This Must Be the Place: A Novel (29 page)

And he wanted to tell Oneida Jones. He wanted to do all sorts of stuff with Oneida Jones, but the first thing he wanted to do was tell her Astor’s secret.

He put his back to the door and grabbed her fluttering hands.

“Can you keep a secret?” he asked.

She smiled an enormous smile, which was good enough for Eugene. He turned the knob behind his back and reached inside to flip on a bank of lights. Oneida’s head swiveled madly in the still murky office, but she made a beeline for the drying rack. The landscape Astor had been working on last week was nowhere to be seen and neither was its original.

“What is this place?” Oneida asked. There were only a few canvases in the rack, and none of them were of anything recognizable. Eugene frowned, disappointed. “Is your mom or dad an artist or something?”

He walked up behind her, unsure if or where he should touch her. He made a grab for her waist but she darted past to Astor’s desk. “Why is that a secret?” she asked. She traced her finger across the spines of Astor’s books and adjusted her glasses. The battered suitcase full of yellowed clippings and random bits of junk was still on the desktop, and Oneida dragged a lazy finger under the latch. Then she opened it.

Eugene approached as quietly as he could, considering his heart was shrieking. They stood side by side in front of the open case. He had crossed a distance of five feet at most, but by the time Oneida’s hair was brushing his shoulder, Eugene had no idea where he was anymore, how
he’d gotten here, or how to get back. It seemed the past two weeks of his life had been leading to this particular moment, in this particular place with Oneida, but whether he was now Eugene or Wendy, or some other person entirely, was a complete mystery to him.

In one hand Oneida held a small green bottle with a fat corked neck. He had smashed a bottle just like it in this very office, had hung another outside her window. He felt the fingers of her other hand weaving between his own.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

For a moment Eugene was sure she was going to let fly with a torrent of questions: her lips parted on the verge of a what, a why, or possibly a where.
Ask
, he thought;
ask me
. He wanted her to ask and he wanted to tell. He wanted to see her eyes grow wider with each revelation, to see understanding dawn in her face—understanding of what he had done, what he was responsible for, and who he was, really, truly, who he was. Then she closed her lips, her eyes darting. Maybe there were too many questions, Eugene thought. Maybe she just didn’t know where to start.

She replaced the bottle and shut the case with a dusty
plop
. Oneida pulled him away from the desk. But before they reached the logical conclusion of the couch, she wrapped herself around him, slowly and completely, locking her arms around his back and burying her head into the hollow of his shoulder. He could smell the fruity soap of her shampoo. The fuzz of her sweater tickled the underside of his arms. She didn’t cry, which he half expected. She breathed—huge inhalations and exhalations that ballooned her entire body, until Eugene found his own lungs matching her breath for breath. After a while, she raised her head to look at him.

“I feel weird,” he said.

“Me too.”

She prodded the edge of his black eye with two fingers, and he winced. “Ow.”

“You can see my boobs now,” she said. “If you want.”

Eugene couldn’t have heard that right.

“I’m not going to take off my bra,” she said, loosening her grip on his torso. “And no touching, not yet.”

She backed away and grabbed the bottom of her sweater with both hands. Eugene thought if he moved at all, he’d fall in a heap of useless arms and legs.

“You ready?” she said, grinning.

He nodded. She pulled her sweater up and over her boobs, and there they were, right there, in a bra:
real girl boobs
. They were the first real girl boobs Eugene had ever seen up close—and the contrast between a real girl boob and the thousands and thousands of boobs he’d seen on television, in movies, and in the lurid film loops that played constantly in his mind was astounding. He adored how very real they were.

She was still holding her sweater up. This was no mere flash, and Eugene felt a rush of abject gratitude even as his hands, slightly more base, floated up toward her.

Her sweater came down like a curtain. Oneida had a smiling face, and Eugene smiled back and lunged. Their teeth clicked audibly. She made a noise halfway between a yelp and a nervous giggle, and kissed him back, a hard full kiss she broke a half-second before his knees liquefied. And then she was gone; he heard the front door slam behind her, the crunch of her shoes on the gravel driveway. There was nothing in the world but the lingering taste of butterscotch on his tongue, a promise and a secret waiting to be kept.

Eugene woke up at 3:00, 4:00, and 5:00 in the morning, rolling over in bed to check the blinking red digits of his alarm clock each time, even though he knew it would only be an hour later. It felt like Christmas morning. Christmas in October—and out in the world, not under any specific tree, a present was waiting that had already shown itself willing and able to unwrap itself. Eugene was too elated to stop grinning and fall asleep.

He bounced out of bed at 6:45 before his mother even had a chance to hassle him, and was showered and fed so early he didn’t have to run for the bus for the first time in weeks. His mother gave him a knowing look when he kissed her good-bye, and even in his hormone-addled state, sloshed on residual pheromones, Eugene could see why. He’d shaved, washed his hair, brushed his teeth, and put on jeans and a
T-shirt that had only been worn once or twice since their most recent laundering, none of which were exactly prerequisites for leaving the house. The jeans were stiff. He hop-skipped down the long driveway to loosen them up.

