Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

  Having accomplished that much, it still left one unresolved problem to deal with: January’s mysterious pregnancy. Though I didn’t want to implicate Jonathan Walker without something real to back it up, I wasn’t just going to let it drop, either. If he was the father, he wasn’t likely to confess, but there was one person I could think of who might already know the truth.

  I prevailed upon Mason for another ride after school, and he spent most of it rather nervously telling me more about how comfortable he was around gay people—paradoxically proving the opposite. He kept sneaking glances at me when he thought I wasn’t looking, and finally fell silent. When he spoke again, he cleared his throat first. “Uh, look, just to be totally clear, I’m not a homo or anything.”

  “Sorry?” It came so out of left field I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “I mean, I’m not giving you a ride because I’m into you, or anything. I’m just trying to be cool.” Judging from his tone, he seemed to feel the importance of this distinction could not be overstated. “Like I said, I don’t have a problem with gay guys, but I’m not one, so … you know. Don’t get any ideas or whatever.”

  “Ideas about what?”

  He rolled his eyes impatiently. “About me. I like girls, okay?”

  “No one said you didn’t,” I pointed out with growing irritation.

  “Right.” He was firm. “Just so we’re clear.”

  “We’re clear,” I assured him coldly. He was such an egotist he couldn’t even entertain the possibility that I wasn’t attracted to him—and although he wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes, Mason Collier, with his Bieber-inspired wardrobe and douche-inspired personality, fell somewhere below a wax dummy of Jack the Ripper on my list of Guys I Might Want to Date. His car then came to a stop outside the gates of the Dumas Academy, and I disembarked with a friendly—but not too friendly, lest he think I was getting “ideas”—good-bye.

  This time I found Reiko sitting at the back of the auditorium, quietly drawing on the top sheet of a high-quality sketchpad, her hands moving with careful, confident strokes across the heavy paper. Arranged beside her were a collection of professional-looking colored pencils and a lumpy gray eraser that resembled a wad of chewed-up food. Near the apron of the stage, Cedric Hoffman stood, offering nebulous directions to a pair of scowling actors. “Cléante, I’m not believing that you love Angelique. Be more in the moment.”

  “But I don’t even understand the script!” the actor playing Cléante snapped.

  “That’s not the point,” Cedric answered in his calm, airy way. “The audience won’t understand it, either. You have to make them feel it.”

  I rolled my eyes, and interrupted Reiko’s concentration. “Hey. Um … I need to speak to you.”

  She looked up. Her eyes were swollen, her face blotchy from crying. When she recognized me, she emitted a sigh and said, tiredly, “I thought I made it really clear that I can’t tell you anything.”

  “You did.” I crossed my arms over my chest, trying not to be moved by her obvious grief. The local media had been relentless that week, salivating over descriptions of duct tape and bloody clothes, and January’s smiling picture had been making hourly appearances above block-letter captions reading PRESUMED DEAD. “That was before, though, when you thought she’d run away because I didn’t want to go to a dance with her.”

  Her mouth twisted unhappily. “Yeah, well. I guess I was wrong. If that’s what you wanted to hear, there you go. You’re not the reason she disappeared; you’re just part of the reason she felt so alone all the time.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said, annoyed. “She shut me out—not the other way around. I told you that.”

  “Fine.” Her commitment to arguing the point seemed to have drained away, and she uttered the word as if she were truly willing to concede the matter.

  She returned to her sketch, pointedly tuning me out as she selected a pencil and applied it to the paper with short, deft strokes, angling the pad so I couldn’t see what she was working on. A little louder, I stated, “That’s not what I came all the way out here for. There’s something I need to ask you.”

  “Excuse me.” The interruption, peremptory and reproachful, had come from Cedric Hoffman. “I hope our little rehearsal here isn’t interfering with your conversation.”

