“Kissies!” I click the phone shut and wander back into the main room.
Sean is still in bed. “Hey, who are you giving kissies to that isn’t me?!”
“Brad, from work,” I say.
“Well, don’t use up any kissies on him that are rightfully mine!”
I smile. “Hey, would it be okay if I used your phone for a second? I’m out of batteries and I should call my mom, I guess.”
“Go crazy.” Sean tosses me his phone. I open my phone and punch my mom’s number into Sean’s phone right before my phone powers down. I don’t even know my own mother’s phone number without my cell phone. How sad is that?
She works the overnight shift on Monday nights, and now it’s Tuesday, which means she’ll have turned her phone off and she’ll be sleeping. I dial her number, it goes straight to voice mail: “Hello, you have reached Jane Wrigley. I’m unavailable at the moment, leave a message and I will call you back as soon as I am able.” I can hear the stress in my mother’s voice, the lack of joy. It somehow seems even more obvious now than it used to. Maybe because I haven’t heard it in a few days, maybe because I’m suddenly so happy. “Hi, Mom,” I say. “Just wanted to let you know I’ve been at Amanda’s house these last few days, which you probably assumed. And I’m still here. Anyway, okay. Hope work is going okay. Bye!” I hang up. A tiny part of me feels the tiniest bit guilty for lying, but what’s the alternative?
Sean reaches up and grabs me around the waist, pulls me down into bed with him.
“I was supposed to work this morning. And I totally forgot,” I say.
“Oh, what a terrible shame,” he says. He nuzzles my neck.
“It’s okay, though, Brad’s not upset.” I sit up.
“Cool,” says Sean. “But, y’know, you don’t have to have a job anymore if you don’t want to.”
“Huh?”
“Well, as you know, I have plenty of money, and I hope this offer won’t make you feel weird or anything.” Sean blushes. “But you could just have some.”
I can feel myself blushing, too. “That’s really sweet,” I say. “But I’d…”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Sean says. “Get that no look off your face. I’m just saying that if we decide we don’t want to come back for a while, if we just want to go on a road trip somewhere else, maybe drive over to my family’s vacation house and just relax there for a while, you shouldn’t feel like we can’t because you have to go back to work, that’s all I’m saying.” Sean smiles again. “Maybe we should go to the vacation house. It’s really beautiful up there and I haven’t actually been in like two years. Or we could go visit, I don’t know, anyone. We could just pick some random person on the Internet and then ask them, ‘Hey, can we come over for dinner?’ and then we can just drive to wherever they are. We can bring a pie! Or we could go to the Grand Canyon. Have you ever seen it? Not just a big hole in the ground! Makes a person feel tiny in the best way possible.”
I smile. “That all sounds really wonderful…but there are some things we haven’t even talked about yet!”
“Oh!” Sean says. “Of course. I should have brought it up already, I’m really sorry about that.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, I mean it, I’m sorry. I swear I wasn’t hitting on her, things were just so awkward between you and me then and I wasn’t sure what you were thinking and I didn’t want to pressure you about anything. I was just trying to be friendly to that girl, but I can see how that would have been awful for you. If it’d been the other way around, I would have been so jealous. And don’t worry, I’m not mad about that dude.”
“What dude?”
“The one from last night, the one you were dancing with,” Sean says. “None of that matters now. That feels like so long ago, anyway.”
“I was talking about Nina,” I say. “And me meeting Monster Hands.”
“Oh,” Sean says. “Right, of course.” He shakes his head. “Tell me.”
I repeat the story and show him the record. “And that guy Peter wrote down the address of that house they dropped her off at.” I take the tiny slip of paper from the pocket of my jeans.
I hand it to Sean.
“Thirteen seventy-two Ledgeview Pass, Big Sur, California,” he says very slowly, very deliberately. “This is where they dropped her off ?” He sits down on the bed, his back to me. He coughs. The tips of his ears are turning red.
“Yeah,” I say. “So I guess that’s the next stop!”
Sean coughs again. “I don’t know.” He shakes his head. I walk over to the bed and sit next to him. “Didn’t you say Monster Hands already looked for her there?”