I Have Lost My Way(16)

Who’s she kidding? She can’t sing, and if she can’t sing there won’t be fame, let alone celebrity or even buzz, and certainly no gossip items in the Post. The fans will disappear. And then . . .

She blinks hard, trying to dislodge the thought, and turns to Nathaniel, who’s staring at the clipboard as though it were written in hieroglyphics. At this rate, they’re going to be here all day. She snatches the clipboard away from him. “How about I fill that out for you?” she says, trying her best not to let her impatience seep through.

He nods.

The name she knows: Nathaniel Haley. “Address? Date of birth?”

“I don’t have one,” he says, and Freya thinks that he really is addled. He’s still holding his wallet, so she takes it back and removes his driver’s license, copying the pertinent info from there. Six foot two. Brown hair, green eyes. Nineteen years old. The address is just a state route in Washington, but when she writes it down, she pictures a house on the edge of a forest. She hears birds singing.

“Emergency contact?” she asks.

His face goes blank.

She fishes out the business card and reads the name: Hector Fuentes. Is that the man in the photo strip? “Hector Fuentes? Is that your father?” she asks, though Nathaniel doesn’t look like the kind of person who has a father named Hector Fuentes, but then again, Freya doesn’t look like the kind of person who has a mother named Nancy Greenberg.

Nathaniel hesitates for a moment, shakes his head.

“Can you tell me your father’s phone number?”

When he returns a blank look, she doesn’t blame him. Who remembers phone numbers anymore? She can get it off that ancient flip phone he used to call his father in the park, but she’s not sure how those phones work, so even though it implicates her further, she writes down her own number.



* * *



— — —

Harun listens to Freya quiz Nathaniel about allergies (shrimp). He feels left out. He wishes he had an allergy to offer. But he’s not allergic to anything, except perhaps himself. This is a thing. He looked it up once. It can be fatal.

“Have you had any of the following?” Freya—he’s sure it’s her now, he saw the credit card—lists a number of medical conditions. They include ailments like tuberculosis, arrhythmia, and emphysema, and Harun can’t help but notice that the most common maladies, the ones that will really hurt a person—corrosive shame, shattered heart, betrayed family—are not included.

She finishes the forms and turns them in. Harun knows that whatever use he might have had is expired, but she is his last chance at getting James back. What are the odds of them meeting, on this of all days? He must find a way to extend his usefulness.

The nurse calls Nathaniel’s name.

Freya says, “You’ll be okay?”

Nathaniel begins to answer, but Harun interrupts. “We should go with him. To talk to the doctor.”

Freya looks extremely unhappy about this, but, sighing, she stands and reluctantly follows.



* * *



— — —

They all three squeeze into the examination room, where, after the nurse takes Nathaniel’s vital signs, it becomes apparent that they are complete strangers with nothing in common and nothing to say to one another.

Awkward silence ensues as they each attempt to find some place in the small room to look that is not at one another.

Freya takes out her phone. The screen, she now sees, is cracked from the fall in the park, frozen on the image of her sister—she said yes!—with her stupid fiancé. The Lurker has his phone in his hand. Is he tweeting about her? Has he already posted pictures? She should check. She should tell someone. But she can’t bear it. She doesn’t want to know. She shuts off her screen but pretends to be busy on her phone so she can take a moment to surreptitiously size up her new companions.

The Lurker is jittery, big brown eyes popping out of brown skin a shade or two darker than hers. He exudes a sort of nervous energy that makes him look like a frightened animal and takes away from the fact that under all those jangling nerves is a cute guy, moderately well-dressed, trying desperately to play it cool.

The other one, Nathaniel, looks like the sort of person who’s never played it cool in his life. Looking like that, he wouldn’t need to. He’s the sort of attractive—tall and lanky and possessing bone structure people pay money for—that others need to play it cool around. Though not Freya. She has been inundated with beauty so much that she’s no longer impressed by it. She would be unimpressed by Nathaniel too were it not for the mismatched eyes, one green, one grayish. They mar his perfection. They make him breathtaking.

“You’re pretty enough,” Hayden told her once, “but it’s your voice that makes you distinctive.” It follows that without a voice she is indistinctive. She is nobody.

There’s a hard knock at the door as the doctor comes in. Freya scopes him out straightaway: young and toothily handsome but with a smug smile that wrecks everything.

“What seems to be the problem?” he asks.

It’s the same opening the doctor used earlier that day. Why do they ask that? Can’t they just read the forms? Only this time there is no Freya’s mother to step into the maw with the explanation, and Nathaniel remains mute.