  I turned around, and when the man saw my face, his expression shifted from irritation to surprise to some unfriendliness that I couldn’t quite read, his lips folding together into a thin, flat line. It was clear that he recognized me, and he didn’t seem particularly thrilled to renew the acquaintance. I didn’t have time to puzzle about it, though, because Reiko thrust her sketchpad down and got to her feet, shoving past me and heading for the door to the lobby. Before I took off after her, I glanced down at what she’d been working on and almost gasped; it was a portrait of January, so accurately detailed that its realism startled me. It was hard to believe a person could produce something so exact by hand; Reiko’s talent was humbling.

  She was ready for me when I emerged into the lobby, Cedric’s glare still burning holes in my back like a surgical laser, and as the door shut behind me she hissed, “I’ve already told you twice that I’ve got nothing to say to you—”

  “I’m aware of that,” I cut her off disdainfully. “You said you couldn’t tell me anything because ‘there are rules.’ What does that mean? Rules about what?”

  She blew out air, her brow knitted, like she was trying to decide if she could even tell me enough to answer the question. “I’m a peer counselor,” she said finally, her tone clipped and resentful. “I got to know January because she came to see me about … stuff she was going through, okay? Part of being involved in the counseling program means I can’t just go blabbing things that people tell me in confidence. January came to me because she needed someone to listen, who wouldn’t judge or spread her private business all over school. I gave my word, okay?”

  “Well, she might be dead now.” The statement took me by surprise, even as it came out of my mouth. It was the first time I’d really acknowledged it aloud, and it felt like someone had just wiped their feet on my soul. “So your secrecy isn’t helping her any.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” The pink-haired girl was resolute, and it was my own composure that was beginning to crumble. I’d been on the verge of an embarrassing meltdown since my argument with Micah that morning, and once again my chest grew tight as I tried to form my next question.

  “Was she … was it rape?” I asked in a strained voice. The word came out with difficulty, disgorged painfully from my heart, and I felt my hands begin to tremble. It had been hard to picture January cheating on me, impossible to imagine her seducing her stepfather, but this …

  “I can’t tell you that,” Reiko whispered, but confirmation was written in the stricken rigidity of her expression.

  “Oh, fuck, it’s true.” The sudden distance, the lying, the distress; it made sense.

  “You should go,” she said thickly, starting past me for the door to the theater. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I should’ve told you to fuck off! What is wrong with me?”

  I grabbed her arm. “Why didn’t you go to the police?”

  “January didn’t want to. She hated the thought of everybody knowing. I told her … I told her the guy belonged behind bars, but she refused to come forward, and there was nothing I could do.”

  “You could’ve gone to them yourself!” I practically shouted, aghast at the thought of what she was telling me, trying desperately not to picture January being … attacked. “Fuck your confidentiality! Don’t you have an obligation to report a crime?” Reiko struggled against my grip, but I held firm, outrage building like a feedback loop. “January was raped, and you’re letting the guy get away with it because you ‘gave your word’?”

  “Fuck you!” she screamed, striking against me with more strength than I would have thought she possessed. I stumbled back as her face twisted up with tears. “You have no idea what it’s li
ke! How dehumanizing it is, how it feels to have everyone look at you afterward! And God help you if the guy who did it was popular, or an athlete or something.” She must have seen the comprehension dawning in my eyes, because she let out a sharp, caustic laugh. “Yeah. Me too. Why do you think my parents took me out of my old school and moved here? I made the mistake of getting raped by a lacrosse player, and when I reported it, I immediately became the town slut. The town liar. A psychopathic whore who just wanted attention. ‘She totally wanted it!’ ‘It was probably a pity fuck, and she just said it was rape to get revenge!’ ‘Boys will be boys!’” She spat the words out, pain glimmering in her eyes. “Even the friends who believed me stopped hanging out with me, because suddenly I was a liability—a social leper. How could I tell January that was worth it?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said sincerely. “But, look, it’s just … it’s not right. I get that she didn’t want to go through all of that, but it’s crazy to stick by your promise now! This guy might have killed her, Reiko, and he can’t just get away with it! He can’t. January would never have wanted that, either.” I knew that as surely as I knew anything. January would want her rapist to pay the price—he deserved to pay—and someone damn well had to see that he did.

