The Missing (18 page)

butter and fluff

sandwich in a locked bathroom stall

during lunch when she noticed the blue cardboard sign taped to the wall: “
Become a Baker Street Irregular. Make Friends and Solve Crime in Your Spare Time!
— Sponsored by the Sherlock Holmes Admiration Society.” She got so excited that she’d dropped her Fluffernutter on the pee-sticky floor right then and there.

Sherlock Holmes was cool under pressure. Smart. Classy. A loner, sure, but people respected him. Even Data from
Star Trek: TNG
wanted to be more like Sherlock. Hooray! She was going to become a Baker Street Irregular! Sophomore year was going to
rock
.

Every September she tried something new. Seventh grade was the year of the disco hot pants and matching feather barrettes. She’d been going for
Xanadu
-era Oli- via Newton-John, but achieved transvestite-hooker- with-something-to-prove instead. In the eighth grade she tried smiling all day long. She figured popular peo- ple were happy, so if she grinned like a moron they’d mistake her for one of their own. “Whatcha so happy

about
Jeannie
?” Justin Ross had mocked relentlessly from the seat in back of her (why did their names have to be so close in the alphabet?). Then there was cheer- leading. She didn’t even want to
think
about those pretend pom-poms. But seeing that sign for Sherlock Holmes while picking the hunks of Wonder bread from between her teeth, she’d decided that things would change. No one was going to flick spitballs into her hair that she wouldn’t find until she got home and her dad shined his shit-eating grin and asked, “Is it snowing loogies out?” Justin Ross wasn’t going to pull her chair out from under her so she fell on her ass. Teachers would stop looking at their seat chart to remember her name. Yes, sophomore year was going to be different.

For one, she had a not-so-secret weapon. Over the summer, magic happened, and her boobs had swelled from A cups to full Cs. She’d stolen a $19.99 red ging- ham strapless dress from Target to show them off. Stowed it in her backpack, and then bought cheap Bonne Bell raspberry lip shimmer at the counter so the security guards didn’t get suspicious. She was wearing the dress in honor of club day today, and when she looked in the mirror she knew she was the spitting im- age of a sexed-up Mary Ann from
Gilligan’s Island
.

Right now she was strutting through the gymnasium while her bra-less boobs jiggled (if you’ve got it, flaunt it!). School was over, and practically everybody was at club day. Well, everybody who showed up. A ton of kids were out sick today.

Ubiquitous table tents advertised things like year- book committee, computer programming, and theater set design. She scanned the rows for the Sherlock Holmes Society, but didn’t see it. “Cheerleaders Are S-E-X-Y!” one sign announced, and around it, girls with perfect figures and dimpled smiles lazed like lizards enjoying

the sun. She walked past them as fast as she could, be- cause last year she’d tried out for the JV team. The try- outs were a sham, it turned out. The senior selection committee picked their little sisters for the team. That was how most things worked in Corpus Christi. Every- body told you that you had a fair shot, but they were full of shit.

Anyway, she’d tried out because her dad was always harping on how important it was to be on the winning side of things, and cheerleaders were definitely winners. When her turn came, she shouted her lungs out in front of almost every girl in her ninth grade class:
Every
body in Corpus Christi wanted to be a cheerleader. She’d waved her arms and moved not just with energy, but with real grace. Some of the girls had smiled like they were impressed, and she’d thought:
Three weeks holler- ing “Rah-Rah-Team” in my dad’s moldy basement, and I finally found something I’m good at.

Suddenly one of the judges in the bleachers snickered. Her teeth were blindingly white, like she gargled with bleach. She covered her mouth to keep from exploding, like the sight of Jean Rizzo holding pretend pom-poms because the stockroom had run out of real ones was just too funny. All the popular girls, Jean realized right then, had magically gotten real pom-poms, and the los- ers hadn’t even gotten batons. The girls with pom-poms were in the running, and all the rest, no matter how hard they worked, no matter how many fake catcalls and spitballs they endured, would never make the cut.

That’s when she lost steam. She’d whispered the final “Go-o-o-o Trojans!” before dropping her imaginary pom-poms and wandering off the athletic field. Maybe the lucky girls who’d made the team still remembered that, or even felt bad about it. Maybe they didn’t care, so long as they got what they wanted. At home that

day, her father was waiting. When he saw the tears in her eyes, he shined his ever reliable shit-eating grin and asked, “Didn’t make the cut, Jeannie?”

