Good and Gone Read online

  “Adrian Wildes. He’s a singer. He left his tour bus and no one knows where he is.”

  “Your father doesn’t understand either.”

  I don’t fully understand myself, but I don’t want Mom to think that both Charlie and I have totally lost it. She doesn’t deserve that. “It’s kind of like a social-media thing, I guess. And Charlie thought it would make him feel better.”

  “He said that?”

  “Yes,” I lie. “He got up off the couch and said, ‘This is something I need to do. To feel whole again.’ And so I said, ‘Well, I think Adrian Wildes is a steaming pile of crap, but if that’s what you need to do to feel better, then let’s ride, brother.’”

  “I know you are lying to me, but are you also making fun of me?”

  “No, Mom. And it’s not a complete lie. That’s what he said in body language, and that’s how I feel about Adrian Wildes.”

  She sighs. “Oh, Lexi.”

  “What?”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Just looking out for Charlie.”

  “Lexi,” she says again.

  “Isn’t that funny, Mom? I mean, like, who would have thought I’d be the one looking out for Charlie. For anyone?”

  “You’re a responsible girl deep down.”

  “Everyone is responsible deep down, Mom.”

  “Where are you now?”

  I hesitate.

  “Lexi.”

  “Rhode Island, I think. But maybe Connecticut.”

  Nothing. More nothing.

  “Mom?”

  “I see.”

  “What’s wrong with him, Mom?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Charlie.”

  I look over my shoulder. Charlie is sitting on a bench outside the office building. He’s staring out at the road, his head twitching back and forth a little as he watches the cars go by. “Okay, sure,” I say. “Listen. We have to keep moving or we’ll never get back.”

  “Get moving where?”

  “Right now I think we’re going toward Pennsylvania. That’s where he was last seen. We have a few clues. We aren’t totally winging this. And there are three of us, and Zack is a junior, so—” I’m not sure how this bit of information is supposed to help my case, except that Zack is older than me, so at least that’s something. “And he’s super responsible,” I go on. “I remember in middle school he was Citizen of the Month like six times.”

  “When will you be home?” she asks.

  “We’ll have to stay somewhere tonight, I think,” I tell her.

  “Where?”

  “I have money. We can stay in a hotel or something. We’ll be okay. I won’t let Charlie decide to sleep under the stars or anything.”

  “And then you’ll come back tomorrow?”

  I hesitate. “Yes.”

  “Lexi?”

  “Yes. I will do my best to get us back home tomorrow, okay? I mean, I think we could turn around now. We might never find this guy. But it’s a little hard with Charlie.”

  There’s a buzzing on the other side of the line.

  “Mom?”

  “I want updates, Lexi.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Enough.”

  “You got it, Mom. Updates and no booze or drugs or hookers.”

  “You aren’t reassuring me.”

  “I’m with Charlie and Germy Zack Donovan. We are the least appealing group of people ever to hit the open road.”

  “You’re very appealing, Lexi.”

  “Let’s have the self-confidence talk when I get back, Mommy Dearest.”

  I look over at the car, where Zack is struggling with a funnel and a can of oil. “Gotta roll.”

  “I love you, Lexi. Tell Charlie that, too. I love you both.”

  “Moon, stars, and sun,” I say. “Got it. Love you, too.”

  BEFORE

  October

  When we started our poetry unit and had to bring in a poem we liked, Gwen chose an Adrian Wildes song. I wasn’t sure if she did it to push my buttons (who can push your buttons better than your maybe former best friend?) or if she really, really loved it, but she sure did analyze the crap out of it. “You can see in verse three that he is making an analogy between the twisted tree trunk and the man’s conscience. This is augmented by the off rhyme and the alliteration.”

  Gack.

  Good old Dewey DeWitt, our million-year-old hippie English teacher, said, “You know, that is a really astute observation, Gwen. And did you also notice that the word ‘soul’ is misspelled as its homonym, ‘sole,’ which of course could be a comparison between the soul as in our spiritual being and sole as in the bottom of our foot. But it could also be a reference to his own name and the unusual spelling of ‘wild.’ It’s risky to assume a poet—or any artist—is creating autobiography, but in this case it seems clear that Wildes is saying that he is the man with the twisted tree trunk soul.”

