Period 8

.14



“Officer Rankin.”

John Rankin stares at an unfamiliar face. “Do I know you?”

“Bruce Logsdon. I teach at the high school. We met at ‘Dragnet in the Park.’”

“Ah, yes sir. What can I do for you?”

“The guy at the desk said you were the person to talk to about things ‘Wells related.’”

“True,” Rankin says. “Why, did something come up? I’m technically off duty. Strictly day shift. I was logging some overtime; catching up on paperwork.”

“I know the feeling,” Logs says. “This won’t take long, and it’ll probably seem frivolous, but my friend Mr. Baum here got a disturbing text message from the Wells girl, on the heels of her being absent again.”

Rankin perks up. “Really?”

Logs nods at Paulie. “Show him.”

Rankin takes his time reading the message. Paulie translates.

“I understand this doesn’t rise to the level that would bring action by you guys,” Logs says, “but it seemed like a good idea to get it on the record in case it turns into something.”

“Good idea,” Rankin says. “Do me a favor and forward it to my cell and I’ll write it down when I get a chance.” He gives Paulie his number. “You were smart to bring it.”

They’re walking back toward the car when Officer Rankin hollers, “Wait.”

They turn in unison.

“It’s probably a good idea to keep the text to yourself,” Rankin says. “I mean, don’t even tell your friends for now, Paulie. I doubt there’s been foul play—there seems to be a lot of parent-child conflict in that house—but on the off chance that this turns into evidence, the fewer people know about it the better.” He smiles. “One of those ‘pieces of information not generally known.’ You good with that?”

“It makes sense,” Logs says. He turns to Paulie. “You keep this between us?”

“Sure,” Paulie says. “No sweat.”

“We’ve done what we can do,” Logs says to Paulie as they get back into his car in front of the police station.

“Man,” Paulie says, “Mary’s dad has his own private police officer. Everything ‘Wells related’?”

“Small town, big money I guess,” Logs says.

Frank’s Diner is a block ahead. “You wanna grab something real quick?” Logs asks.

They pull into the nearly empty parking lot and sit a moment.

“My crazy brain is telling me one thing,” Paulie says.

“What’s that?”

“Arney Stack is in this somehow.”

Logs motions for them to go inside. “How so?”

They walk in and sit at the deserted counter. A young man, probably college age, runs a wet rag over it. Dim light reveals an empty room. Both order shakes; chocolate for Paulie, vanilla for Logs.

“Three different times lately he’s given me bullshit, like exactly opposite of what’s true when there was no reason for it. Like he was lying just to see if he could. When I caught him he gave me more bullshit.”

Paulie tells Logs about his conversation with Justin earlier in the day, then about how he’d asked Arney to take Mary home the night of his big screwup—no pun intended—and how Arney lied about going to meet the Thumpers. “Either he was going someplace he didn’t want me to know about or he was, like, setting me up with Mary for some stupid reason, and that seriously doesn’t make sense. He’d said he was spending time with her, but then he gives me some crap excuse why he can’t take her home.”

Logs frowns.

“I know Mary isn’t telling me everything,” Paulie says. “I’ve tried to call her on it, but she just plays dumb. She’s like this hurt little kid one minute and then like a . . . I don’t know, a f*cking vampire. And I ain’t talking Twilight. I don’t know. It’s crazy; there’s no reason for anything.”

“Or one you don’t see.”

“Yeah, that. And f*cking Stack has his hand in everything. He tells me it was Hannah’s idea to start hanging out with him. I can’t prove it, but no f*cking way. That’s not Hannah. She might rub my face in it, letting me see her with him if he went to her, but no way she sets it up.”

The shakes are placed in front of them. “Thanks, man,” Paulie says to the kid behind the counter. “I could drink five of these a day,” he says to Logs.

Logs lays his straw on the counter and drinks directly from the glass. “Keep going.”

“Okay. Back when Mary first ‘went missing,’ Arney tells us he knows Mary better than anyone, that she’ll be back and okay, wouldn’t screw up her scholarship. When I asked her if she has any kind of relationship with him, she says, ‘Yeah, I hate his guts.’ Doesn’t go into it, like every other goddamn thing. He tells us Mary’s old man is a cool guy if you just get to know him—not scared of him at all. Turns out Mr. Wells knows him as some community service partner for Mary. Period. I mean, why’s Arney even bringing her up? Who gives a shit if he knows her better than the rest of us? He had to be wondering the same things we were wondering when she showed up missing.” He takes a sip of his shake. “I guess you can’t show up missing, but you know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“Then,” says Paulie, “according to Justin and Tak, he and Hannah show up on the other side of Diamond Lake, where Justin and some of his crew were smok—studying, and goes into this rant about girls with no core. Even takes a shot at Hannah. Gets so nasty, Hannah won’t ride home with him. One of his ‘no core’ girls was Mary. Another one was Kylie.”

