The Girl with the Wrong Name (4 page)

Lou blinked. Her lips trembled. I couldn’t believe those words had come from my mouth. I never brought up The Night in Question anymore. At least, not consciously or out loud.

My outburst left a cloud of black silence between us. The kind of silence that has physical mass and weight. Lou stood as if someone else had taken over, as if an invisible hand had yanked on her marionette strings.

“I am so sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I mean, I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t. I think I should just go. I’ll go.”

“No.” I jumped out of bed and grabbed her hand before she got to the door. “That was totally my fault,” I said. “I don’t know why I said that, I really don’t. Stay. I’ll help you with the letter. I’ll totally help you. I mean, duh, of course
I’ll help you, girl.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to,” I lied. “I really want to.”

Three minutes later, I
tore a page from my notebook and handed it to Lou. She’d stayed glued to her phone as I’d scrawled out the first paragraph—reading the latest post from
The A.V. Club
, I prayed, and not some depraved sext from Mike.

A Declaration of Romantic Intent

Dear M,

I really, really, really, really want to have vigorous sexual intercourse with you, preferably in the back of a smelly taxi, or perhaps in one of those pee-stained bathroom stalls in the boys’ locker room (or the girls’ locker room, if you think that is hotter. I’m cool either way).

“Theo,
come on,” Lou grumbled, trying not to laugh, and failing. “I thought you were going to help.”

“What? I’m helping. Good writing is all about conservation of words. Actually, you’re right; we don’t need that many
reallys
.”

She shoved her phone into her pocket. “Okay, if you’re going to be mean—”

“No, okay.” I sat up straight and held my pen over a fresh page. From under my hair, I tried to stop smiling. “What do you want it to say?”

“Well, I’d prefer if it didn’t say anything about vigorous sexual intercourse. Or urine. Or taxicabs. Let’s start there.”

“Oh, so you want it to be romantic,” I said.

She laughed again. “I want to find a way to tell him.”

“Tell him what?”

“To really
tell
him this time. You know, to tell him that I’m . . .” I looked up and watched her struggle for the words. How any girl—especially one as smart as Lou—could search her heart so valiantly and sincerely for Mike DeMonaco was
beyond
beyond me. “To tell him that I’m the one who sees it.”

“Sees what?”

“That he’s not just, you know, that
dude
that everybody else sees—that . . .”

I believe “stool” is the term you’re looking for?

“That ‘
guy
,’” she said in the silence. “He’s not just ‘that guy’ in a jock jersey, cracking jokes.”

“I’m pretty sure he
is
that guy.”

Lou’s face soured. “Well, you’re wrong. Because I’ve watched him for years. I mean, I watch him when he doesn’t even know I’m watching him.”

“Yeah, maybe we leave out the stalker part.”

“And I can see,” she went on, ignoring my snarky comments, “that there’s this whole other side to him. A romantic side. A heroic side that he’s too embarrassed to show anyone. You can’t see it, Thee, but I can. And I think that’s when you know that you’re meant to be with someone. When you can see the part of him that no one else sees. Does that make any sense?”

I fully intended to joke about the part of Mike DeMonaco no one else should see, but I found myself tongue-tied.

“And once you’ve seen it,” Lou continued, “once you know how you feel, you have to let him know in, like, no uncertain terms—you have to just tell him flat-out. Because you think
it’s the most obvious thing in the world. You think, ‘How could he not know how I feel? Every single person in this room is staring at me, and they all know exactly how I feel.’ I mean, you said I was stripper-pole obvious at the Trout, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice barely audible. “Like hooker obvious.” I wanted to hug Lou right then, despite her new tragic taste in men.

Lou rolled her eyes. “Right. Hooker obvious. Well, you know what? I don’t think he noticed at all. I don’t think he has a single solitary clue how I feel. That’s why I need you to put it all in the letter. So there is no way he could possibly miss it.”

I nodded. The epiphany had come slowly at first, as Lou was finishing her monologue. It snaked its way through the shoddy plumbing in my head, and my eyes drifted up to my bedroom ceiling—up to a grimy, pencil-thin, half-woman/half-fish-shaped outline that had once been a sticker of Ariel from
The Little Mermaid.
I began projecting blurry images onto the blank white space where Ariel’s face used to be: half-baked guesses at Sarah’s facial features—dimpled chin, rounded chin; high cheekbones, rounded cheeks . . . every version with those oversized, lifeless eyes that stare back at you from a police composite sketch taped to a subway teller’s plexiglass window.

