The Local News (10 page)

From outside we still heard occasional voices of searchers, sometimes one rising more loudly than the rest, a peaked word or phrase (
… head north … Ready?),
but mostly it was quiet. Sporadic creaking or a slithery noise would come from within the factory, but beyond exchanging startled glances, we didn’t do anything.

For once I found Lola’s airy, tangential stories soothing. Her grandmother’s shih tzu had no depth perception and walked into walls. She had heard a rumor about Mr. Feldkamp, the band teacher, who supposedly had an affair with a first-chair clarinet player several years ago. The stories struck me now like the occasional Popsicle or celebrity magazine, surprisingly satisfying because of their substancelessness.

“What do you do for fun?” she asked me at one point, and it struck me as a funny question, like we were on a date.

“Um …” I tried to think. It was a harder question than I thought. “I don’t know. I liked driving for a while.” I told the story about getting pulled over. They both seemed impressed. Lola had gotten her license six weeks earlier and “had like a total spastic meltdown” whenever she saw a cop car.

“What else do you like?” she asked, so naturally eager it was both disconcerting and endearing. I wondered what Danny had really thought of her, if he liked this or was put off.

“Reading,” I said. “I like to read quite a bit.”

“What are you reading?” Lola said.

“A couple things. One’s called
The Perfect Failure.
It’s about the Bay of Pigs.”

“I don’t really get the Bay of Pigs,” she said.

I laughed a little—I hoped not meanly—and said, “Do you want to know?” and she nodded, though I suspected she would nod at anything. I explained some about Cuba and Castro and our fear of his allegiance to the Soviet Union. She listened smilingly. Bayard sat with his head tipped against the conveyer belt machine, his eyes closed, appearing to be napping.

“We lost the Bay of Pigs,” she said, the words coming out somewhere between a question and a statement.

“Right. It was a failed attempt. We were underprepared. Ken nedy inherited the mission from Eisenhower, but Kennedy was ambivalent, so he didn’t put enough resources toward it.”

“I like Kennedy,” she said. Then: “Marilyn Monroe, you know?”

I laughed again. Lola was a silly girl, but I appreciated her attempt to have this conversation with me. She talked about how handsome John F. Kennedy Jr. was and didn’t I think he was cute
(Sure)
and remember how he saluted his dad at his funeral, can you even imagine that
(Not really),
and I let her words wash over me, steady as the rain outside, until she tired of talking, which was not for a long time.

Finally, after our butts had grown numb and our legs had started cramping in every new position we shifted to, we collected our coats, ran past the dead bird in the stairwell, and marched knowingly back through the first floor. The rain was lighter now, barely a drizzle. We didn’t hold hands on the way back, since it no longer was a mandate. The quiet had returned between us, and I was struck with sudden melancholy, wanting to say something be-fore the day slipped away from us, but not sure what. I wondered how long my parents had been forced to wait. I wondered if we would soon hear shouts of my name. By the time we’d crossed back through the mall parking lot, the melancholy had taken hold, settling into my chest.

“Thanks,” I said. “For taking me with you.”

Lola told me, “Of course.” She told me, “This was so much fun,” and then stammered apologies about not meaning to say searches were fun, and I told her it was okay. She said, “Do you want to go to Lucien Daws’s party tonight?”

Lucien Daws was a senior, a lanky tennis player who had run in the same general circle as Danny, though not really a friend. He had a reputation for throwing crazy parties. Stories circulated for days afterward about holes kicked in walls or glass coffee tables upended. I’d never been to one. I’d never been to any Franklin party.

“I don’t do that kind of thing,” I said.

Lola squinted at me. Then she started to laugh. “What does
that
mean?”

I felt embarrassed and a little exposed. I made a noise like a laugh, which wasn’t a laugh. We were nearing the starting field by then, and I caught sight of the few straggling groups—some of the cops, a few of the Kiwanis breaking down their table. My father was leaning over, tying his shoe maybe. My mother stood with her hands deep in her pockets, looking at something, possibly scanning the horizon. But as we got closer, it was clear she was just staring off.

