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“Well, not exactly,” Laney corrects me. “I guess it’s, like, bastardized Latin? Kind of like a joke. It translates roughly to ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’”
I raise my eyebrows. “All this from the internet?”
“Google is so my bitch.”
We’re in June’s room, on Laney’s insistence that there might be more clues to the identity of the mastermind behind the mix CD. She drapes herself across June’s bed, hanging off the edge upside down, her long wavy hair dangling to the floor. I feel sort of weird about her making herself comfortable on my dead sister’s furniture, but it’s not like everything can stay perfectly preserved in here forever.
I open one of June’s desk drawers and ask, “How were your exams?”
“Precalc can just fuck right off,” she moans, flinging an arm over her eyes.
“It went that bad, huh?” I wince sympathetically, then shoot her a sideways look. “So, um. What’s it like?”
“What’s what like? Precalculus?”
“No. You know. School.”
School is a subject neither of us has broached. Mostly I haven’t even bothered to consider the situation at Grand Lake High since everything went down, but now a sort of morbid curiosity gnaws at me. Laney pulls herself back onto the bed, sits with her knees under her and her hands in her lap, hiding behind a shroud of blond hair.
“It’s … really weird.” She clears her throat and glances at me nervously. “There was this assembly, for the whole school. All these girls crying who didn’t even know her. I swear I wanted to kick them in the face. Oh, and they postponed graduation by a week. The guidance counselors made everyone quote, unquote ‘close to the situation’ have, like, an hour-long debriefing on our feelings. The administration is totally freaked out.”
“Really?”
“I think they’re afraid it’s contagious, and one day they’ll walk in and find the whole school drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid or something,” she says. She studies me carefully for a moment. “Are you okay? Like, generally speaking? I feel a little weird talking to you about this.”
I look away and shrug. “You shouldn’t. I wanted to know.”
“Yeah, but …” Laney looks ready to say more, but she just sighs again and lets it drop, much to my relief.
I open the next drawer, pawing through the mess of papers there. It’s more of the same—old homework assignments, class notes, a flimsy old binder project now falling apart. Nothing of importance. I wonder what my mother is going to want to do with all of this stuff. Throw it away? Or keep the room intact out of sentimentality, like some kind of shrine dedicated to June’s memory?
Okay, that would be totally creepy.
“Hey,” says Laney. She’s leaning over and digging stuff out from under the bed. “I think I found something.”
She resurfaces with a brown paper bag in hand. I sit on the bed next to her as she dumps its contents out onto the bedspread. Two CD cases tumble out. The first case cover has a painting of a man with a cigarette in his mouth, standing in the night under a neon sign, a woman in a fancy dress to the side gazing straight at him. The second cover has a man’s head in black-and-white, overlapped by a series of squares and diamonds and circles, the lettering done in a light blue.
“Tom Waits,” Laney reads off of the first CD’s front, picking it up to examine it more closely. “Hmm. Never heard of the dude.”
“What about the Kinks?” I question. I pass her the other CD.
“Actually, I’ve heard of them. Do you remember that guy? Colin Spangler?”
“Didn’t you date him a few months ago?”
“Yeah, if by date you mean ‘made out with in the back of his mom’s minivan that one time.’ Anyway, he was really into them. They had this one song about, like, a transvestite or something? I’m pretty sure Colin was super-gay. I mean, I’m not judging. But. Definitely gay.”
Did my sister really listen to this stuff? I keep trying to make it fit with the image I have of her in my head, and it doesn’t make sense.
“Where’d she even get these?” Laney asks, shaking the bag like there will magically be an answer inside. Nothing but a receipt flutters out. She smoothes creases from the bag with her hands, and then stops abruptly. I follow her gaze to the black logo emblazoned on the side.
“The Oleo Strut,” I read aloud. “Where is that place?”
“It’s way off on Kilgore,” she explains. “By Stowey’s Pizza. I drive past it all the time, I just never knew what it was.”
She picks up the receipt as I scan the back of the Tom Waits album.
“A clue!” she shrieks, so loud I nearly topple off the bed, then springs to her feet frantically. “Harper, where’s the CD?”
“It’s on top of the stereo,” I say. I watch as she practically dives to snatch it off the desk. “And what kind of a clue?”
“A handwriting sample!” she exclaims. She jumps back onto the bed and hands me the receipt. “Look on the back. That T is unmistakable.”
“You’ve been watching way too much CSI.” I roll my eyes, but flip the receipt over anyway. There’s a note scribbled on the back in faded blue ink.
J.—
Hope you like my picks. Let me know what you think.
—Your Favorite Person in the Universe
It’s the initial that bothers me most. That single letter. No one has ever shortened June’s name like that. And the tone of the note, the signature—it suggests an inside joke, some kind of casual closeness. I crumple the receipt in my fist and toss the balled-up wad over my shoulder.