“What’s wrong?” Lou asked.

The words finally leaked from the corner of my mouth. “She doesn’t know.”

Lou looked confused. “Who doesn’t know what?”

“Sarah. She doesn’t know that he loves her.”

“Sarah who? Sarah Bingham? Sarah Pratt? Crop Top Sarah? There’s, like, a billion Sarahs.”

“No, nothing,” I said. “Nothing, never mind.”

“Are you kidding? Now you have to tell me. Who’s Sarah?”

“I’ll tell you later, but I’m feeling inspired here. Don’t worry; it has nothing to do with this.”

“Oh, then go, go, go.” She jumped next to me on the bed.

I dropped pen to paper and began to scribble furiously, reciting to Lou as I wrote.

“I really need to talk to you. Please don’t be alarmed by the heading of this letter, but our time is running out here at Sherman, and I couldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t tell you how I truly feel
. . .
”

“Oh, that’s good,” Lou purred. “That’s really good.”

Chapter Five

“I don’t think she knows.”

I say this first, instead of “hello” or “I’m sorry for abandoning you like a cowardly ass yesterday.” I say it first, because it’s the most important thing—the missing piece of the puzzle, if my hunch is right. I say it also because Andy’s eyes lit up on me the second he stepped through the Harbor door. For
me
this time. Not for the walking pair of boobs in the corner; not for Sarah, his lost golden goddess (I know
she’s blonde—she has
to be blonde); not for anyone but the half-faced troll camped out at his favorite table with her button cam recording.

I expect him to say, “You came back,” with enthusiastic emphasis on “back.”
That’s supposed to be his line. That’s what he said when I pictured this moment while biking down Water Street in the rain. After all, I’d risked serious injury to surprise him with my heroic return from Alienating New York Bitchhood.

But he doesn’t say anything. He just stands across the table from me, soaking wet from the downpour—somehow smiling without smiling.

Or
is
he smiling? Is he smiling at me, or is he thinking about the awesome grilled cheese sandwich he had for breakfast? Where do beautiful boys learn that unreadable gaze? Is it inherited? Is it taught by elder Jedi beautiful boys, by secret Handsome-Man Yodas across the country?

So I’m
the one who ends up saying it, or adding it, really: “I came back.”

He drops his backpack to the floor and lands in his seat with a puzzled grin. His hair has turned darker brown from the rain. He slicks it back with both hands, droplets trickling down his forehead, and leans across the table. “She doesn’t know what?” he asks. “Are we talking about Sarah? Are you going to help me?”

“Yes, we’re talking about Sarah. She doesn’t know you’re in love with her. I mean, that you fell in love with her that day. I don’t think she knows.”

“Nah, that’s impossible,” he says.

“Listen to me. I’ve done a lot of research on relationships.” (More than two hundred weeks of wedding announcements, though he doesn’t need to know that.) “This is one of the only categories where Pretty Girls are like everyone else. When they fall in love, they are just as insecure about being loved back as Normal Girls.”

“I don’t know.” Andy shakes his head, leaning back.

“But I do, so here’s my version of Sarah’s Sunday morning. Nothing terrible happens to her. Nothing unthinkable. I can see it. She wakes up, groggy, her mouth still tasting of beer. She pulls the sheet up over her head to block out the sun, and that’s when that first physical memory of you bubbles to the surface. And then
boom,
she’s drowning so deep in embarrassment, she can barely breathe. Not because she feels like a slut, but because she’s one hundred percent certain that
you
think she’s a slut.”

“She is?” he asks doubtfully.

“Yes, because she’s made every rookie mistake in the book. She confessed secrets about herself way too early. She asked you to stay with her for an entire week on your first date. I mean, Jesus, she gave herself to you on the first night. That’s, like, an instant disqualification for true love.”

He smirks. “‘Gave herself?’ How do you know that?’”

“Andy, please.” I gesture toward his rain-soaked torso without looking at it directly. “Look, you can use whatever terminology you want. The point is, she thought she’d ruined it already. She didn’t want to show up at eleven forty-five and sit here for three hours like a pathetic fool, knowing you’d lost all respect for her, knowing you’d probably forgotten her name
already.”

