“Really? You want me to stay here?”
Paulie looks at his watch again. “You got some place to go?”
“No . . . I mean, usually nobody . . . I can drink it here.”
“All right then, grab what you want and pull up a chair.” He nods toward a table near the counter.
Bobby grabs a Dr Pepper and moves to sit. “I can pay for it . . .” he says again.
“But you’re not gonna,” Paulie says. “Sit.”
Bobby sits.
Paulie claps his hands together. “So what do you want to talk about?”
Bobby’s eyes widen. Bobby Wright does not often experience cool guys treating him like he’s visible.
“C’mon,” Paulie says, “what’s up?”
Bobby takes a drink of his pop. “Actually . . .”
“Shoot.”
“How’d you learn to swim like that? Like up at the lake an’ stuff?”
Paulie walks around the counter, hoists himself up. “You know, swimming lessons when I was little. Then I joined the Parks and Rec swim team so I could get a coach. Cool thing about swimming is, if you keep doing it you get faster. Pretty soon I started wondering how far I could go. Found out Mr. Logs was a wannabe channel swimmer and just started doing it with him. Guy’s a beast.”
“You think I could learn?”
“Sure. Can you swim?”
“Yeah, I took those lessons.”
“Just go down to one of the city pools when they open this summer. Tell ’em you want to join the novice team. Go from there. How come you want to swim?”
Bobby reddens, looks at the table. “I don’t know. I guess it kind of seems cool.”
Paulie gives a short laugh. “It’s more than cool,” he says. “It’s colder than hell.”
Bobby smiles. “I’ll bet. You think you’d be different? You know, if you didn’t swim.”
“Yeah,” Paulie says, “I’d be different.”
“Like how?”
“I don’t know. Swimming, like that’s a challenge. First time you get in water that cold you can’t fucking believe you’re doing it. In fact, the first time you just get back out.”
“How’d you get back in?”
“Logs called me a pussy.”
“Mr. Logsdon called you that?”
“He didn’t say the word,” Paulie says, “but he said it. Then when you do finally get used to the water, it’s still hard work.”
Bobby’s eyes dart around the room.
“You really thinking of trying it?”
Bobby grimaces.
“Hey, I thought the same thing,” Paulie says, “but that shit makes you tough, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Listen man, you sign up for summer swimming soon as school is out and get a few miles under your belt. Logs an’ I’ll take you out when you wanna give it a shot. The water will be warm by then. Meantime do some running. Lift some weights.”
Bobby finishes his pop and stands. “I tried the weight room once,” he says. “But all those big guys . . . Arney Stack was in there and some other guys. I just left.”
“Naw man, fuck that. Those guys just make all the noise. Especially Stack. If you’d have stayed you’d have seen a whole bunch of regular guys.”
Bobby moves toward the door. “Think you could go down there with me once? Like, show me how the machines work and stuff?”
“Hell yeah,” Paulie says. “I go a couple times a week, on days I don’t swim. Bring your gear day after tomorrow.”
Bobby opens the door, hesitates. “Okay, then,” he says. “Day after tomorrow. Weight room.” He smiles and is gone.
The classroom is abuzz when Logs closes the door for the beginning of Period 8 the next day.
“Guess I already know ‘what’s up’ today, huh?” he says.
“Did they find her?” someone asks.
“I haven’t heard,” he says.
“Something’s messed up,” Justin says. “Lotta time between when Mary was gone from home and when we went looking.”
“You have to admit, Mr. Logs, something’s strange,” Marley Waits says.
“There are unanswered questions,” Logs says. He takes a deep breath. “We need to be careful how we deal with this. Mary’s one of us and I’m guessing she’ll be here again soon. We have to be respectful now, and when she comes back.”
“Yeah,” Hannah says. “I’d be pretty embarrassed if my dad called out the troops when I wasn’t really missing.”
“Well,” Logs says, “as I understand it, Mr. Wells rescinded his missing persons report.”
“She’ll be back,” Arney says, “and this will all make sense. We should make it easy for her. None of us would want to be in her shoes.” He shakes his head. “I don’t get it about the torn-up room.”
