I fumble inside my backpack for the knife. Why isn’t it in my pocket at all times? Haven’t I had this conversation with myself before? I open the blade and position it in my pocket.
At this hour, the front door cannot be opened from the outside. Telling myself I’ll just take a peek, I creep back down the stairs. The Mustang is parked and empty, so that’s something.
Gary could be anywhere. He could nab me right outside this door. Or wait until I’m halfway down the block.
Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod. I can’t go out there.
I holler up the stairs. “Hello?”
A few seconds later, she looks down the stairs at me. “Yes, Mr. Bel?”
“What’s your name again?”
“I’m Kiki.”
“Kiki. Right, sorry.” I’m panting now. “I can’t. I—I can’t go out there.”
She steps down two stairs. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bel. Those are the rules. I need to clean up here, and you need to be out.”
I plaster myself against the wall just inside the glass door. A giant, translucent sticker designed to block out the sun is peeling at all four edges. It offers zero protection. Shit.
Kiki glares at me. “If you don’t clear off, you will be blackballed for life.”
If I do clear off, I may not have a life.
“Out!”
Breathing is difficult, and talking is nearly impossible. “Could you—could you just do me one favor? One?” Leaving the knife in my pocket, I pull out my wallet and shove all my cash toward her, even the Gretchen Sixty, the cash from Mom I didn’t want to spend on anything but us. This is desperation. “I’ll pay you. I will give you everything if you just go out ahead of me. Can you poke your head out first?”
She comes halfway down the stairs, glances at the bulge in my pocket, and decides it is something innocuous, like a phone.
Please don’t be afraid of me. Uttering the sentence aloud would have the opposite effect. I can’t slow my breathing. I can’t calm down. “I know. I know I sound like a nutjob. I know this is strange. It’s just that—” Deep breath. Crap, what version do I give her? “Kiki, someone has been following me, and his car is right across the street. I promise you, if you poke your head out and see no one waiting, I will leave.” And run to Curt’s, where I can figure out what to do next.
Kiki’s not buying it. “Calm down! Just relax!”
Why do people do that? Screaming “relax” pushes me the other way.
“Humor me?” I offer her the money again.
She’s not going to crack, so I resort to begging. “Please. Please … please, I beg you.”
My desperation makes an impression. Wiping her hands on her pants, Kiki stomps down the last few stairs, throws open the door, and walks out into the sunshine. She spins with outstretched arms, looking up and down the street.
“Nobody here,” she says. “Now out.”
Maybe he’s hiding. Maybe he’s waiting at Curt’s! “I could help you today, Kiki. Free labor. I’ll do anything you need me to do. Light bulbs? I’m tall. I’m strong, too. I can lift things. Anything, Kiki. Kiki, please.”
She is infinitely calm. “Mr. Bel, if you do not vacate the premises by the count of five, you will be done with this establishment.”
She’s so professional! I don’t know what to do.
I jump out onto the street and sprint to Curt’s. Everyone inside stares as I pin myself to the wall just inside the door, desperately trying to catch my breath.
Smiling casually, I straighten my pants and mosey over to the window, where I can get a good look at the Mustang. Its license plate is green with a jagged white band at the top. Colorado.
I almost lost my housing over a car that’s not even Gary’s. I can’t believe this. What are the odds? I have never seen another bright blue Mustang, let alone one parked right outside my tiny hostel in this small city in this tiny state in the northeast.
It’s too coincidental. Maybe Gary stole some Colorado plates and is traveling incognito.
Backed next to the window, I part two blinds with my fingers so I can really study the car. The little red tassel Gary had attached to his antenna is missing, and the front grate is completely different.
This is no way to live.
Herds of cool people are roaming the sidewalks, chatting about professors and philosophy and parties, and I can’t leave this block. Burlington is gloriously welcoming, and utterly unavailable to me.
On my way to the library after a slow and laborious lunch, I spot some nooks and crannies where I can hide if I need to. A pinewood at the edge of campus would be ideal for surreptitious people watching, but it’s still not as safe as the library.
