“Gus is here,” he says.
I rub my face and follow Milo back into the store, squinting, trying to wake myself up. As soon as Milo’s uncle sees me, he envelops me in this big bear hug and I can’t figure out why until I realize this is the first time I’ve seen him since the funeral too. Gus doesn’t usually follow one of Milo’s shifts. Mark must have cancelled.
“Holding up?” He keeps his voice low.
“Yep,” I say into his chest.
It takes him forever to let go, or maybe it just feels like it. I can’t wait to get out of his grasp, but as soon as I am, I sort of want to be hugged again.
Gus claps Milo on the shoulder.
“So what’s on the agenda for you two today? Trouble?”
“Of course,” Milo says.
Of course. We leave Fuller’s, making our way to the park so we can sit there and do nothing. Milo walks my bike for me, like he doesn’t trust that I won’t just pedal myself into the back of another truck. We don’t talk. It’s quiet between us lately. All the time. Sometimes I’m afraid my dad’s death has stolen whatever sparked between us back in the second grade.
We never used to be this kind of quiet.
I’m edging down the roof like usual when I catch myself on a nail that wasn’t there before. I tear the skin of my thigh on it and I feel my blood soaking into my jeans. When I hit the ground, my cell phone rings. Milo. I forgot to set it to vibrate. The ringtone is obscenely loud against all the nighttime around me and the only way I can think to make it stop is to answer him, so I do.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“I thought you’d be asleep.” He sounds surprised. “It’s late.”
“No. What’s going on?”
I tiptoe around the house to get my bike, trying to be as quiet as possible. The reception crackles a little. I hope he doesn’t know I’m outside, that he can somehow figure this out.
“Nothing … That truck thing today was pretty fucked up.”
“I know.” I walk my bike to the street slowly. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine—I mean, it’s not fine. I mean, that’s not why I called.”
“Why did you call?”
And then I get this crazy thought that he is finally going to tell me about that night because the silence on the other end of the line is so heavy, so important.
This has to be it.
“I don’t know,” he says. Or maybe not. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I lie. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
Silence. And then he fakes a yawn and says, “Look, I should call it a night but I’ll see you tomorrow or something, okay?”
“Okay,” I say.
He hangs up.
I leave.
This place never has anything to say to me.
Beth’s luggage precedes her, which is horrifying, and as soon as she steps through the door, she immediately throws herself into making the house a “more positive place.”
“It’s all about how you choose to be,” she tells me as she sticks magnets with inspirational quotes all over the fridge. She also brought a few plants—ferns, mostly. I feel bad for them. No one is going to water them and they’ll die. “You need more light—” She walks to the window and pulls back the blinds, giving me a look like I’m the one who drew them closed in the first place. “Vitamin D! Essential. Do you know how many diseases a little bit of sun can prevent? I have a list somewhere in my purse.…”
She flits out of the room before I can respond. Mom is upstairs doing I don’t know what, so I guess I’m the welcoming committee. A second later, one of those Sounds of Nature CDs is filling up the entire house. We now live in a rain forest.
Beth reenters the room and notices the look on my face.
“For meditative purposes,” she informs me.
I roll my eyes. “Because we meditate so much around here.”
“Maybe it’s time you started,” she says. “Stress is a killer.”
“Then I should be dead really soon, because you’re stressing me out.”
“Oh, Eddie.” She comes over and pinches my cheek, something she used to do when I was five. I hated it then too. “I wish making you a more positive person was as simple as all this! You need to stop looking at me as the enemy and start looking at me as a reprieve.”
When her back is to me, I turn my fingers into a gun and aim it directly at her head.
Fuller’s is pretty empty, except for a blue Ford Taurus parked next to the store.
I don’t think anything of it until I get to the door and I see who it belongs to and then I don’t know what to think. Her back is to me and she’s leaning over the counter talking to Milo, but I don’t need to see her face to know who it is. I would recognize those legs anywhere. They’re perfect and tanned. Go all the way up.
Missy Vinton.
Milo looks up from his spot behind the counter and sees me at the door. I hold up a hand and take a step back like, forget it, I’ll go, but he shakes his head and Missy turns to see who he’s staring at and when she sees me, she hurries over and opens the door.
