The Girl with the Wrong Name

by Barnabas Miller

  I nod. “I do.”

  “I think something happened to her. Something really bad. Something, you know, terrible. I got nothing to prove it—I got nothing to tell it’s so; I just know it. If she could have been here by eleven forty-five, then she would have been here no matter what.”

  I nod again.

  He suddenly locks eyes with mine. “Do you believe me?”

  I’m not ready for the question. What do I believe? Did I just sit down next to a creepy stalker who can’t get the hint? My head and my heart start beating the crap out of each other as he stares at me, waiting for my answer. What do I believe? I don’t know what I believe, but I know what I feel: Jealous. Jealous that a guy could fall so deeply in love with a girl in just one day. So much so that he’d be willing to look for her each and every day after.

  “Your silence speaks volumes,” he cracks, his drawl coming through.

  “I believe you,” I hear myself say.

  “You do?”

  “I do.”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So will you help?”

  I shake my head in confusion.

  His eyes drop. “I’m sorry. Forget that. Forget I said that. It was just, when you walked over here, I thought—”

  “No, it’s not—I mean, I don’t even know what I could do to . . .” Don’t talk to strangers, darlin’. I glance at the clock. “God, is it . . . ? I’m supposed to be back at school. I didn’t even realize what time it was.”

  He nods and looks down at his hands. “I didn’t mean to keep you.”

  “No, you didn’t keep me. It’s not—”

  Don’t you ever, ever talk to strangers.

  “You should go,” he says. He flips to the next page of his paper.

  I don’t know what else to say. I only know that I’ll be back tomorrow morning.

  Chapter Four

  “Can you please pass the peas, Theo?”

  There was no point in answering my simpering stepstool. Best to just ignore him.

  How could I have left Andy Reese there? How could I have just abandoned him at the Harbor after Sarah had done the very same thing? After I’d seen his tears up close? No, it wasn’t even about Andy; it was about the raw footage. How could I have walked out in the middle of such a pivotal scene? I’d just started getting all the good stuff—

  “Theo, the peas?” Todd was still gazing at me expectantly.

  Oh, Todd. You may look like a middle-aged man, but you’re one evolutionary step away from sock puppets. And the Mozart hair doesn’t make you look cool; it makes you look like the love child of Betty White and Dr. Zaius from Planet of the Apes.

  “Theodore!” Mom’s fist came crashing down on the table like a gavel.

  My fork fell from my hand. “What?” I asked, sounding more like a little girl than I’d planned.

  Even Todd looked surprised.

  My mother does not emote. At least, not toward me. Our dinner ritual usually consists of silence, followed by three disinterested questions about my day, followed by the Complaints: when Mom and Todd discuss their students’ inability to “grasp the postmodern underpinnings of Thomas Pynchon.” Yes, Mom and Todd are both NYU lit professors, and no, I have not read any Thomas Pynchon.

  “Todd asked you for the peas,” Mom said. “Will you please pass your father the peas?”

  I’d retired the “he’s not my father” retort by age twelve. It was too Lifetime movie. By fifteen, I’d moved past “Why did you even have a kid if you were just going to name her Theodore and treat her with the cordial but distant reserve of a weekend guest at your bed-and-breakfast?” Still, for some reason, on this particular night, it stung.

  “Did my father like peas?” I asked politely, passing Todd the bowl of peas.

  “Excuse me?” Mom said.

  “My biological father,” I said. “Was he a pea lover like Todd? Or was he more of a big zucchini man?”

  Mom shot eye daggers at me. “Don’t go there, Theodore. Not tonight.”

  “Let’s go easy on your mother tonight,” Todd whispered. “You know it’s September, Theo. Beginning of the semester. Let’s try to keep it light.”

  Oh, right, Mom’s “fall semester stress.” It was the one time a year when you could actually see glimpses of anxiety behind her stoic façade. I guess the prospect of teaching Gravity’s Rainbow to another batch of untrained minds was enough to give any lit professor night terrors—even the otherwise unflappable Margaret Lane.

