Weird Girl and What's His Name (8 page)

“You need me to go,” I echoed. I nodded slowly. “My best friend just disappeared, and you need me to go.”

“Rory—”

“Huh. All this time, I thought you were the grown-up in this relationship.” I felt a tight, rough-edged knot at the back of my throat, like a little rock made out of anger and sadness and fatigue. I swallowed, but it stayed stuck there. “Andy. You never did love me, did you?”

“I didn't say that. It's just bad timing. I'm not good for you right now, and you're not good for me. And I'm sorry, sweetie. I really am sorry about your friend—” Andy put his arm on my shoulder. I shrugged him away.

“I'm not your sweetie,” I said. “I'm your employee. That's all. And I quit. Effective immediately.” I grabbed my book bag and walked out, the bell clanking dully behind me. Exit What's His Name, stage left.

I
LOOKED UP
C
OACH
M
ORRIS
'
S NUMBER
in the phone book, and dialed him at home. A little kid answered. I asked her to put her dad on the phone.

“Coach Morris?”

“Yeah?”

“This is Ro—. This is Theodore Callahan.”

“What can I do for you, son?” His voice was clipped. “It's late.”

“I know. I just wanted to say that if you still want me on the team, I want to play. I'll do the summer practices and everything.”

“All right. Come by my office tomorrow and we'll get you started.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Son, I'm sorry about your girlfriend.”

I wanted to say:
She's not my girlfriend. I'm an unrepentant queer and a former nice guy who really wants to shove some guys' faces into the mud all of a sudden. But thanks for the sentiment.
Instead I just said, “So am I.” And then I hung up. Wishing all these assholes would stop calling me
son
.

ten

M
RS.
L
IDELL ASKED ME TO SEE
her in her office the next afternoon. She came in from outside smelling like tobacco. I knew what this was about.

“Rory, you're an excellent writer.” She sat down at her desk and started in right away. “But I don't know what to make of this.” She held up the two blue books I'd ended up using to write my midterm essay. I nodded.

“I know.” I was kind of expecting this.

“I'm sure there are some places where an in-depth analysis of the platonic bond between Mulder and Scully will go a long way. But this class is not an AOL message board from 1997. And your midterm exam isn't the place to wax rhapsodic about old episodes of
The X-Files.”

“I fulfilled the assignment, didn't I?”

“Rory.” I thought she was going to give me one of those looks and keep lecturing me about how I was supposed to be writing about literature. But instead, she looked away, blinking. Was Mrs. Lidell starting to cry?

“I know you're upset about Lula. I'm upset, too. But I don't know how to grade this. I'm going to give you another chance. If you can stay late tomorrow and rewrite this essay, I'm willing to throw this out. But if I start letting students get away with writing midterm essays on television shows . . . you see where I'm coming from, right?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“You can retake this tomorrow?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Here.” She handed me the blue books.

“What for?”

“Save those for when Lula comes home. I'm sure she'd like to read them.”

I
STAYED LATE THE NEXT DAY
and wrote what I knew was a passing essay for Mrs. Lidell. Afterward, as I was walking across the parking lot, I heard someone call my name from far off, and for a weird second, I thought it was Lula. But it wasn't even a girl. It was Sexy Seth.

“Hey,” I called back. He was walking toward the school from his pickup truck, big headphones hanging around his neck, a raggedy one-subject notebook in his hand. The notebook had the word
STUDY!
written on the bright yellow cover in heavy black marker. He had on a black T-shirt with another random saying. This one announced, in big white letters: B
OSTON
S
PACESHIPS
I
S
R
EAL!

“You in for this SAT Prep thing?”

“Me? No, I was just . . . rewriting a midterm essay. For Mrs. Lidell.”

“Oh, shit, man. I'm supposed to have her next year. I heard she's impossible.”

“Nah, she's possible. I just goofed it up, is all.”

“Dude!” Seth slapped me on the arm with his notebook. “I heard you're on the team! Right
on
, man!”

“Yeah, I—” My voice hung up. It was the weirdest thing. The way Seth said “Right on, man,” drawing out the “on.” Lula used to say that all the time. Probably imitating Trey the Burnout Yard Guy, but I thought of it as a Lula Saying. It took me a second to remember what Seth was talking about. Oh yeah, football. “I guess I am. On the team.”

“Coach Morris was freaking out. He says you're a football progeny. He couldn't believe you never played before.”