The last time I saw Missy—before she moved during junior year—she was turning into Marilyn Monroe.
Now the transformation is complete.
Missy Vinton.
That girlfriend Milo had that one time.
“Eddie! Oh my God!” Missy exclaims. She throws her arms around me and squeezes me so hard I can’t breathe. “It’s so good to see you!”
I don’t know what to say. I stare at Milo over her shoulder. He’s looking straight at me, but I can’t read his expression.
Missy Vinton.
It took forever for him to ask her out. He never said love and I know it wasn’t, but he wanted her so bad he had no problem telling me just how much. He was the one who pointed out the Marilyn Monroe thing (only a fleeting resemblance at the time) and he’d always make these really lame jokes about changing his name to Joe. And then, in the middle of sophomore year, at some party at Deacon Hunt’s, he got drunk enough to tell her so.
And I guess she’d liked him for ages too.
They were the loneliest ten months of my life.
“Welcome back,” I tell her.
“Thank you. I am so,” Missy says, and then she pauses right there. Pause. I steel myself for what’s coming next. “Sorry about your father, Eddie. Like, really, really sorry.”
“Thank you,” I say, and she finally pulls away. “Wow, Missy. This is a surprise.”
“Really? I told Milo I was coming in, like, May. I’m staying the summer—with my grandparents.” She turns around to look at him. “You didn’t tell her?”
“No,” I say before he can. “He didn’t.”
It’s not subtle. Not the way it comes out of my mouth. And I’m sorry for the way it comes out of my mouth because I don’t want to cause this kind of tension. Missy actually steps back like I’m going to bite her or freak and I want to tell her it’s not her, even though it’s her. But it’s also not her. It’s Milo.
It’s Milo not telling me.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I try to keep my voice light.
Because Missy and Milo never really broke up. They just stopped. She moved. They didn’t write. They didn’t talk on the phone. I know he missed her. So maybe it wasn’t a full stop between them so much as it was only a pause. Pause. Resume play.
Fantastic.
“I was going to,” he says awkwardly. “But then … your dad…”
“Oh,” I say. And then I laugh. I don’t know why or where it comes from. Nervous laugh. Missy shifts, awkward, and even Milo looks uncomfortable and I’m already a third wheel. “Oh, right.” I nod. “Right. That makes sense. Sorry.” This is painful. “So I should go.”
“But you just got here,” he says.
“I know, but I don’t want to interrupt.”
“You’re not—”
“I am.” I take a few steps back and pull the door open. “I mean, I did.”
I don’t come here during the day, ever.
I come at night, waiting for some piece of the puzzle to click into place, waiting to understand, and I stay until the living world presses in on me and I have to go back to it, but this is the first time since my dad died that I have nowhere else to go. Not home, where Beth is, and not at Fuller’s with Milo, where Missy is. All that’s left is here.
The last place my father was.
Tarver’s Warehouse is old and abandoned. It didn’t start out in the middle of nowhere. This used to be somewhere and it used to be something, but now it’s a “notable stop” on the type of Web sites that spotlight modern-day ruins next to towns that are quickly becoming the same. It stands in the middle of an old dirt lot that has weeds growing up around it. It’s condemnable.
It’s floor after floor of broken windows that go so far up …
The warehouse looks even worse under direct sunlight. No shadows to cloak how truly run-down the place is, how dangerous. The windows seem more broken, the foundation more crumbly. Desolate. I can almost understand how someone would come here with the intention to die, but at the same time, he came here all the time before that moment, just to photograph it.
And he came back.
I set my bike on the ground and sit next to it, bringing my knees to my chest. I should think about how something inside you changes and you can decide nothing is worth living for anymore, but instead, I think about Milo and Missy. Missy is here now. For the summer. There is no good time for Missy, really, but this is the worst possible time.
Her being here feels like a bee sting.
I run my hand over the dirt and grit. Milo will call me tonight, I know it. He’ll want to talk about Missy. He’ll ask me if I hate her. (I don’t.) I’ll tell him it’s fine, even though it’s not, because what can either of us do about it?