Don't Stop Now (2 page)

“Wait. What?” Josh looks at me like he isn't sure he heard me right. “How can she have faked her own kidnapping? How can she fake a kidnapping to begin with? And why would she bother? She's eighteen. What does she need to fake anything for except buying alcohol? And she didn't even have to do that because her parents always left the liquor cabinet open anyway. Remember that night with the Kahlua?” I remember, since I vowed never to allow the tainting of my precious coffee, or anything else for that matter, with alcohol again. “But back to the loon fest at hand. Are you sure that's what she said?”

“I'm trying to remember.” I stir some woodchips around with my toe, revealing the dirt underneath. Circle. Circle. Dot. I've just made a woodchip crop circle. “She was sort of going on about Gavin.” Gavin being her mostly, sometimes ex, boyfriend.
Mostly
when he wants to be with other girls, not when he wants to be with Penny. Convenient.

“No?” Josh feigns surprise. He sits across the bars from me now, on the opposite steps. He removes his shoes, no socks, and plucks up individual chips with his toes.

“Yeah, that's why I was only half listening. I feel bad because I know it was more crappy stuff, like him saying how fat she was getting, or how she's not nearly as cute as some of the freshmen. I don't know, it grosses me out to think about it. But I can only tell her he's a dick so many times. I don't even know what she wants to hear from me anymore. Sometimes it's like she looks at me like I'm going to reassure her that he's a great guy. No can do.”

“So—fake kidnapping?” Josh attempts to toss a chip with his toes, but it just slips through. He tries again.

I scan my brain for memories. “I think I changed the subject. Asked her about that guy she met on spring break when her family went to Disney World.”

“The dude from Portland?” Josh flips chips from his toes toward my crop circle. I think he's trying to make a bull's-eye. I'm always amazed at what goes on up there in his head, how he's able to be so light about some things, serious when I need it, and remember just about everything. Even when it's about some random guy that some not-so-close friend met on a vacation.

“Yeah—Ethan. But when I brought him up, she shushed me. Like, actual full-on librarian shushing.”

“You know, librarians don't really shush people as much as you think. That's a stereotype.” He tries again with a toe toss. Not even close.

I sigh dismissively. “You know what I mean. It was weird. Gavin wasn't even in the room. He wasn't even her
boyfriend
at that particular millisecond, and she's all paranoid that he's gonna hear her talk about another guy. Which she has every right to do.” Josh nods, still looking in the direction of his toes. “What's she so afraid of?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

Josh looks up, chip still stuck between his toes, and asks, “Have you ever seen him in gym class? The guy's a beast. We were playing soccer, by which I mean I was standing in the goal talking to George, and the six bros in the class were bobbing and weaving and man-slapping one another all over the place, and here comes Gavin out of nowhere with the ball. Slams it right into the net. Dudes behind him are spewing names at me I do not care to repeat, and I'm like,”—he holds his arms up in surrender—“‘Sorry.' Gavin busts up to me, all in my face, ‘You got a problem, Turdman?' For which I just answered with one of my patented Erdman looks.” Josh's looks are both hilariously ambiguous and full of meaning if you know how to read them. “And he's still in my face. I'm like, ‘Look, I'm a pacifist, man. Take your macho crap to someone who gives a rat's ass.' For which he declares me a fag and struts away.”

“I am so glad we don't have coed gym,” I proclaim. “Or didn't, I mean,” and I smile at the thought that I will never be forced to do anything phys ed again in my entire life.

“Point being,” Josh tries to get me back on subject, which is not unusual, “the guy's an unpredictable freak. I'm not saying
I'm
scared of him.”

“Of course not,” I tease.

“But I've heard some things. Locker room things that weren't meant to leave its sanctity.”

“Kind of like Vegas, but not at all fun and definitely more stanky.”

“Exactly. But none of it good, and all of it reeking of douchebag boyfriend.”

Grrr. Why did I even get myself involved with this charity case of a girl? “So I'm starting to piece this memory together a little more. Penny is bitching about Gavin and another girl. Doesn't want to talk about herself and another guy. Then the music got loud. Michael Jackson, ‘Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'.' Everyone starts to dance. I wanted to but had to deal with Penny. Tragic. Still couldn't help myself from moving a little, when she whispers something to me. It was one of those conversations where you nod and pretend to hear everything, just to appease the person. She never turns up her voice volume, even when things are loud around her. Drives me crazy.”