  “Sorry, Mom,” I said. “I didn’t mean to probe so deep on the vegetable thing.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, starting work on a new slice of turkey meatloaf.

  “So just tell me again why you despise my actual father?”

  Mom threw her knife down on the plate.

  “Okay!” Todd barked a nervous laugh and clapped, rubbing his hands together like he was trying to make a fire. “What’s for dessert tonight, Meg?”

  My mom still didn’t answer me. She didn’t have to. I hadn’t seen my father since I was five years old, but her stare told me the same thing I’d heard since I was old enough to start asking questions. “Stop treating a divorce like some crippling mystery. The answers do not change with time. Your father and I could not see eye to eye. We were from two different worlds. He was much too young for me, and he was completely unprepared for any kind of real relationship. He just wasn’t a good man.”

  Todd started to open his mouth, but the shrill ring of the doorbell cut him off.

  Mom began to rise, grabbing hold of the edge of the dining table, her knuckles white. The only thing that bothers my mother more than a new class of ignorant freshmen is an unannounced visitor at the door. She once spent twenty minutes chewing out our doorman Emilio for letting a Chinese food delivery guy upstairs without calling first.

  Of course, she’d assumed I was the culprit.

  “Who is it?” she mouthed, like I was Anne Frank and the Nazis had just discovered our secret annex.

  “I don’t know,” I mouthed back.

  “Did you invite someone over?”

  “I did not. Mom, can you chill, please?”

  The thought of finding Andy Reese behind that door didn’t even occur to me till I was reaching for the doorknob. It sailed across my mind like a gust of wind, somewhere between the shave-and-a-haircut knock and the drawn-out, steady thump-thumping that seemed to imitate a heartbeat.

  Here’s a quick tip: when your junior year is winding down and your mother asks a question like, “Have you started your college applications yet?,” don’t give her a vaguely existential answer like, “I can’t even picture my life past the age of eighteen.”

  This will set off an ultrasonic suicide alert that only parents and school counselors can hear. The next thing you know, you’ll be sitting across from Dr. Harold Silver in an office full of Gustav Klimt posters and African folk art, trying to clarify your answer as he writes you a prescription for Lexapro. You’ll try to explain that you’re not the least bit suicidal; you’ve just always pictured a big empty frame after your eighteenth birthday, but he’ll already be listing off potential side effects.

  Later you’ll come to realize that those potential side effects are “everything.”

  In my case, the worst was world-class insomnia.

  So then you’ll tell Dr. Silver that you’re struggling with insomnia, and he’ll prescribe Ambien. While on Ambien, you will bake and eat an entire pan of Pillsbury crescent rolls in your sleep and have a terrible nightmare about the Pillsbury Doughboy, staring at you with this really judgy look in his eyes. After enough of those bad dreams, you’ll stop the Ambien, but you won’t tell your mother or Dr. Silver because you don’t want to try the next thing he has to offer.

  At least, I didn’t.

  So now it’s just me and m
y dear frenemy Lexapro. Sometime I just call him “Lex.” He halfheartedly wards off my depression and anxiety all day, but then keeps me awake all night so I can dream up more depressing and anxious scenarios for him to ward off come dawn. It’s the neurotic circle of life! Or not. He’s like a pet or a little brother you don’t even want.

  Dr. Silver told me that as long as I never missed a pill and continued to stick with the program, the side effects would wear off after the first few weeks. But that never happened, which is fine with me. Honestly? I need Lex’s side effects more than ever now. Lex saves me every night.

  After all, I can’t possibly have another Night in Question if I’m only asleep two to three hours at a time.

  I did not open our front door to find Andy Reese. I opened it to find Louise Cho, my putative best friend, holding a bunch of white daisies.

  “What’s wrong?” Lou asked, disappointed. “They’re daisies. Your wedding flower? Your all-time favorite?” She shook them a little to make them more enticing. “They match the Dream Ring. No?”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said. I tried to smile; I really did. I accepted the flowers from her and took a long whiff of their earthy sweetness.