Would Oneida walk up to him in the hall and stick her hands in his back pockets? Would she pretend it had never happened? His forty-five-minute bus ride allowed Eugene plenty of time to consider the complexities of all possible outcomes. It was possible that, given the time to digest what she’d done, Oneida would become so disgusted with herself for flashing him that she would stay home sick. It was also possible that she would follow him around like a lost puppy. He doubted it—she seemed far too cool, too prickly, for that—but you never knew; it wasn’t impossible, and it was very troubling. To make their . . . whatever it was that they were doing a matter of public knowledge wasn’t something he thought Ruby Falls High—or he—was quite ready for. They were both marginal freaks. He had a bad feeling that they wouldn’t cancel each other out but that, instead, their social stigma would be concentrated, focused. Mutated something dreadful.

It wasn’t until second-period gym that he caught a glimpse of her: a cloud of dark hair disappearing into the girls’ locker room. All of the possibilities where Oneida had to stay home sick, full of self-loathing and regret, mercifully dissolved. The girls and the guys were still separated, so he didn’t see her again until the period ended, and then only from thirty feet away, turning a corner on her way to the science wing. Eugene felt a not-entirely-unpleasant mixture of frustration and thrill, like he was a big cat stalking a particularly elusive gazelle.

She pounced first. Too absorbed in plumbing the pockets of his still too-stiff jeans for lunch money, he didn’t notice she was following until she slid into step beside him.

“Hey,” she said. “Where are you going?”

“Hey, yourself.” She smelled wonderful, like cinnamon and something toasted. He sniffed the air and smiled.

“It’s not me, it’s the hallway,” she said. “Someone burned cinnamon buns in home ec. I guess they were on fire and everything. You want to go to the drama club prop loft?”

This had not been one of Eugene’s many possibilities. “What?”

“I brought us lunch,” she said.

Eugene had never been anywhere near the drama club’s prop loft (or the drama club’s anything, for that matter), both because of a vague discomfort with musicals in general and a hatred of most of the key players in the drama club clique. It didn’t make sense for Oneida to have the inside track on the prop loft either, until they had crossed the silent auditorium’s sea of half-lit chairs and were standing in the wings of the stage, musty curtains solid and warm around them. He felt safe, insulated from the rest of the school, alone in the world with her. Oneida was a girl who knew how to hide out.

“This is the hard part,” she said. He followed the tilt of her head to a metal ladder bolted into the wall, the bottom rungs hanging six feet off the ground. “I usually just stand on something and jump up, but I thought maybe you could give me a boost. You’re so tall.”

He wrapped his hands around her hips and lifted. She wavered a little, surprised, but soon rebalanced enough to grab the bottom rung. He felt her lift her own weight out of his hands. If only you’d worn a skirt, he thought, watching her butt undulate as she climbed up the ladder.

The prop loft was a high open landing, adjacent to the stage, which Eugene discovered after jumping to the bottom rung from a rickety chair and ascending. Weights and ropes and pulleys hung, dark and heavy, above their heads. Meager light came from the auditorium below; the farther from the edge he went, Eugene could only make out simple shapes and colors. Oneida was sitting on one of two beanbag chairs, unpacking a paper grocery bag she must have brought up earlier. So it had been planned; it had all been planned.

“I just discovered this place last spring,” Oneida said. She flattened the paper bag and set it like a table: two sandwiches and two apples on a paper plate, and (weird) two pieces of fancy-looking cake in plastic take-out containers. “They only do one show a year, so it’s pretty abandoned for the rest of the time. Come on, it’s OK. You can sit down.” She patted the other beanbag. In the darkness, her teeth flashed in a nervous smile. “Are you afraid of heights?”

“What? No.” Eugene turned to look over his shoulder and, yes, he was a little afraid of heights. The loft had a very short railing, which
would do absolutely nothing to prevent him, should he slip, from falling twenty feet down and breaking his neck. He moved toward her but the darkness was disorienting. She’d clearly been up here often enough to have her sea legs, but Eugene felt completely undone by his body. He didn’t know how or where to move without falling.

“One sec,” she said, and disappeared into the dark behind the beanbags.

There was a moment of indeterminate scuffling and then a Christmas tree burned itself onto Eugene’s retinas. Several blinks later, the tree—and Oneida, sitting on the beanbag in front of it—came into full candy-colored focus.

“I think they did
White Christmas
a few years ago. . . . Please . . . say something.”

Eugene hadn’t realized how long he’d been standing there, not moving, not speaking, just staring at Oneida—her skin a stained-glass patchwork of light—and feeling something so far beyond anything he had ever felt before that he could only understand it in parts. He felt safe. He felt stunned and awake. He felt cold and electric and terrified of what would happen next. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want the world to burst.

Oneida shifted on the beanbag, tugging the neck of her T-shirt.

“I love you,” he said.

She looked up, stricken. “I made you a sandwich,” she said.

Eugene had to sit, immediately. To her credit, Oneida didn’t recoil when he collapsed into the beanbag next to her.

“You showed me your boobs,” he explained.

She blinked.

“You do that when you’re nervous,” he said, pointing at her hands, which were fluttering like jellyfish. “Please don’t be nervous.”

“I’ll be nervous if I want.” She shifted again and tucked her hands beneath her thighs.

The fact that she hadn’t slapped him or flung herself off the edge gave Eugene the courage to reach down the side of her beanbag, under her leg, and pull out one of her hands. He held it in both of his own until she turned to face him.

“Please don’t take it personally,” he said.

Oneida’s eyes were hiding somewhere behind the multicolored reflections dancing across her glasses. He wished he could see them, instead of the only thing he could see: his face, looming as he moved closer to kiss her, a reflection too large and too colorful to be his own.

13
Missing Persons on Vacation