Last Seen Leaving (5 page)

“Get used to it,” I advised her airily. “Now that we're a couple and I don't have to try so hard anymore, I've pretty much decided to just let myself go.”

“Oh, thank God I'm not the only one.” January rolled her eyes in exaggerated relief, adding, confidentially, “I haven't changed my underwear since Saturday.”

“Well, I ate a whole tub of frosting for dinner last night.”

“I ate a pack of raw hot dogs for breakfast,” January countered, “
and
I threw out all my body wash and shampoo, so I hope you're into chicks with BO.”

“Ah, young love.” The white-haired lady interrupted our banter with a wistful sigh. “So beautiful, and so darn weird.”

January and I were holding hands, giggling stupidly with happiness and relief that our rapport remained the same as always, that altering the status of our relationship hadn't screwed everything up. I hadn't even realized until just then how afraid I'd been that crossing the boundary from Friends to Dating would somehow change us fundamentally, that the sudden new parameters and expectations that came with being a couple would make it impossible for us to be the way we'd always been together—relaxed, teasing, comfortable. The worst part of making that leap, of course, was that, much like those pop-up spikes at the entrance of a parking garage, it was a boundary you couldn't go back across without incurring irreparable damage.

January gave the woman a bashful smile and introduced me. “Carol, this is Flynn—my boyfriend.”

“It's very nice to meet you,” Carol said with a maternal air. “January is one of our favorite volunteers. It's such a blessing to see a young person who exhibits genuine care about the less fortunate!”

Carol sighed rapturously at the end of this tribute to my girlfriend's sterling character, and January made a surreptitious face at me that I understood implicitly. It said: “Carol is harmless, if seriously corny and also maybe just a little bit crazy.”

Volunteering at the Huron Street Homeless Shelter hadn't exactly been on January's summer vacation bucket list; rather, it was yet another decision that had been made on her behalf, and enforced, by Jonathan Walker. Once a week at the shelter and once a week at the Red Cross, the noticeably selfless commitment of her time to Important Causes was guaranteed to be described in the most admiring of tones by journalists writing profiles of the aspiring U.S. senator's model family. The philanthropic activities actually appealed to my good-hearted girlfriend, but not even the threat of a face-first trip through a chipper shredder could have compelled her to admit as much to her parents.

“I'm almost ready to go,” she told me, “but I still need to sign out and stuff. You want to wait out there?”

She gestured in the direction of the lobby, and I gave an affable shrug in reply. Knowing January, it would take a lot longer than she made it sound, but I'd be happy to hang out in the AC for as long as possible. Before I could take a step toward the hallway, however, the general peace in the room was interrupted by an angry shout that rose up from a table in a near corner.

Two men had lunged to their feet, chairs scraping across the floor and dishes scattering, and they squared off with rage-filled eyes. Before I even knew what the conflict was about, it had already escalated; one guy landed a blow on his opponent's nose, bringing forth a jet of blood that painted the man's graying beard a vivid scarlet, and the
would-be
victim immediately retaliated with an attempt at strangling his attacker. It all happened so quickly that we'd barely had a chance to react before the two men lurched abruptly in our direction, careening off tables and other diners like a runaway semi, a dangerous and uncontrolled burst of violence that promised a ton of collateral damage.

I was just starting to move, aiming to get in front of January, when she darted past me and in the next instant placed herself directly between the two furious combatants. Her expression calm and her voice low, she gently pushed them apart, forcing them to acknowledge her. Their chests heaving, they stared daggers at each other over her head, but as January continued speaking, the destructive energy that had erupted with such abruptness began to dissipate just as quickly. Other volunteers rushed in then, converging on the scene urgently if already too late, and led the two angry pugilists away from each other.

January sauntered back over to me, giving her hair a casual toss, acting like someone who'd just finished sorting out a mildly frustrating paper jam in the printer rather than stopping an honest-to-goodness bum fight in its tracks. I goggled at her, impressed. “I can't believe you just did that.”

“Somebody had to, and I was the closest,” she said with a verbal shrug, as if it were really that simple.

