by Barry Lyga
Mr. Hindon let them use the media center after school for a “research project” while he was reshelving and straightening up. The four of them spent the afternoon poring over the documents, sprawled out in various configurations across the room.
No one spoke. It was boring work, going through police reports from the weeks before and after the burial of the time capsule back in 1986. Most of it was “cat stuck in a tree” type of stuff, a hideously boring window into the place and time of their parents’ youth.
Their parents’ names never popped, not even once.
“What the heck does WPWP mean?” Marcie asked. She was the first person to have spoken in almost an hour.
“Don’t worry about it,” Liam said quickly.
“It’s all over some of these,” Marcie said. “I just want to know.”
“I said don’t worry about it.” Liam sounded a little grumpy, which the others all took as the signal to badger the living hell out of him.
Eventually he cracked. “Okay, okay, fine! I’ll tell you.”
He took a deep breath and glanced at Elayah. “It’s an old code that they used back in the day. It stands for ‘wrong person, wrong place.’ They, uh, they used it when they’d hassle Black people for being, you know…”
“For being Black?” Jorja asked.
Elayah shook her head. “For being somewhere they didn’t belong,” she said. “White neighborhoods.”
No one spoke.
“Speaking of white hoods,” Jorja said abruptly, “did you know there was a Klan rally in Canterstown two weeks after homecoming? Apparently, they used to happen, like, once a year. Some dude who owned a farm over near the water tower was a sympathizer and would let them use his field. Anyway, the sheriff’s office had deputies staged there, and there’s a report from an undercover officer.”
“Two weeks after? Then the time capsule was already buried.”
“It would be easy if it was Nazis,” Marcie said.
“Whoa!” El sat up straight. “Look at this!” She waved her phone at them.
“Can’t read it when you’re waving it around like that,” Liam told her.
She held it out steady so that they could look.
“Remember that guy Bradley Gimble?” she asked. “From the yearbook? The guy who died in a car crash? Says here that the crash was, like, a couple of days before they buried the thing.”
Jorja and Marcie had leaned in close to scrutinize the phone.
“You know that place out on Route 9 where the road curves up around the bend? His car went off the edge and dropped—”
“That’s impossible,” Jorja interrupted. “There’s that big stone wall there.”
“Now there’s a big stone wall there,” El pointed out.
“This says he was drunk,” Marcie said, scanning El’s phone. “They found beer bottles in the car. Ugh—his throat was crushed by the steering wheel.”
“That’s interesting!” Jorja said brightly, clearly filing it away for future use in a story.
“Well, unless the knife was driving the car, I don’t think it fits.”
Jorja gave Liam her most withering look. Liam puckered up and blew her a kiss; she pretended to grab it out the air, examine it in the palm of her hand, then toss it over her shoulder with a shrug.
“It’s just a weird coincidence, is all,” El said.
“It’s all weird coincidences,” Marcie said. “The trick is figuring out what isn’t a coincidence. Like… like this one here.” She tapped at her iPad screen. “Does the name Douglas Rumson mean anything to any of you?”
They all pondered. Negative head shakes all around. “Nope,” said Liam.
“He was twenty-two back in 1986. Worked as a pizza-delivery guy for some place called Nico’s.”
“My dad still talks about their pizza,” Jorja offered.
“How are things at the Dearborn house these days?” Liam asked.
Elayah groaned. Marcie glared. But Jorja just shrugged.
“We don’t talk,” Jorja said soberly. “My mother tries to get us to communicate, but we’re both stubborn. So there’s nothing to say.”
“Anyway…,” Marcie said after they all realized Jorja had nothing else to add. “On this guy Rumson: About two weeks before they buried the time capsule, he says someone started following him around.”
“Like, dudes in black trench coats?”
Marse shook her head. “Nope. It was a Friday night and he was at work, and someone in a late-model car started following him everywhere he went on deliveries that night.” She paused. “It sounds really creepy from the way he described it.”
