I hopped onto the drywall stack. “For starters, it would be nice if everyone stopped asking me if I’m a hemophiliac. I wasn’t home-schooled, either.”
“That could be the headline,” she said, taking a swig of beer that made her cheeks puff out and her lips tighten. She glanced up at a network of spiderwebs that sucked in each time the back door opened. “At first I was joking, but maybe it would be a great idea to just lay it all on the table. I work for the paper, so I could probably make it happen.”
“I’d rather be the photographer.”
“I used to be the photographer, but my photos had a bad habit of never turning out. They were always cloudy, or underlit, or something. Now I’m the editor, which is basically my punishment for wasting so much film.”
“So if I wrote this article, I guess I’d be working for you.”
“Not exactly. You’d be working for the paper. But I
would
have the power to fire you, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Then I’ll do it,” I said, thinking the whole scenario sounded pretty sexy, and now honestly considering writing a sensational backstory for myself, if only as a personal dare. The next few minutes were passed relatively quietly as we eyed over clusters of chatty classmates reeking of sweet alcohol and perfumed sweat. While Emily was no longer wearing the Claddagh ring I’d spotted in the hallway, I still guessed it was only a matter of time before her boyfriend came kissing around. (And if he didn’t, I was sure I could count on one of the macho attendees already attuned to our conversation to prove an adequate replacement.) Soon Zach showed up hefting a fresh keg on his shoulder. I didn’t have to say a word before Emily was squinting and panning from him to me, despite the fact that Zach was two inches taller and practically blond when juxtaposed to my radiant redness. Immediately after showing off his expert tapping skills, he marched over to place a firm fatherly hand on Emily’s shoulder and warn her that I’d only been drunk twice, and turned Mr. Hyde-violent both times. (In truth I was a wary drinker and borderline teetotaler, dually anxious and flattered by regular comparisons between myself and my alcoholic grandpa George previously mentioned.)
“Has he seen a doctor?” Emily asked.
“Oh, there’ve been plenty of doctors,” Zach chuckled. “Only problem is that none of the pills they give him are compatible with the booze.”
“I appreciate the warning,” she said, glancing askance to inspect the level of my beer. Zach was grinning big and brave as he sauntered off next to Pat, whom we both identified as a pathetic replacement for his best friend, Jeremy.
“He had his own psychiatrist in grade school,” I said. “He used to brag about it.”
“How would you like to meet Ashley and Lauren?” Emily said, dismissing the remark and nodding at the two girls who’d joined her after the play. “Lauren’s single and supposedly she’s a very good kisser. I don’t know exactly what she does, but apparently it’s very good. This is not gossip, by the way. It’s common knowledge, she’s my friend, and I’m just proud to be the first to tell you. What’s not common knowledge is that she and Hads hook up every once in a while. But no one’s supposed to know about that.”
“What do people say about you that no one’s supposed to know?”
Emily set her beer down and crossed her arms. “So now you’re Don Juan of Davenport?”
“Sorry. I’m just trying to figure out how you fit into the whole scene.”
Emily pushed herself off the stack and pulled her hair back. “If you really want the scoop, you’d better ask one of these other people. Anyway, I think I’ve had enough smoke and B.O. It’s not even raining anymore.” She tossed her cup into an industrial bin, then turned to face me. “Never mind what I told you about Lauren and Hads. It’s none of my business really. I don’t know what I’m doing talking about it.”
“I’m still planning to ask about you,” I said, shoving onto my feet.
