“The front door just isn’t as much fun,” Alex said, and then smiled at her.
“This the one?” She glanced over at me.
Alex said, “The one and only Nanette O’Hare.”
“You’re a very lucky girl. This boy is a saint. A true living saint right here on Earth.”
“Okay, Mom,” Oliver said. “You can leave now.”
The woman smiled at her son, and then to me she said, “Well, nice to meet you… what’s your name again?”
“Nanette.”
“French?”
“I’m American.”
“Good. I like Americans.” She shut the door.
“Can we finally show her now?” Alex asked Oliver.
“I don’t know. I just met her, like, ten seconds ago!”
“Come on. Let’s show her. Look at her face. She’s trustworthy.”
Oliver looked at me and asked, “Are you for Lena or Stella?”
“You’ve read The Bubblegum Reaper?” I asked.
“Only a million times.”
Alex said, “I got him hooked a little early, maybe.”
I looked around Oliver’s bedroom and saw pictures of flowers. Endless flowers. They were all cut out of magazines and Scotch-taped to the wall—roses, lilies, daffodils, carnations, hydrangea, and hundreds of others I couldn’t even name. In between the flowers were pictures of Oliver’s mom and a dozen or so pictures of Alex and Oliver together. There was one of them lying together in a huge field of yellow dandelions. The shot was taken from above—like someone had to climb a tree to get them both in the frame.
Alex pointed to the pic. “We used a timer and some rope to get that. I had to drop from a high branch and lie down before the click. We tried maybe fifty times before we got what we were after, which is why I’m sweaty in the picture. But don’t you think it’s cool?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Stella or Lena?” Oliver said, staying focused.
“Lena,” I said.
“See, I told you,” Alex said. “She’s on your team, bro.”
“What’s with all the flowers?” I asked.
“Boys can like flowers,” Oliver said a little defensively.
“I like flowers. I’m a boy,” Alex said. “It’s absolutely true.”
“Wrigley likes flowers, too,” Oliver said. “Look.”
He pulled out an old yearbook. It was red, and 1967 was printed on the cover in oversize gold numbers.
“What is that?” I asked.
Oliver thumbed through the senior portraits until he got to the Bs. “Here.” He poked the page with his finger.
Nigel Wrigley Booker
“Nothing is more perfect than a flower.” Nigel Wrigley Booker does not describe himself as a loner. He is independent. He has his books and his poetry and his own writing. He didn’t particularly enjoy high school and is hoping that life on the other side is a bit kinder and more humane. (Death to gym class!) He hopes to publish a book of poetry at some point in his life but will write poetry regardless of whether anyone wants to read it. Favorite poem: “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas. Best friend: Lazy Sam, the turtle on the rock behind the high school.
When I looked at the black-and-white photo, I could see clearly that it was Booker when he was our age—only in the senior photo, he looks older than Alex and me, probably because black-and-white photos make everyone look older. He’s also wearing a skinny tie in the shot, and an old-fashioned sports coat. His hair is shaved tight to his skull, making his ears look even more gigantic. He’s not smiling, and he looks sort of beaten down.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“eBay,” Oliver said. “Alex found out where Booker went to high school—only a half hour’s drive away from here—and when he graduated, by writing him letters. And then we searched the Internet for months for this baby. A 1967 graduate, Eddie Alva, died, and his son sold absolutely everything he found in his apartment. Lucky for us. We got this for only four dollars plus postage!”
“It gets better,” Alex said. “Show her.”
Oliver thumbed through more senior pictures until he got to the Ts.
“Here are the twins,” Oliver said. “Sandra Tackett and Louise Tackett.”
They look so much alike you would have sworn that someone had printed the same photo twice by accident. Their dark hair is parted down the middle and hangs just past their shoulders; their necks are equally slender; they’re both wearing a string of pearls and a dark scoop-neck sweater with a lily pinned just under the right collarbone. It’s impossible to tell them apart. They even have the same exact write-up.
“What you see isn’t always what you get.” The Tackett twins enjoy tricking their fellow students. It is impossible to tell them apart, not only because they dress the same, but also because they speak and act exactly the same as well. They are virtually interchangeable and are rumored to be telepathic, although they deny this claim. Sandra and Louise were both crowned junior prom queen because the student body could not tell them apart on the night of, nor could their prom dates. Favorite song: “Paperback Writer” by the Beatles. Best friend: my twin.
Oliver said, “Look at the left corner of Louise’s smile. It’s slightly lower than Sandra’s by a centimeter or so. Like maybe she’s a bit sadder and not really wanting to go along with the joke. Perhaps because she’s not who her sister wants her to be? But not strong enough to be her own person. The type of girl who would confess to a turtle when no one else was around!”
“A stretch,” Alex said, “because that smile difference is barely perceivable. And even if there is a discrepancy between their smiles, maybe it was Sandra who put the song ‘Paperback Writer’ in the shared bio to let Booker know that she had faith in him even back then. And that’s why she’s smiling harder. Booker surely told her that he wanted to write a novel when they were talking in the woods. She knew he’d get the reference. It’s mind-numbingly obvious after all. Maybe even prophetic, since The Bubblegum Reaper was never published in hardback.”
