Last Seen Leaving (4 page)

“You think there's a chance she ran away?” My mother sounded almost relieved by this prospect, and I didn't blame her—it was a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.

“Frankly, there's a pretty good chance,” Detective Moses affirmed. “Nine times out of ten in cases like this, that's the situation. It sounds like January wasn't dealing too well with all the big changes in her life, and it's possible she just took off. Maybe she ran away, or maybe she's lying low for a while, trying to scare her parents and teach them a lesson. That happened right here, a couple of years back: A boy about Flynn's age got in a fight with his parents, took the car, and vanished. The East Lansing police found him a week later, sleeping on the floor of a friend's dorm room at Michigan State.”

It was an appealing suggestion, and I supposed it made sense. January
did
hate her life lately, and she was both impulsive and pretty obsessed with getting out of Ann Arbor.
Tell me about California, okay?
Was it possible she'd disappeared deliberately?

January wasn't stupid; she would've known she wouldn't get very far with no driver's license, no high school diploma, and no money of her own, but I could easily see her hiding somewhere for a few days to teach the Walkers a lesson. She was not above pulling such a stunt. When her mom was planning the wedding, January had fielded a phone call from the baker and, without a single pang of conscience, told them to cancel the order for the cake. She knew her monkey wrench wouldn't stop the marriage from happening, but disastrously fucking up the ceremony was, she'd stated with malicious satisfaction, the next best thing.

As it was, Tammy barely found out about what had happened before it was too late to rectify the situation, and January had been grounded for nearly a month as a result—the Wi-Fi signal was even turned off every night for three weeks, just to keep her from being able to reach the outside world—but January's anger at her mother had provided more than adequate insulation against any guilt she might have felt. She'd wanted to make her protest against the marriage impossible to ignore, and she'd succeeded.

Dutifully, I enumerated for Detectives Wilkerson and Moses the friends January had that might be candidates for Safe-Port-in-a-Storm status. Even as I rattled the list off, however, I knew my intel would amount to nothing; January's friends at Riverside were my friends, too, and if my girlfriend—or ex-girlfriend, as the case may be—were staying with one of them, I'd have certainly heard about it.

“I don't think she's really close with anyone at Dumas,” I concluded with a shrug. January called Dumas “the Dumbass Academy,” and referred to the students in a similar manner.

“This Dumbass girl is having a birthday party this weekend,” she'd told me once when we were hanging out at the skate park Micah and I liked to use. “I really don't want to go, but she asked me in front of Jonathan, and now he's insisting on dropping me off personally. I guess her dad has some kind of connections or something, and Jonathan wants to get the endorsement.” January gave me a nasty smile. “Not only does he get to tell me where to go to school, now he gets to pick my friends, too!”

“Don't worry about it,” Wilkerson told me as he finished jotting down the last phone number I'd provided. “We're going to head over to the Dumas Academy tomorrow and ask around; if she had any friends there, we'll talk to them.”
If she had any friends.
I supposed that meant her parents didn't know much more than I did. Wilkerson got to his feet. “Thanks for your time, Flynn.”

My mom blinked in surprise. “Is that all you wanted to ask?”

“For now,” Wilkerson said, making an effort not to sound too credulous. I guess they didn't want me to think they believed everything I'd said, just in case it turned out I was lying. “If we can think of anything else, we'll be in touch.” The two detectives started for the short hall to the foyer, but then Wilkerson turned back and looked me square in the eye. “And, son? If you think of anything else you want to add to your story—or to change—I suggest you call us sooner rather than later. We suspect your girlfriend's probably fine, but … better safe than sorry.”

And on that ominous note, they left, slamming the front door behind them.

 

FOUR

MY MOM SPENT
the next couple of hours watching me watch TV, and asking if I was okay. When my dad got home, Mom told him everything that had happened, and then he joined her in watching me. Then, for about thirty minutes, we sat in a horrendously awkward silence at the dinner table while they watched me eat, periodically interrupting to ask how I was “dealing with everything.” They didn't seem to want to let me out of their sight, just in case I had a mental breakdown or something and decided to swallow a handful of tacks to deal with the angst. Pleading an imminent math test, I excused myself from the table and fled to my bedroom to study. It was the first time I'd ever been grateful to have homework.

The truth was I had no idea how I felt about January's disappearance yet. On a certain level, I was aware that I was blocking myself from truly considering the different scenarios the detectives had presented. Moses had told my mom that, statistically speaking, it was most likely January had run away—and everything I knew about the girl jibed with that theory—and so I made a subconscious decision that this was indeed what had occurred. I didn't let myself dwell on the possibility that something actually bad might have happened to her.

I didn't let myself dwell on the fact that the cops had steered conspicuously clear of terms like “abducted” and “possibly killed,” even though they were the two most unavoidable theories whenever a teenage girl disappeared.

After I went to bed, the sky cleared and a fiercely bright wedge of moon glared in through my window, throwing gray squares of light across my rumpled blankets and reminding me of that night in the barn. Each time I started to drift off, January appeared again in my memory, her white-gold hair glowing in the moonlight, those luminous eyes wet with tears, and her expression drawn tight with an anguish so alive it practically vibrated beneath her skin. The realness of the dream jarred me from sleep, over and over.

January was always kind of a drama queen, but she'd been more than just her usual, theatrically emotional self that night. Something serious had been bothering her. I'd sensed it in her strange silence when she'd led me across the fields to the barn, and in the faintly despondent way she'd asked me to talk to her about our plans of moving to California, as if it were a bedtime story—and there had been plenty of weird tension in her scrabbling desperation for us to deflower each other, too. If I'd been a better boyfriend, I'd have said something about it. Hell, if I'd been a better
friend
. But I had been on my guard from the beginning, and when she'd started kissing me, I'd let my defensiveness take over.