I had the sense of marching straight back into nothing. I was not ready to separate. From Lola Pepper, of all people. Which was how I came to tell her yes, okay, I would go with her to Lucien Daws’s party, an answer that at once sent my stomach alight and filled me with dread. She squeezed my hand then and hopped like a bunny.

“Goody,” she told me. “Oh, goody, goody, good.”

When the three of us neared my parents, my mom nodded and stretched out a hand. My dad said simply, “Ready?”

I introduced them to Lola and Bayard and they nodded without recognition. Lola kissed me quickly on the cheek as she said goodbye. She held her pinkie and thumb to her mouth and ear.
I’ll call you,
she mouthed.

“How long have you been waiting?” I asked my parents.

They told me twenty minutes, maybe a half-hour. I looked at their faces when they said this. Nothing. This was how it always had been between us, me the responsible one, requiring little thought and even less worry. Which worked, in the sense that they’d never been right up on top of me and I was left to do whatever I wanted. But still.

“We got really lost,” I lied.

My dad’s face blinked awake, if only for a second. “Where?” he said.

“I don’t know. If I knew, we wouldn’t have been lost.”

My mother made a squeaky sound. I felt bad for my tone; this, a crappy time to pick a fight. They looked wrung out—damp hair, chapped red hands, faces droopy as bloodhounds’—the way they always did after searches.

“Somewhere by the factory,” I said. My dad put a hand on my head, nodding. He said he was glad I made it back before dark. “Where’s David?” he said, just now noticing his absence, as if maybe I’d lost him by the factory too.

I shrugged, then told them, “He wasn’t feeling well. I’m going to his place tonight.” The lie came without forethought, from an instinct not to reveal anything that might tip them toward needless poking and probing. I mostly liked the expanses between us, the imbalanced balance. It seemed easiest just to keep everything as much the same as possible.

Had we found anything, my mother wanted to know. I told her no.

“That’s okay,” my dad said unconvincingly.

When I took my mother’s hand it was cold and stiff, and I squeezed, trying to thaw it while we walked toward the car, but by some trick of thermodynamics, the opposite occurred, and instead my hand chilled in hers.

The main precept of chaos theory is that any system which may appear random and free-willed from one perspective, when viewed more closely, actually falls within a completely deterministic and predictable pattern. Lucien Daws’s party
was
chaos theory. As we walked through the front door, assaulted by the smell of sweat and beer and cigarette and pot smoke, the droning bass of a stereo system turned up so loud it made the walls pulse, the crush of bodies (a literal crush—people had to hold their plastic beer cups above their heads to get through the front hallway), I felt an almost swooning regret. I was convinced I might pass out right there, so forceful was the realization of my mistake. Lola was already pressing her way through the crowd, pulling me along as I strategized the best way to get her to take me home. Offer to let her paw through Danny’s room? Make myself cry? Both?

All social convention was off. People elbowed each other out of the way, toes got stepped on, girls were dressed as if it were summertime, in short skirts with tight tube tops or halters. A boy I’d never seen before pushed against me from behind. When I turned around, his shiny face was inches from mine and I felt myself heating inside my pea coat. I was simultaneously totally overdressed and underdressed in my jacket, T-shirt, and heavy jeans. Within seconds someone had spilled beer on me and then roughly, drunk-enly apologized. It was a girl I recognized from PE, her bleary eyes scanning my face for a long time.

The kitchen was even more crowded, if possible, than the hallway. The keg sat in one corner, and there wasn’t so much a line of people waiting to get to it as a throbbing, impatient amoeba. Someone stepped on the back of my shoe, giving me a flat tire. I teetered in the crowd as I stood on one foot, trying to slip it back on. “You okay?” Lola said, putting a steady hand on my shoulder. Lola too wore a strappy tank top that highlighted her small but nipply boobs and her collarbone full of additional freckles.