Not only can I not check out library books without a library card, I also can’t use their Internet. The very nice, kind of goth librarian directs me to an Internet café where I can buy some time online.
If only I could use Burlington’s pervasive Wi-Fi! It is literally everywhere, but I promised Jill I wouldn’t, so now I need The Byte, a hysterically named Internet café.
It’s on the other side of the hostel, so I’ll read first, head to The Byte, and back to my hostel by two.
On the back corner of the library’s second floor again, I score an overstuffed orange chair before realizing someone has checked out The History of Science.
Really? Today?
Instead, I arm myself with a thick tome about New York City and tuck into the giant chair. If Gary arrives, I’ll see him coming.
_______
Two hours later, The Byte is less Internet than café. Dozens of enticing pastries line a cloudy plastic case next to the counter. I wish I could justify a four-dollar peanut butter brownie.
A half-dozen guys crowd around a coffee table, playing a dice game. Baristas sing theatrically, sometimes into the enormous mirror behind the counter, and deliver coffee to the ancient computers that ring two huge tables far from the door.
Internet access costs twenty bucks for an hour. Twenty bucks! Since my fiscal responsibility is shot, I spring for another root beer, too. I flash my Graham Bel(l) ID and sit at the computer farthest from the huge picture book windows. Passersby parade down the sidewalk. I can see everything. Perfect.
I should have paid more attention when Gary claimed he knew exactly what I was doing online. He said he could find anyone anywhere if they weren’t smart. I’m plenty smart, but I don’t know exactly what that means online.
So what can he track? If Laurel’s weekly newspaper can discern the origin of their Internet traffic, Burlington would be a dead giveaway. Half of Laurel doesn’t give a rat’s fart about the rag, and no one outside Laurel has reason to visit the site.
Except me, of course.
So. No tiny Laurel-related websites. No sites for any of Gary’s known clients. In fact, I should just stick to the big social media sites that would never have hired him. A tiny list of my friends’ usernames helps. Jill, Tuck, and Gretchen are first. Grant Blakely posts hilarious anecdotes about his family. I have a half hour before I can check into the hostel, so I jot down a few other people who provide online entertainment.
My barista is overly curious about my Internet activity, and I can’t blame him. Wouldn’t you expect the guy who shuffles to the back of the café to be looking at porn or something?
He’s perky. “Do you need help getting started?”
“No, thank you.”
“You know you’re not on yet, right?”
I smile broadly. “I’m trying to maximize my time here by knowing exactly where I’m going. If I’m efficient about it, I can stretch my twenty-dollar token for several days.”
He accepts this and walks away. A bright yellow backpack shakes in front of me as a girl giggles over The Onion. I can do better than that.
Logging on feels like Christmas. The Christmas in movies, I mean: so much to devour, and so much to see, and so much to celebrate!
Well, not that last one. Gary is nowhere to be found, but my people are here, in th
is thirteen-inch screen. Jill hasn’t posted any photos with numbers in them, so we won’t be talking until tomorrow. She has, however, gone into more detail than I needed about last night’s dinner at Olive Garden.
Now there’s something I can never do again. Mom used to crave Olive Garden, so now the whole restaurant chain is sort of the scene of the crime. No more bottomless baskets of under-baked breadsticks for me.
That’s probably a good thing. But still, Jill should know better than to post about freaking Olive Garden. And also, no one needs to see photos of every meal she eats. At a dollar every three minutes online, I need to keep moving.
I devour Jill’s happy life in 140-character bites. She babysat her brothers this morning and, apparently, had a fight with her mother last night. She didn’t tag me in tonight’s Quaker Steak details, and that hurts. Not that I’m posting or reading my personalized queue, but still. I get that she can leave her house now, but a collective mourning over my absence would be nice. Last night everyone gorged on contraband snacks at the movies. Or everyone else did. Jill, Tucker, Grant Blakely, Gretchen, and a dozen others.