“You know what we should do?” Laney springs off the bed again, bouncing on her toes. “We should go to this Oleo place!”
“What for?”
“Uh, hello? To see if they might know who bought these? Don’t you watch television? You always start at the scene of the crime.”
“Last time I checked, buying music is not a crime,” I point out. “Actually, they kind of encourage that, with all the illegal downloading these days—”
“Work with me here, Harper.” She rolls her eyes. “I mean, aren’t you curious? This could really lead to something.”
Of course I’m curious. It’s driving me crazy, not knowing. It’s why I called Laney in the first place. I don’t even have to say anything and she can see it, written all over my face.
“Go put on your shoes,” she says, pushing me off the bed, “because we’re totally going, right now.”
Grand Lake is a town split into two sections, with the namesake lake as the epicenter. There’s the east side of Grand Lake, where Laney and I live, primarily consisting of well-kept houses in quiet suburbs, and then there’s the west side, generally considered lower income and populated with more apartment complexes. The east and west sides have two elementary schools and one middle school each, and after that, the kids are shuttled into the town’s sole, centrally located high school.
The whole town centers around the lake. “Grand” is something of a misnomer, since it’s pretty small, and the only stretch of beach is the man-made one behind the iron gates of the Grand Lake Yacht Club, where the town’s upper crust keep sailboats and pontoon boats and have a dining hall for club dinners. The area by the lake was an amusement park in the fifties, with a Ferris wheel and roller coaster and everything, but they tore it down long before I was even born. Now there’s just the park and a few businesses and restaurants, including the waterfront Sterling’s Steakhouse. Laney’s father, Richard Sterling, owns the joint, but we never eat there because Laney doesn’t eat meat, much to her family’s chagrin.
To get to the west side, you have to drive past the lake and through this strip called Windermere Village. Windermere is a shopping area, purposefully kept antiquated with a cobblestone road, the streets lined with gaslights and outdoor sculptures. There’s an old-fashioned ice cream parlor called Duncan’s, a bunch of old family businesses and other little shops. It’s the kind of place where mothers amble with their baby strollers and golden retrievers, and older women wearing fluorescent headbands power walk in pairs.
I don’t usually have much reason to go west past Windermere. As we speed by in Laney’s piece-of-crap car, I watch the newer housing areas give way to dated apartment buildings. She turns down a side road, passing a gas station and a liquor store, and continues down to a two-story building made out of dusty red brick. That’s when I see the sign, lit up in neon-green over the doorway of a store on the bottom level: the Oleo Strut.
A bell above the door chimes as we walk in. There’s a guy behind the counter, looking like he’s in his twenties, sporting Buddy Holly frames and an eyebrow ring. His brown hair is short and spiky. He scrawls something onto a notepad at rapid-fire pace, pausing every so often to fiddle with a calculator—it’s one of those old-fashioned ones, with a ribbon of receipt paper churning out with each button pushed.
“Can I help you?” the guy asks, distracted. He punches a few more numbers into the calculator and scratches the top of his head.
Laney looks at me expectantly, but I’m not sure how to even begin, so she jumps in without missing a beat.
“This is going to sound so weird,” she starts, “but we’re trying to find out the identity of someone who made a purchase from you a few months ago. We know what was bought, but that’s it. Maybe if we gave you the date, you could, like, look back through security tapes or something?”
Now he looks at us, bemused, tapping the pen cap against the countertop. “Yeah, we don’t keep track of that.”
“Well, you look like the type who has an amazing photographic memory.” She pushes herself up against the counter, bending so far over I’m sure her boobs will spill out of her top, and gives her most charming smile. I roll my eyes behind her back. “The Kinks? Tom Waits? Any of that ring a bell?”
“Sorry, kid, my memory is for shit,” he says with a grin, and I’m impressed with the fact he doesn’t even give her chest area so much as a second glance. He jabs the pen in our direction in mock seriousness. “That’s why you should stay away from drugs.”
As he starts to walk toward the back room, Laney throws her hands up in frustration.
“A walking PSA,” she mutters under her breath. “How helpful.”
Suddenly he turns to face us again. “Hey, you know, you might have better luck with my brother. He works the register sometimes and he’s good with faces.”
“And where would he be?” I ask.
He nods his chin in the direction of the back of the store. “Stocking. I think he’s doing vinyl.”
With that, he disappears. Laney and I exchange glances.
I shrug. “Worth a shot.”
The store is so crammed with music that it’s difficult to squeeze through the aisles. Everywhere are carts filled with CDs and cassettes, handwritten signs plastered on the walls categorizing them by genre, and even those have subcategories. The rock section is split into classic rock, garage rock, glam rock, soft rock, psychedelia, alt-rock and indie rock. Punk contains anarcho-punk, garage punk, hardcore and riot grrrl. New Wave has an entire cart to itself.
