the attack-dog routine?” I was starting to lose my patience with being pilloried by people I’d never met before. “I’m here because I’m concerned about her, all right?”

  “About yourself, you mean.”

  “What the hell is your problem with me?” It was déjà vu all over again as I tried to defend myself against another one of January’s friends.

  Reiko stabbed a finger at my chest. “You were never around for January when she needed you. Never. You made her go to parties full of strangers all by herself because you didn’t want to hang out with anyone from Dumas; she was the only person at that dance without a date, and she was so miserable she could barely smile in the pictures—”

  “What dance?” I was shouting now, my voice rebounding loudly off the tiled corridor, and Reiko flinched.

  “The charity dance,” she repeated stiffly, and seeing that I needed more than that, she rolled her eyes. “The dance the Dumas Philanthropic Society puts on every year?” I was still looking at her blankly, so she huffily explained, “You buy tickets to attend, and all the proceeds go to a worthy cause, and everybody gets all dressed up, and it is literally the biggest social event of every single fall semester, and your girlfriend had to go by herself because you ‘don’t do dances’!”

  She delivered the last bit with a remarkable amount of mocking sarcasm, and I assumed it to be a direct citation. It took me a moment to answer her, though, because the words conjured up no memories whatsoever. No conversation January and I had ever had came back to me at that prompt. Mystified, I put up my hands. “I may not be crazy about dances, but I would’ve gone if January had asked me. This is the first I’m even hearing about it.”

  “She said she did ask you, and you told her you weren’t interested.”

  “She never invited me to anything at Dumas,” I insisted. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden it was really important to me that I repair my image in the eyes of this girl. “She told me that she didn’t even want to go to those things, that her stepdad forced her, so why would she make me go with her? I
mean, when even was this ‘big dance’?”

  Reiko was staring at me with naked suspicion, but she grudgingly answered the question. “Three weeks ago, Saturday.”

  “The day you picked up January’s final paycheck together.” I lifted a brow.

  The girl shrugged uncomfortably. “Yeah. She wanted someone to go with her. I told her it was a bad idea to quit her job, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Why did she quit?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because of you,” she shot back, her expression once more frigid and hard as an iceberg.

  “Boy, I sure can’t wait to hear where you’re going with this.”

  “Well, you made her quit the play, so who knows what else you made her—”

  “What do you mean she quit the play?” My head was starting to spin. It was like we were speaking two different languages that only sounded sort of similar. “She’s been going to these rehearsals every day after school since almost the beginning of the year!”

  Reiko cocked her head and stared at me like I was the crazy one. “No, she quit after the dance. She said you were giving her all this crap about how she was always busy with school stuff, and how she wasn’t spending enough time with you! Once again, your great, big whiny needs came before—”

  “I didn’t say jackshit to her about the play, or about any of her other time commitments,” I exclaimed heatedly, “and if she quit, she never told me anything about it! Two weeks ago, she was still blowing me off for rehearsals!”

  Reiko was adamant. “No. No! She quit for you. We had plans for the Saturday before last, and January blew me off because you needed her to come watch you pop a wheelie on your skateboard or some dumbass thing like that.”

  “I’ve barely seen January since September, and ten days ago, she dumped me! So we didn’t do anything together that Saturday,” I declared firmly, deciding not to correct Reiko’s egregious misunderstanding of what one does on a skateboard.