Emily shrugged off the comment and headed for the back door, gathering her girlfriends along the way. Despite marching me from one group of classmates to the next, she was much harder to talk to after that and I was sure that our personal-revelation part of the night had officially concluded. Emily’s introductions began with Ashley, a high-browed brunette in a push-up bra, and Lauren, a tall platinum blonde with amicably poor posture. (While both of these girls were categorically cute, I couldn’t help feeling that their faces belonged to generalized type groupings with ubiquitous representatives that covered every state in the union. As for my own face type, I’m certainly not a member of any larger type grouping, nor even a redheaded sub-grouping. My face displays a Celtic fullmouthed symmetry suggestive of a jovial inattention, capped by naturally upstanding curls in a shade of auburn that is especially striking in reflection.) After asking where I lived, Ashley informed me that I was lucky I hadn’t enrolled at “
Scurv
andale,” where I’d surely have ended up a motorhead addicted to methamphetamine. Lauren offered me a piece of watermelon gum and offered me up to Smitty, an evident straight shooter with a steady handshake and a 1950s-combed cut. Smitty taught me all about the wrestling team’s challenge match system, then related a long account of his short career as a Cutpro scissors salesman, including the day he cut his first showroom penny in half only to watch in suspended time as a fraction of that penny whirled its way into the eye of a would-be customer. And this is when I discovered that when Emily starts laughing, when something really tickles her in the right place, there’s no way she’ll stop. She shook madly, bursting forth in a seizing and unexpectedly high-flung hoot that overwhelmed and eventually embarrassed her.
Near the end of the night the backyard was overtaken by a muddy tennis ball war that began as a slopping game of catch with a buzzed golden retriever. Eventually Tino came stumbling up alongside me, ragingly affectionate and roaring about all the fish we’d be catching and deer we’d be shooting. Hadley apologized about the mud tracks up my driveway. When the kegs emptied and everyone cleared out, Emily offered us all rides in her Volvo, which she touted as having achieved a perfect safety rating. This news proved comforting when I discovered that she was an oblivious driver who showed little concern for any roadway actions that didn’t involve the twenty yards of pavement directly in front of her. But despite the symphony of car horns that made me feel we’d just left a winning basketball game, she never panicked and seemed only to interpret the castigations as neigh borly noise that was none of our business. While her highway abilities appeared utterly opposite her abilities onstage, she was similarly at ease in both roles, going so far as to lend the impression that if we found ourselves head-on with a brick wall, she’d only end up snoozing on her airbag, and wake up fresh as a daisy to face the following day.
At some point during the drive home, when I was the only passenger left, I was struck by a second—or third, or fourth—wave of infatuation. This occurred at the moment of Emily’s wrong turn onto Hawthorne Drive, when I realized that in her presence I felt on the verge of artistic greatness, like a magician at the precise moment of his maturation when he steps out into the spotlight perfectly assured of his heroic and earth-shattering new trick. Soon enough I was breaking a promise to myself and telling her the story of my family’s first night in Des Moines. (By then everyone knew that the Patterson girl had lied to her parents about an overnight babysitting job in order to spend the intermediate hours with her first official boyfriend. Nicholas Parsons turned out to be a jealous neighbor who did his strangling while the boyfriend was out in the parking lot digging in the backseat for music, for the mood.)
“Her name’s Missy,” Emily said, after the second time I’d referred to her as “the victim.”
“Did you know her?”
“Vaguely,” she said, as a sudden sadness weighed in that seemed to catch her off guard. But she controlled it and it passed quickly. “We had some junior sports together, and a dance team camp. I only remember a couple of conversations. My friend Mandy lives in her neighborhood. Mandy knew her pretty well.”
“I thought Des Moines was supposed to be a safe place.”
“Yeah, well, so did I. My mom is completely freaked out. She probably thinks I’m being strangled right now. I just try to stay calm and think about it logically. Are there even CD players in hotel rooms? How was Josh planning to play whatever music he was getting from the car?”
“Who’s Josh?”
“Missy’s boyfriend.”
“Right,” I said, noticing a new strictness in my voice. I was mostly sober again. “Maybe he had a portable boom box. Or else he was planning that they’d end up lying in bed together sharing headphones.”
“Something’s fishy. If it was their first big night, and he was so concerned about the music, I’m pretty sure he would’ve prepared something beforehand.”
“Don’t forget that they went to a movie earlier that night. If he wanted to have everything ready and waiting, he would’ve had to check in in the middle of the day.”
“Which would’ve been impossible because he was working at the hardware store.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“I heard something on the radio the other day that someone might have seen him out in the parking lot talking with Josh. That’s the strange part,
if
it’s true. Personally, I don’t think the cops are even sure it wasn’t Josh who killed her. They could be pretending it’s Nicholas, while the whole time they’re secretly building their case against Josh. Maybe Nicholas was the first to find Missy’s dead body, and he was so destroyed by it that he fled for the woods, or some crowded city, or wherever he went.”