  “Or,” I said, “maybe he just can’t spell.”

  Gwen rolled her eyes at me.

  Dewey DeWitt said, “That is not a very helpful contribution, Lexi.”

  So I put my head down on my desk. Dewey DeWitt didn’t say anything.

  It’s a cry for help! I wanted to shout. I am a good student and a good kid and now here I am facedown on the desk. Aren’t you going to do anything?

  Tooley spoke from behind me. Mike Tooley, but we’ve all called him by his last name so long I’ve almost forgotten he has a first. “I kind of wonder, well, if he’s the twisted tree, then, isn’t that a lot of self-hate?”

  “Yes!” Dewey said enthusiastically.

  Gwen said, “I think he’s really digging deep and examining himself. We all have dark parts and I think it’s very brave of him to take a close look at his.”

  I turned my head to the side so I could see my notebook. In the margin, I drew a picture of a girl with curly hair, like Gwen. She had a big smile on her face and wore a triangle dress like the women on bathroom signs. I started drawing her deep, dark core: a black spiral. I pressed so hard I tore through the page, but I kept spiraling out until the whole girl was covered in black ink.

  Gwen’s Black Sole, I wrote underneath it. Then I raised my hand.

  “Yes, Lexi?” Dewey DeWitt said. And I’ve got to hand it to him: he had a hopeful look on his face even though my cheek was still on my desk.

  “A sole is also a fish,” I said.

  “Lexi—”

  “Wait,” I said. “And the song is talking about the tree growing down by the river—which is twisting, too, by the way. A twisted river and a twisted tree, and this poor little sole. That’s what he says, ‘Poor little sole all alone, all alone.’ So maybe he didn’t misspell it, and maybe it isn’t a reference to his own name. Maybe it’s a fish swimming in the twisted river by the twisted tree. This poor little fish-soul trying to make it when everything else around her is twisted and bad.”

  Dewey DeWitt didn’t say anything at first. He didn’t move, either. Then he stepped around my desk so he was in my line of vision. I sat up, and I didn’t turn away. “Well, I’ll be,” he said. “That’s almost brilliant, Lexi.”

  I smiled at him, but all the while I was looking past him, at Gwen, whose dark little sole was puffing out of her nose.

  When I told Seth about it later, he laughed. Then he said, “I think you’re giving Adrian Wildes way too much credit.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Definitely.”

  “Probably,” I agreed.

  NOW

  Zack and Charlie are still looking under the hood of the car when I get off the phone with Mom. Like Charlie knows anything at all useful about cars. They have four wheels. They take you places—but only if you get up off the couch and get into them.

  There’s a sidewalk leading away from the office building, which is weird because the road is a four-laner, dotted with strip malls. It’s like some planner said, “We should have a walkable downtown,” and
thought that putting in some sidewalks would automatically solve the general laziness of the population. I wonder if I am the first ever person to walk down this sidewalk. Like, maybe the city council will all jump out with balloons and give me the key to their city, whatever that means.

  Instead what happens is someone yells at me from the road. “Nice tits!”

  I cross my arms over my chest. Snap my head up. It’s a truck, big and black, and a boy is leaning out the open window. He has on a camouflage baseball cap that hides all of his hair. “Nice tits!” he yells again.

  I want to yell something smart back at him. Something that will make him never call out a window again. I want to nonchalantly raise my middle finger at him. I can flip off a little girl, but not this douchebag? I want to yell out, “Is that the best you’ve got? ’Cause I’ve gotten it a lot worse!” I want to do anything other than the nothing that I do.

  The truck peels off, the black cloud of diesel exhaust behind it making me cough. “Asshole,” I mutter under my breath. Too late. I’m always too late with my words when it really matters.

  When I am sure the truck is gone and not turning around to come back and yell at me some more, I pivot and start walking back toward Charlie and Zack. The hood of the car is closed and Zack is leaning against it. Charlie is in the passenger seat and even from this far, even through the glass, I can tell he’s annoyed with me. Well, screw him. He never has to worry about being yelled at just for walking down the street. Just for existing.