“Who
are
all these people?” I had to shout to be heard over the music.

“I
know,”
Lola said, but her voice was filled with the wrong emotion. Excitement rather than bewilderment.

As we neared the keg, which sat in a long, shallow pool of spilled beer, Lola yelled “Two! Two!” and held her fingers in a peace sign to the zitty boy who was filling red and yellow cups. When we finally got ours, she nudged her cup against mine and yelled “Cheers” before taking a long, deep gulp. We fought our way back through the crowd, which collectively scowled at us—for going against the flow of traffic or for having achieved the goal that still eluded them, it wasn’t entirely clear—and only reluctantly stepped out of our way.

Lola seemed to have the schematic map of Lucien Daws’s house memorized, as she swiftly navigated through a new hallway and more ribbons of people, and then through a back den where a huddle of guys watched a wall-sized television displaying huge, pixe-lated dirt-bike racers going round a dusty track, and finally out the back sliding doors to a concrete patio and a nearly endless expanse of dark lawn. There were plenty of people milling around out there, but the cold had kept most inside. And even though there was a JV football player shouting from one of the swings of the old metal swing set, and a couple making out loudly on one of the patio lawn chairs, and a group of guys standing around a woodpile talking about setting fire to it, compared to inside, it was nearly relaxing.

“Drink up,” Lola said before taking another long guzzle of her beer. A foam mustache sat on her lip. Her cup was almost empty already. I stared into mine. I’d drunk beer twice, both times when Danny had snuck Dad’s bottles from the fridge and brought them upstairs, both times just a few sips because it’d tasted bitter like a stomachache. Since I’d started high school, our parents had taken to letting us drink wine on vacations. The last time had been the winter before, when we’d stayed in a condo in Florida, my mom making pizzas in the gritty-floored kitchenette as my dad poured each of us a glass of white wine. It tasted fermented but sweet, and I remember feeling mostly tired and saying “Beezle” when a black-shelled beetle skittered across the condo floor. “You’re drunk,” my mother said, laughing, and for the rest of the trip someone would say
Beezle
and everyone would laugh, because we were like that on vacation—easily prone to amusement, lighthearted, inclined toward in jokes.

I drank some of my beer. It tasted horrible, like something you’d swallow on a dare. Lola laughed at the face I made. She told me it was an acquired taste.

“Lydia. Flippin’. Pasternak,” someone shouted from the dark of the lawn. Drunk people, I realized, took readily to shouting. It was Dawnelle Ryan, one of Danny’s old, fleeting girlfriends, bounding across the lawn toward us, pushing her long brown hair out of her face over and over again as if she were trying unsuccessfully to get a strand of it out of her mouth. “Holy shit. What are you doing here?”

Dawnelle had spent last Thanksgiving with us, since her parents let her stay home while they visited a sick aunt. “Lymphatic cancer,” Dawnelle announced matter-of-factly at our table. “She had a tumor on the side of her neck the size of a damn fist.” She held her own fist to her neck. Her father was in sanitation, and she peppered dinner with stories of weird things people threw away. Complete dinette sets. Full refrigerators. Framed and matted art. Her father once thought he’d found an original Giacometti. He hadn’t, “but it was a damn good copy.” My parents kept exchanging glances at the swearing. Danny didn’t even seem to be listening. I found Dawnelle fascinating, mostly because she was louder than any of his other girlfriends and her boobs were so big that they rested on the table while she ate.

Now she was right up on top of me, her breath sour and hoppy from the beer. “How
are
you?” she said, and then suddenly touched my face. It was very strange to have her touch my face. Her hand was damp, and I wasn’t sure what to do.

“Fine,” I said.

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” She laughed at her own joke and then paused, and I was unsure if I was supposed to really answer. I drank more of my beer. It was slightly easier if I tried not to breathe through my nose while doing it. Dawnelle stared at me smilingly. She asked the standard questions about how my parents were doing, if we had any news.