Watch her, p.17
Watch Her, page 17
“Your face doesn’t say Can I help you?” she said. “It’s more like Get away from me. What’s going on with you?”
“I’m nineteen,” he said. “Drama.”
Dreamessa wiped down the counter and brewed a carafe of dark roast.
“Where are you from, anyway?” she asked.
“You saw my ID when you hired me.”
Dreamessa raised an eyebrow. “I did,” she said. “DeKalb. What’s it like there?”
“I’m from the outskirts of DeKalb. There were lots of farms. We raised pigs and grew corn.”
“How’d you wind up here?”
“You know, luck.”
Dreamessa tossed a rag beneath the counter. “Look,” she said, “you’re pissing me off. It doesn’t have to be this hard. The world’s a big place, with all sorts of people. But you have to be open to it. Stop being scared. Or be scared. Do whatever you need to, but you’re here now, not there. You can find your place in this world.”
Barret knew she wanted to help, but it didn’t keep him from shutting down. He wished he was bolder, one of those people who took on the world, who declared who they were without regard to anyone but themselves, but that wasn’t him. Except with Libby. And Alice, before.
“Here, I’ll tell you something about myself. My name’s not Dreamessa.”
“I’d never have guessed.”
“Want to know my real name?”
“Not if you want something in exchange.”
“It’s Lisa Simpson. Try going through life with that name. It’ll scar you.”
Barret fought back a smile. “You are the sensitive and thoughtful one,” he said.
“Zip it.”
A pack of teenagers stormed into the shop right then, lining up and cutting off the conversation. They were the type of high school students Barret used to dread seeing on the street, the type he imagined might single him out, but now he barely noticed them. That, he supposed was a kind of progress. Still, as he moved through their orders, Dreamessa’s question stuck with him. How had he gotten here, to Boston of all places? He hadn’t said goodbye when he’d left the farm, only a note, one that told his mother she didn’t understand him. He suspected that she was glad he was gone. When he thought about why he’d run away, he realized now that it was easier in the end than facing his truth or allowing anyone he loved to face it with him.
* * *
“What can I get you?” Barret asked.
Dreamessa had gone into the kitchen, and a tiny woman with a black ponytail stepped up to the counter. She took in his name tag and his face in a way he’d gotten used to. And he remembered her, from the gala, and from seeing her through the Matsons’ window the other night. “Looking for your kids again?”
“Barret?” she asked. “Do you go to Prescott University?”
He nodded.
“Could I ask you a few questions? I have a list. Would you take a look at it?”
This was the woman Libby mentioned, the one looking for Brittany. Thankfully, his phone beeped, and a text popped onto the screen. “I’ll have to catch you later,” he said.
He took off his apron. He had an hour to go before the end of his shift, but he left the café without telling Dreamessa where he was going. The text was from Libby. She wanted to see him. And nothing else mattered.
HESTER
Barret ran right past Hester, the café door slamming behind him as he took off into the rain.
A woman in her thirties walked out of the kitchen with a tray of clean mugs. She had a shock of pink hair and the look of a manager who’d seen it all. “Where did he go?” she asked.
“He got a text,” Hester said.
“Strike three,” the woman mumbled to herself, and then gave Hester a practiced smile. “Sometimes it’s for the best. What can I get you?”
“Has he always gone by Barret?”
The woman’s smile faded.
“He looks like someone I used to know,” Hester said. “How long’s he worked here?”
“Yeah, I’m not going to tell you that, or anything else about him. Do you want something? Otherwise, I have plenty to do, especially now that I’m shorthanded.”
“I’ll take a coffee,” Hester said.
“That, I can help you with.”
Hester carried the cup to a table, and then booted up her laptop. One of the big pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place with one look at Barret. She returned to the Hardenne family blog and found the photo of Elaine and Brittany running the three-legged race. Despite the tattoos, the earlobe plugs, the cropped hair, and dye job, Hester could still see Brittany Hardenne in Barret’s features. They were the same person. Somewhere along the line, Brittany had transformed herself into Barret. If one good thing came out of this, maybe Hester would convince Barret to call his mother.