  “Um. So, hi?” Lou said.

  “What up,” I mumbled. Awkward silence.

  “I really like your hair,” she said cautiously. She reached out to touch it, but I couldn’t help jerking my head back. I turned to the floor and smoothed my hair against my cheek. I knew what she was trying to say; I just wish she hadn’t said it. Max had known better.

  “Thanks,” I said. Without noticing, I’d begun to tap my foot.

  “Okay, what?” Lou threw up her hands. One of them landed on her bony hip.

  “Whut-whut?” I replied reflexively, imitating some long-dead MC.

  “Why so gangsta?” She laughed, uncomfortable. “What is your thing today? You didn’t answer any of my texts this morning, you avoided me at the Trout, and you didn’t find me after school. We were totally fine on the phone last night. What changed?”

  “You did,” I didn’t say. “You drank the girly-girl Kool-Aid in Florence, and now you’re hunting meat-brained linebackers as sexual prey.”

  “Who is it, dear?” Mom asked.

  Lou peeked over my shoulder and announced herself with a smile. “It’s Louise, Mrs. Lane.”

  “Sort of,” I muttered. I scanned her tight red dress and strappy sandals.

  Lou laughed. “Is that what this is about? My dress? Come on, Thee. My mom made me get this dress for the final concert in Florence. I thought it would be a funny outfit for the first day back.”

  “It’s not the dress.”

  “Well then what?”

  “Aren’t you coming in, Louise?” Mom asked pointedly.

  “I’m trying, Mrs. Lane.” Lou dug her hand into her new suede saddlebag. “Okay, look, I can prove it’s me. Look.” She put her glasses on and slipped them up the bridge of her nose. Then she pulled her hair back into its familiar ponytail. “Mr. Schaffler, this editing bay was built in the late ’90s!” she exclaimed earnestly. “We need to upgrade all the A/V equipment in this room. I cannot produce the Sherman News in these conditions!”

  I lowered my head so she couldn’t see me smile. Louise Cho was doing Louise Cho, and it was a damn good impression.

  “Admit it, Ms. Rinaldi,” she went on. “The Tchaikovsky concerto was invented to mangle the slender fingers of Asian teens—”

  “Okay.” I glared at my mom over my shoulder. See? I asked silently, eyebrows raised. Not an intruder.

  Lou grabbed my shoulder and steered me toward my room. “Thee, I need your brilliance. I need a Cyrano letter.”

  The Cyrano Letters had started in seventh grade. Lou would fall in love with some sensitive young geek in the viola section, or a fellow techie in the middle school production of Godspell, and she wouldn’t have the guts to approach him. Instead she’d beg me to help her compose a “Declaration of Romantic Intent.” (Not to be confused with a “Love Letter.” Lou felt that, much like the word genius, the word love was tossed around far too prematurely and far too often.)

  I’d developed an early obsession with Cyrano de Bergerac, based on Steve Martin’s modern adaptation Roxanne. I guess the idea of pining for an unattainable love hit home with a dour seventh-grader who was always planning her wedding day when she should have been planning her bat mitzvah.

  Now, as we sped down the hall to avoid one of Mom’s generic Lou interviews (“How was your summer?” etc.), a dark irony was dawning. Lou probably hadn’t even realized it yet, but substitute an impossibly huge schnoz with a hideous scar, and I was Cyrano de Bergerac.

  “I have some ideas for the first paragraph,” Lou said breathlessly. She knew exactly where to find the blank composition notebooks on my desk, even buried under a heap of Mountain Dew cans, half-eaten desserts, and memory cards. “But this has to be all you, Thee. You’re the wordsmith here.”

  “Yeah, and I have two words for you already,” I said, tossing the daisies onto my bed. “Hell, no.” I shut my bedroom door and flopped onto the mattress. I quickly realized my hair was hanging off my face—exposing said scar—so I slid back against the wall, holding a pillow between my knees and chin. “But thanks for the flowers. This room could use them.”

