You Can't Catch Me(15)

I drop my cigarette and crush it. I feel nothing about what Covington’s saying. The good thing about this many drinks is I’ve reached that point. Painless. Blameless.

“I think it’s safe to say that there’s lots of us who wanted him dead, who thought about it, even. Then it happened. That was a good thing, wasn’t it? Who cares if it makes sense?”

“Not so good for everyone . . . what about Kiki?”

I wince, the shot of adrenaline my body releases acting like Narcan, jump-starting my heart. “What the hell, Covington? Are you trying to make me upset?”

He raises his hand in surrender. “Sorry.” He tosses his cigarette into the street. “I suck, okay? We all suck.”

“So says Todd.”

“And Todd is all.”

I shake my head at the call and response we said by rote a thousand times. “If he was murdered, he deserved it.”

“He did.” He pulls me into a hug. Touching most people still feels weird to me, all these years later. Physical contact wasn’t allowed in the Upper Camp. Who knows what the kids might get up to if they could embrace?

“You okay?” Cov asks.

“I’m fine.”

“I’m going to head back in.”

“I’m going to stay out here for a bit.”

He lets me go and enters the bar. I’m going to leave in a minute, but for now I linger. I watch the group through the window like they’re on a sitcom, talking with big gestures, laughing, free. The leftovers, the side effects, the only family I have left.

My mind wanders. I check my phone, scrolling through my texts. Jessica Two’s seen my message. So, her phone is working, real. And she has her read receipts on, so she wants me to know she’s read it. A point of connection that I can use. But what words will unlock a reaction? A daily text? Hourly?

I poke at my phone and tap out: I’m coming to get you, get you, get you.

“No more drinking,” I say out loud.

“I tell myself that every day,” the homeless man I didn’t even notice says. He’s sitting on the ground against the side of the building, his possessions jumbled into a shopping cart.

“We should take each other’s advice.”

“Easier said and all that.”

He raises a can in my direction. I toast him with air.

My phone vibrates. It’s a text from Liam.

I found her.





Chapter 7

Road Trip

“Let’s just go,” I say, and for once Liam agrees with me. So here we are, in the middle of a Wednesday, driving out of the city.

It’s a bright, sunny day, and we’re on I-95, heading north. To Wilmington, New York, to be more precise, about five hours away. That’s where this Jessica Williams lives, on a small dirt road outside of town.

While the world was still tilting in Brooklyn, I sent her a Facebook friend request. She didn’t answer it. Then I realized I could send her a direct message even if we weren’t friends, and so I wrote to her, setting out the basic details of what had happened and asking if the same thing had been done to her.

She didn’t write back, but the message might have ended up in her spam folder. You’d have to be a monster not to respond to a cry for help from someone with the same name as you who’d been defrauded because of it, right?

In the sober morning, I took another tack and sent friend requests to the two women who’d tagged her in my original Facebook post. They were more open to communicating with a stranger and accepted my requests quickly. Then they both started messaging with me. One was named Miranda, and she worked at a high school where Jessie—that’s what Miranda called her—worked a while back in a suburb of Chicago. She couldn’t tell me much about her other than where she lived now, and that Jessie had come into some money, she thought, but she didn’t know the details. Jessie was kind of a private person, you know? She wouldn’t like me telling you these things.

The other woman was named Leanne, and she lived in Wilmington, half a mile from Jessie. She didn’t know Jessie too well, only that she was new in town these last two years, and kept to herself, and why did I want to know, anyway? What did my post on Facebook mean? Was there some kind of Jessica convention going on down there in New York City?

I laughed at that one. I had to get in a room with Jessie. Maybe face-to-face, she’d talk to me. A drunken Facebook DM is easy to cast aside. I’m much harder to ignore in person.

Even Liam knows this. That’s how we ended up in this car, snarled in traffic.

“So,” I say, digging into the food hamper at my feet when we’ve left the city behind, “I’ve got portable cheese and near-cheese products. Also, many kinds of chocolate. You like chocolate, right?”

Liam looks over at me. He’s wearing a black T-shirt, aviator sunglasses that reflect me back at myself, and the Mets hat I gave him for his birthday a few years back. “What’s gotten into you?”

I bounce in my seat. “I’m both nervous and excited. I’m nercited.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“It could be a thing.”

“This is a crazy idea.”

“Who you calling crazy, sitting next to me, driving me there?”

Liam smiles what I like to think is his happy smile, and I feel like mission accomplished already. I can’t think of the last time we were alone like this, spending the day driving somewhere. It’s a beautiful day out, crisp and fresh, the sun high in the sky. You forget, living in the city, what the air can smell like, how clean it can be. How green the trees are when they’re not covered in a film of dust and grime.