Schizo (9 page)

So what I do is, I leap forward and grab the file and tear through it, my heart beating so fast, I can hardly breathe. Sweat breaks out all across my forehead. My vision blurs.

But still, I'm able to find the page with the suspects' names. There are even photos—and what look like street addresses. I take the pages and quickly stuff them into my backpack, closing the file and jumping to my feet, knocking the chair over.

My breathing slows.

I wipe the sweat from my face with the sleeve of my jacket and set the chair to right.

Detective Demarest has not come back, but I leave the office anyway, closing the door behind me.

There is no one in the hall, so I walk quickly out to the main room.

That woman at the front smiles at me and waves.

I go out the door.

No one tries to stop me.

I have the information I need now.

And I will find Teddy.

Because, despite what anyone might say, I know that he is alive.

I know it because I feel it—like a clear, cool breeze blowing through my mind.

OUTSIDE THE FOG HAS
settled in over the city, so the streets and skies and buildings and cars and people walking with their heads down and the crows and pigeons and everything are gray and muted silver.

After stealing that list of suspects and being so close to finding Teddy, you'd think the clouds would've parted and the sun would be shining down like a goddamn golden halo all around me.

That's how it would work if this were a movie.

But there is only gray and fog and trash and a thick layer of black sludge ground and beaten into the sidewalk. A bus goes lumbering past, rumbling and shaking, the men and women crowded together inside, sitting and standing.

I run across the street and then go fast up a couple of blocks to get away from the police station, just in case Detective Demarest notices part of my brother's file is missing. Not that he will. He'll stuff the folder back in with all those others as part of his “system.” Then he'll forget about it. He'll forget about Teddy, like everyone else has. I'm the only one left who can help him. And so I need to get home as soon as possible to look over what I have.

I hike up the hill to the bus stop on Grant next to Caffe Trieste. I turn to see someone waving at me from inside the coffee shop.

“Miles!”

Of course, it's Eliza. She comes out the swinging door not set right on its hinges.

I say
of course
only because fate or karma or whatever fucking else clearly has it in for me.

So it
has
to be Eliza.

Looking beautiful as always—dark hair pulled back, her face pale, her eyes flashing green-blue against the gray. She's wearing tight jeans and fur-lined boots and a hooded parka. It's cold outside, and she rubs her small hands together.

“Hey!” I say to her, still moving—wanting to get away.

But she immediately starts talking.

And she asks me to sit down.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

She smiles. “Homework. I'm so far behind.”

Those pages I stole are stashed in my backpack, and I want so badly just to go home and read through them. But now Eliza is saying to me, “Come on, Mie. Come sit down for a minute.”

I follow her in and order coffee and then I ask her if we can go back outside so I can smoke. She grabs her books and backpack, and we go sit at one of the unsteady tables.

Across the street there is a white church with steeples like pulled sugar stretching up above the white marble steps. There is a pack of street kids huddled together beneath the vaulted arches wearing army gear and wrapped in tattered wool blankets. They have some sort of off-white pit bull mix tied to a long piece of rope.

“Aww, what a cute dog,” Eliza says, exhaling the smoke a little theatrically from the cigarette I gave her. “Did you know my mom and I brought a puppy back from New Orleans?”

“Awesome. What kind?”

“A bloodhound,” she says, looking down at her hands. “Seriously, they are absolutely the cutest things in the entire world.”

Her legs are crossed, and she leans forward. She's very close to me now. I can feel the heat from her body.

I don't want to feel it, but I do.

So I keep on dipping my raspberry ring thing into my big bowl of coffee with sugar and milk.

“Miles,” she says, bowing her head. “Listen, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean for it to get out, about what happened. When I came back in I was just upset, and Mackenzie Miller was right there when I told Lily. Remember her? She transferred to Lincoln in eighth grade, and she was totally my best friend.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” I tell her, which is the truth.

“Well, believe me, she wouldn't have said anything, I promise. And I really was too freaked out to notice all the people standing around us. But I think it was Mackenzie. That's what Ian Larkin told me. He said he heard it from her.”

I breathe then and drink my coffee. I don't want to care about any of this.

“Look, it's okay. I knew you didn't mean for it to get out.”

