Since You've Been Gone (14 page)

“No,” I said, looking over at him, thinking that this should have been obvious, since I was
running
. “Why is it fantastic?”

“Because there has to be more to it than that, right?” he asked. “It can’t just be the list. There has to be a code, or a secret message . . .”

“I don’t think so,” I said, thinking back to the thirteen items. They had seemed mysterious enough already to me without needing to go looking for extra meanings.

“Will you take a picture and send it to me?” he asked, and I saw he was serious. “If there’s something else in there, I can tell you.”

My first response was to say no—it was incredibly personal, and plus, there were things like
Kiss a stranger
and
Go skinny-dipping
on the list, and those seemed much too embarrassing to share with Frank Porter. But what if there was something else? I hadn’t seen anything myself, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t. Rather than telling him yes or no, I just said, “So I guess you really like puzzles.”

Frank smiled, not seeming embarrassed about this. “Kind of obvious, huh?”

I nodded. “And at the gas station, you practically took over that guy’s word search.”

Frank laughed. “James!” he said. “Good man. I know, it’s a little strange. I’ve been into them for years now—codes, puzzles, patterns. It’s how my brain works, I guess.” I nodded, thinking this was the end of it. I’d shared something, he’d shared something, and now we could go back to running. But a moment later, Frank went on, his voice a little hesitant, “I think it started with the Beatles. My cousin was listening to them a lot, and told me that they had secret codes in their lyrics. And I became obsessed.”

“With codes?” I asked, looking over at him. We weren’t even walking fast any longer. Strolling would probably be the word for what we were doing, just taking our time, walking side by side. “Or the Beatles?”

“Well . . . both,” Frank acknowledged with a smile. “And I got Collins into them too. It was our music when we were kids.” He nodded to the road ahead. “What do you think?” he asked. “Should we try running again?”

I nodded, a little surprised that he wanted to do this, since he’d really seemed to be struggling. But this was Frank Porter. He’d probably be training for a marathon by the end of the summer. We started to run, the pace only slightly slower than what it had been before.

“God,” Frank gasped after we’d been running for another mile or so, “why do people do this? It’s awful and it never gets any easier.”

“Well,” I managed, glancing over at him. I was glad to see that he was red-faced and sweaty, since I was sure I looked much the same. “How much have you been running?”

“Too much,” he gasped.

“No,” I said, taking in a breath while laughing, which made me sound, for an embarrassing moment, like I was choking on air. I tried to turn it into a cough, then asked, “I mean, how long?”

“Never this long,” he said. “This—is too long.”

“No, that’s your problem,” I said, wishing that this could have been a shorter explanation, as I was getting a stitch in my side that felt like someone was stabbing me. “Running actually gets easier the longer distances you cover.”

Frank shook his head. “In a well-ordered universe, that
would not be the case.” I looked over at him sharply. He’d said the first part of this with a funny accent, and I wondered if maybe we should stop, that maybe he’d pushed himself too hard for one day. Frank glanced back at me. “It’s Curtis Anderson,” he said.

This name meant nothing to me, and I shook my head. But then I remembered the CD that had slid out from under the passenger seat of his car. “Was that the CD you had the other night?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “The comedian. That’s his catchphrase. . . .” Frank drew in a big, gasping breath. He pointed ahead of us, three houses down. “There’s my house. Race you?”

“Ha ha,” I said, sure that Frank was kidding, but to my surprise, a second later, he picked up his pace, clearly finding reserves of energy somewhere. Not wanting to be outdone—especially since I was supposed to be the expert here—I started to run faster as well. Even though every muscle in my body was protesting it, I started to sprint, catching up with Frank and then passing him, but just barely, stumbling to a stop in front of the house Frank had pointed at.

“Good . . . job,” Frank gasped, bent double, his hands on his knees. Not having the breath to speak at the moment, I gave him a thumbs-up, and then realized what I was doing and lowered my hand immediately.