“No core?” Logs says.

“Yeah, like they need somebody else to tell them who they are.”

Logs sits a moment, considering. “What else?”

“I sure don’t buy his plea for world peace in P-8. Gives us all that crap about his legacy as ASB prez. ‘We gotta take care of each other.’ Then he talks this shit about Mary and Kylie. Then there’s his big business deal.”

“I guess I don’t know about that.”

“Supposedly his old man gave him a bundle to invest. Hooked him up with some business guys downtown and bankrolled him big enough to make it worth their while. Arney says his dad wants him to know how to handle real money.”

“You think that’s related?”

“I don’t know that any of this is related,” Paulie says as they head back to the car. “I just know I have the same gut feeling about all of it. Shit, it’s probably just the feeling I have about Arney since he started hanging out with Hannah.”

Logs watches Paulie struggle with it. If all this is related, there are some really loose strings.

“Anyway,” Paulie says, “stuff either makes sense or it doesn’t, and since the night I cheated on Hannah, a hell of a lot more doesn’t than does. I know I’m obsessed, so it’s all running together, but . . . wanna hear something really crazy?”

Logs laughs. “Don’t stop now.”

“I was looking back on the night I messed up, when Mary asked me to dance.”

“And . . .”

“I swear, there was this look on Arney’s face when she asked me. It was like he sicced her on me. Then the day you and I saw her up at the lake; that day she came back, she said there were things she couldn’t tell me. ‘Awful things,’ she said. I thought she was talking about her dad, but now I’m not so sure. Arney . . .”

“You think Arney is actually involved in Mary’s disappearance.”

“Couldn’t be, right?” Paulie says. “He’s a f*cking kid, like me.”

“I think you’re probably pissed at him, Paulie, but some of this stuff is easy to check out,” Logs says. “Tomorrow I’ll see if I can track Mr. Wells down and find out if he knows where Mary is. We’ll go from there. Until then, there’s nothing to do if you don’t get more messages from Mary, so why don’t you go home and try to get some sleep.”

“Because I have to go home and get at least one paragraph down on my senior thesis, or I’m going to be stuck in this hellhole without you.”

Logs puts his hand on Paulie’s head. “Go forth and write as if your life depended on it, grasshopper, because it does. I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.”



Draft V

What do you do when you know your brain isn’t developed enough to do the right thing? Brain scientists tell us the adolescent brain isn’t quite “cooked” yet. The evolution of the individual follows the pattern of the evolution of the species. The emotional brain—the instinctive brain—has been fully evolved in those species in line to turn into humans for millions of years. The rational brain—evident only in humans—has been evolved for, in relative terms, a blink of an eye. (Medina; Brain Rules). The development of the individual brain follows that same pattern. The emotional aspect is fully formed at an early age, but the rational aspect doesn’t become fully developed until the early to mid-twenties (Medina; Brain Rules). Which accounts for why teenagers often do what seems like some spectacularly stupid shit.

But to say that the rational brain isn’t fully developed in adolescence isn’t to say that it isn’t almost there. The more we know about where that development is headed, the better chance we have of making better, more adultlike decisions.

(Okay, that’s further than I’ve gotten before. Taking my partially developed brain to bed.)



Paulie hits the light and lays his head back on his pillow, staring out his bedroom window at a starry, moonless night, imagining being Bruce Logsdon on that day toward the end of 1968 when he first saw a photograph of our blue ball hanging in the void of space, and all that couldn’t be seen from that distance. His mind drifts toward semiconsciousness when suddenly Mary’s face flashes before him. What if she’s out there in some tortuous situation and can’t call for help? What if her last text ever was to his phone? Was she suicidal? “Might not make it back” could mean a lot of things. sory I got u into this. What? What did she get him into? And what is the danger? His imagination is driving him crazy. The one person he’d give anything to talk to has nothing for him but contempt. Truth be told, as angry and hurt and disappointed as he’s been, he’d do anything to make up with her.



