B00B9FX0F2 EBOK Read online

  Haha, sooo funny that we both have that quote. I love that song!!!!!! I saw the Mountain Goats play at Brighton Ballroom last year and I literally lost my voice from singing along. Totally worth it. One of the best nights of my life!! What other music do you like? I loooove tMG, and Bon Iver and the Decemberists, but I also really like dance music. Lately I can’t stop listening to Robyn!

  Anyway, thanks for messaging me. Tell me the music you’re into and maybe I’ll make you a mix ;)

  Jason had never considered himself prone to good luck, but he wondered if he’d won the lottery. She was naming all the artists from his iTunes most-played list. And was she flirting with him? He didn’t have a ton of firsthand experience in such matters, but after a decade of observing Rakesh’s social successes, he was pretty sure that wink at the end was a good sign.

  Lacey,

  Thanks for your message. We have the exact same taste in music! Except I don’t dance that much, but I have been known to sing some Robyn in the shower, haha.

  This is kind of embarrassing, but I’m really into ’80s teen movies right now. Love watching them on the big screen at art house theaters and thinking about what it would have been like to see them when they first came out, before they’d been copied a million times. Have you ever heard of the Rosewood Theater? It’s near my friend Rakesh’s house and we’ve been going to midnight movies there since we were in middle school. That was where I first saw Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — even in 7th grade, Rakesh was just like Ferris. I guess that makes me Cameron, only my dad doesn’t have a Ferrari.

  He was about to tell her his dad didn’t even live with him, but something Rakesh had once said rang like an alarm bell in his brain: “If you can’t play hard to get, at least don’t be a psycho about it.” He was complaining about one of his many admirers, and at the time, Jason had just rolled his eyes, but as he began getting to know Lacey he had newfound sympathy for the thick-eyebrowed freshman he’d noticed following Rakesh from class to class.

  They had continued like that since their first exchange, sending each other MP3s and playlists they found on indie rock Tumblrs. He recommended ’80s movies for her to see — Some Kind of Wonderful, Pump Up the Volume, Heathers (which he couldn’t believe she hadn’t even heard of). She forced clubby remixes and YouTube videos on him. He had brought up the possibility of them meeting in person a few times — once by suggesting they get tickets to see Sleigh Bells in the city. He’d held his breath after sending, and hadn’t thought of anything else until he got her reply. Lacey took a day longer than usual to answer, and when she did, she failed to mention anything about them meeting, but he was so relieved and heartened that she hadn’t disappeared completely that the next week, when they were IMing, he wrote, “I hope you don’t think I’m weird for saying this, but I really want to meet you.” A minute went by, and then she answered, “me too” and then a moment later “ugh, so annoying, mom came in my room. Brb.” She hadn’t been right back, but she e-mailed the next day as usual. There was no mention of them meeting, so he’d listened to the voice telling him to slow down and held his tongue.

  Jason watched the video she’d sent again. He was about to start formulating a response when he heard the front door open from downstairs. Mark was home. He slammed his laptop shut and grabbed his history book in case his mom came to his door to announce dinner was served.

  When Jason finished washing the dishes that night, he returned to his room, shutting the door carefully behind him. Normally, there were clothes strewn about the floor and half the time his comforter could be found on the floor after he’d kicked it off in the night, but his mother had read him the riot act the previous weekend: Either he cleaned up his room himself, or she did, and there was no telling what she would throw away if she got her hands on it. And so he spent Sunday afternoon folding gray and white T-shirts and placing them in the wooden dresser that had belonged to his father when he was a kid. Jason alphabetized the records he’d bartered for at Vinyl Exchange and won in late-night eBay auctions and stacked them in crates he’d dragged in from the garage. He’d made the bed with new navy-blue sheets his mom had bought him, and once everything was in place, she had helped him hang concert flyers and vintage movie posters he’d collected on his bare white walls. All week, Jason had been admiring his handiwork. A hand-printed sign for a Wild Flag show he’d been to that summer adorned the wall above his bed, and Ferris Bueller, mischievous as always, gazed down at him as he did his homework. His mom had looked on silently as he’d hoisted the last frame, a color poster for The Big Sleep, one of his dad’s favorite movies, onto the back of the door. Jason knew she didn’t like to think of his dad if she could avoid it, but he was always grateful she never bad-mouthed him the way other divorced parents sometimes did. Instead, she’d told him he’d done a great job cleaning up, and then, before it turned into some sort of Hallmark moment, added, “Now you may return to your regularly scheduled destruction.”