I close my eyes for a second before opening Gretchen’s page. Her profile photo is like a punch in the gut. She’s in the middle of a huge belly laugh, her face caked with mud from the spring mudslides, mouth wide open and eyes squeezed shut. I run my index finger down her cheek. Gretchen is here, inside this computer, writing about her normal life. I take note of the books she’s reading. She’s off to New York again next week—so close, and yet so far from me. Would it be weird if I went back to New York to see her?
More stalker than weird, probably.
Everyone is busy online. Tucker is waxing poetic about love. Grant Blakely is, indeed, organizing pickup soccer multiple times this week. Everyone is obsessing over Seven Versions, which Google tells me is a summer replacement/spin-off TV show I have never heard of.
I feel like one of those people who sits alone at lunch.
Toggling between Jill, Tucker, Gretchen, and a few other profiles, I can reasonably piece together the last twenty-four hours. It’s all typical summer stuff: Dairy Queen, cruising the mall, movies, and plans for more hanging out.
It’s Infinite Summer. In Laurel, at least. Mine is an entirely different sort of infinity.
Damn.
Catching up online doesn’t sate my hunger for friendship. Now I’m dying to open my email. Status updates and photos are great, but I need something personal, something to say they haven’t forgotten me.
Are they thinking of me? Maybe they’re sending lots of emails. I choose to believe my inbox is full, but settle for Reddit instead. Twenty minutes later, after enough cat pictures and trendy new memes to satisfy any junkie, I log off. Mostly, the Internet binge has made me homesick. And all the talk about Quaker Steak has left me hungry.
Time to check in at Curt’s before checking back in with Kiki. Sunday is practically over. I’m one day closer to going home. I’ll lock into the hostel with my sandwich and coast until lights out.
And Gary has no clue where I am. And I have Jill tomorrow at nine. Perfect.
Perfect except that I’ll probably be sleeping in the woods again after, of course. Maybe Jill will have great news and I can head to the Greyhound station instead.
It’s way after two when I climb the hostel stairs. Kudos to me for braving the world for an extra half hour. It feels too quiet. The empty dorm means I can blast some U2 and feel a little like my normal self, though.
One of Mom’s frilly bookmarks falls out of On the Road, and for an instant I am pissed at her for reading my stuff. How petty am I, being pissed at her when she’s dead? Why did we fight over books anyway?
Sometimes I was really crummy to her. She always said I would get my comeuppance when I was older, but I don’t think she meant a month older. We’re supposed to be bickering over stupid shit, still. She’s supposed to tell me to eat something other than Reubens and tell me I need a shower. She doesn’t get to tell me anything anymore.
I was a crap son. Maybe Gary was right: I am worthless. Maybe I did deserve what I got. Did he mean that? Did he mean I deserve to be orphaned from my mother and isolated from my friends?
If I had gone into the kitchen, Mom would be alive. I would have given my stupid graduation speech, and I still would have never left Ohio. I got exactly what I wanted: road trip, no speech, no curfews. I did this to myself.
This continuous Mom-Gary-fault loop is agonizing, but I can’t stop. No matter how fast I run from radioactive ash, or how loudly I blast the iPod, my mind is filled with Mom.
I try to focus on “Save Ur Ash,” though. I’m not sure how nuclear holocaust compares to my current situation, but at least the game can be beaten. Unlike Mom’s absence, the game has an end. And I’m so close.
_______
I still haven’t won, and the dorm is full.
Tonight Brad, Bingham, Paul, and I are joined by Bridget and AnneMarie. Brad suggests card games that the girls have never heard of.
Bridget dismisses euchre outright. “Too complicated.”
Gretchen is two levels of complicated removed from this girl.
Brad runs through a dozen other card games, most of which I don’t know, before they settle on schwanz. Schwanz is German for “tail.”
“You look interested,” Brad says.
I hate getting caught staring. “Sorry, I don’t know schwanz.”
“Want to learn?”
I literally have nothing better to do. “Sure.”
Brad launches into a brief explanation of the game, and play begins. Schwanz is awesome, but it makes me ache for Jill. Euchre over lunch. Euchre as we wait for Mr. Tucker to make dinner. Euchre because it’s our favorite thing to do. We always needed a fourth, so we were constantly teaching Tuck’s Girlfriend of the Day how to play.
