Don't Stop Now (4 page)

After I listen to the message, I'm in stun mode. Penny really did it. Did she do it? She must have done it.

“Your face looks weird,” Josh says to me, and I'm too shocked by the message to reply in any sort of annoyed way. “Hello?” he asks, poking my shoulder with his finger.

“We completely underestimated this freak.”

“Which freak? That guy waiting in line for the bathroom with all those packages of cheese curds? I'm glad I was ahead of him. Who knows what he planned to do with those things.”

“No,” I interrupt Josh with a bite. “Don't speak for a minute. I need to process.” Josh opens his mouth to say something, then reads the seriousness on my face and shuts himself up. “That was a message from the police. Apparently, Penny's purse was found in her car, with her wallet and cell phone inside, although her license was missing. Her car keys were in the ignition and the driver's door was ajar.”

“The door was a jar? But how can that be?” Josh jokes this pathetic joke we've made a million times before, at the absurdity of anyone using the word
ajar
. I only now used it because the cop did, and it's pissing me off that Josh is being so goofy about all of this.

“I'm just reporting what the officer said. The
police officer
? Who called
me
on
my
phone?” I emphasize the words to drill it into his brain that police are now calling me to ask where Penny is.

“Wait—the police called you about Penny. So that means that they think…What, exactly?” Josh is more serious, as if he finally recognizes the possible weight of the situation.

“I don't know if they think anything. He said he was calling to let me know that Penny is missing and that if I have any information I should call him.”

“But why you? Why'd he call
you
?”

“Because I was the last phone number that Penny called from her cell phone at four thirty in the morning.” I sigh at the idiocy of it all. Not only did Penny seriously make it look like she may have been kidnapped—abducted? I don't know what to call it, since she's not technically a kid—by leaving her car, purse, and phone, but she's implicated me by calling.

“So how do we know she didn't actually get taken somehow? Like, if you were going to run away, wouldn't you take your purse? Or at least your phone?” Josh doesn't seem to get the illogical way Penny's brain works. Or doesn't work.

“The whole mad scheme was because she didn't want people to know where she was going. And, I gotta say, I'm sort of impressed. Leaving her purse, the door open. Very believable. But her license was missing, so isn't that like a dead giveaway that she took it out? Who kidnaps someone and is, like, ‘I better take their ID in case we need to rent a DVD or something'?” I'm wavering between kind of annoyed and kind of in awe. Annoyed that I'm the keeper of secrets and awed by her follow-through, albeit a shady one. “She's usually so passive.”

“If she's truly faking her own kidnapping just so she can get away from her life, I'd have to label that one as passive-
aggressive
. It's like the wussiest thing on earth to not have the balls to say, ‘Look, I'm leaving town. Don't follow me, don't try to stop me. I'll call when I feel like it.' But she”—he stutters, incredulous—“she can't even leave a note? Instead, she puts you in the middle of some sort of elaborate kidnapping plot, just so she can get a little love, and she's off roaming the country. How do we know the cops aren't calling you because her parents tipped them off or something? Maybe they think
you
kidnapped her! And you're holding her for ransom and won't take less than an olive tree in exchange for her life,” Josh pontificates animatedly.

I know he's kidding, but it's kind of weird that the police called me. Like, maybe they do think I know something? Because I do. But they don't know that. Or do they?

My cell phone rings again, and I jump. Thank god it's my mom's number that appears on the caller ID.

“Hi, Ma,” I answer, relieved.

“Hi, honey. Everything OK?” Mom sounds concerned but like she's trying not to.

“Sure. Yeah. Why?”

