SIX

AFTER SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY, I joined the swarm of people filing out through the overstuffed hallways of WRHS and made my way to Harold. I had to change the Band-Aid, which took a few minutes, but I preferred to let the traffic thin out a bit before driving home anyway. To kill time, I texted Daisy, asking her to meet me at Applebee’s, our go-to restaurant for studying together.

She responded a few minutes later: I have work until 8. Meet you after?

Me: Do you need a ride?

Her: Dad picked me up. He’s taking me. Has Davis texted?

Me: No, should I text him?

Her: ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Her: Wait between 24 and 30 hours. Obviously. You’re intrigued but not obsessed.

Me: Got it. I didn’t know there were Texting Commandments.

Her: Well there are. We’re almost there so I gotta go. First order of business, drawing straws to see who has to get in the Chuckie costume. Pray for me.

Harold and I started our drive home, but then it occurred to me that I could go anywhere. Not anywhere, I guess, but nearly. I could drive to Ohio, if I wanted, or Kentucky, and still be home before curfew. Thanks to Harold, a couple hundred square miles of the American Midwest were mine for the taking. So instead of turning to go home, I kept driving north up Meridian Street until I merged onto I-465. I turned the radio up as a song I liked called “Can’t Stop Thinking About You” came on, the bass sizzling in Harold’s long-blown speakers, the lyrics stupid and silly and everything I needed.

Sometimes you happen across a brilliant run of radio songs, where each time one station goes to commercial, you scan to another that has just started to play a song you love but had almost forgotten about, a song you never would’ve picked but that turns out to be perfect for shouting along to. And so I drove along to one of those miraculous playlists, headed nowhere. I followed the highway east, and then south, then west, then north, and then east again, until I ended up at the same Meridian Street exit where I’d started.

The journey around Indianapolis cost about seven dollars in gas, and I knew it was wasteful, but I felt so much better after circling the city.

When I parked in the driveway to open up the garage door, I saw I had a series of texts from Daisy:

I just drew the short straw so I have to get inside the fricking Chuckie costume.

See you later if I survive.

If I die weep at my grave every day until a seedling appears in the dirt, then cry on it to make it grow until it becomes a beautiful tree whose roots surround my body.

They’re making me go now they’re taking away my phone REMEMBER ME HOLMESY.

Update: I survived. Getting a ride to Applebee’s after work. See you.

—

In the living room, Mom was grading quizzes with her feet up on the coffee table. I sat down next to her, and without looking up, she said, “A Lyle from the Pickett estate brought over our canoe today, repaired. Said you and Daisy were paddling down the White River and hit a rock.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You and Daisy,” she said. “Paddling on the White River.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She looked up at last. “Seems like something you would only do if, say, you wanted to run into Davis Pickett.”

I shrugged.

“Did it work?” she asked.

I shrugged again, but she kept looking at me until I gave in and spoke. “I was just thinking about him. Wanted an excuse to check on him, I guess.”

“How is he doing, without his father?”

“I think he’s okay,” I said. “Most people don’t seem to like their dads much.”

She leaned into me, her shoulder against mine. I knew we were both thinking about my dad, but we had never been good at talking about him. “I wonder if you would have clashed with your father.”

I didn’t say anything.

“He would’ve understood you, that’s for sure. He got your whys in a way I never could. But he was such a worrier, and you might have found that exhausting. I know I did, sometimes.”

“You worry, too,” I said.

“I suppose. Mostly about you.”

“I don’t mind worriers,” I said. “Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.”

“You sound just like him.” She smiled a little. “I still can’t believe he left us.” She said it like it was a decision, like he’d been mowing the lawn that day and thought, I think I’ll fall down dead now.

—

I cooked dinner that night, a macaroni scramble with canned vegetables, boxed macaroni, and some proper cheddar cheese, and then we ate while watching a reality show about regular people trying to survive in the wild. My phone finally buzzed while Mom and I were doing the dishes—Daisy telling me she’d arrived at Applebee’s—so I told Mom I’d be back by midnight and reunited with Harold, who was, as always, a pure delight.

Applebee’s is a chain of mid-quality restaurants serving “American food,” which essentially means that Everything Features Cheese. Last year, some kid had showed up on our doorstep and talked my mom into buying a huge coupon book to support his Boy Scout troop or something, and the book turned out to include sixty Applebee’s coupons offering “Two burgers for $11.” Daisy and I had been working our way through them ever since.