“Really? Oh, good, Miles. I was worried.”

“No, no, I'm fine. And, listen, I hope you know that it had nothing to do with you. I'm on a lot of medication and I get super sick if I don't eat enough. But, anyway, I'm . . . I'm sorry I puked on you.”

I smile then, and so does she.

“Well, technically,” she starts, stubbing out her cigarette in the red plastic ashtray laid out between us, “you didn't puke
on
me—but you were close.”

She giggles sweetly so the table shakes a little and some of her coffee spills into the saucer. A hipster guy in his early twenties walks past, transfixed by the screen of his iPhone—though he still manages to stop and do a kind of double-take when he notices Eliza. He stares and then catches himself staring and averts his eyes back to his phone and keeps on walking.

It's not a big deal or anything.

I mean, it's just a moment—and yet it is enough to remind me that Eliza is really, truly, out of my league.

I swallow and blush and say, “That guy was totally checking you out just then. Did you see that?”

Her head tilts to the side. “What? Who?”

“That hipster dude that walked by. You didn't notice?”

“Uh-uh.” She smiles with her lips pressed together.

“I bet that happens to you all the time,” I say, maybe because I'm already feeling jealous, which is so totally dumb.

“Yeah, I guess. I'm sort of used to it, you know? Not to sound all full of myself or anything.”

I shake my head. “No, no, of course not. It's just a fact, right? You're super beautiful.”

But right after I say that, my face goes hot and I'm embarrassed as hell and my heart races and I smoke and don't look at her. It came out sounding really awkward, too.

“No, I'm not.” I can hear her fidgeting around. “But thank you.”

My throat is very dry. “Sorry, was that weird I said that?”

Her body moves closer to mine.

“No, are you kidding? You're so sweet. Coming back here, I was scared you were going to hate me for what I did. And maybe . . . maybe even blame me for what happened.”

I cross my legs and make myself small in my chair.

“Blame you?”

“Yeah, for what happened to you.”

“Not all all,” I say hurriedly. “Me having that episode . . . I mean, it's a disease—bad wiring in my brain. It's nobody's fault. Nobody's.”

She takes another deep breath and exhales noisily. “I know that. But, I don't know, it's just so weird that it happened, like, right after that thing with you and me. Right after I left. I mean, wasn't it after that?”

“Well, yeah, it was. But it's just a coincidence.”

She rubs my arm a little. “I wanted to call you after I found out. I really did. Except . . . well . . . like I said, I thought you might be mad at me.”

“No, I was never mad at you—not ever.”

“I'm so happy to hear that,” she says, talking softer now. “I hope we can start hanging out again now that I'm back.”

I sit up straight and I'm not sure what to say, but I turn toward her and she's leaning across the table, so I lean in, too, and then we kiss for real this time. Our mouths fit perfectly together, and I taste the warmth and sweetness of her and my body feels lifted off the ground.

We kiss like that until one of those kids from across the street whistles, like, “Woo-hoo,” at us.

“You wanna go?” she whispers at me, and I feel drunk or high or both.

We walk down the street together back toward the bus stop, and this time we are holding hands and leaning against each other, and it's so strange because walking to the café we were just friends from long ago running into each other, and now we're, like, a couple.

At least, I think we're a couple.

I kiss her then, as if to ask her, and she kisses me back and she looks up at me and the fog is wet and thick around us and her eyes shine out and she smiles and I know the answer must be yes.

Only . . . only that can't be the answer for me; not yet—not until I bring Teddy back home.

I stop and breathe and press the palm of my hand against my forehead.

“What's wrong?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “I just . . . I want this. I do. But . . . I can't. Not right now.”

She tilts her head to one side. “But . . . but I thought you were better.”

“I am better. But it's not that. I . . . I can't talk about it too much. Not yet.”

“What do you mean?”

I start to answer and then stop. As much as I want to talk to her about Teddy, I know that I can't. She would try to stop me. She might even tell my parents. And that's the last fucking thing I need.

None of them will understand. They'll think I'm being reckless. And, anyway, I'm trying to keep them from dealing with the pain of all this. That's the fucking point.

I can't tell her.

So what I say is something completely fucking stupid.