  “You okay?” Zack asks.

  “Sure,” I tell him.

  “That truck—were they talking to you?”

  “Yeah.” I wave my hand, like it’s nothing. “Stupid bro-dude. Catcalling. I let out an impressive string of profanity in response. Your ears would’ve bled.”

  He looks at me, looks ready to say something, but then Charlie beeps the horn and I climb back into my cage in the back seat.

  THREE

  Once upon a time, a princess was born in a kingdom on a cliff. The view was so magnificent that no man could go to the edge of the cliff without throwing himself from it. The king was losing his finest knights and soldiers to the ocean. The only way to break the spell of the cliff was for a man to resist its pull. The only beauty more powerful than that of the sea, the king reasoned, was that of his daughter, the princess.

  NOW

  Adrian Wildes has a video about a road trip. It uses, like, every filter you can find on your phone’s camera, so the characters in it are all glossy and golden and windswept. The woman trails her arm out of the car and her hair blows into her face. It’s Alana Greengrass, Adrian Wildes’s girlfriend at the time, and she is absolutely beautiful: long, highlighted hair, eyes perfectly lined. If the back seat windows in Zack’s car actually went down—which they don’t—and I held my hand out the window, it would probably get smacked off by a passing SUV. And if I let the wind ruffle my hair, my lungs would fill with diesel exhaust. Alana Greengrass manages to appear sad and pensive and poignant all just by looking into the distance. And the road trip is intercut with all these kissy-kissy scenes between her and Adrian. The song washes over them:

  You always said that when you left

  You’d be good and gone

  And gone for good.

  So let’s go together, baby.

  Let’s be good and gone from here.

  And all the while you assume he’s the one who is driving the car, but then the end reveals that it’s some other guy and that guy and Alana Greengrass literally go driving off into the sunset together. It was before Alana and Adrian broke up for real, but not too long before. And of course everyone talked about how they knew things were going bad and the video was their swan song, not that I cared at all. I only noticed because Alana Greengrass got totally slammed like it was all her fault—she was too clingy, too distant, too flirty with other guys, too reserved. And Adrian Wildes just walked away, slipping her off like an old coat.

  Within three weeks he was dating that pop star. That lasted a month. And again the girl was the one with troubles—couldn’t hold a man. I thought that was just being a celebrity, but when Seth left—well, it didn’t take him long to find someone else. To find Hannah.

  Anyway the song is maybe three and a half minutes long, which is about as long as the road part of a road trip can be interesting.

  Really it’s just the three of us in this little box rolling down the road for hours and hours and hours. Days, months, years. That’s what it feels like.

  Zack has three empty (mostly empty) fast food cups in the back seat, one of which is sticky around the edges. There are seven pennies stuck into a divot in what I think is supposed to be an armrest. I pocketed those somewhere between the Total-Mart and Narragansett. The seat belt in back on the driver’s side doesn’t work. There’s a spring or something in my seat that manages to poke into my ass no matter which way I sit.

  Super glam, right?

  And on the radio, it’s all Adrian Wildes, all the time. Here are the songs we hear over and over:

  »“Nothing” (Of course: it was his number one hit and also, even though Charlie can’t control what comes on the radio, it still feels like he is doing it on purpose. Like he has some sort of sixth sense and can tell it makes my skin crawl.)

  »“Barnstormers”

  »“All Along the Watchtower” (Cover. This leads to lengthy discussion of which of the versions of this song is the best, which I stay out of because I don’t know half the bands Zach and Charlie are talking about, and, anyway, the original is always best, so I say it was Jimi Hendrix, and Charlie says, “No, dumbass, Bob Dylan did the original,” and that’s when I shut up.)

  »“Open Up Your Heart”

  »“Ain’t No Plan”

  »“Sweet” (A duet with Alana Greengrass, before everything went sour, of course, and it kind of kills me that I liked this song even a little bit.)