Progeny?
I started to ask, but there was a weird lump in my throat.

“Man, it's gonna be righteous,” Seth went on. “Friday nights, five thousand people all going apeshit in the bleachers. Talk about a rush. We are gonna have a serious GT, I promise.” Seth gave me his sexiest of Sexy Seth grins.

“A GT?”

“A
good time,”
he drawled happily. “Hey, listen, though. Seriously, uh. I wanted to say sorry. About your girl Lula. I heard about her. Going missing and all. I know what that's like, man. I lost my brother. He passed on, a few years ago. I know it's tough.”

“Lula didn't
pass on,”
I said. “She's just missing. She'll be back.”

“I hope she will, brother.” Seth gave me one of his squinty, serious smiles. Like he's George Clooney or Sawyer from
Lost
or some shit. Like he's Mr. Charm and he feels so sorry for the rest of us because we aren't him. “I truly hope she will.”

“Seth.” I threw open the driver's side door to the Beast, which gave a horrific rusty metal squeal. “I'm not your brother. The word you're looking for is prodigy, not progeny. And your T-shirt is grammatically incorrect.”

I got in the car, slammed the door, and drove away. In the rearview mirror, I could see Seth, just standing there in the parking lot with his stupid notebook that said
STUDY!
One hand in his pocket, his floppy hair in the breeze. I didn't have to be so mean. Seth was trying to be nice. At least he remembered Lula's name. But I didn't want to be nice. I wanted somebody to blame. I didn't care who. If this really was
The X-Files,
this would be the part where I turned into Action Mulder, and I put on my bulletproof vest and went after Duane Barry or Krycek or the Cigarette-Smoking Man. But I wasn't Mulder, and there was nobody I could beat up and threaten to bring Lula back. Putting a masking-tape X on my window wasn't going to lure any secret operatives to my house to give me clues in the middle of the night. I didn't have any Lone Gunmen to help me uncover any secrets. Maybe there weren't any secrets to uncover. Lula was gone. Just gone. And whoever had taken her was gone, too. Or she was gone by herself. Because she didn't want to be around anymore. And if that was the case, I was useless. I had been useless from the start. Or, worse than useless, I was the monster Speed Briggs said I was. The liar, the deceiver, the damage. I had this thing inside of me that she was right to run from. This black fear, this anger I couldn't keep down. I thought about the things I said to her that last night, and it made me sick inside. Lula was right. We were supposed to be in this together. I should have told her about Andy. I should have trusted her, above anyone and everyone else. But I failed. And now there was nothing I could do but sit around and wait for her to come home.

T
HOSE FIRST FEW DAYS HAD BEEN
little marathons, dividing up the town with Janet and Leo, taping up
MISSING
flyers in every shop window that would let us. At home, it seemed like the phone was always ringing, or about to ring. Then it wasn't. Almost two weeks had passed since Lula disappeared, and there was still nothing I could do but wait. There was no job to go to after school. No Friday nights watching
X-Files
with Lula. I finished my homework early and studied football strategies. I stayed home and had uncomfortably quiet dinners with my mom. I stopped going to the gym—Andy had probably dropped my membership, anyway. The school gym was uncomfortable, the older guys on the team either making halfhearted attempts at hazing me or acting all sympathetic about Lula when we both knew that, two weeks ago, they would've been calling her Weird Girl just like everybody else. I built homemade weights and worked out in the garage. Whenever I left the house, I saw the flyers Janet had posted on telephone poles, Lula's picture getting faded and tattered from the rain. I went for long runs, looping past the woods that the police had combed again and again when Lula first went missing. I kept thinking how stupid that was. Lula hated the woods. She hated camping. Then I realized they weren't expecting to find her
living
in the woods.

I knew Lula wasn't dead, though. I didn't have any proof, but I was becoming more and more convinced that if something bad had happened to her, I would've felt it in my bones, like a disturbance in the Force. I went to Janet and Leo's almost every night, to check up on them. Leo smoked too much and studied maps and bus routes and talked about getting in touch with some of his buddies in army recon. Despite the endless stream of casseroles and Crock-Pot dishes brought over by friends and neighbors, Janet cooked massive amounts of Polish food and sent the leftovers home with me. Dark gray roots showed in her brassy blond hair. Her white lipstick was often smudged and she took up smoking again. She kept a box of Benson & Hedges in the back of the silverware drawer and taught me how to mix Manhattans. They would answer the door by saying, “No word yet,” and I never knew if they were asking me or telling me.