“Or the fact that nobody saw it but her parents,” Marley says.
“How about instead of wild adolescent speculation,” Logs says, “we talk about how we felt out there looking for her? It sure wasn’t the way I wanted to wrap up my teaching career.”
“I was just praying I wouldn’t be the one to find her,” Josh Takeuchi says. “I kept thinkin’, leaves and dirt in her face, eyes all glassed over, marks on her neck; please God don’t let it be me.”
“You’ve been watching too many Criminal Minds reruns, Tak,” Hannah says.
Josh opens another sandwich bag. “Maybe so,” he replies, “but I’m telling you . . .”
“Luckily, it didn’t have to be anyone,” Logs says. “Actually that’s a pretty sane reaction.”
Hannah laughs. “I thought wrestlers are supposed to be tough.”
“Exactly,” Tak says, “and if I didn’t want it to be me, I mean, I wanted someone to find her, if she was out there. Kind of cowardly to want her found but let her ghost haunt someone else.”
“Cowardly, maybe,” Logs says, “but I found myself looking under some piles of leaves with held breath and gritted teeth.” He surveys the room. “Anyone else?”
Up goes Bobby Wright’s hand.
Logs closes his eyes. “I’m not going to win this, am I, Bobby? You will raise your hand at my funeral.”
Bobby pulls his hand down. “I just thought, what if it was over all of a sudden. You know, way too soon.”
“Say more.”
“We thought she was probably dead. At least I did. She was here one day and then just gone, like for no good reason. I just thought, what if that was me? I sit around thinking of all the stuff I’m gonna do someday, you know, when I get it together. What if there’s no someday?”
No shit, Paulie thinks.
“So I’m out there in the woods, thinking, man, I better get it together, and I feel, like, ready to do that. Like I crank myself up. And then—and this is bad—they find out Mary isn’t really missing and . . .” Bobby shakes his head. “. . . and I already feel it draining out. I know I’m not going to have the guts.” He shakes his head. “I went home yesterday thinking, what a schmuck . . . somebody’s gotta die for me to be brave.”
I will get that little bugger into the weight room, Paulie thinks, and then I will get him into the water.
Logs walks over and sits on a table at the side of the room. In a low voice he says, “Wow.”
Justin snorts, running a hand through his short hair. “Seems to me that was pretty brave right there.”
Bobby looks off to the side.
“Don’t do that,” Justin says. “You feel like you feel because you shrink off all the time. You look right in my eye and say, ‘Damn right it was brave, Justin Chenier.’”
The trace of a smile crosses Bobby’s lips again. He glances at Paulie, who nods.
“Fuckin’ say it,” Justin says.
Bobby looks at the ceiling.
“Don’t make me get up.”
“Damn right it was brave, Justin Chenier.”
“A’ight then,” Justin says and turns to Logs. “So, Brother Logs, when we get to hear the climax to this saga?”
“Soon as
there is one, I suspect,” Logs says.
“Whatever’s going on with Mary,” Arney says, “she’s not going to let a shot at another four-point-plus GPA and more than a hundred thousand in scholarship money go down the drain. Trust me, she’ll come around.”
Paulie has been taking it all in. He frowns. Ol’ Arney. Always in the know. Even when he isn’t.
“And I’m guessing I can get her to bring us up to speed,” Arney says. “I’ve spent some time with her.” He looks at Bobby. “She’s more willing to talk about the important stuff than you might think.”
Justin sits up. “You mean . . .”
“Get your head out of the gutter,” Arney says. “I just mean she’s not as surface as everyone thinks. She’s just careful.”
“Mr. Logs,” Paulie says, “If you were sitting in a bar having a beer with your best friend with none of us around, what would you be saying you think happened?”
“You think I drink beer?”
“C’mon, man.”
“I don’t know what I’d say, but I get your point, Paulie. This is Period 8, where we let it all hang out. I’m being careful because when we don’t understand something, it’s because we don’t have enough information. Let’s keep focused on how you were feeling.”