“Um, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, sweetheart, but a policeman came by the house looking for information about your friend Penny. It seems, well, she may have been abducted.” My mom sounds devastated, like this is the worst news a mom could tell her daughter. I want to give it up, right now, to end this ridiculous plot of Penny's, but something stops me. A big, disgusting, faux-military vehicle in shiny suburban silver (reminiscent of Penny's mom's baby, I mean,
Hummer
), complete with skinny mom in baseball cap, pulls up next to us at the Cheese Castle. The woman gets out, two kids barely visible in the backseat above the auto armor, and says to them, “I'll be right back.” Then she closes and locks the door—
beep beep
—leaving the kids in the car. You don't do that. That's Mom 101. I saw this episode of
Oprah
about a mom who left her kid in the car because he was sleeping and she didn't want to wake him, and he died. Dead. Suffocated by hot air. My mom would never do that. But Penny's, I'm not so sure.

“Ma, I don't want you to worry. Don't ask how I know, but I'm pretty sure Penny's all right. Call it friend's intuition. You have to trust me on that.”

“It's good to think so positively, Lil.”

“No, Ma, I mean, I know, like,
for sure
that she's fine.” I wish she could see my face to read the certainty in my eyes.

“Lillian, is there something you're not telling me?” I'm relieved to hear a bit of the suspicious mom in her voice, like she's starting to believe me.

“Maybe.” I laugh a little, trying to reassure her. And myself. “I think there's been a misunderstanding between her and her family, and I don't want you to worry about it.”

“Are you sure? Because that policeman…”

“I'll call him and straighten things out, Ma. You don't have to get involved at all. No worries. Done,” I convince her. And just like that I get an idea in my head of how I'm going to deal with this. “I love you, Mom. I'll talk to you later.”

“Love you, too. Be good.” And she hangs up.

Josh watches me, one eyebrow raised. “So you're turning Penny in, just like that? Game over?”

“Not exactly,” I say guiltily. “I told my mom that so she wouldn't worry.” I look over at the Hummer. “Good moms worry,” I say.

At that moment, a police car pulls into the Cheese Castle lot. I start a bit, wondering for a minute if they're after me, but this is a Wisconsin state trooper, and I seriously doubt things have gotten this extreme that there's an APB out on me. The cop probably just has to get his cheese on. A female police officer steps out of the car and slams the door. I look over at the Hummer again, windows hardly cracked. “Excuse me, officer.” I barely recognize my voice as I walk toward the cop. I catch Josh's panicked expression, knowing he probably thinks what I'm going to do has something to do with Penny. Which it does, albeit indirectly.

“May I help you?” she asks with a twinge of suspicion. I see her eyeing Josh, who's now sitting on the hood of his car, shirtless in his dick shades, dropping cheese curds delicately into his mouth.

“I just wanted to let you know that a woman left some kids in that Hummer over there. And it's kind of hot out, you know?” I want to add that real moms don't leave their kids locked up in environmentally destructive tanks while gallivanting about inside cheese meccas. A real mom would bring her kids in and buy them cheese in the shape of mystical beasts. Or cows.

“Did you see where the woman went?” the officer asks.

“Inside the Cheese Castle.” I almost laugh at how absurd that sounds. “She's wearing a powder blue baseball cap,” I add.

“Thank you.” She nods her head and walks with purpose into the Castle.

“Josh,” I say, turning toward the shirtless wonder on the hood. “I don't want to go home.”

“Yeah, sure, we can go somewhere else. We got nowhere to be.” He plucks a curd out of the cheese water and plops it into his mouth. “Just melt on your tongue, don't they?”

“No.” I shake my head. “I mean I don't want to go home today. I think I need to get away, too,” I proclaim.

Josh sits up, sparked by the idea. “Where do you want to go?” he asks, mischief glinting off his mirror shades.

“To find Penny,” I answer.

“I'm in,” Josh declares.

“Wait—I'm supposed to convince you with all sorts of important and meaningful reasons about why I must do this. A quest unfulfilled, and all that.”

“Whatever. You don't have to sell me. The open road. A far-off destination. I'm there.”

Maybe it's good that was so easy. If Josh wasn't so enthusiastic, I might have caved and gone straight to Penny's parents' house to confess.

“But riddle me this: Why are we going to see Penny? Isn't she, like, the root of all stupidity at this point?”