“Wait,” I said. “So you’re saying that you have the Thatch twins’ real names and yet you haven’t done anything with them? You haven’t done any other research?”
“Oh, we have,” Oliver said. “But there’s a little problem.”
“And you’re not going to like it,” Alex said.
“Why?”
“Your girl Louise is no longer with us.”
“Guess what year she died?” Oliver said.
“How would I know that?”
“Nineteen eighty-nine,” Alex said.
Oliver said, “One year after—”
“The Bubblegum Reaper was published,” we all said in unison.
“Which might explain why Booker never resold the rights after he reacquired them,” Alex said.
“Why?” I said.
“Because,” Oliver explained, “he wrote it for Louise Tackett. He was trying to win her heart! So once her heart stopped beating, there was no point for the book to be in print any longer. At least as far as Booker was concerned. It’s not a novel but a public love letter to one woman.”
“Unless,” Alex said, “he had the twins mixed up, and I was right all along and Sandra Tackett was his great love—the twin who talked to turtles in the woods. Only Booker had it wrong the whole time, thinking he had that moment in the woods with Louise when it was actually Sandra, which would be the greatest tragedy I’ve ever heard of. It would even beat Romeo and Juliet. Only it would mean Booker’s Juliet isn’t actually dead but has been waiting all these years for him to figure it out!”
“But then why wouldn’t she come forward when she read the book?” I asked.
“Exactly!” Oliver said.
“Maybe she never read the book,” Alex said. “I mean, present company excluded, do you personally know anyone else who has—besides the teachers who gave it to us? Anyone?”
“Good point,” I said. “So why not track down Sandra Tackett?”
??
?Oh, we have,” Oliver said. “Like everyone else in South Jersey, she lives about twenty minutes from here.”
“So what are you waiting for?” I asked.
“It’s a gamble,” Alex said. “What if I’m wrong? What if Sandra Tackett gets mad when she reads the book? And what if Booker doesn’t want us to get involved? I mean—he’s forbidden us from even talking about The Bubblegum Reaper. What if Booker gets so mad at us that he’ll never speak with us again? We could be digging up an ugly skeleton here.”
I thought about how I’d lost Mr. Graves in an instant, and I didn’t think I could handle losing Booker, too.
“I’ve voted yes,” Oliver said. “Alex voted no. You’re the tiebreaker.”
“I am?”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “We agreed to let you end the stalemate. So your call, Nanette.”
“You really have her address?”
“Yep. She’s widowed,” Oliver said. “And pretty hot for an old lady. So if Alex is right…”
“Sometimes we go to her street and watch her do yard work from a distance,” Alex said. “She has a fantastic garden—vegetables and flowers. Her sunflowers grew seven feet before she cut them down this fall! And she’s spry for an older woman, moving around on her hands and knees quick as a spider. We’ve been scouting her for old Booker. It’s the least I could do after he wrote me so many letters and encouraged my writing—sending me so many book recommendations. Introducing me to Larkin and Bukowski. He’s the best teacher I’ve ever had, and he isn’t even officially my teacher. But I still worry about being wrong. Messing it all up. Crossing a line.”
There was that saying again, “crossing a line,” and I thought about Mr. Graves once more. Visiting the real live Stella Thatch, meeting another character from The Bubblegum Reaper, was almost impossible to resist—just like kissing Mr. Graves on Valentine’s Day—so hadn’t I learned my lesson? But this was different, because I would be doing it for Booker and not me. Or would I be?
“So what do you vote, Nanette?” Oliver said. “Moment of truth.”
“I have to think about it,” I said.
“Crushing anticlimax!” Oliver said, and then his mom came in right on cue.
“School night for Oliver,” she said, as if Oliver were six years old and not fourteen.
“Mom!” Oliver said.
“We’re going,” Alex said. “Talk tomorrow, Oliver.”
“Nice meeting you, Nanette,” Oliver said. “Good to have you on the team.”
“Good to be on the team,” I said, and then as I waved good-bye I saw the same goodness in Oliver’s face that I had seen in Alex’s many times. I started to wonder if that was what the bullies were after. Did they want to smash that goodness out of everyone? Alex was always calling the bullies “pretty boys,” maybe to emasculate them, maybe because they were the most popular and therefore considered the best-looking—but to me, being pretty wasn’t something to be ashamed of, and Oliver and Alex had a soft beauty in their glances and smiles that I found to be radiant. Maybe not in a sexual way, but in a way that makes everything okay, if only for a second or two. Mr. Graves had this quality, too.
Once we were in the Jeep, I said, “You bastard! Sitting on all this info!”
“Couldn’t betray my partner’s confidence. Guy code.”
“So many secrets,” I said. “Kind of sexy.”
“I am a man of infinite mysteries.” He raised his left eyebrow.
“You know that both of your theories are wildly implausible. I’m not sure I really saw a difference in the smiles. ‘Paperback Writer’ was a very popular song—the favorite of many teenagers back then? And there are twins in almost every big high school class. The similarities between the real yearbook names and the ones in The Bubblegum Reaper are striking—but maybe Booker took fragments of his high school experience and fictionalized the whole thing?”