“Long as we’re baring our souls . . .” Heads turn toward Taylor Max. Baring our souls comes out sarcastically. She pushes her dark bangs away from her eyes. “I think she was lucky.”
Silence.
Logs says, “Why lucky?”
Taylor hesitates, testing the waters with her eyes. Taylor Max would be pretty, if her life weren’t all over her face—and she’s tough as nails. Taylor isn’t silent because she’s shy. Taylor is silent because she doesn’t believe anyone wants to hear what she has to say.
“I come here, to this class, to learn something—anything—that goes against what I think the world is like,” she says. “But I always go away thinking I’ve got it about right.”
She takes in the room again, and says, under her breath, “What the hell.
“I’ve heard the same stuff everyone else hears,” she says. “Mary’s dad is a control freak, makes her give him her cell phone every day so he can look at the call history, calls the numbers he doesn’t recognize. He made her sign the ‘Saving Myself for Marriage’ vow, or whatever they call it. He’s not even religious, just has to have control. Who knows what’s true? The only times I’ve ever seen him, he looked like any parent, kind of quiet, maybe a little stern.”
Taylor breathes deep. “But I caught her crying in the bathroom once last year. She was, like, way not Mary. So I said right out what I thought. She didn’t deny any of it. If somebody says your dad’s a beast and he’s not, you deny it.”
Taylor scans the room; doesn’t catch any looks of disagreement. She shakes her head. “That shit is poison.”
Silence.
She shrugs. “My mom’s been bringing control freaks into me and my brother’s lives for fucking ever, excuse my shitty language. They’re all the same. Look good at first, start to take over and try to convince you the crap they want you to do is for your own good. I don’t know how it works in Mary Wells’s house, but the more they get burrowed in the more power they get. If you’ve got a mom like ours, she’s so glad to have a man around the house she’ll believe anything. Pretty soon she’s just the gravy train for a pig. Good thing about my mother is, she finally recognizes it and gets rid of the bastard. Like I said, I don’t know what Mary Wells’s mom is like, but I see Mr. Wells and I get a feeling in my gut that is way familiar. And if you’d have seen her in the bathroom that day, you wouldn’t start asking me a bunch of dumb questions or telling me why my situation is different.”
Nobody is about to do that.
“And by the way,” Taylor adds, “after she gets rid of the bastard? She goes and gets another one. But that’s a story for another time.” She puts her head down on her arms. “Anyway, that’s why I thought she was lucky. Any escape is an escape. She was out.”
“I’m with Taylor,” Hannah says. “Anybody who has that much control over his kid is creepy. And I’d say that if Mary were in the room.”
Arney Stack stands. “Maybe you guys are right,” he says. “Maybe I do have it wrong, and this is going to sound like some geeky ASB president . . .”
Justin says, “Tell us somethin’ we don’t know.”
“We have to do something about this,” Arney says. “I don’t mean just about Mary, but all of it. There’s not much a student body officer can do in a school, it’s not like we influence educational policy or anything. But we ought to at least figure out how to have each other’s backs.”
Paulie glances at Justin.
“A lot of us have been in school together four years, some even longer than that. No offense, Bobby, but if your family wasn’t in the paper for receiving Christmas charity I wouldn’t even know who you are.”
Bobby looks stricken. His family’s picture on the front of the Regional section of the local newspaper is the embarrassment of his high school career.
Arney catches Bobby’s look. “I didn’t mean . . . Hey, man, I just meant we don’t have each other’s backs like we should.”
Justin puts his head down.
“Look, we’re in this together. I get to be student body president because no matter how much I pump iron, I lack the skills to be what I really want to be, which is a super-jock. So I teach myself to speak in public and do the political thing. Hell, Bobby, you’re every bit as smart as I am and twice as sensitive, given what you just told us, but somebody’s been pushing you around making you think all you can do is survive. Man, go check it out with your parents . . . okay, not your parents, but some adult, maybe Mr. Logs, and get him to tell you how many of the cool guys and girls in high school turned out to be duds once they got out in the real world. My dad makes over a half-million a year in one of the most prestigious law firms in this town and he was voted ‘Kid Most Likely to Get Beat Up By Someone from a Lower Grade’ in high school. I just meant . . .”