Now, everywhere she looked at the club sign-up event, kids were laughing and talking like the high school belonged to them. Like they were kings. Even the shaggy-haired, peach fuzz–faced, waiting-for-the- apocalypse-so-I-can-shoot-up-the-school rifle-team kids were yucking it up. She walked down the rows of tables like passing through a gauntlet: auto shop gearheads, red-eyed environmental club potheads, Ivy League– bound young Republicans.

That was the thing about the people at this school. Even the losers had it easy. Sure, some of them acted hu- man. If they teased her too much, they felt bad and apologized later. The dorky ones even invited her to sit with them at lunch, but in the end they were all the same. Their lives were perfect. They worried about luxuries like the prom, boys, homework, and whether they’d go to college out of state. They didn’t have to steal their clothes, and nobody ever handed them a jar of fluff and told them it counted as dairy. They came home every night to a home-cooked meal, and she came home to a shit-eating grin.

But passing through that club gauntlet, she decided that today everything would change. She’d find people just like her, who loved Sherlock Holmes. Maybe there was a secret society of them, even, and they ran the school. She’d add her name to the sign-up sheet, and to- night she’d get an anonymous phone call. A deep- throated, mysterious voice would confide: “The invisible hands that elect the class president. Prom queen. Win- ners of the Battle of the Bands. That’s us, the Sherlock Holmes Society. We’ve been watching you. Sorry we made these last fifteen years so hard, but we needed to

be sure you were cool. Welcome aboard. We knew you had it in you. First meeting’s in Danny Walker’s base- ment. Wear your red dress. You look like Mary Ann from
Gilligan’s Island
in it.”

At the very end of the rows of tables, she found the Sherlock Holmes Society. There was no giant crowd. No official-looking sign-up sheet. No gaggle of popular people quietly nodding their approval as she approached. Nope. The twelve-year-old genius freshman who’d skipped two grades was helming the table. Draped over his shoulders was a checked wool cape, and he was chewing on a decorative corn-cob pipe.

He was pale and doughy, like in bed at night he ate Skippy Super Chunk peanut butter out of the jar with his fingers. He looked at her boobs for a long while, so she crossed her arms over them. He didn’t stop looking, which made her hate him, because only cool boys were supposed to notice the outline of her nipples, and by seeing them become spellbound and announce that they loved her so much they’d kill for her. They’d die for her, or at least buy a porterhouse for her.

The genius freshman chewed on the fake pipe that his parents had probably bought for him as a souvenir from the Indian reservation on Penobscot Island. “We need three people to form a club or the school won’t as- sign a teacher,” he said. Then he flicked the sign-up sheet in her direction like he was doing her a favor. Like he figured she wasn’t smart enough to solve a Sherlock Holmes mystery, but hey, he needed a warm body for the head count.

“Screw you, freshman,” she thought to say ten min- utes later, but in the moment she only mumbled, “This isn’t cheering practice,” and walked away.

At the racks, she unlocked her rusty red boy’s bike that her dad had gotten for her from the dump when

she was a kid. It was too short now, and her knees scrunched when she rode it. No one else was out here. Every other kid in Corpus Christi was back at the high school having fun. Even the football team canceled practice for club day. Yeah, right now they were all laughing at the way she’d run out of the auditorium. As soon as she left, the party had started. They were doing keg stands, turning off the lights, hooking up. And the genius freshman, he’d been a test. The Sherlock Holmes Admiration Society really
was
the secret society of pop- ular kids, only to get accepted, you had to shove the freshman’s corn-cob pipe up his ass. Literally.

Her dad was right. She was a loser.

She kicked her bike, which sent sparks of pain through her toes, but she didn’t care. She kicked it again, and this time her whole foot cramped up. It felt good to hurt. She was glad she hurt. The bike fell over, so she jumped on it until its frame bent and its chain came loose, and the plastic flower broke off its handle- bar. She pretended the bike was her school, her dad, the dough-faced genius freshman, her crappy strapless dress from Target. After a few minutes, she was pant- ing. The bike was bent. Some of its paint was ground into the cement, and it sparkled there like red granite dust. A drip of sweat rolled into her eye. The bike lay there, unmoving. The bike was dead.