Logs rolls into the school parking lot an hour early and lets himself into the main office, determined to clear up as much of the Mary Wells mystery as he can. He brings up the Wellses’ numbers on the office computer: home and cells for Mom, Dad, and Mary, noticing that Mary’s number does not correspond to the one that popped up on Paulie’s phone last night. He slips a note under Dr. Johannsen’s door: Please call my room ASAP. Logs

He walks through the breezeway, into the math/science department foyer and toward his room, lost in thought.

“Hey, Mr. Logs.”

He looks up to see Hannah Murphy on the carpeted hallway floor next to his door, writing in a notebook and texting.

“Hannah. You’re early.”

“You have no idea.”

“Been here awhile, huh?” Logs glances around the empty foyer. “How’d you get in?”

“Mr. Branson was just finishing up in your office.”

“Well, since you’re sitting next to my door, I’m guessing you want to talk with me.”

“This is why you’re my favorite teacher. You’re so smart.”

Logs unlocks his door and they go inside. “What can I do for you?”

“Mr. Logs, I think I might have made a big mistake.”

“Tell me.”

“With Paulie.”

Logs’s eyebrows go up involuntarily.

“You think so, too.”

“Look, Hannah, I love you both, I do. And I’ll be honest: I used to think there weren’t two kids more perfect for each other. But life ain’t predictable and things happen. We all have to figure out how to negotiate them.”

“I was being a bitch hanging out with Arney.”

“Your words, but I know.”

“I can’t tell you how stupid that was.”

Logs smiles. “You don’t have to.”

Hannah takes a deep breath. “Actually that’s not why I’m here—the stuff with me and Paulie, I mean. I can deal with that.”

Logs waits.

“It’s Arney.”

“What about him?”

“I told him I’d go out to his family cabin last weekend to help get it ready for summer. I thought it would be nice to just get away, and he and I had been getting along okay. Like friends.” She looks at her feet. “And I guess I wanted Paulie to think we went there for a different reason.”

Logs’s face is expressionless. It’s not his job to judge, but he’s had a trace of ill will toward Hannah for choosing Arney of all people to rub Paulie’s nose in. Not that Paulie didn’t have it coming. . . .

“I know, I know. Like I said, I was being a bitch. At any rate, Arney seemed cool enough, but he was saying things about Paulie that couldn’t be true.”

“Such as.”

“Mr. Logs, something’s seriously wrong with Arney.”

“Did he get out of line?”

Hannah laughs. “You think there has to be something wrong with a guy to make a move on me?”

“I meant . . .”

“I know. Yeah, he made a move, but I expected that and it wasn’t going to happen. But we had a few beers and he got into this fancy scotch his dad keeps hidden up there, and he said some things . . . he was like, hateful.”

“Mel Gibson Syndrome. Get plastered and out comes the real you.”

She tells Logs about the birds following their mother across the two-lane. “He swerved right into them,” she says. “It was creepy. I looked at his face and he was . . . I don’t know, proud, or smug or something. Then when he saw how horrified I was he blurted out this stupid story about how he thought they were going to reverse direction, but Mr. Logs, they couldn’t have. They were full-speed ahead trying to get out of the way. I didn’t think it was so weird right then because I wanted to believe him, I guess.”

“And that was before he was drinking?”

“Only coffee,” she says. “We were on our way up.”

“That’s troubling.”

“On the way home we stop by to see Justin and some other kids and he goes way off, calling people—girls—horrible names and saying things . . . worse than earlier. He even started going after me. Justin took me home.” She breathes deep. “How in the world did we elect him student body president?”

Two sharp knocks. “Hey, man . . .” Paulie stops cold. “Hey, Hannah.”

“Hey, Paulie.”

Logs watches them lock eyes. Hannah blinks first. “Paulie, I’m sorry about the other day in The Rocket.”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Paulie says. “You know me, when things start to go bad I gotta speed them up.”

Logs winces.

“I probably had it coming,” Hannah says.

Paulie studies her a moment. “Well, this is awkward,” he says finally. “I’ll leave you two to your sordid affair.”

“Actually we were finished with that,” Logs says. “Pull up a chair.” He holds up a slip of paper. “Got the numbers we needed. Thought I’d give Mr. Wells a little time to wake up.”

Hannah crinkles her nose. “What’s going on?”

“Mary Wells seems to be AWOL again,” Logs says. “We’re trying to find out if she’s with her family.”