  “There’s no way to prove it.” She shook her head. “There were no witnesses, the guy slipped her something so she was unconscious when it happened, and by the time she came to see me all the bruises were gone. There was no evidence left.”

  My jaw felt stiff, my eyes swimming. “He got her pregnant.”

  Reiko blanched and her knees seemed to give out; back to the wall, she sank down, whispering, “No…”

  “She must have been scared shitless when she realized it.” I felt heat on my cheek as a tear slipped toward my chin. “She didn’t know what to do, or who she could count on. And I think he found out. I think she confronted him, and he killed her to keep it a secret.” I got down so I was eye to eye with Reiko. “Even if you didn’t see it happen, you can tell the cops what January said to you. Don’t let him get away with it, Reiko. Tell me who did it.”

  “I … I can’t,” she said in a strange, anguished way. “She never said his name.”

  It sounded like the truth, but I’d picked up on her brief hesitation. Quietly, I said, “You figured it out, though, didn’t you? Or you suspect?” Stomach acid stinging in my mouth, I asked, “Was it her stepdad?”

  Reiko looked back at me for a long time, her expression tortured but undecipherable. I waited her out, trying in vain to detect whether I’d hit the target. Finally, in a soft, rocky murmur, she promised, “I’ll think about what you said.”

  Then she stood up and slipped through the door into the theater, leaving me alone in the silence of the lobby.

  NINETEEN

  MY STOMACH BUMPED and rolled like a barrel going over Niagara Falls as I took a city bus home, kids in costume streaking past on the sidewalks in the settling dusk. A ghost was swinging a pumpkin-shaped pail filled with colorfully wrapped candy, a diminutive witch with a pointy hat and a green face dragged an old broom along the ground in her wake, and two fairy princesses screamed and hugged each other when a plastic skull at the end of someone’s walk lit up and started laughing when they got too close. It made my heart hurt, nostalgic for a time when cheap Halloween decorations were what girls feared most.

  I dropped my head into my hands. January had been raped. The instances of her aloof and inexplicable behavior erupted across my memory like painful sores, their timing suddenly significant in retrospect. The weekend before the hayride, she’d just stopped showing up for work, giving no explanation … was that when it had happened? With growing unease, I recognized that that was just about the same time the distance between us first truly became apparent; and, as I counted backward, I gave a sudden start, my blood turning to cement as another realization dawned: The Saturday Kaz said January had called in sick to Old Mother Hubbard’s was exactly twenty-four days before she’d vanished. In an instant, the bus dissolved into nothingness, replaced before me by a vision of twenty-five hatch marks carved emphatically into the rotting wall of the hayloft.

  Twenty-five. Was it possible? Barricaded in the isolation of her secret hideout, had she really marked the days she’d endured after her assault? Twenty-five days was almost four weeks.… Was that long enough for her to realize she might be pregnant? To become panicked enough to take a test and confirm the answer?

  Long enough to learn the truth and begin spiraling?

  She’d quit her job and then she’d dropped out of the play … each move a decision that Reiko had argued against. She’d probably told January it wasn’t healthy to distance herself from other people, that she shouldn’t allow her trauma to get the upper hand and take over her life; in response, January had lied and said she was doing it so she could spend more time with me. Reiko had probably been outraged because January was hurting and she believed that I was making demands, either oblivious of or apathetic to my girlfriend’s horrific ordeal.

  You were never around for January when she needed you. It was starting to sound like Reiko had been right. It hurt like an open wound that January felt as if she couldn’t tell me what had happened, as if she thought that maybe I would judge her or look at her differently; I wasn’t a good boyfriend, but I’d loved her, and I would have stood by her no matter what. But the pain I felt, knowing that instead of asking for my support she’d lied and said I was selfish, was dwarfed by my shame; there had been signs, and I’d missed them because I was too busy using the rift in our relationship as a place to hide from the intimacy she’d wanted from me.