  Settling into his desk chair, he logged in to Facebook. As he’d hoped, there was a green dot next to Lacey’s name, and he forced himself to slowly count to ten before opening a chat with her.

  Jason: Hey

  Lacey: Hey yourself

  Jason: You’re not punk, and I’m telling everyone

  It was the first line from the Jawbreaker song. He’d been planning to use the line since the second he’d opened the video. He hoped she’d think it was clever, but now he worried she’d think it was mean. After a second, she answered with another quote from the song.

  Lacey: Seriously, how amazeballs was that?

  Jason: Pretty amazeballs.

  Lacey: Actually, all the videos the A.V. Club does are ridiculous. Titus Andronicus covering They Might Be Giants? Iron and Wine doing GEORGE MICHAEL? I MEAN.

  Jason: Haha

  Lacey: Can you even imagine how badass that room where they sign their names and the song they did must be? Gahh, I want to go to there.

  Jason: It’s in Chicago I think. Have you ever been there?

  Lacey: This is so embarrassing, but when my brother was in middle school, he went to lacrosse camp there. And when we went to pick him up, I made my parents take me to the American Girl doll store.

  Lacey had never mentioned a brother before. For the life of him, he could not remember a word Mr. Sharp had said about derivative functions in the last two months, but everything Lacey had ever told him was cataloged in his mind. She drove a standard-transmission Volkswagen that had once belonged to her grandfather, she hated chocolate, and she drank her coffee black. And she had a brother. For weeks, Jason had been meticulously drawing a mental picture of Lacey, and each time she fed him information he filled in new areas, as if bringing her to life. Each fact was like a new shade of paint studied closely before applying it to the canvas.

  Jason: I’m guessing this was last week?

  Lacey: Haha, exactly. No, I was 10, and I had a Molly doll I took with me EVERYWHERE.

  Jason: So your brother is older?

  Lacey: Yeah, 2 years older, but we’re close. When he’s not being a crazy jock frat boy in training. Do you have siblings?

  Jason: Nah, just me. It’s how me and Rakesh got so close — we’re both onlies and our parents used each other as babysitters. We watched a lot of Sesame Street together.

  They went back and forth like that for the next half hour. Normally, when Jason was around girls, his brain went blank and his tongue tied up. When he imagined himself going on dates, he pictured himself opening doors and pulling out chairs and wowing with stories of his rock star heroics. But in real life when he tried to hold open doors for his classmates he felt like a security guard at the mall. As for the rock star thing … well, he had an 11:00 P.M. curfew on school nights. But with Lacey, everything was just as he imagined it should be. Yes, it was Facebook chat and not a hipster club in the city, but each conversation with her was like a date with his dream girlfriend. So why did he feel so weird about just asking her out?

  Jason: S
ooo … I think I have to study for my history test.

  Lacey: Yeah, I should go too.

  Jason: But would you want to get together sometime? You know, IRL.

  He felt like he’d see his heart pounding if he looked down, so he squeezed his eyes shut. He shouldn’t have said “IRL,” it was so cheesy. He shouldn’t have said anything at all. Jason waited as long as he could before peeking at the screen.

  Lacey: Yes! Things are sort of … complicated right now. I’ll explain more another time, but Jason, I do really want to meet you. You just have to give me a little time to figure out what’s going on with me.

  Jason: Whenever you’re ready. I just … like talking to you.

  Lacey:

  Jason: K, good luck with your homework.

  Lacey: Yeah, I’ll try not to blow my brains out from boredom. Talk to you soon.

  He breathed a deep sigh of relief. So what if it wasn’t happening tomorrow? She wanted to meet him, and that was enough.