“Focus, Lil, focus.” Josh manages to flip a chip right into the center of one of my circles. “Yesss!” A small fist pump.

“Um, focus?” I chide. Josh smiles. “I'm thinking she said something about having to leave, but not wanting Gavin to know why or where. Doesn't want to make him mad. Then she mentioned Portland again. And then, maybe I'm just crazy…” Josh nods in agreement. “Shut up. But I think she said that she had this idea. She might have even said ‘good idea.' To fake her own kidnapping.”

“That doesn't make any sense.” Josh tires of his toe-chip game and stands up to hang from the bars again. “I mean, at eighteen you don't even have to run away. You can just
go.
Why would she have to fake her own kidnapping?”

“I'm trying to figure that out. If she was going to run away, she clearly would have said ‘run away,' which doesn't sound anything like ‘fake my own kidnapping.' That seems overly bizarre for anyone, let alone Penny.” I lean forward, grab a particularly large wood chip and begin crossing out the circles with
X
s. “But let's just say, hypothetically, that someone, possibly even someone named Penny, does fake her own kidnapping. Why?”

“Because she wants attention?” Josh suggests, dangling.

“But Penny didn't want attention. Not that kind, anyway. Not the kind that would let Gavin in on her tryst with another guy. He'd go ballistic, right?”

“So maybe she'd fake her own kidnapping to take the focus off her and put it on a fake kidnapper?” Josh moves his way onto one bar and back to another, legs bent, trying to keep his six-foot-three-inch frame from touching the scrapey ground. I nod in semi-agreement, and Josh continues, “But that's jacked-up.” He crosses the bars now toward me. “Kidnapping gets you
and
your kidnapper a buttload of attention. Media-grade attention.”

“Yeah, but I think that's how Penny's head works. I bet she didn't even think of that. It's like every thought she has is based around Gavin. Remember how every time we went to a movie and we'd invite her, she'd have to ask, ‘How long is it?' Because she might be expecting a text. So I'd say, ‘Just keep your damn phone on,' and she'd be all, ‘No, because Gavin freaks on people who text during movies, and I don't want to piss anyone off.' Um, Gavin's not even at the theater, and he's the person you are hoping to get a text from anyway, so why would it matter if you texted him at the movies? And she'd say, ‘He knows.'”

Josh lands in front of me and plops himself down on the woodchips at my feet. “So let's put ourselves in Penny's brain.” We both shudder. “Penny wants to leave town. She needs to move on from Gavin, distance herself from family, suburban life in general. There's some nice guy in Portland waiting for her. But because of some not-so-nice guy here, possibly psycho, she needs to go away
secretly
. Not of her own volition? If she just leaves, she has to give reasons to everyone—”

“She could just leave without telling. She doesn't have to fake her own kidnapping,” I interrupt.

“We're in Penny's brain, remember? If she's kidnapped, well, what choice did she have in getting away? Maybe this is her ploy to get Gavin to actually worry about her instead of making her worry.”

I think on it for a minute. “I guess. Still sounds completely absurd. And I don't think she'd really do it, do you?”

“Not sure. But what did she mean then by ‘I did it'?” We spend a minute perplexed; Josh allows the summer breeze to sway him. I draw stars in the dirt with the stick.

My cell phone rings, and we both startle. I check the caller ID. “Oh my god.” I look at Josh. “It's Penny's home line. It's gotta be her dad.”

Josh drops down and puts his hand on my shoulder. “It's probably just Penny, telling you that what she meant by ‘I did it' was that she bought a new pair of shoes or something.”

I shake my head. “She never calls me from this number. She always calls from her cell. I only know it's her parents' number because they always call me when they're looking for Penny because she refuses to answer her cell when they call.”

“Are you gonna answer it? Maybe it's nothing.”

But I know it's something. She
did it
. Whatever “it” is. I click the answer button. “Hello?”

Rewind to the beginning of senior year. I'm on my no-AP cruise-control plan. Applied to a handful of colleges with good creative writing departments, but nothing overly ambitious to keep me out. Lots of room for a chill senior year. Figured I'd work hard when I'm actually paying for the classes.