I straightened up, stretching my arms overhead, and got my first look at the house we’d stopped in front of. “This house is amazing,”
I said. It looked like something out of a design magazine—pale gray, and done in a modern style that was pretty unique for the area, which tended to favor traditional, especially colonial-style, houses.

“It’s okay,” Frank said with a shrug.

There was a small sign in front of the house that read, in stylized letters,
A Porter & Porter Concept
. I nodded to it. “Are those your parents?”

“Yeah,” he said, a little shortly. “My dad’s the architect, my mom decorates.” He said this with a note of finality, and I wondered somehow if I’d overstepped.

“I didn’t know you lived so close to me,” I said. “I’m over on Driftway.” The second I said this, I hoped it hadn’t sounded creepy—like I made it my business to know where Frank Porter lived. But it was a little surprising—I thought I knew most of the kids who lived around me, if only through from the pre-license bus rides we’d all endured together.

“We’ve only been there about a year,” he said with a shrug. “We move a lot.” I just nodded—there was something in Frank’s expression that told me he didn’t want to go into this.

I nodded and unwrapped my earphones from where I’d wound them around my iPod. Frank was home, so clearly our run, unexpected as it was, had come to an end.

“Do it again soon?” Frank asked with a smile, but he was still breathing hard, and I could tell he was kidding.

“Totally,” I said, smiling back at him, so he would know I got the joke. “Anytime.”

I started to put my earbuds back in and noticed Frank was standing still, looking at me, not heading back inside. “Are you going to run back to Driftway?”

“It might be more like a walk,” I admitted. “It’s not that far.”

“Want to come in?” he asked. “I’ll buy you a water.”

“That’s okay,” I said automatically. “Thank you, though.”

Frank shook his head. “Oh, come on,” he said, starting to walk toward the house. After a moment, I followed, falling into step next to him as we walked up the driveway. It was beautifully landscaped, with flowers planted at what seemed to be mathematically precise intervals. He walked around to a side door and reached under the mat for a key, then unlocked the door and held it open for me. I stepped inside a high-ceilinged, light-filled foyer, and had just turned to tell him how nice his house was when I heard the crash.

I froze, and Frank, standing just behind me, stopped as well, his expression wary. “Is—” I started, but that was as far as I got.

“Because this is my project!” I heard a woman screaming. “I was working on it night and day when you were spending all your time in Darien doing god
knows
what—”

“Don’t talk to me like that!” a man screamed back, matching the woman in volume and intensity. “You would be nowhere without me, just riding on my success—” A woman stalked past us, her face red, before she disappeared from view again, followed by a man, red-faced as well, before he too passed out of view. I recognized them, just vaguely, as Frank’s parents from
pictures in the paper and school functions when they were usually standing behind their son, polite and composed and smiling proudly as he received yet another award.

I glanced over at Frank, whose face had turned white. He was looking down at his sneakers, and I felt like I was seeing something I absolutely shouldn’t. And I somehow knew that, however bad this was for him, it was worse because I was there to witness it. “I’m going to go,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. Frank nodded without looking at me. I backed away, and as I reached the door, I could hear the voices being raised in the other room again.

I let myself out the door and started walking up the driveway, fast, wishing I had just gone home when I’d had the opportunity, and not had to see the expression on Frank’s face as he listened to his parents screaming at each other. I started walking faster once I hit the street, and then broke into a run, despite the fact that every muscle in my body objected to this.

I ran all the way home and it wasn’t until I’d almost reached my house that I noticed I’d been sticking to the outside, leaving enough room for someone to run next to me.

I stood behind the counter of Paradise Ice Cream and looked longingly at the door. In the four days that I’d been working at the ice cream parlor, I’d had exactly five customers. And one of them was just a guy who wanted change for the parking meter. If Sloane had been there, and we’d been working together, it would have been awesome, and the lack of customers would have been the job’s biggest perk. But since it was just me, alone, all day, I found myself looking up hopefully whenever anyone walked by, crossing my fingers that they wanted some ice cream. But although people sometimes glanced in the window, they walked on, usually to the pizza parlor.