“So…” Elayah tapped her chin, thinking. “So we know that a couple of weeks before everything went down that someone was sneaking around town, following this guy.”
“How is this related?” Jorja asked. “I mean…”
“I’ll tell you how,” Liam said, sitting up. “Everyone keeps telling us, ‘Oh, this was just a sleepy little town back then. Everyone worked at the factory and everything was fine, not like today.’ But there was stuff going on, man! Knives and blood and car crashes and weirdos following pizza-delivery guys. What if it was our parents following the pizza guy? And what if they followed him another time and killed him?”
“Why?” Jorja asked.
“Who the hell knows?” Liam flung his hands as high as his arms would let him. “Come on! Something happened! Someone bled!”
Elayah elbowed him in the ribs, hard, then jerked her head toward the circulation desk, where Mr. Hindon had glanced up from his computer. “Keep it down. We’re not alone.”
“I don’t see a Douglas Rumson on Facebook anywhere near here,” Marcie announced, waggling her phone. “I checked every town I could think of. Nothing.”
“Missing person report from 1986 for Douglas Rumson, maybe?” Elayah asked.
Jorja clucked her tongue. “Good idea. Let’s look.”
They returned to their screens.
LIAM
They never found a missing person report for Douglas Rumson. Which didn’t mean anything—it could have been filed in 1987 or never filed at all. Or lost in the intervening decades. Man, the passage of time was harsh.
El shook him off when Liam offered her a ride home. “My mom’s picking me up.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “But thanks.”
He flashed a grin that felt painted on, a thin scrim of lie presented to the world to cover up the absolute fact that he’d screwed up with her, totally and completely. He’d waited too long. And then he’d made her mad. Lost any chance he ever had.
Ha. Yeah, right. As though he’d ever, ever had a chance with El.
Still smiling his idiot’s smile, he bade her farewell and drove home.
This, he thought as he loped into the house, is the last day of the beginning of your life. And the beginning of what historians will someday call El-less Liam.
I guess that would make me just plain Iam.
There was something there other than a bad joke. Something about Iam and I am and being without El, but Liam knew he wasn’t the one to figure it out. He stood there in the entryway to the house, the door still ajar behind him, trying to puzzle it out for so long that Pop poked his head around the corner from the living room.
“I’ve been sitting here waiting for the door to close.”
Liam said nothing.
“Kinda still waiting.”
Right. Liam shook himself and shut the door, then meandered into the kitchen. He was heartbroken and ruined, but he was also hungry because he was pretty much always hungry. Gotta feed the machine.
Pop followed him into the kitchen just as he opened the refrigerator. “You’re about to perform some kind of culinary crime, aren’t you?”
Liam frowned, leaning into the fridge’s cool and glare. “Not if you stop me.”
Knowing both when he’d been had and when he’d been beaten, Pop steered Liam away from the fridge with both hands on his shoulders, settling him int
o a chair. “Grilled cheese?”
“Two, please.”
With a sage grunt, Pop hauled a block of cheddar out of the cheese drawer, scrutinized it like an old-timey prospector examining a nugget of gold from the river, then began grating it into a yellow pile on the butcher-block counter. As he worked, he said, “What’s new?”
“Marcie and Jorja are hooking up, if you can believe that.”
Pop did a pleased double take. “Well, that’s sweet! Good for them. You don’t seem particularly happy about it.”
“Kinda could use my best friend these days, but she’s too busy sucking face with El’s best friend.”
Shrug.
“You want to talk about it?”
“Not much point.”
“There’s always a point.”
Liam groaned. He was hungry. Watching Pop take forever to carve fat slices of brioche was killing him.
“So here it is: A while back, I said stupid things to El and things are still kinda frosty, which is totally cool for her, but sucks for me ’cause I would like her not to hate me.”
Pop shrugged with one shoulder as he assembled the pieces of the sandwich for the griddle. “Yeah, I guess your life is over.”