“No, well, not really. She's just lost. And if we find her, then I've fulfilled my promise to her and myself that I won't tell anyone where she is. Then I'm going to make her turn herself in, tell her to grow a set, and finally rid my psyche of this hold she's had on me for the last year.”

“Fair enough. So do we go home and pack? Or should we rough it?” Josh asks.

I'd hate to go back home and find the cops waiting outside my house. Or worse, run into my mom and have to lie or be guilted into confessing something. “Let's just go. We can buy some stuff along the way.” Which really means Josh can use his dad's credit card and we can buy whatever we want. I never was one to take advantage of that as much as other people, although I rarely said no to a free meal. That would be rude, right? But this is the perfect—even noble—excuse to mooch. “But along the way where? Do we just head west and hope to find her standing on the side of the road?”

“West sounds best,” Josh amuses himself. “Nobody ever found adventure by driving east. Or at least not in the movies.”

“Which is practically real life anyways,” I concur. “Our ultimate goal can be Portland because that's probably—maybe, anyways—where she might be. It's the biggest lead we have. And it certainly is west. About as far west as we can go, really. West to Portland!” I raise my pointer finger into the air in a declaration. Then Josh gets this
boing!
idea look on his face. “What's going on in that wacky head of yours?” I ask.

“Best idea ever,” Josh declares. “
Hiding Out
.”

“Oh, no. No. No?”
Hiding Out
is this absurd movie from the eighties that always seems to be on the local crap channel at two in the morning. It stars Jon Cryer, the dad from
Two and a Half Men
, as someone who has to go into hiding for witnessing a murder or something, so he stops at a gas station, takes an ugly T-shirt off a rack, grabs a razor, bleach, and some shaving cream, heads to the bathroom and proceeds to shave off his beard and bleach his hair into the ugliest skunk do. Then he enrolls in high school. “Which part of
Hiding Out
are we talking exactly?” I'm leery. “Because I'm not going back to high school. Or shaving my beard.”

“Let's buy ourselves wardrobes from Mars' Cheese Castle! And dye our hair in the bathroom!” Josh is hyper-enthused, almost more than the time he found a copy of the ancient
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
computer game on eBay. A little scary, really. But also kind of funny, too. I shrug an OK, and we head inside. At least it's the beginning of a plan.

On our way in, we pass the cop and the baseball-hat bitch-mom coming out. The cop nods at me, and I wink at her.

“Did you just wink at that cop?” Josh whispers.

“Yep,” I answer. I just winked at a cop.

The Castle is buzzing with tourists sifting through fridges and freezers of cheese fare. We make our way over to the racks of Wisconsinalia clothing. Josh pulls out a green shirt that proclaims,
WISCONSIN: SMELL OUR DAIRY AIR
. I laugh and find a tank top reading,
WISCONSIN: SMELLS LIKE CHEESE
.

“Half of these are about smells,” I note.

“And the other half are about cows.”

“And the other half are about cheese
and
cows,” I add.

We grab a selection of goofy shirts, some grotesque sport shorts, Packers boxers, bikini undies covered in cheese wedges for me, and a couple Badgers fleece blankets. In the grocery section we pack a Styrofoam cooler with pop, chips, CornNuts, beef jerky, bread and, of course, cheese. Josh adds a couple of cheese hats—giant yellow foam hats in the shape of cheese wedges—at the register. I give him a quizzical look. “In case we need a disguise,” he says. As if wearing wedges of yellow Swiss on our heads will make us incognito. The hair dye will have to come later, since that is one product that Mars' Cheese Castle does not carry. If only it were cheese based.

Whenever I imagined a no-holds-barred shopping spree, à la
Pretty Woman
, I thought it would be in a fancy department store, complete with doting salesgirls and an appropriate montage soundtrack. Never did it involve cheese products.

We pack up the car and are about to drive away when I realize, “Wait. We don't have any maps.”

“Maps? We don't need no stinkin' maps,” Josh accents.

“Right. We already barely have any idea where we're going, but we're going to try and get there without maps? I don't think so.”

“All we have to do is drive west, baby.” Josh has one hand on the steering wheel, one hand hanging next to me on my seat back.