“It’s okay,” Bobby says. “I know you didn’t mean anything.”
“My point is,” Arney continues, “that one thing the whole student body can do is start recognizing who we all are. I’m ticked off at myself because I’ve been judging the people who come in here every day and don’t say anything. I mean, if I hadn’t started getting to know Mary . . . well, I’m just saying we need some kind of decency campaign in this school. That’s what I’m going to shoot for the rest of my time.”
Paulie thinks, Arney just fucked Bobby and got Bobby to let him off the hook. Business as usual.
The bell rings and no one moves. Arney picks up his books as if nothing has happened. Gradually everyone else begins packing up and heading out.
“Hey, Mr. Logs,” Paulie says at the door, “can I talk with you a minute?”
Logs slaps his forehead. “That’s right, you said you needed to talk with me. Sorry.” He closes the door behind Hannah, who just walked by as if Paulie didn’t exist.
“Ready for TMI?”
Logs frowns.
“She’s the one.”
“The one . . .”
“Mary Wells. She’s who I cheated on Hannah with.”
.7
“Hannah was at that debate tournament,” Paulie says.
“I’m not sure I want to hear this. You sure you want to tell it?”
“I didn’t, but that was before all this craziness.”
Logs says, “What the hell, this is my last year.”
“So Arney wants me to go over to the Armory and listen to Justin and his new group, and a couple of other groups he’s tight with. I’m already planning to go so I say I’ll meet him.
“We’re early and they’ve got a bunch of pretenders for the first hour or so, guys whose parents should never have given them music lessons, and we’re shootin’ the shit, waiting for Justin and his guys. I look over at this girl who I catch looking at me and I bare
ly recognize her. I mean, she looks like Mary except she has this way low-cut sweater.”
Logs frowns, in disbelief rather than disapproval.
“Swear to god, man, I’m not out looking. I’m not.”
“I believe you.”
“Pretty soon she’s beside me. She says hi to Arney and we’re watching and she’s bumping me, like almost by accident. But then we’re talking, almost yelling over the music, ’cause Jus is on now and he’s cranking it up, and her hand is on my arm and they start to play a slow one and she asks me to dance. I don’t want to, but it’s Mary Wells. Even if Hannah’s friends see me, it’s the Virgin Mary. I could get in as much trouble dancing with Arney.”
“Why do I think you should have danced with Arney?”
“No kidding. Anyway she leans into me, arms around my neck, pressed up against me. This is not the Mary Wells I have come to know and yell ‘Go Team Go’ at. The second it starts feeling good, I start feeling bad and I push her away. She backs off a little and we finish the dance and I’m looking around the room and a couple of Hannah’s friends are watching so I know I need to get my ass home.
“I tell Arney I’ve gotta cut it short, go up to the stage and tell Justin he rocks, and head for the parking lot. Only when I get to my car, there’s Mary goddamn Wells.”
Logs frowns, again in disbelief, though he knows the one guy he always believes is Paulie Bomb.
“She wants a ride home. I ask who she came with and she says, ‘Julie Fricke and some other cheerleaders, but they left,’ and something feels wrong, because the cheerleaders stick together. They’re jocks.”
“So . . . you took her home?”
“Kind of. I stall for a while, then I see Arney coming out of the Armory and I holler at him. He drives over, rolls down the window, and I tell him to give Mary a ride; she lives on his way. He says no-can-do, he’d really like to but he’s headed to some midnight thing with the YFC kids. Are you kidding me? Arney Stack doing midnight come-to-Jesus with Youth for Christ? I mentioned this but he says he’d promised to help them get Johannsen to let them hold meetings in a classroom as long as it was after school. I said, ‘Arney, you won the election. You can’t run again, this is high school. Campaign promises aren’t even real promises in high school!’ but he said something about being a politician with a new kind of ethics, to which I said a new kind would be some.”