Lando Cronenberg (I know, right?) threw a Labor Day blowout at his parents' condo. Not much of a blowout, considering he has neighbors above and below, and his mom and dad are heads of the condo association. But still, fun enough with the usual crew, a few close friends, Josh, and an assortment of people who know people I like and would say hi to me in the hall or sit near me if no one I liked more were in one of my classes. We were playing dirty Scattergories and eating lots of Lando's patented seven-layer guac when in walks Penny Nelson. Shriveled into herself, long brown hair, floor-length black dress. I guess she could have been classified as emo or goth except that her demeanor and behavior just didn't seem that outwardly expectant. She wasn't doing it for everyone else's attention. Whatever she was doing, in fact, seemed to garner her as little attention as possible. In the three previous years we spent together at school, we never actually spent any time together. Well, that's not entirely true. I can probably go back and look at pictures from any party or show or coffee shop that I went to with a group of people, and she'd be there in the background, holding up a wall.

Lando's Labor Day extravaganza was like any other, except that this time I noticed Penny before she melted into the scenery. Maybe it was the way the light hit her face or the fact that the room was only a little bigger than a shoe box, maybe a boot box, but she looked sort of
broken
. Shadowed and caved-in and unbelievably sad. Gavin, her Neanderthal, was there, too. They walked in together, and the second they entered the room, he beelined for the beer and left her to fend for herself. Not that anyone should be fending when they know everyone in a room. But if what I knew about Penny was any indication, she probably didn't
really
know anybody.

I stood up, climbed over a few floor-seated buddies and grabbed myself some tortilla chips and a scoop of dip. I approached Penny cautiously, as one would to get a closer look at a deer without scaring it off.

“Hey,” I said and smiled a closemouthed, not too over the top, but trying somewhat to be warm smile.

“Hey,” she replied, with a dart of eye contact and an equally noncommittal grin.

“You want some dip?” I asked. I don't know why, but I felt like it was my duty to get this girl out of her slump and into this party.

She shrugged an answer that I thought meant no, until she reached a ghostly hand toward the chips, grabbed one, and dipped the tiniest corner into the guac. Her fingernails were chewed to the quick, and her deep blue nail polish was chewed along with them. She cautiously brought the tortilla chip to her mouth and bit off the barely green corner.

“Good, huh?” I asked enthusiastically. It felt like I was force-feeding a child. Like, “Choo choo, open wide.” I took up a chip of my own, slathered on the dip, and stuffed it in my mouth. Aware of the guac goatee I had just given myself, I looked over at Penny and gave a guaccy grin. That's when she smiled, a real smile, a smile that showed she actually had teeth and made her eyes crinkle and everything, and that's how it all started. It became my goal, my mission, my
quest
, to get this girl to smile again. Even if that meant putting effort into something during my senior year.

The nice thing about including Penny in my periphery of friends was that she wasn't usually available to hang out, so it wasn't always all that different from life BP (before Penny). She was usually so glommed on to Gavin that my friendship with her mostly involved me asking her to hang out and her telling me she was busy. All right. But when she was available because of being ditched or dumped or any other variety of Gavin neglect, she was more or less a tagalong. Because no matter how much we tried to include her, Penny just sort of dragged herself behind us, like a deflated balloon left on a string.

I've had friends who talked about their boyfriends
a lot
, and I'll admit to being that girl once or twice (when my short-lived relationships consumed every bit of my soul, only to turn out to be imposters of shams of relationships and really just mildly amusing grope sessions that ended with little to no conversation and even less admiration. No thank you). But Penny's boyfriend-speak is painful, and constant. And try as I might, nothing I say has changed that. Fight after fight, breakup after breakup, long-sleeved shirts in the middle of Indian Summer…She just stayed with him. Even when he wasn't with her.

My friends, the close ones, made it question number two every time we made plans. 1. What do you want to do? 2. Is Penny coming? And based on number two's answer, people might show or not show. Except for Josh. He always showed, at my request, even when he had something better to do. Sometimes even when he had a girlfriend, he was ditching last minute to be there. I should've just dumped Penny, left her behind to do whatever it was she was doing before I took on her charity case (What
was
she doing?), but I just couldn't. She was a quest, after all.