“Oh, man.” Andy sighs. “If three hours makes her a pathetic fool, then what do you call the guy who waits for five days?”

“No! I mean . . . I didn’t mean
you
were a pathetic fool for waiting—”

“But that’s what you were thinking.”

“No, listen to what I’m telling you.” I finally drum up the courage to lean a little closer. “Sarah does love you. She just doesn’t know that you love her back. The only thing worse than loving someone who doesn’t love you back is sleeping
with someone who doesn’t love you back. If she’d known you loved her, she would have been here at eleven-freaking-fifteen with an orchid in her hair and the prettiest dress she owned. All we need—I mean, all you need to do is find her and tell her that.”

He furrows his brow. “I think you might be missing the point here. I can’t find her. I don’t even have her last name or her number. So when you say ‘we,’ you’re right.”

“Well, what else have you tried?”

“Tried?”

“Yeah, what other ways have you tried to find her besides coming here?”

I’d fallen so deep into the conversation, I’d almost forgotten who he was for a minute. Then I see that familiar look sail across his eyes again. The Lost Boy look. Not exactly forlorn, not exactly confused, just clearly at home in a place that isn’t here.

“But this is where we’re supposed to meet,” he says, mostly to himself.

“I know, but haven’t you tried anything else? Like retracing your steps, or asking around the café to see if anyone else knows her?”

He rubs his eyes like a toddler waking from a nap. I study his face, trying to understand the sudden glitch in the conversation. I know he’s not stupid. He’s not naïve, either. But there’s something going on with him. It reminds me of that awkward three-second delay in a satellite news interview. Like half his brain is an over-taxed processor, trying to load, and the other half is frustrated at the slow pace.

“Andy?” I tilt my head to see him from a different angle. “Are you okay?”

His hands drop. “We did go to her house.”

“Her
house
? Jesus, you know where she
lives
?”

“I didn’t say that.” There was a glimmer of hope, but it’s gone. He glances out the window at the rain. “She wanted to stop by her place to change into something fancy for our date. I went with her, but I don’t have a clue where we went. We took one subway, we took another subway. I wasn’t looking at subway stops, I was looking at her. I was looking at her eyes and her mouth. I was thinking,
How does this girl get that big ballsy laugh through that fragile little neck of hers?
I didn’t know if we were on a subway to Greenwich Village or New Jersey, and I didn’t care.”

“New Jersey. Did you take the PATH train?”

He laughs hopelessly. “The
what
train? See, I’m totally screwed.”

“I don’t think so. If you really want my help . . . I can help. We can do this. You just need to focus. Did you notice the names of any of the subway stops?”

Andy’s staring out at the river now, at the swells and whitecaps lapping against the pier. Again, his brain seems to be working much too hard to answer an easy question. “Maybe,” he says. “Maybe Clark Street? Is that a stop?”

“Yes, it is! Clark Street is on the Number Two line. Were the numbers red when you walked into the station?”

“Maybe,” he says, sounding more focused now. He turns back to me.

“Well, what did it look like when you came out of the train? What kinds of buildings?”

“The blocks were real calm and peaceful. Not like the city. We walked past a lot of those little row houses.”

“Brownstones.”

“Right, brownstones. Just one after the other down the whole block—all of them kind of fancy. You could see big chandeliers through some of the windows, and all those books. Almost every one of those places had wall-to-wall shelves of books.”

“Brooklyn,” I say. “Probably near Clark Street, too.”

“You think?”

“I know it.” I can’t sit still. Blood starts rushing to my head, liquid determination. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. After school, I’m going to come back here, and we’re going to get on the Two train and get off at every stop after Clark Street until something looks familiar. And if we don’t find anything on the Two, then we’ll try the Three and the Four and the Five and the L and the F and—”

“How come you’re being so nice to me?” he interrupts. “I thought you were a bona fide New Yorker and all that.”

“Well, it’s one of our best-kept secrets,” I say. “We’re actually really nice people, we just don’t tell the tourists about it. Then we’d have to talk to them.”

It’s the first time I’ve offered a real smile to a stranger in two and a half months. But then again, he’s not really a stranger anymore. As a filmmaker, I work my over-wide ass off to steer clear of corny clichés, but I have to admit Andy never really felt like a stranger to begin with.