  Who are you taking to formal, Jason?” Kelly Drummond asked, pulling Jason out of his reverie. “Rakesh seems to think getting a date will be no problem. So which lucky lady are you going to ask?”

  Not for the first time, Jason wondered why he sat with Rakesh’s friends at lunch. Some of them, like Lloyd Clifford, the star shortstop who Jason had met in Little League before he realized he sucked at baseball, weren’t so bad. For the most part, though, their table was filled with kids who were so terrified of being different that they behaved like lemmings. Jason wasn’t exactly shaving his hair into a Mohawk or painting his nails black, but the world outside Roosevelt High School seemed like a much more interesting place to blend into than the world inside of it.

  “Don’t worry about Jason,” Rakesh answered. “Plenty of girls want to go with Jason.”

  “Oh, like who?”

  Under other circumstances, Jason’s feelings might have been hurt, but at the moment, he simply prayed Rakesh wouldn’t say anything about Lacey. He could begin to imagine what Kelly would make of him liking a girl he only knew on Facebook, besides the fact that she’d probably tell everyone who would listen.

  “Jason’s got game you don’t even know about.”

  “Speaking of game, are any of you watching the basketball team today?” Lloyd asked.

  Relieved to be out of the spotlight, Jason shot one last nasty look at Kelly and went back to daydreaming about Lacey. He’d thought about asking her to the spring formal before. School dances hadn’t held much appeal for Jason in the past. The music was all Top 40 and kids were more focused on snapping cell phone pics of one another than actually dancing. But you were supposed to ask a girl you liked to a dance, and Lacey would make a good date — they’d stand in a corner and spot the funniest outfits, the poufy dresses and ruffled tuxes that jocks wore ironically but that just made them look foolish. He’d request Robyn for her, and might even venture onto the dance floor.

  On their way to history, Rakesh asked Jason whether he’d brought up the idea of the formal with Lacey.

  “Not exactly,” he answered begrudgingly.

  “What are you waiting for? Kelly’s only gonna get more annoying about it.”

  Jason knew he was right. Lacey said she needed time, and there was a month before the dance. Would that be enough?

  “I don’t want to rush her,” Jason answered.

  “Come on, you’ve been talking to her for weeks. I’m starting to think she’s just stringing you along.”

  “Lacey doesn’t play games.” He said it as authoritatively as he could, but he couldn’t help but think of how they’d ended their last conversation. Things are sort of … complicated right now. What did that even mean? As much for himself as for Rakesh, he quickly added, “Besides, it’s a stupid dance. I don’t even care whether or not I go.”

  Lowering himself into the dingy gray desk, Jason snuck a look at Facebook. Lacey had written him a long message. He skimmed it, and the tension in his chest eased as he read her jokes about her school’s band and saw that she’d included a long pro and con list describing her feelings about Vampire Weekend. It was the same old Lacey. Sliding his phone back into his pocket, he wondered what he’d gotten so worked up about.

  He took out his notebook and instinctively turned to the back, where he jotted down lyrics, but he caught Rakesh peering over from the desk next to his. He quickly turned to a fresh page and wrote the day’s date in bold letters at the top. He willed himself to pay attention to the lecture, but there was a voice in his head drowning it out, one that sounded conspicuously like Kelly Drummond laughing at him. Oh, like who? Sometimes the idea of Lacey liking him seemed too good to be true. As his dad always said, when something seemed too good to be true, that’s usually because it was.

  Jason liked any homework that required his computer. For one thing, if he had to use the Internet, he knew he’d be good at the assignment. For another, being online gave him an excuse to check Facebook. The history project was so easy he could spend five minutes on Google, and then use the next hour to chat with Lacey. If she wasn’t online, he could at least compose a response to the Vampire Weekend pro and con list she’d sent him earlier.