  Lou scowled. She grabbed a notebook from my desk and cleared one of the piles of dusty Sunday New York Times from my formerly white couch, carving out a seat for herself. “I might have to repo them. You don’t get it. I need this one bad, Thee. Like really bad.”

  “Who’s it for?” I asked. I knew, but I wanted to hear it from her.

  Her lips twisted in a secret smile. “I can’t tell you. It’s too embarrassing.”

  “See, that’s a red flag right there. You can’t write a love letter to someone you’re too embarrassed to love.”

  She groaned. “It’s not a love letter, it’s a Declaration of—”

  “Romantic Intent,” I finished. “I know, Lou. Would now be a good time to remind you you’ve never actually given one of these Declarations to any of the boys we’ve written them for?”

  “Well, this time I will. I have to. It’s my last chance.”

  “Oh, right, because ‘all bets are off.’”

  Lou’s eyes narrowed. “What bets? Who’s betting?”

  “I am just stating for the record that I absolutely refuse to play any part in this disgusting A.B.O. senior year crossbreeding. It’s unnatural.”

  “A.B. what? Can you just slow down? I feel like we’re not communicating.”

  “I know who it is,” I declared.

  “You do?”

  “Jesus, I was at the Trout this afternoon, remember? I saw the whole thing.”

  Her face flushed. She giggled. “Oh, God, was I that obvious?”

  “‘Obvious’ doesn’t really do it justice. I’d call it ‘stripper-pole obvious.’”

  I could see the flush of pink climbing up her cheeks. “So you hate me now.”

  “Oh, please. It’s more a mix of shock and dismay, and maybe the first few seeds of disrespect.” I nodded toward the desk. “Funnel cake?” I offered, pointing toward the last stale piece from last night’s bender.

  “No, thanks,” she said, crinkling her nose.

  “Sorry, I don’t have any low-fat scones or dried kale chips.”

  She tossed the notebook to the floor. “Thee, why are you being like this?”

  “Like what? I thought you loved my dry wit. I thought I gave the Sherman News its bite.”

  She was looking at me seriously now. “You have a bite, but you’re not mean. Who are you today?”

  “Who am I? Are you kidding me right now? Who are you? It’s like you showed up at school a completely different person.”

  “No, I have a different outfit, and I let my hair down. I’m being serious. Whe
re were you this morning? Whatever happened to you this morning, you’re different.”

  “Oh, you think it was this morning? You don’t think something might have happened to me, say, two and a half months ago that might have changed me a little bit? Maybe just a little bit?”

  Lou blinked. Her lips trembled. I couldn’t believe those words had come from my mouth. I never brought up The Night in Question anymore. At least, not consciously or out loud.

  My outburst left a cloud of black silence between us. The kind of silence that has physical mass and weight. Lou stood as if someone else had taken over, as if an invisible hand had yanked on her marionette strings.

  “I am so sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I mean, I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t. I think I should just go. I’ll go.”

  “No.” I jumped out of bed and grabbed her hand before she got to the door. “That was totally my fault,” I said. “I don’t know why I said that, I really don’t. Stay. I’ll help you with the letter. I’ll totally help you. I mean, duh, of course I’ll help you, girl.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to,” I lied. “I really want to.”

  Three minutes later, I tore a page from my notebook and handed it to Lou. She’d stayed glued to her phone as I’d scrawled out the first paragraph—reading the latest post from The A.V. Club, I prayed, and not some depraved sext from Mike.

  A Declaration of Romantic Intent

  Dear M,

  I really, really, really, really want to have vigorous sexual intercourse with you, preferably in the back of a smelly taxi, or perhaps in one of those pee-stained bathroom stalls in the boys’ locker room (or the girls’ locker room, if you think that is hotter. I’m cool either way).

  “Theo, come on,” Lou grumbled, trying not to laugh, and failing. “I thought you were going to help.”