“They’ll catch him,” I told her, trying to build the conversation back up. “You can’t get away with murder these days.”
“Or maybe Nicholas disappeared because Nicholas is dead,” she said, smirking and throwing her hands up at all of our various conjectures. “The main question for me is how do I know
you’re
not the strangler?”
“You don’t,” I said.
“You really didn’t hear anything?”
“No. But I haven’t eliminated my brother as a suspect. He got up at least once to go to the bathroom.”
“That’s some luck for your first night in Des Moines.”
“That’s what the detective said. He kept asking me all these questions about what I heard. All I kept thinking was, Jesus, what did everyone
else
hear? Was she screaming for help? While I was up there, snoring? Actually, I don’t snore, but my brother and father, they can really snore.”
“I’ll tell you what I would’ve done. I would’ve hopped into the family wagon and hauled ass back to Davenport.”
“That would’ve been the smart thing to do.”
“But not the fighting Flynns,” she said, raising a proud finger in the air.
“Nope. We’re gonna to stick it out, see what happens to us down here in Des Moines.”
“I wouldn’t call it
DEE-moyn
,” she said, hitting the brakes. “But I guess I’m glad you’re sticking it out. This is your house here, right?”
I thanked her and said good night, not realizing until then that we’d already passed my house, that Emily had employed the cul-de-sac at the end of my block in order to more perfectly time our arrival with the lighthearted conclusion to our conversation.
“See you Monday,” she said.
“See you,” I said, stepping out and trudging my way up the driveway, wondering for the hundredth time why they hadn’t flattened our lot like the rest of the lots on the block.
Five
While this account contains no shortage of scandals that for plot purposes I would be mistaken to withhold, I choose this moment to reveal one peripheral disgrace for the simple reason of its psychological effect on our heroine, Emily Schell. But first a scrap of context concerning the weeks following my introduction to Smitty, Tino, Hadley, Ashley, and Lauren.
1
Even today I can hardly flick a cigarette out the window without recalling that first string of weekend nights driving circles around the city, the girls in one car, the guys in another, our fiery cigarette cherries streaming in the wind (occasionally revisiting us via the back window as a result of Hadley’s routinely poor release), all of us hoping to stumble upon an adventure that nine times out of ten shaped up as “cosmic billiards” under the dark lights at Merle Hay Mall, midnight pancakes at Perkins, or guzzling beer in the basements of houses under construction in West Des Moines. It was during this time that I discovered Tino’s knack for not-standing and not-sitting in awkward pseudo-yogic positions that lent every conversation with him a sense of uncertainty. I also learned that Hadley was exactly the same person when he was sober or drunk, and that when Smitty went silent and then hypercritical, urging us to think twice about whatever inane, illegal act we were about to commit, there was probably a cop car about to round the corner. Our gang never missed a Friday-night football game, and more than once I woke on Saturday morning to find Emily Schell in one of the sports-page photos, cheering from the stands with a red bandanna and painted cheeks.
Of course over time I received all sorts of reports about Emily, including her periodic tendency to retreat underground, her frequent travels to flea markets without ever buying anything, and most of all, the fact of her famed virginity. Apparently she’d never had a boyfriend, despite a relationship near miss with a fellow junior named Peyton Chambeau who thought his future was set because he made the varsity basketball squad his freshman year and his dad owned a shoe outlet. (The two of them were always on cheap commercials, flying around on magic carpets, barking about sale items direct from the warehouse.) Though I never asked, I was certain that Peyton had attempted to close the deal by his purchase of the aforementioned Claddagh ring, a sneaky and arm-wringing maneuver if ever there was one. The last major piece of news, and certainly the most shocking, was that Emily’s thirteen-year-old sister suffered from an extremely rare incident of pubescent multiple sclerosis. According to Smitty, Katie Schell’s assorted symptoms were dominated by the fluctuation of pain and deadness in her legs, which at times were rendered useless.