“Doesn’t Mrs. Byers take care of that?”

Logs nods at Paulie as if to say, “Bring her up to speed,” while he punches Victor Wells’s cell number.

While Paulie shows her the text message on his own cell, Logs speaks into his.

“Mr. Wells? This is Bruce Logsdon . . . from the high school? I’m calling in reference to Mary’s attendance. Is your family out of town? . . . You and your wife are? Becca. Not Mary? . . . I’m afraid so . . . Two days; we’re a little worried. Paul Baum got a text from her, or a partial text. . . .”

He listens for what seems to Paulie like a long time, then, “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions . . . I know, she’s not my daughter . . . Yes, sir. This afternoon, then? Sure, I’ll stay ’til you get here. And I’ll call if she shows this morning . . . Please let us know if you hear from her. Yes, sir, thank you.”

“She’s not with him,” Logs says. “There was an emergency in Mrs. Wells’s family. Mary stayed home to catch up on some work. He didn’t know she hadn’t been to school.” He shakes his head. “My God, Wells is pissed at her for causing him more problems. I’d be worried out of my head. Hell, now I am worried out of my head.” He slaps his hand flat on his desktop. “Listen, I’m going over to the office to talk with Dr. Johannsen; I’ll catch up with you in P-8.” And he is out the door.

“I can’t believe her dad left her alone,” Hannah says. She hesitates. “You think she’s back on whatever she was on the night I almost ran her over?”

“Oxys,” Paulie says. “I don’t think so; that freaked her out pretty bad.” He shakes his head. “But like Logs says, bring in drugs and all bets are off.”

Hannah moves closer, sits on the edge of the desk next to Paulie’s chair. He aches to reach out to touch her. It almost seems she would let him.

“So this is more than just Mary Wells getting into drugs?” she asks.

He nods. “It sure seems like it.”

Hannah touches his hand.

“Hey,” he says in barely a whisper. “Truce?”

“Yeah,” Hannah says. “For now.”



“In case your day’s starting slow, Mary Wells is missing again.”

“My God,” Dr. Johannsen says, sitting back in her chair. “Where did you hear that? Her father again?”

“Actually I told him,” Logs says. “Paulie had been hanging out with her right before she disappeared, and got a strange text message, one that worried him. He and his dad drove over, found no one home, and because of all the recent uproar, he came to me. I caught up with Mr. Wells this morning. He’s out of town with his wife and younger daughter, but Mary was supposed to stay home to catch up on all the work she missed. He’s coming back this afternoon. I thought you and I could meet with him.”

“Goodness, yes,” Dr. Johannsen says. “Let’s head this one off and see if we can get this year over without my having to stand in front of one more camera.”

Rachel Randolph, the front office receptionist and secretary, rushes into the office.

“What is it, Rachel?”

Rachel’s face radiates alarm. “Come look.”

Logs and Dr. Johannsen step into the empty outer office and see the TV monitor mounted above the entrance door, tuned to the local news. Police tape surrounds a modest house, still smoldering from what must have been an intense fire. Police cars, lights flashing, sit at the edge of the lawn and firemen roll in their hoses.

Logs can’t place the house, but the neighborhood looks vaguely familiar. “What is this?”

“Kylie Clinton’s house,” Rachel says. “She’s one of our students.”

Logs’s stomach leaps into his throat. He didn’t see her after her meltdown in Period 8. She said she was okay. He leans forward on the counter. “What are they saying? Was anyone hurt?” The video is obviously from last night. A girl with her face intentionally blurred is helped into the back of an ambulance by paramedics and a woman who must be her mother. The woman gets in behind her.

“The fire chief says there’s a gasoline smell everywhere,” Rachel says. “He didn’t come out and say it was arson because they have to do a formal investigation, but . . .”

“She had her hands over her face,” Logs says. “Do you think they blurred it because she was burned?”

“I don’t think so,” Dr. Johannsen says. “She would have been on a stretcher. They blurred it because she’s a juvenile.”

Logs hits his forehead. “Duh!”

They watch the scenario play out repeatedly, but no new information comes to light. “I will be so glad when this school year is over,” Dr. Johannsen says. “I swear I feel responsible for everything that happens to these kids nine months out of the year, whether the school has anything to do with it or not.”

Logs stares at the screen. The images aren’t live. If Kylie isn’t burned, what’s she doing getting into an ambulance?