“I just . . . uh . . . need to focus on my own stuff. I'm sorry.”

She looks up then, right into my eyes—taking hold of my hands in hers.

“Okay. Yeah, no, I get it.”

“You do?”

“Yeah . . . for sure.”

The bus lumbers up to the stop and the brakes exhale loudly and the door opens.

It's her bus, the fifteen, not mine.

Eliza gets on board.

“See you tomorrow,” she tells me.

The doors close.

And the bus drives off.

THERE'S NO LOCK ON
my bedroom door, but that's just the way the house was built; it has nothing to do with me.

I shut myself in and throw my backpack on the unmade bed. The light on the side table has been left on, but it's fully dark outside, so I turn on the overhead light, too, sit down on the bed, and take out the pages.

My hands shake as I try to focus my eyes on the words and images. The photos are black-and-white copies, grainy. My eyes keep watering and I shiver, still not able to see clearly.

“Goddamnit,” I say.

I turn the pages over, upside down on the bed, and go up to the computer on my desk, putting on some music to try to calm down a little bit. The library is set to shuffle, and just by chance a John Lennon song plays and it is calming and I go back to the bed.

It's a love song. John's singing,
Even if it's just a day, I miss you when you're away. I wish you were here today, dear Yoko.

Turning the pages back over, it looks as if the detectives have highlighted the names and addresses of the most likely suspects. The one sex offender on the list who fits Dotty Peterson's description
and
drives a white Ford Explorer lives only three blocks from Ocean Beach, so that seems like a pretty damn good lead. And as I'm reading about the man's alibi—the alibi that cleared him—I notice, unbelievably, that the cops got the date of the actual kidnapping wrong. No wonder Teddy's never been found. These police are seriously incompetent. The date they've written is exactly one week later than the day in question. So the alibi of the man, Simon Tolliver, is totally meaningless.

That breeze comes clear and cool in my mind.

Half the junior class is taking a trip down to Ocean Beach tomorrow to clean up trash. Hopefully I can slip away for a minute to check out Tolliver's house. For all I know, Teddy is there right now.

Reading more about Tolliver, though, I have to admit, I'm a little scared to go confront him. The guy sounds like a total psycho. And while the report states that he's been compliant with his parole officer for almost a decade, he'd been in prison for fifteen years before that.

So he's obviously a bad fucking dude. And honestly, even though I know I should go and scope out his house, I'm kind of scared about having anything to do with a crazy-ass psycho like that.

But I will.

I'll go there tomorrow and I won't get caught.

There's a Joy Division song now playing on the computer speakers.

And then the door swings open and I jump a fucking mile—turning the pages from the police files over quickly and covering them, as casually as possible, with my backpack.

It's Janey.

She bursts into my room, jumping onto the bed.

“Miles!” she shouts. “That movie was so good!”

I stand up and sit down and knock my bag and the papers back more so they fall off the other side of the bed and onto the ground.

“What movie was it?” I ask, hugging her to me. She smells like clean laundry and maple syrup.

“
Moonrise Kingdom,
” she tells me.

“I wanted to see that. Was it great?”

“So, so great. Where were you, anyway?”

“Nowhere,” I answer. “Just walking around.”

“We tried calling you.”

“Oh, yeah? I guess my phone was off.”

I pause for a moment, think, stare at the floor.

“Jane,” I say distractedly, “I know things have been hard around here. But . . . I just . . . It's gonna get better. I promise. I'm going to fix everything.”

Her eyes open wide at me. “But everything
is
okay, isn't it?”

“Sure, yeah, of course. But . . . you know what I mean.”

She shakes her head. “Don't worry about that.”

“No,
you
don't worry. That's what I'm saying.”

I am so close now to finding Teddy. This endless hell—this endless waiting—is almost over. I just wish I could tell her. I wish I could tell somebody.

But they will know it soon enough.

When I bring our brother home.

I kiss Jane on the forehead, and we go out together to eat the hamburgers they brought back from Bill's Place on Clement.

The rain is falling outside, and I can hear it like static, loud across the rooftops.

Water drops bead and sweat from the cracked ceiling overhead.

But tonight we eat and we are happy.

Teddy is coming home.