Once we were in the Jeep, I said, “You bastard! Sitting on all this info!”
“Couldn’t betray my partner’s confidence. Guy code.”
“So many secrets,” I said. “Kind of sexy.”
“I am a man of infinite mysteries.” He raised his left eyebrow.
“You know that both of your theories are wildly implausible. I’m not sure I really saw a difference in the smiles. ‘Paperback Writer’ was a very popular song—the favorite of many teenagers back then? And there are twins in almost every big high school class. The similarities between the real yearbook names and the ones in The Bubblegum Reaper are striking—but maybe Booker took fragments of his high school experience and fictionalized the whole thing?”
“And yet he’s always saying, ‘There’s no such thing as fiction.’ ”
“True.”
“And these details and theories, flimsy or solid or somewhere in between—they’re what we have—all we have—to go on.”
“Why do we have to go on anything? Why can’t we just let things with Booker be?” I said, even though—deep down—I knew I’d never be able to resist the proposed adventure.
“You have to find something to believe in—root for. You know? ‘A life lived well gets messy,’ ” he said, quoting The Bubblegum Reaper. “It’s maybe—I don’t know. It’s just what we have right now. The thing we do together. You and me and Oliver, too. I mean, we wouldn’t even know each other if it weren’t for The Bubblegum Reaper. You and I would have never kissed if Booker didn’t write the book. And now we can use the same novel that changed our lives for the better to improve the author’s life. How amazing is that? It’s the literary equivalent of helping and repaying God.”
“Assuming that your theory about Stella Thatch is correct, of course. Which is a gamble. If you’re wrong, things could get ugly.”
“Well, sometimes you have to gamble.”
“So why did you vote no?”
“So we’d need a tiebreaker and Oliver would be cool with my cutting you in.”
It was flattering, but I flashed on Mr. Graves again and started to feel nervous, so I changed the subject by saying, “Oliver loves you.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, and then grinned.
“You shared it with him—our novel.”
“He needs it just as much as we do. Don’t you think?”
I leaned over and kissed Alex full on the lips, and then I said, “Why didn’t you have a girlfriend before we met? How did you ever fall to me?”
He smiled, put on the Los Campesinos! song “What Death Leaves Behind,” and then shifted into gear.
It was a cool fall night, especially with the top down, so we blasted the heat, which felt nice on my hands and feet, even though it burned just a tiny bit.
When we reached my home, Alex said, “You know we’re going to visit Sandra Tackett.”
“I know,” I said. “But I’m not so sure we should.”
“I think we have to.”
“Why exactly is that again?”
“Because if we don’t try, we’ll never know.”
“Know what?”
“That love can win.”
“Can love win?” I said, but not sarcastically. My voice sort of quivered a bit, and I realized that my heart was pounding and it felt like someone was pressing a finger into the spot where my throat meets my chest. We were messing around with dangerous forces, and Alex was only slightly less afraid than I was.
Under the streetlight in front of my home, we kissed for a time right in full view of the neighbors, but I didn’t even care.
I grabbed his hand and put it on my chest, and he didn’t pull away.
He was gentle, and it was nice to be touched.
When we finished making out, I said, “You know what? I didn’t see any signatures in Eddie Alva’s yearbook.”
“That’s because there weren’t any.”
“Not even one? Nobody signed it?”
“Nope.”
“So why do you think he kept it all these years? If he didn’t have any friends in high school? It’s so sad.”
“I don’t know.”
“What does his senior bio say?”
“There isn’t one. Just his picture and name: Eddie Alva. He looks tortured in the photo. No smile. Definitely not one of the pretty boys. Heavy eyebrows. Crooked nose. Just by looking into his eyes, you can tell he hated high school. I think the blank space under him says everything. Maybe the metaphorical equivalent of your double middle finger to the soccer team.”
“And yet he kept his yearbook?”
“Maybe he did it for us, Nanette.”
It was tempting to believe that—there was poetry in such thinking. Like maybe the universe was conspiring in our favor all of a sudden. But it felt a little fucked, too. Eddie Alva didn’t even know we existed when he died. And his keeping a yearbook for almost five decades, a yearbook that no one signed, was depressing enough to make you want to curl up in your room alone and weep for him. He reproduced, so maybe he had known love for a little while, I told myself. He had sex at least once with someone. There was that. And maybe he loved his high school classmates in a strange sort of way—the way you sometimes love the villains in your favorite stories just because they are an integral part of the plot. Maybe it was what he had, Eddie Alva, this set of classmates to populate that part of his personal history. And I thought about how I sort of missed Shannon in a weird, sad way, even though I definitely didn’t want to hang out with her anymore. I’d probably be thinking about Shannon and all my soccer teammates until I died. The Rainbow Dragons were a part of my psyche for good, bad, or indifferent, and that was just the way it was. And then it hit me: None of them would probably be signing my yearbook, either, because they no longer would even make eye contact with me, which was certainly sad, but I was also okay with it somehow.