“They were huge and trying to kill each other,” I pointed out. “They were, like, four times your size—you could've been stomped into the linoleum!”

“Please, me and the girls could've taken 'em easy,” she blustered jokingly, flexing her biceps so I could see which girls she meant. “Fear is for suckers!”

“Seriously, though.” I couldn't quite let the subject go. I was still worried about her safety, even in retrospect, and wanted her to admit she'd been reckless. “You can't honestly pretend that you weren't a little bit scared.”

January gave me a bemused look that might or might not have been genuine, a knowing glint flickering in the depths of her placid blue eyes. “Flynn, haven't you figured it out by now? I'm not scared of anything.”

*   *   *

The next day at school I learned that Wilkerson and Moses had wasted no time in following up on the names I'd given them: At least five of January's closest friends came up to me in the halls to tell me they'd received visits from the cops the night before. None of them knew anything, just as I'd surmised, and most of them tried to pump me for more information. The only person I'd held out any real hope of January's having confided in was Tiana Hughes, her best friend and—not coincidentally—Micah's girlfriend.

I caught Tiana at her locker after first period, where she was trying to fix the hinge on a heart-shaped locket that Micah had given her for their two-month anniversary the previous summer. She seemed to sense my arrival because, without even looking up from what she was doing, she groused, “This fucking heart keeps breaking and it's starting to make me homicidal.”

“I hope that's no reflection on the state of your relationship,” I said, and she smirked.

“Please. It'll take way more than Micah's questionable taste in jewelry to drive us apart,” Tiana said, “although you might want to tell him, for future reference, that just because something's an antique doesn't mean it isn't also a piece of crap.” Giving up, she tossed the necklace into her locker and slammed the door shut. Then she turned to face me for the first time, her brown eyes wide and frank. “Dude.”

With just that one word, I knew the cops had spoken to her as well. Without any real hope, I asked, “You don't happen to know where she is, do you?”

“No.” Tiana tossed her hands up and let them drop to her sides. “Do you?” When I shook my head, she bit her lip, looked away, and then met my eyes again, her brow furrowed worriedly. “Flynn … how freaked should I be here? Honestly.”

The fact that she even had to ask sort of upped the Freak-Out Quotient automatically for me. “The cops told me they think she's probably, like, hiding out somewhere, trying to scare Tammy and Jonathan. I mean, it kinda sounds like her, doesn't it?” I received a noncommittal hitch of one shoulder from Tiana, and continued, meekly, “I thought maybe she might've talked about it with you.”

“She didn't, or I'd have told her it was a stupid-ass idea,” Tiana replied in a level tone, and she was clearly being honest. The girl was not exactly known for keeping her opinions to herself for the sake of diplomacy.

“When
is
the last time you talked to her?”

Shifting her weight unhappily, Tiana made a strange face. “I don't know. Maybe a couple of weeks ago?”

“What, did your iPhones melt down from overuse or something?” I asked, only half kidding. January and Tiana sort of famously couldn't last five whole minutes without one of them texting the other; January once drowned a phone in the shower because she was trying to write Tiana something she'd forgotten to tell her when they'd been Skyping ten minutes previously. “I thought you guys talked, like, constantly!”

Tiana shifted again, and her strange expression became more pronounced, a mingling of unhappiness, embarrassment, and vulnerability. I had never seen Tiana—a girl who once chased a guy built like a linebacker across a Burger King parking lot, loudly and publicly denouncing him as a dick for knocking the cup of change out of a homeless man's hand—look the least bit vulnerable. “Actually, Flynn, she's kind of been … I don't know, icing me out lately.”

“Did you guys have a fight or something?”

“No!” Tiana looked up at me, puzzled, more worried lines appearing on her forehead. “That's just it! I … Flynn, did she say anything to you? Did I … do something to piss her off?”

“Not that I know of, but … to be honest, she's kind of been shutting me out, too. It's like, we would text for a bit, but then she'd blow me off whenever we'd try to make plans.”