My customer-free and silent workplace wouldn’t have been so bad, except when I left my job I had to go home, where my phone was still silent and I had nobody to hang out with.

I hadn’t yet been able to cross anything else off the list, and two nights earlier, in a low moment, I’d taken a picture of it and e-mailed it to Frank’s school address. I’d regretted it as soon as the e-mail had gone through, but since I hadn’t heard anything from him, I figured that he was either not checking his school account over the summer, or that he’d forgotten all about our unexpected running conversation. Either way, I’d made no progress, and it was making me anxious.

Now, I looked away from the door and down at the napkin in front of me, where I’d compiled a list of all the Jamies from school I could think of. I didn’t know any of them well, and I honestly didn’t think I’d be capable of calling one of them up and asking if I could come to his house and hug him. I’d just remembered one more—I was pretty sure the guy who’d been in the mascot costume last year had been named Jamie—when the over-the-door bell jangled and a girl rushed into the shop.

I pushed the napkin to the side and tried to look professional. “Welcome to Paradise,” I said, smiling at her.

She froze in the doorway and I realized why she looked familiar—she was the girl who worked two doors down at Captain Pizza. “Hi,” she said in a shaky voice. I looked closer and realized that her face was blotchy and her eyes looked puffy. Aside from that, though, she was pretty—petite and curvy, with
bright blond hair and bangs, and pale blue eyes that seemed to be about twice the size of normal people’s eyes. She ran a hand through her hair and took a step closer to the counter. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I actually don’t want any ice cream.” I sighed and nodded; at this point, I felt like this shouldn’t even have surprised me. She took a big, shaky breath. “I just needed to get out of there for a moment. And if I went to my car, everyone would be able to see . . .” Her face crumpled and she held her hand up to her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said in a choked voice. “I’ll be gone in a second.”

“Um,” I said as I looked around, like one of the signs about handwashing and checking freezer temperatures would help me in this situation. I came out from behind the counter and twisted my hands together. “Are you okay?”

The girl nodded and gave me an incredibly bad version of a smile, one that turned wobbly and collapsed after a few seconds. “No,” she sobbed, starting to cry in earnest. I reached for one of the napkin holders on the counter and brought it over to her. She sank down onto one of the metal chairs and pressed a napkin to her face. “I just feel so stupid, you know. I should have seen it. It was right in front of my face. Like, literally. But my cousin Stephanie always
said
I was too trusting.”

“Should have seen what?” I asked, taking a step closer to her. I couldn’t decide if it would be rude or helpful to point out that, in the movies at least, people who were in emotional crises often got through it with some ice cream.

The girl wiped under her eyes, then blew her nose on the tissue and looked up at me. “That my boyfriend was cheating on me.”

“Oh god,” I said, pushing more napkins at her. “I’m so sorry—”

“With my best friend.”

“Oh,” I said, swallowing hard.

“And we all work together.” She pointed in the direction of the pizza parlor. “Next door.” Telling me all this information seemed to bring the gravity of the situation back again, and she burst into fresh tears.

“Um,” I said, taking a step closer to the table, “is there a possibility that maybe you just misunderstood? Maybe your best friend didn’t mean it, or maybe you saw something that wasn’t . . .” My voice trailed off. A memory, one I didn’t like to think about if I could avoid it, was suddenly intruding with full force—that night in May, Sam’s house, the look on Sloane’s face, the glass shattering at her feet.

“No,” the girl said, her voice choked, as she shook her head. “I was out on delivery, and the last two were right near each other, so I got back super early.” Her voice got quiet, and shaky. “And that’s when I saw Bryan and Mandy, making out by the employee cubbies.” She looked up at me and I saw her eyes were spilling over with tears. “That was
our
place. It was where
we
used to make out.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, handing over another stack of napkins,
realizing that I might have to get her another dispenser soon.

“And so I said, ‘What is this supposed to mean?’ I really was maybe willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I swear,” she said, pressing the napkin under her eyes again. “But then Bryan takes Mandy’s hand and tells me that we need to talk. Can you believe it?” She started crying again, and I reached over and tentatively patted her on the back.