“And yet he’s always saying, ‘There’s no such thing as fiction.’”
“True.”
“And these details and theories, flimsy or solid or somewhere in between—they’re what we have—all we have—to go on.”
“Why do we have to go on anything? Why can’t we just let things with Booker be?” I said, even though—deep down—I knew I’d never be able to resist the proposed adventure.
“You have to find something to believe in—root for. You know? ‘A life lived well gets messy,’” he said, quoting The Bubblegum Reaper. “It’s maybe—I don’t know. It’s just what we have right now. The thing we do together. You and me and Oliver, too. I mean, we wouldn’t even know each other if it weren’t for The Bubblegum Reaper. You and I would have never kissed if Booker didn’t write the book. And now we can use the same novel that changed our lives for the better to improve the author’s life. How amazing is that? It’s the literary equivalent of helping and repaying God.”
“Assuming that your theory about Stella Thatch is correct, of course. Which is a gamble. If you’re wrong, things could get ugly.”
“Well, sometimes you have to gamble.”
“So why did you vote no?”
“So we’d need a tiebreaker and Oliver would be cool with my cutting you in.”
It was flattering, but I flashed on Mr. Graves again and started to feel nervous, so I changed the subject by saying, “Oliver loves you.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, and then grinned.
“You shared it with him—our novel.”
“He needs it just as much as we do. Don’t you think?”
I leaned over and kissed Alex full on the lips, and then I said, “Why didn’t you have a girlfriend before we met? How did you ever fall to me?”
He smiled, put on the Los Campesinos! song “What Death Leaves Behind,” and then shifted into gear.
It was a cool fall night, especially with the top down, so we blasted the heat, which felt nice on my hands and feet, even though it burned just a tiny bit.
When we reached my home, Alex said, “You know we’re going to visit Sandra Tackett.”
“I know,” I said. “But I’m not so sure we should.”
“I think we have to.”
“Why exactly is that again?”
“Because if we don’t try, we’ll never know.”
“Know what?”
“That love can win.”
“Can love win?” I said, but not sarcastically. My voice sort of quivered a bit, and I realized that my heart was pounding and it felt like someone was pressing a finger into the spot where my throat meets my chest. We were messing around with dangerous forces, and Alex was only slightly less afraid than I was.
Under the streetlight in front of my home, we kissed for a time right in full view of the neighbors, but I didn’t even care.
I grabbed his hand and put it on my chest, and he didn’t pull away.
He was gentle, and it was nice to be touched.
When we finished making out, I said, “You know what? I didn’t see any signatures in Eddie Alva’s yearbook.”
“That’s because there weren’t any.”
“Not even one? Nobody signed it?”
“Nope.”
“So why do you think he kept it all these years? If he didn’t have any friends in high school? It’s so sad.”
“I don’t know.”
“What does his senior bio say?”
“There isn’t one. Just his picture and name: Eddie Alva. He looks tortured in the photo. No smile. Definitely not one of the pretty boys. Heavy eyebrows. Crooked nose. Just by looking into his eyes, you can tell he hated high school. I think the blank space under him says everything. Maybe the metaphorical equivalent of your double middle finger to the soccer team.”
“And yet he kept his yearbook?”
“Maybe he did it for us, Nanette.”
It was tempting to believe that—there was poetry in such thinking. Like maybe the universe was conspiring in our favor all of a sudden. But it felt a little fucked, too. Eddie Alva didn’t even know we existed
when he died. And his keeping a yearbook for almost five decades, a yearbook that no one signed, was depressing enough to make you want to curl up in your room alone and weep for him. He reproduced, so maybe he had known love for a little while, I told myself. He had sex at least once with someone. There was that. And maybe he loved his high school classmates in a strange sort of way—the way you sometimes love the villains in your favorite stories just because they are an integral part of the plot. Maybe it was what he had, Eddie Alva, this set of classmates to populate that part of his personal history. And I thought about how I sort of missed Shannon in a weird, sad way, even though I definitely didn’t want to hang out with her anymore. I’d probably be thinking about Shannon and all my soccer teammates until I died. The Rainbow Dragons were a part of my psyche for good, bad, or indifferent, and that was just the way it was. And then it hit me: None of them would probably be signing my yearbook, either, because they no longer would even make eye contact with me, which was certainly sad, but I was also okay with it somehow.
When I finally went inside, Mom was sitting on the living room couch. “Nice show out there.”
The funny thing is—I think she was proud of me. I was growing up, finally making out with a boy, doing age-appropriate things. What she did when she was my age, back when she was a cheerleader. But then Mom shifted the conversation like a knife across my throat.
“In other news,” she said, “your father moved out.”
“What?”
“Yep.”
“When?”
“About three hours ago. You missed his big blowup.”
“He’s already gone?”
“You can call him on his cell if you want an explanation.”
“What’s your explanation?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“Is it because I quit soccer?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course not,” Mom said, looking out the window, avoiding eye contact.
“When is he coming back?”
“I really don’t think he is, sweetie. I’m so sorry.”
There were tears in her eyes, but I could tell that she felt it was all for the best—that this was a long time in the making, and perhaps final.