  Mrs. Kimball had warned her class not to rely on Google or Wikipedia, but Jason was convinced the forty-some-odd candles on her most recent birthday cake had blinded her to how useful they were. It’s not as if Jason trusted everything he found online, but he knew enough to recognize the kind of primary source she’d asked them to find. As he predicted, finding a scanned letter from the nineteenth century was easy. He clicked print, and was about to turn his attention to Facebook when he had an idea.

  He’d never Googled Lacey. Every piece of information he had about her, she had given him or he had gleaned from her status updates. As he typed her name into his search bar, he felt a twinge of guilt about cyberstalking her, although he wasn’t expecting it to turn up much. He’d searched for his own name last year and found a veterinarian specializing in large animals; a Hawaiian painter whose work looked like it was influenced by Woodstock flashbacks; and a private investigator who promised thoroughness, discretion, and sensitivity to the pain of a cheating spouse. Three quarters of the way down the second page of results was his postage stamp–size Facebook profile picture — one of the few photos of him that didn’t make him look either deranged or like an overgrown eight-year-old.

  He hit enter, and scanned the page until his eyes registered the by now familiar photo of Lacey from her Facebook page. He clicked the text automatically, but the moment the page loaded he realized he’d made some sort of mistake. The headline glared at him from the screen.

  TEEN KILLED; BODY FOUND AFTER LOCAL PARTY

  He blinked. On the monitor, Lacey’s name blinked back at him. He rubbed his eyes. It was still there.

  TEEN’S BODY DISCOVERED IN

  BRIGHTON BACKYARD MONDAY

  After Brighton High junior Lacey Gray was reported missing over the weekend, a body believed to be hers was found yesterday in the backyard of Steven and Grace Choi.

  Lacey Gray, a budding musician and volunteer at the Hanson Place Soup Kitchen, was last seen at an unsupervised party at the Chois’ house on Friday night. According to several sources, she did not return home after the party, and on Saturday morning friends and family began a frantic search for the honor roll student, who had never disappeared before.

  Grace Choi, who was in Florida with her husband at the time of the party, discovered the body after returning on Monday morning, and immediately called the police. Despite numerous requests from the Brighton Times, the Brighton Police Department has neither confirmed that the body has been positively identified as Lacey Gray, nor the cause of death, but a memorial service for Gray has been scheduled for Saturday morning at the Brighton Unitarian Church on Johnson Avenue.

  The Gray family has declined requests for interviews, and, through a lawyer, asked that their privacy be respected in this difficult time. Brighton High principal Lynn Darnell relea
sed the following statement: “Lacey Gray was a kind, vivacious young woman with a bright future, and her loss will be felt deeply by those who knew her and by the entire Brighton community.” Darnell added that grief counseling will be available to all students.

  In addition to her parents, Ed and Leslie, Gray is survived by her brother, Luke, a senior at Brighton High School, and cocaptain of the lacrosse team that took home the state championship last year. The family has asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Hanson Place Soup Kitchen.

  His brain sprinted through the possible explanations: It was another Lacey Gray, it was another town called Brighton, it was all just a terribly unfortunate coincidence. The problem he couldn’t get around was the photo. The photo he knew better than any photo of himself, better than any photo of anyone. It was Lacey’s profile picture. Frozen, mid-laugh, the girl of his dreams was right there in front of him. Maybe he was hallucinating. He pinched himself — hard. It hurt, but none of the text in front of him changed.

  I got termites in the framework — both of us do. The cheerfully desperate lyrics rang in his ears.

  Jason felt dizzy and nauseated. He clicked the red x to close the on-screen window and stared at his computer. He tried to focus on the photo of the Mountain Goats playing live he’d saved as a desktop background, but everything went blurry. It had to be some sort of mistake. Or a joke. Rakesh was playing a prank on him. It wasn’t a funny prank, but Rakesh had crossed the line before. He’d once witnessed Rakesh, with tears in his eyes, telling a girl from another school he had terminal cancer, and he wanted to spend some time with her before he died. When she’d figured out what was actually going on, she was so horrified that she’d never spoken to him again. He’d tried to send Jason to smooth things over with her, but as soon as she realized Jason had known Rakesh was healthy (if stupid) all along, she splashed a glass of water on his face.