We’re turning a corner when Laney says, “That must be him.”
I look in the direction where she’s pointing, and suddenly I can’t breathe.
“Oh my God,” I gasp. I grab her arm, haul her around the corner and safely out of sight.
It’s the boy. The boy from the wake, who leaned up against my house and smoked cigarettes and glared a lot. The boy who obviously had some connection to my sister, but at the time I’d been too preoccupied to even consider his, like, existence, never mind what that connection could be.
Well. Now I know. Sort of, anyway.
“Hey,” Laney says. Her eyes widen. “I know him!”
“You—you do?”
“I mean, I don’t know him, but I know of him. His name’s Jacob. Jake Tolan.” She frowns. “He looks way different without blue hair.”
“Blue hair?” I sneak a furtive glance around the shelf. He has one of those sticker guns in his hand, is labeling a stack of vinyl records and putting them away in alphabetical order.
I have seen him before. Blue-haired boys stand out at Grand Lake High. And then something clicks—Tolan. I know that name. It was on one of those forms I discovered while rifling through June’s drawers. Her National Honor Society papers, the ones she filled out to log her tutoring hours.
“That’s him,” I realize. “He’s the one who gave June those CDs.”
“Wait, seriously?” Laney peers around behind me, scrambling to get a second look. “How do you know?”
“I’ll explain later.” At her skeptical look, I add, “I promise. Just—go look around or something. I want to talk to him alone for a second.”
She raises her eyebrows, but then she nods and goes to browse the shelves. I step out from around the corner and begin to peruse as nonchalantly as possible. I thumb through the D’s, watching Jake out of the corner of my eye before sliding out a record at random.
“That’s a good pick.”
I jump a little when I realize he’s at my shoulder, still wielding the sticker gun. If he recognizes me, he masks it well.
When I just stare at him blankly, he leans over and taps the cover with one finger. “Miles Davis. Kind of Blue. Circa 1959, I believe. It’s one of the most definitive jazz albums of all time. You listen to a lot of jazz?”
“Yes,” I lie. I pause. “No. I mean. I’m just looking.” Feeling bolder, I say, “Any recommendations?”
He thinks for a moment. “John Coltrane is a must, and you’ve gotta listen to Charlie Parker. Oh, and Thelonious Monk. That man could play the hell out of a piano.”
“When you put it so eloquently …” I pop the Miles Davis back into its rightful place and turn to him again. “What about Tom Waits?”
Jake looks confused. “What about him?”
“I’ve heard he’s good. Any recommendations?”
“Tom Waits isn’t really jazz. I mean, he is, but he isn’t. There is one album—” He stops mid-sentence and stares at me, and I swear I can actually see him working out the connection, how he gave the same one to June. Which means he knows that I know. Abruptly he turns his back on me and returns to the stack of records, stabbing the sticker gun against them with vicious concentration. “I’m busy. You can look for it yourself.”
“Right. Well, take it easy, Jake,” I say. I make sure to pause for effect before adding, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
Not the smoothest hint drop ever, but it gets my point across. This time his head snaps around so fast it’s a wonder it doesn’t come flying clean off his neck. I know I’ve struck a chord with that one, even if I’m not exactly sure what it means. His mouth opens, but if he says anything, I don’t hear it because I’m already halfway down the aisle.
Jacob Tolan can suck it. He’s not the only one around here who can make a mysterious exit.
chapter three
“That is so weird,” Laney says.
I glance at the column of people ahead of us and nod. “I know.”
“No, I mean, that is so weird,” she stresses. “Like—I cannot even!”
We’re waiting in line at Windermere’s local coffee shop, The Windermere Coffee Co. Creative name, I know. Our repeat business here is not due to customer loyalty but because somehow Grand Lake manages to be so obsolete that even the all-seeing Starbucks corporate machine has skipped over the town entirely.
“So what are you going to do about it?” Laney asks.
“What can I do? He knows I know. I don’t even know what I know, but I’m pretty sure I know something. You know?”
This line of thinking is confusing to follow even for me, but because Laney is my best friend, she nods and says, “Oh, yeah, I so know.”
Laney orders a soy venti latte with, like, five shots of three different flavored syrups, hazelnut and mint and vanilla. It sounds gross. I like to keep it simple: skinny chocolate mocha, extra whip. After the bored-looking girl behind the counter takes my order, I look around the crowded shop, hugging my arms around my middle. It feels weird, being out in the real world again. Around people just living their lives like normal. Their presence is oppressive. The very fact that the world is going on as usual, like nothing ever happened, makes me want to scream. I know it’s irrational to expect everything to grind to a halt because of June, but still. A wave of anxiety builds in my chest, my head pounding so loud it drowns out the noise of people talking and tapping away on their laptops.
The snap of the cashier’s chewing gum brings me back down to reality.
“That’ll be two dollars and ninety-five cents,” she says.