  It finally occurred to me, though, that there might have been more behind her attempt at seduction that night in the barn than just a simple ruse to disguise the baby’s paternity. Maybe she really did want me to be her “first.” Rape was violence, not sex, and after what had been done to her, maybe she wanted to be with someone who cared. Another sharp pang shot through me. The fact was, I would never know.

  By the time I got home, I was heartsick and restless. I didn’t feel like I could tell my parents what I’d learned; the thought of saying the words out loud again filled me with dread, and in any event, I had no evidence to back it up. It was a conversation I wouldn’t have been sure how to initiate under ordinary circumstances, let alone the current ones, where it seemed like even the simplest interactions were awkward and laden with subtext. My mom rambled for a long time about how she and my dad had joined PFLAG that afternoon, and then they proceeded to have a conversation for my benefit about Annette at my dad’s office, whose daughter was a lesbian. They even started recommending gay-themed movies they’d read about and thought I might enjoy. As touched as I was by the effort they were making, the whole experience was mortifying, and I fled to my room as soon as I could to drown my embarrassment, grief, and related emotions in several mind-numbing hours of Xbox.

  I’d been supposed to go to Madison Reinbeck’s Halloween party with Micah and Tiana, but I wasn’t exactly in a partying mood—and I wasn’t sure they wanted me to go with them anymore. I texted Micah several times after dinner with no response, and then finally tried Ti. A while later, she wrote back, telling me that the two of them were already at Madison’s house. Sorry for the mix-up! Right.

  Even though I’d no longer wanted to go, even though I had anticipated Micah not wanting to see me that night, I felt miserable knowing they’d gone without even bothering to tell me they wouldn’t be picking me up after all. A week ago, Micah and I had been skating together and getting high, wondering where January was; now I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom, staring at a paused game of BioShock, feeling lonelier than I’d ever been in my life.

  Knowing I had to either do something or risk being sucked through a metaphorical air lock into an oxygen-free wasteland of bad juju, I grabbed my phone and called the only person left.

  A half hour later, my phone buzzed, and my feet barely touched the floor as I raced down the stairs an
d out the front door, calling a hasty good-bye to my bewildered parents with a promise to return before my midnight curfew. The black Lexus was purring at the curb like a contented panther, and when I yanked open the passenger door, I was greeting with the scent of sandalwood and soft leather. The combination made me embarrassingly weak in the knees.

  “Hey,” Kaz said with his crooked smile as I buckled myself in. He was wearing his peacoat again, his hair constructed into that perfect crown of soft, messy spikes, and his stunning hazel eyes were filled with curiosity. “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, flushed and a little flustered. I was looking at his lips, thinking again about the kiss in the hayloft, and I suddenly felt so electrified I was afraid the air would start crackling around me. “Downtown, I guess. Maybe coffee?”

  “Okay.” Kaz sounded mildly amused, as if he could tell that a caffeine fix wasn’t at all what I had in mind. “Coffee it is.” He put the Lexus in drive and pulled away from the curb, turning when we reached Plymouth Road and heading for the center of the city. “I have to admit I was surprised when you called. I know I gave you my number and all, but I kinda thought you were really pissed at me.”

  “I … I mean, I wasn’t pissed, exactly—”

  “Yes you were,” he corrected me, but in an understanding way. “I was really pushy and presumptuous. I didn’t have the right to say the things I said. For the record, I’m sorry again. And I’m really glad you called.” He shot me another cockeyed smile, glancing at me across that perfect Grecian nose. “Why did you call, by the way? I mean, it’s a Friday night—Halloween, even. How come you’re not going to some huge party somewhere?”

  I squirmed a little as we coasted to a stop at a red light, feeling my neck get warm. For some reason, I’d thought it would be easier to tell Kaz than either my parents or Micah, but the same nerves were spiraling through my limbs again. “I—I told my parents that I’m gay.”