“Yeah, and end up fried to a crisp in Death Valley. I'll be right back.”

“You have a morbid imagination!” Josh yells after me as I walk into the Cheese Castle.

I pick out a few maps in the Castle, add in a pack of Chuckles, and then we're off.

“So which way do we go?” Josh asks.

I pull out the Wisconsin map and scan westward. Portland is a long way off, so we have a lot of possible terrain to cover before we either (a) find Penny or (b) give up and turn her in. As long as we're on the road, we may as well stop and see some of our glorious country before I go off to school (or get thrown in jail for aiding a fraud) and Josh goes, well, somewhere. I trace my finger along the treasure of lines and spot something that jars a wonderful family (pre-divorce devastation) road-trip memory. “The House on the Rock!” I yell. “We have to go!” I'm so excited I'm bouncing in my seat.

“What's the House on the Rock?” Josh asks, intrigued.

“Words do not describe, my dear. Just drive where I tell you.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

“I can't hear you…,” I sing.

“Aye aye, Captain!” Josh cries, and we drive off singing the
SpongeBob
theme song.

About an hour into the two-hour drive to House on the Rock, I remember I told my mom that I'd call the police back. Basking in the state of Wisconsin masked but didn't rub out the whole point of this impromptu journey: Penny the kidnapee.

“I have to call the police.” I turn down the stereo and yell over the open windows, “To tell them I don't know anything.”

“Lying to the cops. Nice!” Josh enthuses. I doubt he'd be that way if he was the one doing the calling. Actually, he probably would.

“I need to center myself. Get my lie face on.” I close my eyes and try to remember why I'm covering for Penny in the first place. Hummer. Babysitter. Olive tree. I feel a
pluff
on top of my head, and I look up to see that Josh has installed the cheese hat on me.

“Your disguise,” he informs me.

“Naturally,” I agree. “Roll up your window so I can hear.” Josh uses the hand crank on the aged Eurosport door to muffle the highway noise, and I clear my throat. I beep through my phone to find the cop's number, then will myself to hit Send.

“Sergeant Sundstrom.” His serious voice answers after one ring.

“Yeah, hi, this is Lillian Erlich. You left me a message….”

“Right, yes. We're looking for Penny Nelson. We believe her to be missing. You were the last person she spoke to. Did she say anything about going out? Meeting up with someone? Leaving town?” His questions sound slightly accusatory, as if he knows I know something. Is there some heat reader that can sense my guilt through the phone? I grip the cheese hat for strength.

“No, sorry, she didn't say anything. Is she going to be OK?” I fake distress, but it's difficult when Josh grabs my knee and busts up. I shoot him a shut-up look, and he takes his hand off my knee to put a shush finger to his lips.

“Well, what did she call you about at four thirty in the morning?” He clips as if calling someone at four thirty in the morning is something unheard of. Does he remember being eighteen? I argue with him in my head, convincing myself I'm completely in the right.

“Just, you know, to talk. About her night. Her boyfriend.”

“What can you tell me about her boyfriend?” Is this a trick question? Am I somehow going to drag Gavin into this? Should I? Wouldn't be so bad for the cops to put a little scare into him. Why not.

“Well, truthfully, officer, he's kind of a dick. Pardon my French. Cheats on her. Says nasty things to her. Maybe worse. Hard to say. She doesn't tell me everything.” There's a pause, and I can hear him scribbling everything down. “Look, I kind of have to go because I'm driving and shouldn't really be talking on the phone for safety reasons, but if you hear anything, please keep me posted. I'm really worried.”

“Sure thing, miss. I'll be sure to call you if I need to talk to you.” Again with the tone. We hang up.

Josh claps admirably. “Well done, Cheesehead.” I pull the sponge hat off and toss it into the backseat. Josh and I roll our windows down, and the loud music resumes.

That wasn't so hard. Lying to the police. It almost helped suppress the guilt I'm sort of feeling about not telling Penny's parents. Maybe I should wear a cheese hat more often.