She was waiting for me at a booth, changed out of her work shirt and into a scoop-neck turquoise top, staring into the depths of her phone. Daisy didn’t have a computer, so she did everything on her phone, from texting to writing fan fiction. She could type on it faster than I could on a regular keyboard.

“Have you ever gotten a dick pic?” she asked in lieu of saying hello.

“Um, I’ve seen one,” I said, scooting into the bench across from her.

“Well, of course you’ve see one, Holmesy. Christ, I’m not asking if you’re a seventeenth-century nun. I mean have you ever received an unsolicited, no-context dick pic. Like, a dick pic as a form of introduction.”

“Not really,” I said.

“Look at this,” she said, and handed me her phone.

“Yeah, that’s a penis,” I said, squinting and turning it slightly counterclockwise.

“Right, but can we talk about it for a minute?”

“Can we please not?” I dropped the phone as Holly, our server, appeared at the table. Holly was our server quite regularly, and she wasn’t exactly a card-carrying member of the Daisy and Holmesy fan club, possibly on account of our coupon-driven Applebee’s strategy and limited resources for tipping.

Daisy spoke up, as she always did. “Holly, have you ever received—”

“Nope,” I said. “No no no.” I looked up at Holly. “I’d just like a water with no food please, but around nine forty-five I’ll take a veggie burger, no mayonnaise no condiments at all, just a veggie burger and bun in a to-go box please. With fries.”

“And you’ll have the Blazin’ Texan burger?” Holly asked Daisy.

“With a glass of red wine, please.”

Holly just stared at her.

“Fine. Water.”

“I assume y’all have a coupon?” Holly asked.

“As it happens, we do,” I said, and slid it across the table to her.

Holly had hardly turned away when Daisy started back up. “I mean, how am I supposed to react to a semi-erect penis as fan mail? Am I supposed to feel intrigued?”

“He probably thinks it’ll end in marriage. You’ll meet IRL and fall in love and someday tell your kids that it all started with a picture of a disembodied penis.”

“It’s just such an odd response to my fiction. Like, okay, follow the thread of thoughts with me: ‘I really enjoyed this story about Rey and Chewbacca’s romantic adventure scavenging a wrecked Tulgah spaceship on Endor in search of the famed Tulgah patience potion; as a thank-you, I believe I will send the author of that story a photograph of my dick.’ How do you get from A to B, Holmesy?”

“Boys are gross,” I said. “Everyone is gross. People and their gross bodies; it all makes me want to barf.”

“Probably just some loser Kylo stan,” she mumbled. I had no understanding of her fan-fiction language.

“Please can we talk about something else.”

“Fine. During my break at work, I became an expert in wills. So, get this: You can’t actually leave any money to a nonhuman animal when you die, but you can leave all your money to a corporation that exists solely to benefit a nonhuman animal. Basically, the state of Indiana doesn’t consider pets people, but it does consider corporations people. So Pickett’s money would all go to a company that benefits the tuatara. And it turns out you don’t have to leave your kids anything when you die. No matter how rich you are—not a house, not college money, nothing.”

“What happens if their dad goes to prison?”

“They’d get a guardian. Maybe the house manager or a family member or something, and that person would get money to pay the kids’ expenses. If finding fugitives doesn’t work out for me as a career, I might get into guardianship of billionaire children.

“Okay, you start putting together background files on the case and the Pickett family. I’m gonna get the police report and also do my calc homework, because there are only so many hours in a day and I have to spend too many of them at Chuck E. Cheese.”

“How are you going to get a copy of the police report, anyway?”

“Oh, you know. Wiles,” she said.

—

I happened to be friends with Davis Pickett on Facebook, and while his profile was a long-abandoned ghost town, it did provide me with one of his usernames—dallgoodman, which led to an Instagram.

The Instagram contained no real pictures, only quotes rendered in typewritery fonts with soft-focused, crumpled-paper backgrounds. The first one, posted two years ago, was from Charlotte Brontë. “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

The most recent quote was, “He who doesn’t fear death dies only once,” which I thought was maybe some veiled reference to his father, but I couldn’t unpack it. (For the record, he who does fear death also dies only once, but whatever.)