She returned to her conversation from earlier with Libby Thomas, who’d said that Brittany didn’t exist. Unless there was more to that story, Hester had what she needed, but Libby had said that she didn’t exist either. A simple search on Libby’s name, filtering for news, returned too many results. Hester thought through the conversation for other information. When Hester first told Libby about the project, Libby said that the people on the list wouldn’t want anything to do with her. It was when Hester told her that the project was for Prescott University that she seemed to relax a bit. What if she’d enrolled at another school before moving to Boston? But why keep that a secret, why leave it off her résumé? She texted the question to Morgan, and he responded a moment later
Because she flunked out, got kicked out, or was forced to leave?
With Prescott University’s open-enrollment policy, the admissions department wouldn’t care about any records or past transgressions. I should have thought of that, Hester replied.
Distance helps. You should see how many scans I’ve studied for hours before one of the other doctors points out the problem in about two seconds. We’re a good team!
They were, Hester thought.
She returned to the spreadsheet and read through the columns. Libby was from California, but narrowing the search to that state didn’t help either. None of the results was about a woman in her early twenties. She tried adding the word “college” to the query, but most of the results that returned were about sporting events.
According to Libby’s online profile, she’d enrolled here in Boston in the fall. Hester narrowed the search to cover the spring semester, a year earlier. She removed “Libby” from the equation and added the word “scandal.”
Bingo.
A YouTube video came to the top of the query with a headline that read “Stanford Student Rips into Pharmacy Employee,” and linked to a Bay Area news story from the year before. Hester plugged headphones into the laptop and began the video, which she had a vague memory of having seen. It took her a moment to recognize Libby, aka Mary-Elizabeth Thomas, in the grainy footage. This woman had the same dark curls and intense eyes, but she also seemed open and carefree, like someone who hadn’t yet learned how much life could hurt. She stood in line at a pharmacy, the video starting up mid-sentence as Libby asked a salesclerk if there was something wrong.
“It’s hard,” the clerk said. “Ah . . . I can’t . . .”
“You can’t what?” Libby said. “It’s a fucking pair of sunglasses. Ring them up.”
“The scanner. It doesn’t . . .”
“ ‘It doesn’t,’ ” Libby said, imitating the way the cashier tripped over his words.
“Take a chill pill, Mare,” one of her friends said.
“All I want is a fucking pair of sunglasses,” Libby said. “And this fucking god-damned retard can’t work the register. How hard can it be? Are you a fucking retard?”
Hester had seen enough. She remembered now; this video had spread across the Internet, playing in Twitter and Facebook feeds for a few days till it had been replaced by some other scandal. She remembered that feeling of schadenfreude that it wasn’t her own worst moment caught on camera for the world to see. Even now, she couldn’t quite look away.
Libby snatched the sunglasses from the cashier, put them on, and attempted to leave the store without paying. A security guard tackled her and hauled her to the ground. “I’ll sue you,” she shouted. “Do you have any idea who the fuck I am? You’re retards. All of you!”
The video stopped abruptly. The first of thousands of comments read, Bitch is CANCELLED.
Hester thought of the terrible things she’d said in her life, of her worst moments, and imagined seeing them play out on video. And she judged too. She could understand how the video had gone viral. She imagined the hate mail Libby had received, the death threats on her social media.
Hester searched again, this time using Mary-Elizabeth Thomas in the query, and the search returned thousands of results. Libby had been in her junior year when the video went viral. The public shaming began at once, with follow-up videos of Libby being chased into her dorm by a group of students chanting, “Do you know who we are?” Within a few days Libby disappeared from campus, and soon she disappeared from the news cycle.
Hester took a sip of her coffee. It was stone-cold.