“Same here.” Tiana slumped against her locker, her dark hair falling into her face. She brushed it back with fingertips painted a lilac hue that contrasted against her flawless sienna skin. “I mean, at the beginning of the year we made this huge pact that things would be exactly like always, that even though we were going to different schools, we would still talk all the time and that nothing would change. But, I don't know … it's hard to keep that up sometimes. It's one thing when you're just hanging out at rehearsals or whatever and talking shit, but it's another to write texts while you're supposed to be paying attention to other things. I guess I got lazy and sort of let things drift a bit.”

“I can relate,” I admitted.

“But for, like, the last few weeks or something, it's like she's barely bothered to respond to any of my messages. I was worried that maybe she was pissed at me.” Tiana was looking at me with a doubtful expression. “It's weird, because Jan's the kind of girl who tells you to your face when you've crossed the line, you know? But she never said anything to me. Never even called me out for dropping the ball on our pact. I was always getting into it with her dipshit stepbrother, and for a while I thought maybe he'd gone crying to Mr. Walker and had me put on the Do Not Fly list, but Jan wouldn't have put up with that. So I don't get it.”

“Me neither,” I mumbled.

Tiana gave a nervous laugh. “I guess I also kinda worried that maybe she was starting to go native over there at Dumbass. You know? Like, she was spending all day rubbing designer elbows with her new rich-bitch classmates, and maybe it went to her head. Like suddenly I wasn't good enough for her anymore.”

“I don't believe that,” I said comfortingly. I couldn't think of a single nice thing January had ever said about her “rich-bitch classmates” that would lead me to believe she'd decided to cross over to the dark side, even if Jonathan Walker had forced her to socialize with them from time to time. “But while we're on the subject, what do you know about the people she hung out with at Dumbass?”

“Jackshit,” Tiana answered promptly. “I know Mr. Walker forced her to go to some parties, but she never actually liked the chicks that threw them. I guess she
might
have made some friends over there once she joined the drama club?” Tiana's tone was skeptical. “I mean, she spent hours every single day after school hanging out with the same group of people, and she mentioned a few of them to me more than once, but that's about it.”

“Who were the people she mentioned, specifically?” I was genuinely curious. January had never told me much about the drama club, except to say that the actors sucked, their play was incomprehensible, and the drama coach was a freak.

Tiana made a helpless gesture. “I don't know any of their real names, because she always used nicknames that she'd made up. Like, at the first meeting January went to, she texted me that this one girl was wearing a sparkly crop top that was apparently straight out of an eighties music video, so she called her Sparkles. It just kind of stuck, and after that, every time she talked about this girl she was just ‘Sparkles.' ‘Sparkles wants to know if Jonathan is hiring interns for his senate campaign,' and ‘I wrote the quadratic formula on the back of my hand in math, and Sparkles literally just asked me if it was a tattoo.' Stuff like that.”

“Sparkles,” I repeated with deflating hopes. There went my plan to scrounge up new leads for the Missing Persons Unit.

“Yeah. I remember Sparkles for sure, and there was also Pube-stache, Pink, and FBA.”

“FBA?” I asked, not caring for an explanation of “Pube-stache.”

“Fake British Accent. Like, this bitch apparently lived in London for a year when she was twelve, and pretends it permanently made her sound like Kate Middleton or some shit.”

Great.
I could tell Detectives Moses and Wilkerson to head to Dumas and round up Sparkles, Pink, Pube-stache, and Fake British Accent. January would be home again by bedtime.

The bell rang for class, and the hall started pulsing with activity, people streaming in both directions while Tiana and I stayed right where we were.

Warily, I looked at Micah's girlfriend, my girlfriend's best friend, and watched her eye the passing crowd. I'd had no idea a rift had formed between her and January. I'd always thought of them as scary-close—the kind of close where I would tell January something in confidence and then hear it repeated back to me out of Tiana's mouth. It always made me wonder if January had told Tiana she suspected that I might be gay. Almost undoubtedly she had, which meant that, by extension, Micah had almost undoubtedly heard about it, too.