I stayed up nights, thinking about Lula. Laughing at things she'd said months ago. Her impression of Mrs. Dalrymple, the librarian. The way she'd put down this smartass senior in the cafeteria one day. I became obsessed with the late-night radio show on the community college's station, the one Lula used to listen to, hosted by a guy named Midnight Steve. I called Midnight Steve every night to request Lula's favorite songs, the ones she'd burned for me once on a mix CD. I requested “Teenage FBI” by Guided by Voices and “This is Hell” by Elvis Costello. I requested “Walking After You” by the Foo Fighters. I requested “Man of Steel” and “The Marsist” by Frank Black. I requested “Love is Nothing” and “Fantasize” by Liz Phair. I requested “View of the Rain” by Urge Overkill and “Do You Love Me Now?” by the Breeders. I requested Laura Nyro. Midnight Steve never had any of the songs I wanted to hear, but he told me how 'bout if he played some Dashboard Confessional instead. I finally told Midnight Steve that he and Dashboard Confessional could go fuck themselves.

For a while, I kept up my visits to the
XPhilePhorum.
Mainly because I was looking for her. All the regulars on the message boards knew about Lula, I guess because the police investigated all her online comings and goings. But pretty soon I got tired of waiting and waiting for the next comment that popped up to be from BloomOrphan and getting some dumbass rant about supersoldiers or whatever from MrsSpooky82 or LordKinbote instead. I got tired of their crackpot theories. I finally blew up at everybody in the chat room one night and said it was total bullshit; Lula didn't get abducted by aliens, or members of a shadow government, or Bigfoot, or some run-of-the-mill psycho. She ran away. Plain and simple. She ran away to some better place. To be with her mother, to live some fun, bohemian life in New York. To find some new best friend who wouldn't keep secrets or run around with older men behind her back.

Lula was always talking about the places she wanted to live when she finished school. She wanted to live in Seattle, or Vancouver. The rainy, romantic Pacific Northwest. She wanted to go to Paris, like Mrs. Lidell. Have adventures and lovers and smoke Gitanes. Why wasn't anybody looking there? Why were they wasting their time combing the goddamn
woods
?

eleven

“J
ANET
M
ONROE CALLED YOU.
T
WICE
,”
MY
mother announced when I came in from running. She was sweating, but she was sober. Rearranging the furniture again. This time, though, it kind of made sense. At least, the coffee table was at a normal angle in front of the sofa.

“Did she say anything about Lula?”

“She said not to get excited. But they found something they hope is a clue, and they want you to look at it.”

I didn't even shower or change clothes. I ran all the way over. When I got there, I saw a blue Chevy Cobalt with an Enterprise Rent-a-Car sticker on the back, parked in the driveway behind the white Cadillac. I knocked hard on the door.

“Rory, honey, come in. I guess you got the messages.” Janet pulled me inside.

“My mom said you had something you wanted me to look at.”

“Come here. My goodness, you've been out running in this heat?”

“Yes, ma'am.” Immediately, I felt like I should've showered and changed. There was a woman sitting in the kitchen, perched on one of the barstools. She was tall and thin and had cheekbones like glaciers. Her hair was the same sandy blond as Lula's, the same sandy blond that Janet got out of a bottle. She wore silver bracelets, a silver ring on her long, tanned thumb. Dark blue jeans and a loose black T-shirt. Worn-out cowboy boots.

“Rory, this is Christine. Lula's mother.”

I didn't know what to say. She didn't look like the bleached-out Polaroid that Lula kept. This woman was so beautiful, it made my chest hurt. She looked just like Lula. I wanted to put my arms around her. I wanted to believe that this was really Lula, somehow. Taller and transformed. Time-traveling Lula, returned from the future to tell me that everything was going to turn out okay.

“Hi, Rory. I've heard a lot about you.” Christine put out her hand to shake mine.

“I've, uh—me, too.” I didn't know what to say. “It's nice to meet you. Finally.”

“Rory, here,” Janet put a glass of ice water in my hand. “Now, take a look at this and tell us what you think.” Janet drew me away from the woman sitting at the kitchen bar, the one I had a hundred questions for. She put a piece of paper into my hand, a copy of a printout from a computer, stamped and numbered and signed off with looping initials.

