"Jess," he said, after I went, "Hello?"
"Oh, hey." I hoped my disappointment that it was Douglas and not Rob didn't show in my voice.
"How's it going? Who was that freak who answered the phone? Is that your boss, or something?"
Douglas sounded good. Which meant he'd been taking his medication. Sometimes he thinks he's cured, so he stops. That's when the voices usually come back again.
"Yeah," I said. "That was Dr. Alistair. We aren't supposed to get personal calls, except on Sunday afternoons. Then it's okay."
"So he explained to me." Douglas didn't sound in the least bit ruffled by his conversation with Dr. Alistair, world-famous orchestra conductor. "And you prefer working for him over Dad? At least Dad would let you get phone calls at work."
"Yeah, but Dad would withhold my pay for the time I spent on the phone."
Douglas laughed. It was good to hear him laugh. He doesn't do it very often anymore.
"He would, too," he said. "It's good to hear your voice, Jess."
"I've only been gone a week," I reminded him.
"Well, a week's a long time. It's seven days. Which is one hundred and sixty-eight hours. Which is ten thousand, eighty minutes. Which is six hundred thousand, four hundred seconds."
It wasn't the medication that was making Douglas talk like this. It wasn't even his illness. Douglas has always gone around saying stuff like this. That's why, in school, he'd been known as The Spaz, and Dorkus, and other, even worse names. If I'd asked him to, Douglas could tell me exactly how many seconds it would be before I got back home. He could do it without even thinking about it.
But go to college? Drive a car? Talk to a girl to whom he wasn't related? No way. Not Douglas.
"Is that why you called me, Doug?" I asked. "To tell me how long I've been gone?"
"No." Douglas sounded offended. Weird as he is, he doesn't think he's the least unusual. Seriously. To Douglas, he's just, you know, average.
Yeah. Like your average twenty-year-old guy just sits around in his bedroom reading comic books all day long. Sure.
And my parents let him! Well, my mom, anyway. My dad's all for making Doug work the steam table in my absence, but Mom keeps going, "But Joe, he's still recovering. . . ."
"I called," Douglas said, "to tell you it's gone."
I blinked. "What's gone, Douglas?"
"You know," he said. "That van. The white one. That's been parked in front of the house. It's gone."
"Oh," I said, blinking some more. "Oh."
"Yeah," Douglas said. "It left the day after you did. And you know what that means."
"I do?"
"Yeah." And then, I guess because it was clear to him that I wasn't getting it, he elaborated. "It proves that you weren't being paranoid. They really are still spying on you."
"Oh," I said. "Wow."
"Yeah," Douglas said. "And that's not all. Remember how you told me to let you know if anyone we didn't know came around, asking about you?"
I perked up. I was sitting at the receptionist's desk in the camp's administrative offices. The receptionist had gone home for the day, but she'd left behind all her family photos, which were pinned up all around her little cubicle. She must have really liked NASCAR racing, because there were a lot of photos of guys in these junky-looking race cars.
"Yeah? Who was it?"
"I don't know. He just called."
Now I really perked up. Rob. It had to have been Rob. My family didn't know about him, on account of how I never really told them we were going out. Because we aren't, technically. Going out. For the reasons I already told you. So what's to tell?
Plus my mom would so kill me if she knew I was seeing a guy who wasn't, you know, college-bound. And had a police record.
"Yeah?" I said eagerly. "Did he leave a message?"
"Naw. Just asked if you were home, is all."
"Oh." Now that I thought about it, it probably hadn't been Rob at all. I mean, I'd made this total effort to let Rob know I was leaving for the rest of the summer. I had even gone to his uncle's garage, you know, where Rob works, and had this long conversation with his feet while he'd been underneath a Volvo station wagon, about how I was going away for seven weeks and this was his last chance to say good-bye to me, et cetera.
But had he looked the least bit choked up? Had he begged me not to go? Had he given me his class ring or an ID bracelet or something to remember him by? Not. So not. He'd come out from under that Volvo and said, "Oh, yeah? Well, that'll be good for you, to get away for a while. Hand me that wrench right there, will you?"
I tell you, romance is dead.
"Was it a Fed?" I asked Douglas.
Douglas went, "I don't know, Jess. How am I supposed to know that? He sounded like a guy. You know. Just a guy."
I grunted. That's the thing about Feds, see. They can sound just like normal people. When they aren't wearing their trench coats and earpieces, they look just like anybody else. They're not like the Feds on TV—you know, like Mulder and Scully, or whatever. Like, they aren't really handsome, or pretty, or anything. They just look … average. Like the kind of people you wouldn't actually notice, if they were following you—or even if they were standing right next to you.
They're tricky that way.
"That was it?" I noticed that there was this one guy who kept reappearing in the photographs on the secretary's bulletin board. He was probably her boyfriend or something. A NASCAR-driver boyfriend. I felt jealous of the secretary. The guy she liked liked her back. You could tell by the way he smiled into the camera. I wondered what it would be like to have the boy you like like you back. Probably pretty good.
"Well, not really," Douglas said. He said it in this way that—well, I could just tell I wasn't going to like the rest of this story.
"What," I said flatly.
"Look," Douglas said. "He sounded … well, he seemed to really want to talk to you. He said it was really important. He kept asking when you'd be back."
"You didn't," I said, just as flatly.
"He kept asking and asking," Douglas said. "Finally I had to say you wouldn't be back for six weeks, on account of you were up at Lake Wawasee. Look, Jess, I know I screwed up. Don't be mad. Please don't be mad."
I wasn't mad. How could I be mad? I mean, it was Douglas. It would be like being mad at the wind. The wind can't help blowing. Douglas can't help being a complete and utter moron sometimes.
Well, not just Douglas, either. A lot of boys can't, I've noticed.
"Great," I said with a sigh.
"I'm really sorry, Jess," Douglas said.
He really sounded it, too.
"Oh, don't worry about it," I said. "I'm not so sure I'm cut out for this camp counselor stuff anyway."
Now sounding surprised, Douglas said, "Jess, I can't think of a job more perfect for you."
I was shocked to hear this. "Really?"
"Really. I mean, you don't—what's the word?—condescend to kids like a lot of people do. You treat them like you treat everybody else. You know. Shitty."
"Gee," I said. "Thanks."
"You're welcome," Douglas said. "Oh, and Dad says anytime you want to quit and come on back home, the steam table's waiting for you."
"Ha-ha," I said. "How's Mikey?"
"Mike? He's trying to get as many glimpses of Claire Lippman in her underwear as he can before he leaves for Harvard at the end of August."
"It's good to have a hobby," I said.
"And Mom's making you a dress." You could tell Douglas was totally enjoying himself, now that he'd gotten over giving me the bad news. "She's got this idea that you're going to be nominated for homecoming queen this year, so you'd better have a dress for the occasion."
Of course. Because thirty years ago, my mom had been nominated homecoming queen of the very same high school I was currently going to. Why shouldn't I follow in her footsteps?
Um, how about because I am a mutated freak? But my mom stubbornly refuses to believe this. We mostly just let her live in her fantasy world, since it's easier than trying to drag her into the real one.