Jill would love schwanz, and I can’t even call her to share.
I just want to be there. Home. I’m safer here than in Laurel, but I can’t stay away indefinitely. If Jill’s parents have loosened her leash, she has been gallivanting all over Ohio.
I want to gallivant. I’m riding the new friendship wave with Bingham—hearing his best stories and marveling at our differences. There are worse ways to spend my time, but I miss my people. With a bit of luck, I can head home tomorrow.
TWENTY-TWO
Today has been a low-profile carbon copy of yesterday: exit hostel—but without the Mustang freakout and accompanying embarrassment—Curt’s, library, The Byte Café.
And now, on the cusp of my homecoming call, I’m ready to be done with this little adventure. I want to go home to Laurel. Mom won’t be there anymore, so it’s not truly home, but I want to be where she was. I want to do the things we used to do. Normal things.
Or normal for me. I’ve never been normal normal, and it won’t be normal to have a father in prison—provided they ever actually find him. A trial won’t be normal. Life without Mom won’t be normal.
But there will be something. If Gary is caught, I’ll have twenty-four Greyhound hours to figure out that tiny detail of a new normal. As soon as tomorrow, I can hear about everything I’ve missed—especially Gretchen’s cryptic lovelorn posts—and ease back into life.
By the time I dial Jill, I’m grinning like an idiot. Missing two weeks of summer was a small price to pay for freedom from Gary forever. Forever!
“Uh, hi?”
My entire body relaxes at the sound of Jill’s voice. “Hi, Jill.”
“Xander! How are you?”
“Great, now that I’m talking to you! I have an entire roll of quarters in my hand and all the time in the world. Tell me everything.”
“You’re not gonna like the news,” Jill says, and I know I’m not going home tomorrow. Maybe ever. “Last night, some rinky-dink cop in Columbiana County picked up Gary and let him go.”
“What? How?”
“He was on a county road doing eighty-five and the cop called in his plate and didn’t wait to
hear from command. So they chatted and—get this—your dad had a Hustler open in his passenger seat.”
“Gross.” Who keeps his porn in his car?
“Yeah, so the cop got all chummy with him and they talked about the centerfold and the guy let your dad off with a warning. To hear him tell it—and this is third-hand now, from his sheriff to Dad to Mom last night after they thought I was in bed.”
That’s my girl.
“The cop—quote—relieved himself in the field—endquote—before he got back to the radio. And I think both of us know what he relieved himself of. By the time he was back in his cruiser, Gary was long gone.”
I was so right not to trust the police. “Tell me again where this was.”
“County Road 421 in Columbiana.”
At least Gary was headed in the wrong direction. “That’s near where his mother lives!” I am a better sleuth than all of those cops. We haven’t seen Ethel Fife for years, but Mom saved everything. “Her address is in my mom’s red Christmas letter book.”
“They thought of that. Ethel is long dead.”
Damn. My family is tumbling like dominoes.
“Natural causes,” Jill says. “Three years ago.”
That’s embarrassing. I haven’t seen Gary’s mom for years, but I should at least be able to place her on the right side of death’s door.
Okay. Okay, okay. “What’s the new plan?”
Jill’s sigh takes the wind out of my sails from hundreds of miles away.
“Jill?”
“There is no new plan, Xander. They’re looking as hard as they can. My dad comes home for a few hours every night and goes back in to work. He says he’s culpable. He was home that day, did you know? He was home napping and Gary was two doors away, and Dad did nothing.”
It sounds kind of bad, but nowhere near as bad as my having actually caused the whole thing. Or being three feet away when Gary killed Mom. “Tell him it’s not his fault.”
She’s quiet. “Well, he feels like it is. Last night I leaned on his guilty conscience enough that he let me go out with Tucker. Now that the police have made a huge production about you being gone, Dad feels like we’re safe. He is sort of getting suspicious about my recent appetite for Pizza Works, though. And he’s watching my email. He’s worried about you. We all are. Can’t you just come home?”
Life Before Page 11