I'd become so scared that I'd lashed out at her, attacked to protect myself and deliberately started a fight. That was the worst part. My face burned from guilt and shame as I lay there in my bedroom, staring up at the ceiling and wishing I could go back in time and do everything over. January had been troubled by something, and I was so terrified of being honest that I'd made things worse on purpose. And now she was missing.
Missing.
What if the scenario was truly worst case? What if I could have done something to prevent it, but I'd let my secret get in the way?

And now I'd lied to the cops as well. It was a small lie, but still. What if January had killed herself? And what if part of the reason was because her boyfriend had rejected her? How would I live with myself?

What would have happened if I'd let her accuse me? If I'd finally blurted out the truth? It had been on the tip of my tongue—it was
always
on the tip of my tongue—but before I ever got near to speaking it aloud, terror squeezed my heart like a python. Once the words were out, they would never go back in again; everything would change. For better or worse,
everything would change
. The thought made me nauseated and dizzy.

You're right, January. It's not about you at all. The reason I don't want to have sex with you is because I'm gay, and I want to have sex with boys instead.

Fuck, what if I'd said it? Would it have made her feel better about being rejected, or worse, because then she'd think she had proof that I'd merely been using her as a smoke screen for the past four months? It wasn't true, that was the awful thing. I really
did
care for January, and had since the beginning. More than simply being my girlfriend, she was my
best
friend—just as much as Micah was, if in a different way. She and I knew each other so well that we could have whole conversations with nothing but meaningful looks, a volume of words exchanged in facial expressions; we liked the same bands, laughed at the same jokes, mocked the same bad TV shows; she was smart and pretty and easy to talk to.… She was everything a guy was supposed to want in a girlfriend. And I really, genuinely
liked
her. I'd thought, I'd hoped, that eventually I would also start to feel the
other
things I was supposed to feel for a girlfriend. The physical things.

But that stuff never developed. Incongruously, the more comfortable January and I got around each other, the less romantic our relationship became—to me, anyway. She started to seem like a sister or something, and the more I tried to find her sexy, the weirder it felt. Meanwhile, my penis would go up and down like a periscope every time I'd attend one of Micah's swim meets, where athletic guys strutted around the pool in tiny bathing suits, wet and glistening all over like hard candy. My body clearly didn't care what I wanted it to want.

Would January have hated me if I'd told her? Resented my lies forever? Or could she have maybe understood—laughed at the incredible awkwardness of the situation and resolved to stay my friend? I might never know, because I'd picked the safer option. I'd tried to make her feel bad for pressuring me, and now she was gone.

I burned with shame until my sheets were damp with sweat and I decided that, no matter what, I would do everything I could to figure out what had happened to her.

*   *   *

The heat had been punishing that summer, the air so thick with humidity that if you tossed up a blade of grass, you half expected it to get stuck on the way back down. That day in June, my bike's aluminum frame had become a deadly weapon as I pedaled my way across town, the blazing metal threatening to leave blisters on my flesh every time my knees touched it on a tight corner. By the time I skidded to a halt outside a nondescript brick building on Huron Street, my clothes were clinging to my skin and I could feel sweat dripping from the hair that bristled at the nape of my neck.

I grabbed my shirt at the bottom and started working it like a bellows, trying to circulate air across my torso, wishing I'd had the confidence to wear a tank top in spite of my skinny arms and glad that I'd remembered to put on deodorant. Biking that far had been sort of a stupid idea, I knew, but it had been either that or take the bus, and between the two options there was no contest. The last time I'd opted for public transportation, an eighty-year-old man had sat down beside me, popped out his false teeth, and stuck them in my lap before I knew what was happening. Anyway, it was silly for me to feel as self-conscious as I did; I was just there to meet up with January so we could go hang out at Starbucks or whatever, like always, and it wasn't as if she'd never seen me looking like shit before. The only difference on this occasion was that it would be the first time she'd see me looking like shit since becoming my
girlfriend
.

We'd been official for almost forty-eight hours, and even though we'd been friends for close to a year, my stomach still buzzed like an overtaxed electrical transformer as I made my way into the deep freeze of the air-conditioned building. The chill felt exquisite for about twenty seconds, and then goose bumps rippled across my exposed arms and legs as I spoke to the person behind the front desk and started down a corridor to the left. As nervous and excited as a musician taking the stage, I swallowed compulsively, baffled by my sudden case of the butterflies. There was no reason to freak out … was there?

I stepped into a cafeteria much like the one at Riverside, folding tables and flimsy chairs still in use despite appearing to be on the verge of collapse, with fluorescent lighting and colorless linoleum floors that had seen better days. The major difference was that most of the people I was looking at were adults; overdressed for the heat, their faces craggy and aged before their time by years of hard living, they were the city's homeless. A white-haired woman standing near the doorway, clearly someone who worked there, gave me a nakedly curious look. “Can I help you?”

“Actually, I'm … um, I'm just here to meet my girlfriend?” The G word sounded so important spoken out loud, and the woman's look turned doubtful, as though she found my claim suspicious. I was saved from having to explain myself further, however, when January appeared at that very moment through a doorway at the back of the room.

“Flynn!” Her face broke into a smile, her eyes lighting up, and I felt my cheeks redden as I grinned back, the reaction instant and irrepressible. We probably looked ridiculous, beaming idiotically at each other across the drab cafeteria like lovers meeting in a field of wildflowers, but it only lasted a moment before she darted to my side, tossing her arms around me and putting her lips to mine in our first-ever public kiss. After a moment, she drew back with an affectionate smirk and stated, “You're lucky you're so cute, because you are seriously gross right now.”