Part 19 (1/2)

”Is Daniel here?” she said, which really made no sense given that I just a.s.sumed he was knocking on our door. But I could hear fear in her voice.

”No,” I said. ”Why would he be here?”

She was anxious, squirmy, a body trapped inside its own skin. ”He hasn't been home, not in days. I'm really worried.” She stared at me. ”Look, I don't know what was going on up here, and I don't care. But please tell me if he's here. I want to talk to him.”

”He's not here,” I said. ”We haven't seen him. Do you want to come in?” I pulled the door open wider, in a gesture that was halfway between, ”Come in, tell us all about it,” and ”If you don't believe he's not really here, you can come in and see for your d.a.m.n self.”

She brushed past me. She stepped around the apartment, even poked her head into the bathroom and the bedroom. I'd implicitly given her permission to look around, and she'd taken me up on it. (Once again, I worried about dirty underwear and bottles of lube, but then I remembered we had more important things to worry about than Zoe being shocked by the fact that Kevin and I had s.e.x.) ”What's going on?” Kevin asked her.

She still fidgeted. ”He hasn't come home, and he hasn't gone to school either. He won't answer his phone. I don't know where he is. He's never been gone this long.”

There was a long, accusing pause. Sure enough, she faced us and said, ”What's he been doing up here?”

I really didn't appreciate the tone. On the other hand, her brother was gone, and she was scared. I looked at Kevin. We didn't really know anything, but it was time to tell her what we did know, right?

”Well, he's been acting strange,” Kevin said. ”Ever since we moved in.”

”Strange how?” she said, too quickly.

”Uh, friendly,” he said, even though that wasn't really a good description. But I guess Zoe was smart enough to have some idea what had been going on, because she sort of stiffened in her shoes.

Should we tell her about Wednesday? I didn't know. If he'd been missing for ”days,” that must have been when he'd left. Were Kevin and I the reason why? But why? We hadn't done anything wrong. Anyway, we couldn't exactly say to her: Yeah, he came here and said he wanted to take a shower, but what he really wanted was to come out naked and show us his b.o.n.e.r, so we'd take him into our bedroom and f.u.c.k him silly.

I remembered something.

”He mentioned a guy who said he could be a model,” I said.

”What?” Zoe said. ”Who? When?”

”It was a while ago,” I said. ”Wait. Did he turn eighteen last Sunday?”

Zoe nodded, wary.

”Then it was last week,” I said.

That's why he left, I thought. Not because of us, but because he'd finally turned eighteen. Maybe that was also why he'd come on to us. Maybe the guy who'd asked him to ”model” had come onto him first.

”Who was it?” Zoe said, still panicking. ”You have to tell me!”

I thought back, but shook my head. ”I'm sorry, I don't know. It was just an off-hand comment he made. I didn't really think about it.”

The light in Zoe's eyes started to dim.

”I'm really sorry,” I said. ”Really.”

She sagged ever-so-slightly. ”I don't understand. Why would he just leave? Why wouldn't he at least tell me?”

I didn't know what to say. Everything I could think of was like a line from some bad movie, like, ”Everything will be okay. You just need to be strong.” Daniel was barely eighteen years old, and eighteen-year-olds are mostly morons. Still, if you couldn't save an eighteen-year-old from himself, there was something seriously wrong with the world.

”It's all my fault,” she said. ”He needs a man in his life. Someone to knock some sense into him.”

This sounded vaguely h.o.m.ophobic, like Zoe was blaming Daniel's confusion about his s.e.xuality on the fact that he didn't have a strong male role model. Maybe that's not what she meant - maybe it was more about Daniel's annoying Tyler-Posey-gone-bad posturing. But even if it wasn't, it was still hard to judge Zoe. She was just a sister loving her little brother, wanting what was best for him.

”We'll look out for him,” I said, and I really did hope there was something we could do. I still had no idea if Daniel was ”a good kid,” but I sure as h.e.l.l didn't want anything bad happening to him.

I couldn't sleep again that night. It's funny how you can be so tired that you can barely sit upright during the day, barely stand to brush your teeth, but when it comes time to finally sleep, you climb into bed and your brain is instantly on high alert. It's like the night amplifies things - not just sounds outside your window, but also your thoughts. The silliest things, things you can ignore during the day, grow at night, becoming clanging gongs inside your brain.

I thought about Declan McConnell, and Gina and Regina, and even Daniel. Kevin was right about this d.a.m.n city: there was desperation all around us, hanging in the air like smog. It was a little less visible on some days than others, but it was never gone completely. We were always inhaling it. To make it in this town, people here would walk barefoot across broken gla.s.s.

According to Kevin, my movie deal with Mr. Brander might not be real. So basically, he thought I should feel desperate too.

I was tired of it all. At that moment, I was also tired of lying on the futon, awake, turning and twitching, feeling every itch in my underwear and t-s.h.i.+rt.

I climbed out of bed and went out into the front room. I could be twitchy and anxious just as easily on the couch.

As before, I didn't turn on the lights. I sat there in the dark, staring at the shadows on the floor and listening to the sounds of the city outside the open windows.

As always, cars whooshed by on the freeway.

Far away, a cat howled.

Something skittered in the dried leaves below our window - a racc.o.o.n or maybe a person out walking.

Was I alone in the front room? I couldn't help but remember the ghost of Cole Gordon. He hadn't spoken to me since that one night those months before, and that had been all in my mind anyway, a trick of the acoustics.

A floorboard creaked, probably the building settling. Then I remembered the building was more than sixty years old: wouldn't it already have done all the settling it was going to do? On the other hand, why would a ghost make the floorboards creak? Ghosts don't have any physical presence! (The a.s.sociation between ghosts and creaky floors has never made any sense to me.) I didn't care. Right then, there was only one person in the whole world who knew exactly how I felt, and Cole Gordon was it.

Whatever you do, don't- He'd told me that before, clearly a warning. If I really wanted to avoid ending up like Declan McConnell, or Gina and Regina, or even Cole Gordon, I needed to not do something. But what?

”What did you mean?” I said to the empty room. ”Whatever I do, don't do what?”

In the bathroom, the faucet dripped. Had it been dripping before, and I hadn't noticed? I'd been listening to the sounds of the night - the freeway, the leaves outside the window - and I didn't remember hearing the faucet dripping. Then again, maybe it had been dripping since Kevin and I moved in, dripping for so long that I didn't even hear it anymore.

I stood up and walked to the bathroom. I was still in my undies, and for a moment I was embarra.s.sed that if the ghost of Cole Gordon did exist, he was seeing me like that. Then I realized that if he was real, he'd already seen me in far more compromising positions than this.

Moonlight lit up the gla.s.s block windows. It shone down on the wall near the tub.

There was something in that ray of moonlight: an irregularity in the wall, a small rectangle the size of an electrical socket. It had been plastered or s.p.a.ckled over at some point, and painted to match the rest of the bathroom. In the daylight, I'd never even noticed it before, but in the light of the moon, it was obvious.

There had once been an electrical outlet there, but it had been too close to the bathtub - it had probably violated building codes designed to prevent people from electrocuting themselves - so someone had sealed it up, probably decades ago.

That's how he did it.

Cole Gordon had plugged something into that outlet - a radio or a toaster - then gotten into the tub, and pulled the appliance into the water with him. Cole's suicide was probably the reason why that socket had been sealed up in the first place, not some stupid building code.

The water dripped. The floor creaked ever so slightly - I swear it did.