Scrolling through the quotes, I noticed a few users who consistently liked Davis’s posts, including one, anniebellcheers, whose feed was mostly cheerleading pictures until I scrolled back more than a year and found a series of pictures of her with Davis, featuring a lot of heart emojis.

Their relationship seemed to have started the summer between ninth and tenth grades and lasted a few months. Her Instagram profile had a link to her Twitter, where she was still following a user named nkogneato, which turned out to be Davis’s Twitter handle—I knew because he’d posted a picture of his brother doing a cannonball into their pool.

The nkogneato username led me to a YouTube profile—the user seemed to like mostly basketball highlights and those really long videos where you watch someone play a video game—and then eventually, after scrolling through many pages of search results, to a blog.

At first, I couldn’t tell for sure if the blog was Davis’s. Each post began with a quote and then featured a short little paragraph that was never quite autobiographical enough to place him, like this one:

“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”

—TONI MORRISON

Last night I lay on the frozen ground, staring up at a clear sky only somewhat ruined by light pollution and the fog produced by my own breath—no telescope or anything, just me and the wide-open sky—and I kept thinking about how sky is a singular noun, as if it’s one thing. But the sky isn’t one thing. The sky is everything. And last night, it was enough.

I didn’t know for sure that it was him until I started to notice that many of the quotes from his Instagram feed were also used in the blog, including the Charlotte Brontë one:

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

—CHARLOTTE BRONTË

At the end, when walking was work, we sat on a bench looking down at the river, which was running low, and she told me that beauty was mostly a matter of attention. “The river is beautiful because you are looking at it,” she said.

Another, written the previous November, around the time he and anniebellcheers stopped replying to each other on Twitter:

“By convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color, but in reality atoms and void.”

—DEMOCRITUS

When observation fails to align with a truth, what do you trust—your senses or your truth? The Greeks didn’t even have a word for blue. The color didn’t exist to them. Couldn’t see it without a word for it.

I think about her all the time. My stomach flips when I see her. But is it love, or just something we don’t have a word for?

The next one stopped me cold:

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

—WILLIAM JAMES

I don’t know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name.

The way he talked about thoughts was the way I experienced them—not as a choice but as a destiny. Not a catalog of my consciousness, but a refutation of it.

When I was little, I used to tell Mom about my invasives, and she would always say, “Just don’t think about that stuff, Aza.” But Davis got it. You can’t choose. That’s the problem.

The other interesting thing about Davis’s online presence was that everything ceased the day his father went missing. He’d posted on the blog almost every day for more than two years, and then on the afternoon after his dad disappeared, he wrote:

“Sleep tight, ya morons.”

—J. D. SALINGER

I think this is good-bye, my friends, although, then again: No one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.

It made sense. People had probably started snooping around—I mean, if I could find his secret blog, I imagine the cops could, too. But I wondered whether Davis had really quit the internet entirely, or whether he’d just decamped to some farther shore.

I couldn’t pick his trail back up, though. Instead, I got stuck searching his usernames and variants of them, and ended up meeting a lot of people who weren’t my Davis Pickett—the fifty-three-year-old Dave Pickett who was a truck driver in Wisconsin; the Davis Pickett who’d died of ALS after years of posting short blog entries written with the help of eye-tracking software; a Twitter user named dallgoodman whose blog was nothing but vitriolic threats directed at members of Congress. I found a reddit account that commented on Butler basketball and so probably belonged to Davis, but that, too, had been silent since Pickett Sr.’s disappearance.

“I’m very close,” Daisy said suddenly. “Very, very close. If only I were as good at life as I am at the internet.” I looked up, returning to the sensorial plane of Applebee’s. Daisy was tapping at her phone with one hand while holding her cup of water with the other. Everything was loud and bright. At the bar, people were shouting about some sports occurrence. “What’ve you got?” she asked me as she put down her water.

“Um, Davis had a girlfriend, but they broke up last November-ish. He has a blog, but hasn’t updated anything since his dad disappeared. I don’t know. In the blog, he seems . . . sweet, I guess.”

“Well, I’m glad you’ve used your internet detective skills to determine that Davis is sweet. Holmesy, I love you, but find some info on the case.”