“At last someone understands me.”
“You know the frame in the dining room, the one of that Halloween when Dad and I were Lenny and Squiggy?”
“Yeah.”
“Go get it.”
The sandwich would take a couple of minutes, so why not? Liam fetched the framed photo. When he returned, Pop was assembling the makings for the second sandwich as the first one cooked on the stove top. Damn, how did he manage to make something as mundane as grilled cheese so mouthwatering?
Pop shifted the grilled sandwich to a plate, put the other sandwich over the heat, and presented Liam with the first half of his meal. Then he wiped his hands on a dish towel and popped the back off the frame Liam had brought in.
Under the first photo, the Halloween one, was a second one Liam had never seen before. It was his dad, younger, in high school, wearing a tux and standing very upright and very humorlessly with a girl of about the same age.
“Who’s that?” Liam asked.
“Dad’s girlfriend.”
Girlfriend. Wow. Liam knew, of course, that his father had not really acknowledged or discovered his sexuality until partway through college—and a boyfriend named Whit, believe it or not—but it was one thing to know it; quite another to have evidence. It was difficult to tell if the girl with her arm looped through Dad’s was attractive or not. All that 1980s stuff got in the way.
“Dad with a girlfriend. Sheesh. Does not compute.”
“Don’t look at me—he was already gay when I got to him.”
Liam chewed through the sandwich. “I know you have a point here, but I’m too stupid to get it.”
“You’re not stupid, and I hate when you say that about yourself.” Pop said it lightly, but with just enough spine that Liam knew he meant it. “You ride yourself too hard just because you have some friends who are smarter. Smarter, Liam. You’re a smart kid. And even if you can’t do differential calculus, you have other skills that other kids would kill for. Hell, I flunked algebra twice—once in high school, once in college. And then I went to culinary school instead and suddenly I wasn’t a dummy; I was a genius.”
The grilled cheese sandwich was just utter perfection. Just the right amount of cheese, melted just so, its texture velvety and smooth on his tongue. A little dash of pepper for heat. And the amazing bread, which Pop had baked from scratch last week—crusty and soft at the same time, in the same bite.
“Still don’t see the point,” Liam said, but he had to admit that the sandwich was beginning to make him not care about whatever the point was.
Pop pried the second sandwich off the grill with his pancake turner and slipped it onto Liam’s plate.
“The point is this: When your dad was around your age, he thought he was straight and figured his life was going to look a certain way. He was wrong.”
Chewing that over along with the sandwich, Liam shook his head. “I’m always going to be in love with El. Nothing will change that.”
Pop sat next to him and put an arm around him. “And that’s okay. But being in love with her doesn’t mean you won’t find happiness with someone else. And not for nothing, but you might be wrong about being in love with her. Or her hating you.”
“I’m not wrong.”
As he made his way through the second sandwich, he stared at the photo. He wondered what had happened to this girl. Dad had never mentioned her.
Was there something there? Who knew?
ELAYAH
Marcie left school with Jorja, which wasn’t a big surprise. Until Elayah realized Marcie had her extra-large purse, the one she used when she’d spent the night at Elayah’s.
Holy crap. Was Marcie spending the night at Jorja’s?
As the sky darkened and she waited for Mom to pick her up, Elayah composed text after text to Marcie, but sent none of them. It was tough, she realized, to find the right words to ask your best friend if she was getting Jorja’d on the regular.
Her focus turned to a frown when Dad’s car pulled into the school parking lot. It was supposed to be Mom.
Life in the Laird house had settled into a flimsy ritual of school and work, a fragile, desultory performance in which the three actors played their roles by rote. Elayah went to school, came home, and finished her homework just as her father roused himself from sleep to prepare for his night shift. They spoke only as necessary. Mom observed it all, silent. She tried once to tease out from Elayah the nature of her and Dad’s quiet disharmony but yielded nothing in the conversation.