That same afternoon, we
board the 2 train at Chambers Street and get off at each stop in Brooklyn, beginning with Clark Street. I suspect Andy doesn’t have much money after five extra days in New York. He wears the same outfit every morning and never orders so much as a coffee at the Harbor. I offer to pay his train fare, but he refuses. Every time we approach a new station, he races out ten eager steps ahead of me and then runs down the stairs, burrowing his way into the crowd.

Then he finds me again on the other side.

I wonder if he’s jumping turnstiles, but I think better of it. He isn’t some Brooklyn skate rat looking for a free ride; he’s a genuine Texan, born and bred. He proves it by letting me have the seat on the train every time.

On again, off again five straight times: we walk a block or two from each station and backtrack if nothing looks familiar, checking around corners and down avenues, hoping he’ll recognize a store or a landmark.

As we pull into the ninth station, he speaks the words so softly I almost miss it.

“Bergen Street.”

I bounce up from my seat. “You recognize it?”

“Yeah,” he says with the beginnings of a smile. “Because I thought it was Burger Street, and she thought it was hilarious that Andy Reese was strutting down Burger Street.”

“Yeah, that’s hilarious if you’re five.”

He frowns at me. “Theo, when you’re in love, everything someone says is hilarious. Come on.” He weaves his way through the onslaught of hipsters pouring onto our train and races up the stairs. None of those hipsters would ever dare utter a line like the one he just pulled off—with total sincerity, no less. They would all be seething with envy.

“Andy, slow down!” I do my best to cut through the rush-hour crowd, thinking of all the useless, shaky footage my button cam is recording as I climb to the surface. Nothing but shoulders, chins, messenger bags, and shuffling feet.

I’ll have to find a few minutes to upload the footage to my cloud drive, so I can keep recording.

Instinct seems to carry
him the next five rainy blocks. Pizza places, wine shops, and trendy little ten-seat restaurants give way to those well-appointed brownstones he’d remembered—thick slabs of Old New York limestone and brick, squeezed together along peaceful, tree-lined streets.

His smile grows wider. His trot turns into a jog and then a sprint, until he stops at a redbrick townhouse between Nevins and Bond.

I’d considered that it might take three or four tedious days of meeting him after school to find the house. I’d also considered that there was a very decent chance we’d never find it at all.

Three hours. That’s all it took. I guess Andy had been paying a little more attention to his surroundings than he thought.

“Holy crap!” He drops his backpack to the ground and breaks into a celebratory dance, with that unbridled “king-of-the-world” howl that Leo DiCaprio somehow manages to slip into every movie he’s ever made. “You did it, Theo! You found
her! Come here, girl.” He reaches for me, grinning.

“Whoa!” I lurch away from those outstretched arms.

“Whoa,” he echoes. He raises his hands as if I’d pulled a gun.

I laugh, blood rushing to my face. My scar twitches. “No, it’s just—”

“Sorry, sorry.” He takes a very deliberate step back, keeping his hands up. “Got a little too excited there. I will never attempt to hug you again, I swear.”

I try to keep laughing, try to get to the next moment quickly. “No, you just need to
warn
me first . . . Anyway, this is big. This is huge.
You know what? We’ve got to record this.”

I hadn’t planned on this exact moment, but I know a rain-spattered button cam in the gray twilight will yield me next to no usable footage. He can only be the unknowing star of his own documentary for so long.

I disconnect the cord in my pocket, pull out my iPhone, and start recording him head-on.

“Oh, hell
no!” he shouts. In a flash, he blocks the camera with his palm, the same sort of reflexive reaction I had to his attempted hug. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“It’ll be tasteful, I promise—”

“No way,” he says. “I already look stalkery enough showing up like this. I don’t need the Publishers Clearing House camera crew standing behind me when she opens the door.”

“Are you kidding me?” I’m ducking and jumping. “You and your lovely wife Sarah will thank me some day. How often does a moment this intimate
get caught on film? The beginning of your life together, preserved for all your Golden Angel Children and Grandchildren to enjoy!”

“Shut up.” He laughs, turning his back to the camera. “I don’t even think she’s home. Look up at the windows. It’s darker than dead in there.”