In Her Skin(2)

TEMPLE LOVECRAFT, the ID reads.

“Temple Lovecraft,” I mouth.

You frown in the picture. Badass, with your chin tipped up. You love Emily Dickinson but you hate school. Why do you hate school? Because you go to a la-di-da all-girls school in the city when you’d rather be—where? You come here every day. You get off on poetry. You’re coddled, fed. Yet you’re empty. It’s rare I can’t figure out another person’s wants and needs. It’s how I live. You are worthy of study. But are you worthy of stealing? I flip the ID over. Trapped under plastic, your cheek can’t feel me drag my thumb over it slowly.

“Fifteen minutes until closing,” Brown Tooth shouts. She doesn’t aim this toward Baby Arm, or Muttermouth, or Hoodie, just me, because she worries about me. Wants me warned before I get turned out onto the street for the night. I lean back in my chair and nod to Brown Tooth. To speak would encourage Brown Tooth, and I have ten minutes left to mine the Interwebs for your address, where I will paw through your trash for helpful digits. I’ve got five more minutes to write the note I will leave in my carrel, tacked with gum to the inside of the green lampshade for Wolf to find. He’ll look for me here, after I leave him asleep in our tent tonight, headed for my new life as Temple Lovecraft.

Don’t think about Wolf. Same way you don’t think about Momma.

Wolf’s better off without you. Better off without you. Better off.

Saying a thing three times makes it so.

I rush across the hall to a computer station and type Temple Lovecraft. I have to be quick, because they’ll shut down the servers soon, and I’d like to drop this wallet back under your chair before you return from your visit to the girls’ room.

Oh. Look.

It’s you! The daughter of Henry and Clarissa Lovecraft of Boston’s Back Bay in a tasteful dress standing next to your catalog parents at an event called Charity Begins at Home, where lots of other kids and their rich parents are in The Boston Globe’s People and Places section. And Dad is the owner of Lovecraft Construction, the name on the crane that rises against the twinkly Boston skyline that Wolf and me see from our tent flap every night. In one panting article after another, you’re named a United States Presidential Scholar and a National Merit Scholar. You won the National French Contest, the Hamilton Award, and the World Scholar’s Cup, which has nothing to do with soccer. Not that you aren’t sporty. You rank first on the national girls’ varsity fencing team. You’re musical, too: first cello in the Boston Youth Conservatory and, when you were younger, you were a child opera singer featured on America’s Got Talent until “vocal nodules ended a promising career.” To keep up with all this stuff, you told a reporter you pull all-nighters to study “on a regular basis.” The reporter ends her article by telling us “Pinned to her bedroom wall is a quotation from Oliver Cromwell: ‘He who stops being better, stops being good.’”

You dazzle me, Temple Lovecraft. But I still need your address. I type Lovecraft alongside Back Bay apartment and … what’s this?

NINE-YEAR-OLD GOES MISSING FROM PROMINENT LOCAL DEVELOPER’S HOME

By Stephanie Ebbert | BOSTON GLOBE MAY 23, 2010



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Boston—A nine-year-old girl has gone missing from a Back Bay apartment as her playmate’s parents sat dining several feet away.

Vivienne Weir, the daughter of Travis and Marie Weir, was last seen in the brownstone town house owned by Boston developer Henry Lovecraft and his wife, Clarissa. The Lovecrafts were seated in the outdoor section of Restaurant Chloe, which is attached to their home on Commonwealth Avenue, where they say they left Weir and their daughter alone watching a television show around seven p.m.

Abductions with parents in proximity are rare but not unheard of, making the case reminiscent of the 2007 disappearance of four-year-old Madeleine McCann, the British girl who vanished from her hotel room at a resort in Portugal while her parents dined fifty yards away.

Below the article is a photo of a girl taken from the waist up. The back of her head nestles against the chest of a woman who is cropped out, except for her chin, arms that cross the girl in a hug, and dark curls that spill onto the girl’s shoulder. The girl’s own hair is the color of butter, and she has big square teeth. Her eyes make happy half-moons, like someone she loved said “Smile!” and she did, because she had reasons to. I settle on the woman’s arms. They hug the girl so hard, the front of her bathing suit puckers.

My breath burns.

The want I feel for those phantom arms could shatter the screen. Make it pop, sizzle, and die. Make the shelves shake and the books tumble down. The want’s like with the girl on the bus, but it wasn’t useful then, and it’s not useful right now.

Stealing Temple Lovecraft’s identity will get me money. It will get me off the street. But it won’t get me those arms.

I type Vivienne Weir. The next story reads fast.

PLANE CRASH OFF NANTUCKET KILLS BOSTON COUPLE

By Julie Dalton | BOSTON GLOBE July 2, 2011



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Nantucket, Massachusetts—Fog is believed to be the cause of a small plane crash off the coast of Nantucket Friday evening. The passengers, Travis and Marie Weir of Boston, are presumed dead. The Weirs are the parents of nine-year-old Vivienne Weir, who went missing in May 2010.

I did not see that coming.