So I did. The Indianapolis Star wrote about Russell Pickett a lot because his company was one of Indiana’s biggest employers, but also because he was constantly getting sued. He had some huge real estate deal downtown that devolved into multiple lawsuits; his former executive assistant and Pickett Engineering’s chief marketing officer had both sued him for sexual harassment; he’d been sued by a gardener on his estate for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act; the list went on and on.

In all those articles, the same lawyer was quoted—Simon Morris. Morris’s website described his company as “a boutique law firm focusing on the comprehensive needs of high-net-worth individuals.”

“Can I get a charge off your computer BTW?” She actually said the letters B-T-W, which I wanted to point out required more syllables than just saying “by the way,” but she was clearly locked into something. Without ever taking her eyes from her phone, Daisy reached into her purse, pulled out a USB cable, and handed it to me. I plugged it into my laptop, and she just mumbled, “That’s better, thanks; I’m really close here.”

I noticed Holly had come with my to-go order. I cracked the plastic container and grabbed a couple fries before returning to my investigation of Pickett. I stumbled onto a website called Glassdoor, where current and former employees could review the company anonymously. Observations about Russell Pickett himself included:

“The CEO is skeezy as hell.”

“Russell Pickett is a straight-up megalomaniac.”

“I’m not saying Pickett executives make you break the law, but we do frequently hear executives start sentences with ‘I’m not saying you should break the law, but . . .’”

So that’s the kind of guy Pickett was. And although he’d gotten around all the lawsuits by settling them, the criminal investigation wouldn’t go away. From what I could gather, the company had bribed a bunch of state officials in exchange for contracts to build a better sewer overflow system in Indianapolis.

Fifteen years ago, the government had set aside all this money to clean up the White River by building more sewage retention pools and expanding this tunnel system that runs underneath downtown, diverting a creek called Pogue’s Run. The idea was that within a decade, the sewers would stop dumping into the river every time it rained. Pickett Engineering had gotten the initial contract, but they’d never finished the work, and it had gone way over budget, so the government pulled the contract from Pickett’s company and allowed anyone to bid on finishing the project.

And then, even though they’d done a terrible job the first time, Pickett Engineering won the new contract—apparently by bribing state officials. Two of Pickett’s executives had already been arrested and were believed to be cooperating with the police. Pickett himself hadn’t yet been charged, although an editorial in the paper from three days before his disappearance criticized the authorities: “The Indianapolis Star Has Enough Evidence to Indict Russell Pickett; Why Don’t the Authorities?”

“Annnnddd it’s happening. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Just waiting for the zip to download, yes, and opening, and . . . oh, hell yes.” Daisy finally looked up at me and smiled. Her front teeth were a little crooked, turning toward each other, and she was self-conscious about it, so she rarely smiled all the way. But now I could even see her gums. “Can I do the thing, like, at the end of Scooby-Doo and tell you how I did it?”

I nodded.

“So the first article about Pickett’s disappearance refers to a police report obtained by the Indianapolis Star. That story was written by Sandra Oliveros, with additional reporting by this dude Adam Bitterley, which is a bummer of a last name, but anyway, he’s clearly the junior guy on the story, and a quick google shows him to be a recent IU grad.

“So I made up an email address that looks almost exactly like Sandra Oliveros’s and emailed Bitterley an order to send me a copy of the police report. And he replied, like, ‘I can’t; I don’t have it on my home computer,’ so I told him to go the hell into the office and email it to me, and he was like, ‘It’s Friday night,’ and I was, like, ‘I know it’s Friday night, but the news doesn’t stop breaking on the weekend; do your job, or I’ll find someone else who will do it.’ And then he went to the fucking office and emailed me scans of the fucking police report.”

“Jesus.”

“Welcome to the future, Holmesy. It’s not about hacking computers anymore; it’s about hacking human souls. The file is in your email.” Sometimes I wondered if Daisy was my friend only because she needed a witness.

As the file downloaded, I glanced away from my screen, through the slits of the blinds to the parking lot outside. A streetlight was shining right at us, which made everything around it look pitch-black.

I was trying to shake off a thought, but as I opened the police report and began scanning through it, the thought grew.

“What?” Daisy asked.

“Nothing,” I said, and tried again to swallow the thought. But I couldn’t. “Just, won’t he get in trouble? Like, when he goes into work on Monday, won’t he ask his boss why she needed that file, and then won’t she be, like, ‘What file,’ and then won’t he get in trouble? Like, he could get fired.”