“It turns out Lula had a diary she kept on the computer. This is the last entry—she didn't date it, but according to the computer, she wrote it the night she left.”

I realized that all the stamps and the writing in the margins were from the police. Marking it as evidence.

“Rory, honey.” Janet touched my arm. I wasn't even embarrassed that she knew I was gay. I was almost lightheaded with relief that Lula didn't mention Andy. But I couldn't believe this. Lula, in love with me? This had to be one of her jokes. I must've been reading it wrong.

“I didn't know. I didn't know how she felt. I didn't know she—I thought everything was okay.”

“We all did, honey.”

“Everybody thinks their kids are fine,” Christine chimed in. “They all say they never saw it coming.”

“That's enough, Chris. You want to get your digs in at me, fine, but we've been raising your child for the past fourteen years,” Janet said.

“And doing a bang-up job, Mom.”

“Hey, knock it off!” Uh-oh, I said that out loud. I looked at Lula's mom, who looked surprised.

“Hey, yourself,” she said. “Who do you think you are, anyway?”

“Who do you think
you
are?” I felt the printout of Lula's diary entry crumple a little in my grip. “I've been Lula's best friend since seventh grade. You left her without even a goodbye. Do you have any idea how much time she's spent thinking about you? Reading your stupid actor books? Looking you up on the computer, trying to figure out where you were?”

“Rory.” Janet patted my arm.

“And now you show up—why? You think it's going to help anything now? You don't even know her.”

“I'm her mother,” Christine said, her face flat.

“So what?”

“Rory, that's enough.” Janet put her hand on her hip. “Can you please look at this letter and tell us something helpful?”

I looked the letter over again. Christine clipped off into the dining room, her boots tapping on the parquet.

“I don't know, Janet.” My hands were shaking. I'd just totally gone off on Lula's mom. What had gotten into me? I had to stop losing my shit like this. “We fought because she was upset that I was seeing someone else. But she knew that I, uh—”

“You don't like girls. That's fine, Rory. But—what's this about sleeping in her bed?” Janet opened the silverware drawer. Looking for her cigarettes.

“I stayed over. One night before she left. She let me sleep in her bed. Instead of on the floor. That was all.”

“You don't think she could be pregnant?”
Now there's a theory.

“It wasn't like that. I promise.”

“Oh, Rory.” She lit her cigarette. “Honey, I'm sorry. I'm asking you all these embarrassing questions. I feel like a fool. But I'm grasping at straws, here. We just want to bring Lula back home, and the police are losing interest. They figured out what she looked up on the Internet the night she left: Amtrak and Greyhound schedules. But the people working at the bus station and the train station that night can't remember seeing her there. The police are still looking, but now they're saying she's just a runaway.” Janet shook her head.
“Just
a runaway. Can you believe that? They won't even put out an Amber Alert, because she's too old and there isn't enough evidence to prove that she isn't just . . . off partying or something, I don't know. It's ridiculous. Missing is missing, I don't care how it happened.” Her voice was bitter, exhaling smoke. “But where else could she go? We checked out the boarding school where her friend Jenny goes now. Jenny hasn't heard from her in years. We're trying to remember the name of that girl she was pen pals with a few years ago—Stacy or something—one of the girls she went to drama camp with. But there's nothing on the computer and we can't find the letters. Did Lula ever mention anything to you?”

“Not about any pen pals, no.” Lula had told me about going to Drama Camp for Teens at the community college. Something she'd done over the summer to try and get closer to her mom. I remembered that Lula said it was lame, having to visualize yourself as a tree or whatever, but she'd met a cool older girl there. They hung out a few times before the girl moved away, but I never met her, and Lula never told me about writing any letters. As for Jenny, she and Lula stopped hanging out back in junior high, back when Jenny started trying out for cheerleading and Lula started spending her weekends watching
Star Trek: The Next Generation
reruns with me. Janet studied the letter again.

“What about this GA? What does that mean? Leo's on the phone with someone he knows in Atlanta right now—do you know why she would've gone down there?”

I hated to let her down. “No. GA—we were talking about Gillian Anderson. The actress. From
The X-Files.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake.” Janet sighed and sat down. Deflated. She put her hand to her eyes, shaking her head, muttering softly to herself. “Her favorite show. I should've known that. I should've known.”

Janet already knew who Sam was. And I did, too. Sam was Samantha. Mrs. Samantha Lidell.