Now, reluctantly, she threw her backpack in the back seat and climbed into the passenger seat. “Mom got held up at work,” Dad said with forced brightness.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
They glided back out onto the street. The school was set back far from any of the main roads, down a long, winding single-laner that wended through dying soybean fields and cornfields gone fallow. Someone, theoretically, owned all this land. Also theoretically, it had to be worth something. But it never sold.
“How are you doing?” It was Dad-code for How’s your throat? How’s your soul?
“I’m good.” It was the same answer she gave every time, both positive and neutral at once.
“I’m glad you’re getting out with your friends. How’s Liam?”
She didn’t feel like talking about Liam. Talking about Liam made her think of Marcie and Jorja, in each other’s clutches. The press of them. The heat they must have felt. The light in Marse’s eyes when she’d talked about it, the urgency in her voice.
Her anger at Liam had burned out days ago, and its residue of annoyance was blown away by her long-lived affinity to him. Every time she thought of him, she became less angry.
Liam. She wanted what Marcie had with Jorja. She wanted him against her. Wanted to wrap herself around him, but more than her yearning for him, she wanted to be wanted by him. She craved his urgency, his compulsion, his… his… lust, okay? She had little experience in this arena, but she knew from romance novels that, crushed to a man in an embrace, you could feel his hardness against you. She’d never in her life experienced that, but she knew she could and she craved it. She wanted the feeling and to know that she and she alone was the cause of the excitement, that she had summoned his arousal as though with a spell. She wanted to melt into Liam, to the point that all she wanted was to want, the word want over and over in her head, reminding her, at the last, of the other meaning of the word: privation.
And she lacked Liam, that much was true.
Drawing in a deep breath and relocating herself in the universe, she said, “He’s okay, I guess.”
Dad diverted his attention from the road for a split second to grace her with a skeptical eyebrow arch like the Rock.
She couldn’t restrain a giggle from spilling out from b
etween her lips. It was the first time since all this had started that she’d allowed herself to relax in her father’s presence. It felt good. It felt right. She missed him, and suddenly she didn’t care if he was Antoine or Marcus or Loki in disguise. He was her dad.
Dad paused at a stop sign, checked the intersection, then proceeded. “You’re so obvious, it’s painful, baby girl. You think that boy doesn’t know you’re into him? Who do you think you’re kidding?”
“It’s gross talking about boys with my dad.”
“Hey, I was a boy once! I can give you the inside scoop! Help me help you, Elayah.”
Their chuckles were interrupted by a loud, single WHOOP! Behind them, a red light spun into the darkening day.
“What the hell…?” Dad muttered, staring up into the rearview mirror.
It was a Canterstown Sheriff’s Department cruiser, pulling up behind them, its cherry top lit. Dad spent a split second fuming, then signaled and pulled over to the side of the road. There was no shoulder to speak of—the road cratered off to the side, leading right into a decaying field. The car came to a halt with its passenger side tilted downward, tipping Elayah against the door.
“What the hell?” Dad grumbled under his breath, staring into the mirror. “What the hell?”
Then he suddenly seemed to remember that he wasn’t alone in the car. With a queasily upbeat expression, he said, “Everything is going to be fine.”
She swallowed hard enough to tug at the stitches. Sure, everything would be fine. Because routine traffic stops never went sideways.
The cop paused briefly at the rear of the car to stoop and peer through the rear window, assessing.
He approached from the driver’s side. Dad had the window down already and his hands visible on the steering wheel.
“License and registration, sir.” A Canterstown sheriff’s deputy. Didn’t look much past twenty-five. He wore the short-sleeve version of the uniform top, with tightly corded arms adorned with tattoos.
“I’m just reaching for my wallet,” Dad told the deputy. He always put it in the little nook in the center console when he drove. Plainly visible and always in reach. “Do you mind telling me what this is about? Was I speeding?”