Daisy just rolled her eyes, but I was in the spiral now, and I started to worry that Mr. Bitterley would figure out how to track down Daisy, that he would have her arrested, and maybe me, too, since I was probably an accomplice. We were just playing a silly game, but people go to prison all the time for lesser crimes. I imagined a news story—girl hackers obsessed with billionaire boy.

“He’ll find us,” I said after a while.

“Who?” she asked.

“The guy,” I said. “Bitterley.”

“No, he won’t; I’m on public Wi-Fi in an Applebee’s using an IP address that locates me in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. And if he does find me, I’ll say you had no idea what I was doing, and I’ll go to prison for you, and in thanks for my refusal to snitch, you’ll get my face tattooed on your bicep. It’ll be great.”

“Daisy, be serious.”

“I am being serious. Your skinny little bicep needs a tattoo of my face. Also, he’s not going to get fired. He’s not going to find us. At most, he will learn an important lesson about phishing in a way that’s minimally harmful to his life and the company he works for. Calm down, all right? I gotta get back to this very important argument I’m having with a stranger on the internet about whether Chewbacca is a person.”

Holly came by with the check, an unsubtle reminder that we’d overstayed our welcome. I put down the debit card Mom had given me—Daisy never had any money and my mom let me charge twenty-five dollars a week as long as I kept straight As. Beneath the table, I rubbed my thumb against the callus of my finger. I told myself that Daisy was probably right, that everything would probably be fine. Probably.

Daisy didn’t look up from her phone, but said, “Seriously, Holmesy. I won’t let anything happen. I promise.”

“You can’t control it, that’s the thing,” I said. “Life is not something you wield, you know?”

“Hell yes, it is,” she mumbled, still sunk into her phone. “Ugh, God, now this guy is saying I write bestiality.”

“Wait, what?”

“Because in my fic, Chewbacca and Rey were in love. He’s saying it is—and I am quoting—‘criminal’ because it’s interspecies romance. Not sex, even—I keep it rated Teen for the kids out there—just love.”

“But Chewbacca isn’t human,” I said.

“It’s not a question of whether Chewie was human, Holmesy; it’s a question of whether he was a person.” She was almost shouting. She took Star Wars stuff quite seriously. “And he was obviously a person. Like, what even makes you a person? He had a body and a soul and feelings, and he spoke a language, and he was an adult, and if he and Rey were in hot, hairy, communicative love, then let’s just thank God that two consenting, sentient adults found each other in a dark and broken galaxy.”

So often, nothing could deliver me from fear, but then sometimes, just listening to Daisy did the trick. She’d straightened something inside me, and I no longer felt like I was in a whirlpool or walking an ever-tightening spiral. I didn’t need similes. I was located in my self again. “So he’s a person because he’s sentient?”

“Nobody complains about male humans hooking up with female Twi’leks! Because of course men can choose whatever they want to bone. But a human woman falling in love with a Wookiee, God forbid. I mean, I know I’m just feeding the trolls here, Holmesy, but I can’t stand for it.”

“I just mean, like, a baby isn’t sentient, but a baby is still a person.”

“Nobody is saying anything about babies, Holmesy. This is about one adult person who happened to be human falling in love with another adult person who happened to be a Wookiee.”

“Can Rey even speak Wookiee?”

“You know, it’s a little annoying that you don’t read my fanfic, but what’s really annoying is that you don’t read any Chewie fanfic. If you did, you’d know that Wookiee was not a language, it was a species. There were at least three Wookiee languages. Rey learned Shyriiwook from Wookiees who came to Jakku, but she didn’t usually speak it because Wookiees mostly understood Basic.”

I was laughing. “And why are you using the past tense?”

“Because all of this happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Holmesy. You always use the past tense when talking about Star Wars. Duh.”

“Wait, can humans speak Shyri—the Wookiee language?”

Daisy did a very passable Chewbacca impersonation in response, then translated herself. “That was me asking if you’re gonna eat your fries.” I passed the to-go carton across the table to her, and she took a handful, then made another Chewbacca noise with her mouth half full.

“What did that mean?” I asked her.

“It’s been over twenty-four hours; time to text Davis.”

“Wookiees have texting?”

“Had texting,” she corrected me.