  »“Two fer the Road”

  »“Hallelujah” (This one is a cover, too, and I guess this one breaks my original-is-best rule, because Jeff Buckley sang it best even though it’s a Leonard Cohen song. And if you’re impressed that I know who Leonard Cohen is, you can thank Seth since Leonard Cohen is just about the only non-YouTube musician that Seth has any respect for.)

  »“Clear Eyes, Full Hearts” (This is a song about a television show about football in Texas. Really.)

  »“Topeka”

  »“Bartleby” (And this one is about some Herman Melville story, at least that’s what Charlie says. I thought Melville only wrote about the stupid whale, but evidently he had boring things to say about other boring topics that would inspire boring songs.)

  »“Generations Lost”

  »“Too Too Far”

  »“Sweet Obsessive”

  »“Truth. Love.” (Punctuation his. Poser.)

  »“Hold On Now” (Another duet with Alana Greengrass, when the end was coming.)

  »“Green Witch”

  And all the while I am jealous of Alana in the video. Because she is glowing. Because her hair snapping into her face doesn’t seem to bother her. Because she has somewhere to go and someone to go with.

  “It’s getting late,” Zack says. “What do you say we stop for the night?”

  “That makes sense,” I say. “Especially since, you know, we don’t actually have a destination.”

  “We’re going where he was,” Charlie tells me. All I can see of him is his hair puffing up above the headrest, so he must be slumped down in the seat. The Charles Green slump: it’s legendary.

  We’ve snaked through Rhode Island and we’ve just gotten back onto 95 in Connecticut and it seems like the cars are zipping past us at alarming rates.

  “We could stop, take another look at the map, come up with a plan,” Zack says. “My cousin goes to college around here. Connecticut College. We can stay with her for the night and then in the morning we can get going toward Pennsylvania again first thing.” His voice is gentle, and I remember once when we w
ere in middle school this stray dog wandered by us at the bus stop. It was all mangy and had stuff oozing out of its eyes. My heart had raced and I was sure this dog was rabid and was going to attack us. But Zack had just spoken to it in that soft, easy voice, and it curled up right by our feet and when the bus came, Zack told the bus driver, who called animal control. That’s the voice Zack is using to talk to Charlie.

  Charlie doesn’t answer, and I don’t want to sway him by saying that I think stopping is a good idea, so I keep quiet. In a few miles, Zack gets off the highway, and we’re back on quieter roads.

  The campus feels like a movie set: huge stone buildings, some of them draped in ivy. There’s a big quad in the middle with the remnants of snow dusting it that are somehow not dingy and gray like the snow everywhere else. Zack parks in a visitor lot and then leads us to one of the drabber buildings. At the security desk he says, “My name is Zack Donovan. I’m here to see my cousin Kristy Donovan. She isn’t expecting us.”

  The security guard doesn’t say anything. He picks up the phone and calls up, says “Zack Donovan is here,” to whoever answers. Then he hangs up and says, “Wait.”

  So we wait. I realize that Charlie smells like fried food and I wonder if that’s his constant smell now, or if it came from Zack’s car. And if it came from Zack’s car, does that mean I also smell? I am trying to inconspicuously smell myself when a girl skips down the stairs. She has on pajama bottoms and a T-shirt with a picture of the girl from Phineas and Ferb on it. “Zack!” she says, and wraps her arms around him. “I thought that’s what the guy said, but I didn’t know you were coming, so I thought maybe I’d heard him wrong.”

  “We’re on a road trip and we need a place to crash.”

  “Oh, Zack! That is so you!” She smiles, and then turns to look at me and Charlie. “I’m Kristen.”

  “I’m Lexi,” I tell her. “And this is my brother, Charlie.”

  “Okay, you all just need to sign in. We’ll find you places to crash, okay? Have you eaten? You look hungry.”

  I write the time, 6:07, and then all our names onto the little book. First Charlie, then Zack, and then me. For myself, I write Alexandra Green, which is my full name, though no one ever, ever calls me that. But maybe when I go to college, I will change that. I will stop being Lexi, and I will be Alexa. Or Xandra. Or Allie, like the reporter. I trace over the A and actually feel my heart lifting a little bit: maybe changing things is as simple as changing what people call you?