Libby had a secret. Like other people who’d been publicly shamed, she’d tried to leave her past behind and reinvent herself. In a way, Barret also had a secret, but an open one, at least to anyone who met him in person. Maybe the third student on that list, Naomi Dwyer, had a secret too.
BARRET
Brittany was Barret’s deadname, a name he hadn’t used since his hair had been blond, when his mother still called him her daughter. He hadn’t used it since that last day in Illinois, one he could still remember like it happened yesterday.
The day had been frigid, with an unrelenting wind screaming across the bare fields and snow in the forecast. He’d packed a bag, mostly art supplies, but also a few changes of clothes, jeans and flannel T-shirts. He left the skirts behind. He didn’t take photos either, nothing to weigh him down. His room, with its toys and posters of boy bands seemed like it belonged to someone else.
Downstairs, he scribbled the note to his mother and left, and outside he tried his best not to turn around, to take in the farmhouse, with its peeling paint and patchy front lawn and unpaved driveway, or the sadness that had infused everything, every moment, since his father died three years earlier.
As Barret headed toward the old highway, Rusty emerged from the warmth of the barn, collapsing with a sigh on the frozen ground. Rusty was fifteen, going on sixteen, and now, Barret wondered if he’d lasted these months. That day he’d stopped to let the dog lap his face in exchange for a belly rub, but even Rusty couldn’t keep Barret from leaving the farm. “Take care, boy,” he said, as he dragged his suitcase down the long driveway and the sound of Rusty’s thumping tail faded away.
Barret sensed a new life opening in front of him. When he hit the road, he turned left, toward DeKalb, ten miles away. Eighteen-wheelers sped by, leaving sonic blasts in their wake. A mile in, he stopped at the 7-Eleven for a hot chocolate and a bag of Doritos, paying with one of the twenties lining his backpack, forty-one of them in total, saved from months of working at the Dairy Queen, months of skimming off what he handed his mother, months of imagining this day. The guy working the register barely looked up as he handed him the change. Barret finished the hot chocolate and plunged into the cold to continue his journey.
The church rose from a sea of fresh asphalt. Barret knew every inch of this building, every member of its community. Inside, at this very moment, Father Todd might be preaching about destiny. Maybe Alice was there too, her skirt falling below her knees, her hair curled around her shoulders. Alice had mastered a smile, one that masked her secrets. Their secrets. Her touch, like Libby’s, had surprised him, mostly because he’d thought he was alone in the world, and for a while, a few days, really, he hadn’t been. Losing Alice had made him lonelier than he’d ever felt in his life. But that loneliness had given him the resolve to leave.
Brake lights shone. Tires squealed across the blacktop. A pickup truck reversed. The passenger-side window slid down and a blessed cloud of warm air enveloped Barret before dissipating into the cold.
“Want a ride?” the driver asked.
He wore a checked dress shirt and tie and a heavy overcoat, and he probably had a clown suit in the rear cab. Barret kept walking. The truck inched along beside him. “Come on, babe,” the driver said. “Hop in. I got nowhere to be. You’ll freeze your ass off out here.”
Not in a million years.
“Suit yourself, freak,” the man said, driving off fast enough to kick gravel in Barret’s face.
Barret was a freak. And every step he took, every advance he rejected, every potential serial killer he spurned, took him closer to embracing his difference. And this guy, with his pickup and checked shirt, was a surprise blessing. He distracted Barret long enough to forget the church and the minister and his mother and Alice and Rusty till they were all far, far behind him. Good riddance to them all.
Except Rusty. And his mother.
Eight miles to go.
* * *
“Chicago,” Barret said that afternoon at the bus depot.
“Sixty-five dollars.”
Barret handed over three twenties and the change from his stop at the 7-Eleven.
“ID?”
He slid his ID beneath the bulletproof glass.
“Don’t look much like you.”
“Glasses,” Barret said. “And I cut my hair.”