She started walking. Screw the bike. Screw every- thing. She wished she had a knife so she could cut her- self with it. She wished she’d kicked the bike so hard that it had exploded into metal ash. She wished she could crush the school in the palm of her hands so ev- erybody inside it would die while she laughed. She wanted the blood vessels in her brain to burst so that she’d fall into a coma, and everyone would write cards saying they were sorry for keeping her on the outside all

these years; they’d only been kidding. Really, they liked her.
We took the joke too far
, they’d say.

But that wouldn’t happen. Sophomore year wasn’t going to be any different from freshman year. Sure, her dress fit tighter than a sausage’s second skin, but nobody’d asked her out. Except for the dorkiest fresh- man in the world, nobody had even looked at her. Her grades were bad except in art, where they were medio- cre. Even her online friends didn’t like her. They’d write long, soul-baring notes to each other at first, but after a while, even if she IM’ed ten or fifteen times a day, they stopped answering, and sometimes even blocked her mail. She didn’t have a special talent or a pretty face. Couldn’t run fast or dance. To be honest, the genius freshman had been right. She never figured out Sher- lock Holmes’s cases before the stories ended. Some- times she couldn’t even figure them out
after
the books explained them. This year would be just like last year, which had been like every year before that. She was a nobody. An embarrassment. A sack of shit.

She kept walking. She didn’t want to go home, but she didn’t have any other place to go. Maybe she’d wander around for a few hours, and after dark she’d walk through the front door and tell her dad that she’d joined the club anyway. Been elected president, in fact. He might believe her. At least it would delay the shit-eating grin, like he was so happy they were both swimming in this loser stew together, and he didn’t have to go it alone.

Half a mile down the road, she reached the Puffin Stop. She looked in the window, but Enrique Vargas wasn’t there. Instead his little brother was ringing up sales behind the counter. Enrique was nice. He let her hang around the shop even if she didn’t buy anything. Twice he’d turned a blind eye when she’d reached inside

the revolving spits of the “Frankenator” and stolen two shriveled Ball Park hot dogs. She loved Enrique a little bit. She’d written him three letters, all of which she’d buried under the loose boards in the basement so her dad wouldn’t find them. Probably she should have burned them, but if she’d done that, she figured they wouldn’t come true. “My love,” one of them said, “Even though you’re foreign, I’d die for you. You’re just like Leo from
Titanic
, so I know you’d die for me, too.”

But Enrique’s little brother sucked. At school he sneered at her because she wasn’t pretty, or maybe be- cause he knew he could get away with it. He probably thought if he teased her, people would like him even though he had an accent. He was right. So even though she was thirsty and wanted a Coke and for once had the dollar fifty-five for all sixteen ounces, she kept walking.

She went up the hill. Past town. Toward the woods. She wished she’d worn a coat or even a sweater. But she’d been too excited about her pretty dress and big boobs. After a while she came to the back road that spanned the distance between Corpus Christi and Bed- ford. She’d heard a kid was missing and half the town was looking for him. He was the son of the CEO of the hospital, which explained why everybody cared so much. Last year her dad got fired from the morgue for taking too many sick days. His severance package was running out, and he needed to get off the couch and start looking for work again, but she doubted he would. Probably he’d just sit around drinking beer until he lost the house, and then where would she live?

Meanwhile, they didn’t ever go out to eat, or buy groceries except at the Puffin Stop. They didn’t say grace like they’d done before her sister left to tend bar in Florida. Their lawn was brown even in summer.

They didn’t wave to people in town, and no one ever waved to them.

Her dad’s beer club was in a shack about a mile down the road. Most of its members were from Bedford, be- cause Corpus Christi people usually belonged to the golf club. The beer club was a place where her dad met his friends and played cards. Since the fire at the mill her dad didn’t go there much. Most of the members had moved away.

Cars drove by in either direction every few minutes. Cops and volunteers looking for James Walker, she guessed. They slowed as they passed. When they saw that she wasn’t someone they recognized or knew well enough to offer a lift, they sped up again. One of the cars practically came to a dead stop at her side. She turned to give the driver a dirty look, because she was sick of everything right now. Sick of happy cheerlead- ers, her dad, her crappy dead bike, and Fluffernutter: What the hell? Marshmallow’s not dairy, is it? She turned, ready to flip the bird at the driver. Instead of raising her middle finger, she blushed. The car was a used yellow Saturn. She and the driver locked eyes. The driver was her dad.