“It looked better before, missy.”
The man wore a name tag that read TOM. Maybe Tom sat here all day saying things to piss people off, but what did it matter what Tom thought of Barret’s hair? He wouldn’t see him again.
On the bus, Barret took a window seat. Other passengers filtered on, each stopping at his seat and staring too long. There was power in being a freak. His phone beeped with a message from his mother. Can you pick up your brother at Bible camp?
The bus driver eased onto the interstate, and a few hours later, when they stopped at Popeye’s for a break, Barret bought a small order of French fries, loaded them with ketchup, and tossed his phone in the trash.
He couldn’t wait to see the world.
A day later, his train pulled into Boston and his new life began. Three months had gone by now, and he could barely remember Brittany. Brittany had giggled at boys and baked cookies and lived most of her existence outside her body, looking in. Barret was still getting to know himself, but he didn’t live his life like an endless dress rehearsal anymore. He was small and slight, shorter than most women, let alone men. He usually wore jeans and bowling shirts and a sports bra tight enough to keep his breasts in place. He hadn’t yet considered any kind of surgery—it was beyond anything he could afford—but Libby had taken that all in stride, and that had been enough. He wondered whether it ever still could be.
* * *
The heavy rain seeped into Barret’s worn sneakers, but he hardly cared. His feet felt light, like he might lift into the air and fly away.
Meet me, Libby had written. By the boathouse.
Their special place.
He came to the traffic light and waited, squinting through the rain to where the boathouse rose out of thick fog. Early-evening traffic passed by him, wipers fighting against the deluge. He stepped into the road before the light changed. A truck sped by, horn blaring. He remembered that night with Libby all over again, the touch of a gloved hand, the burn of the cold. He’d begun calling himself Barret as soon as he arrived in Boston, but the new name had sounded strange, translated, like speaking a foreign language.
That night on this pond, he’d put his hand to Libby’s hair. He pulled her toward him. He pressed his lips to hers. With that kiss, he left Brittany behind and became Barret. He became someone he wouldn’t ignore again. That’s what Libby meant to Barret.
She meant everything.
* * *
The walk sign flashed. Barret dashed across the street. The city seemed miles away. “Libby?” he said. “Where are you?”
No one answered.
“Is someone there?”
He took a step forward, into the dark.
ANGELA
Angela pulled in front of the UMass Boston campus. She was late to pick up Jamie, who stood outside waiting while rain poured off an awning. He managed to slide his enormous frame into the front seat of the car by jamming his knees beneath the glove box. “Could have taken the bus,” he said.
“You probably could have walked at this point,” Angela said. “Sorry to be late.”
For most of the day, she’d avoided having to talk to Stan again, but as the afternoon wound down, Zane returned from the crime scene at Stony Brook Reservation. Or to be precise, from the hospital, where the suspect they’d picked up had woken and confessed without being asked so much as a single question. “A win is a win,” Stan said, insisting that they go for drinks to celebrate Zane’s first close. At the bar, Zane sucked down a cosmo and told every detail of the confession, while Stan watched Angela from across the room. She’d finished her wine and gotten out of there as quickly as she could.
Now, she kissed Jamie’s cheek, her hand brushing the scar, which, like his stammer, had faded but not yet disappeared.
The reminder.
Two years ago, someone under Angela’s command had shot Jamie during a raid on his apartment, during a raid that shouldn’t have happened. As a black man in this world, he’d suffered the exact fate that Angela feared every day for Isaiah. She hadn’t pulled the trigger, but she still blamed herself for being part of the problem.
Good had come from the whole situation. Jamie, who didn’t have much family, had moved from a lonely apartment in Everett, to the one in Hester and Morgan’s house. He’d brought Butch with him, and he’d become a part of their lives. Now, he came to Angela’s house every Friday night for dinner, and she’d committed to making sure he could become the best he could be. It wasn’t that hard of a job. He came with the goods.
