Chapter Sixteen
Thursday, November 25th
Thanksgiving Day
“Are you feeling okay?” Mom asks. Shared sadness weighs heavily over every holiday.
“Just tired.” I push aside my half-eaten plate of food. With Carol not home and the extended family spread out over the country, Thanksgiving isn’t much of a celebration, because this family doesn’t have a lot to be thankful for this year—like last year, and the one before that. We’re all dressed up, but with no place good for our hearts to go.
“Girl problems,” Dad says, then winks at Mom. They still don’t know about Gabby. She’s busy with her own family. Somehow that makes me even lonelier than when I had nobody.
“I wish I had girl problems!” I shout. Nobody laughs. Nobody laughs here anymore.
“Girls at your age will only lead to problems,” Mom, a teen mom herself, says, then sighs.
“Mom, Dad, can I ask you something?”
“If it’s about college, we just don’t know. I might be back to work next—” Dad starts.
“Not college.” I pause, stiffen my spine and prepare to break their hearts. “Caitlin.”
“Why would you spoil Thanksgiving?” Mom asks. “Didn’t she ruin enough holidays?”
“Carson, please, don’t upset your mother, not today,” Dad says softly. He gulps down the beer he’d probably planned to nurse through the meal.
“No, we should talk about her,” I counter. “What would happen if she came home?”
There’s a long pause. A time standing still pause. It’s so quiet I can hear my dad’s cheap watch clicking from across the table. Or maybe that’s all our hearts beating too loud.
Mom breaks the soft silence. “Honey, Caitlin isn’t coming home.”
“She can’t come home,” Dad says. “Not after what she’s done.”
“Doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?” I ask Mom. I channel Gabby.
“Caitlin used up her second chances,” Dad says. “She had two hundred second chances.”
“If only we had done something earlier,” Mom says.
“It is not your fault. She made her choice!” Dad says, then storms from the table before I confront him with what I’ve long known, but never said. I heard from the top of the stairs the choice he gave his daughter on Christmas morning—a choice no person should have to make.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say. In the other room, I hear the fridge, then the bottle open. The second of many, I suspect. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“It’s not your fault,” she says softly. “It’s everybody’s fault.”
I don’t say anything. Instead, I help clean up the table that we all messed up.
* * * *
Up in my room, I hear nothing but silence downstairs. I put on a hoodie, then surrender again to the computer and consider my options, mostly pondering ends and means. My end is simple—contact Caitlin. The means are difficult. I have no way to reach her. Without a credit card, I can’t get into her webcam. I found the Callie Bangs Facebook page immediately, but she’s not responded to the message I sent, which was simply—
-Caitlin, it’s your brother Carson. Please contact me.
There’s little on her Facebook except nearly nude photos of her newly tattooed arms, the fact that she lives in California and information about what she likes to do in bed. The last login date is two months ago, which sends chills up and down my spine. Two months ago because she’s done with that life, or two months ago because she’s done with her life? Like her old Facebook page, this new one prompted hundreds of comments.
Last Thursday, when I Googled her new name, I found more photos, but no way to contact her. Buying a prepaid cell, I called the company, but nobody answered or returned my call. The company selling her is based in California, so I searched online phone books but found nothing. I looked under Callie, Caitlin, even Autumn, and under both Banks and Bangs, but couldn’t find an address, phone or email. She’s an optical illusion—so close yet still so far.
I’m getting nowhere when I get an IM from Tim. He’s bored and wants to get together. As guys, neither of us will admit to missing each other, but that’s obviously what’s going on. I’ve not told him about Gabby, but it’s time. I’m drowning in secrets heavier than Mom’s gravy.
* * * *
“Hey, you want some Dew?” Tim says, offering me a sip from his two-liter almost the second I climb in his Mom’s silver Monte Carlo. It’s a neat as a marine’s boot camp footlocker.
“No thanks,” I say, then sip from my travel coffee mug. “So, where to?”
“I don’t know. Everything’s closed,” he says.
“You got gas?”
“I just ate twenty pounds of Thanksgiving dinner. What do you think?”
“I meant gas in the car, a-hole,” I crack back.
“Half full,” Tim says.
“Half empty,” I correct him. “Why don’t we just drive?”
He slurps from his two-liter and starts our two-lane drive to nowhere. Along the way, we do our best to crack on each other as much as we crack each other up, the one area where Tim’s NHS friends don’t excel. Sometimes we get serious, talking about how bad the economy in Michigan is, although lots of people in school like Tim don’t seem to think or talk about it as much as I do. But then, Tim’s dad still works in some executive job for GM. The white-collar guys keep their jobs. The blue-collar guys like Dad lose theirs. That’s probably why Dad wants me to be an engineer. Tim’s MIT bound and getting out. No wonder he sees the tank half full.
We drive around Fenton, past all the half-finished subdivisions and nearly deserted strip malls. Just before Tim gets ready to pull on the expressway, I ask him instead to drive toward Silver Lake Road. I direct him into yet another cookie cutter collection of houses. Half are for sale, the other half show Hummers or huge GM SUVs in the driveway. I ask him to slow down by a house with a white Chevy Tahoe covered with Fenton sports bumper stickers in the driveway.
“Who lives here?” Tim asks.
Coffee sip, deep breath, and here we go. “Gabrielle Gibson.”
“That tall black girl?” Tim asks and something clicks, what it’s like to be Gabby. Tim doesn’t say the pretty girl, the athletic girl or the shy, smart girl, but the tall black girl. Tim doesn’t have a racist bone in his body so he means nothing. It’s just how Fenton sees Gabby.
“Can you pull over?” I ask. Tim finds a spot behind a newish black Dodge Charger.
“What’s going on?”
“Can I trust you with a secret?”
He ponders for a second with a puzzled look on his face, then looks toward the house, back at me, then asks while a huge smile taking over, “You’re hitting that?”
I pause for a second, then crack a smile of my own when I answer, “I can’t say.”
“That means you are,” he says, then laughs. “Congrats.”
“I didn’t say I was, but I didn’t say I’m not. So, I’m not lying or telling you anything.”
“Your moral ground is shakier than cafeteria Jell-O!”
“But, let’s say we ran an experiment, and I was romantically involved—not ‘hitting that’ as you say, Dew boy—with Ms. Gibson. What results might we find?”
“What do you mean?”
I turn from Tim and stare at Gabby’s house. “Do you think I’d piss people off?”
“Who cares what other people think?”
I imagine her inside, in her bed. “Okay, what would you think of this?”
“I think it’s a mistake,” he says, then sips from the Mountain.
My heart skips. I turn back toward Tim. “Because she’s black?”
He laughs. “No, because she’d kick your ass if you messed up like you did with Thien.”
I laugh back. “Well, it’s other physical activities that I’d rather—”
He cuts me off with a loud slurp then says, “Everybody’s pairing up but poor, pitiful me.”
“Look, why don’t you go out with some of the Honor Society girls, like Thien?”
“What? I get your leftovers?”
“She likes you.” While I’m worried that Thien might spill our prom secret, I’m more concerned that my best pal spends weekend nights fetching lo mein instead of locking lips.
“You never told me what happened with her,” he says. “If I’m not getting any, at least I could live vicariously through you, but no, you’re Mr. Too Shy To Talk About It.”
“So you really don’t know what happened with Thien at the prom last spring?” I ask.
“I figured if you wanted to tell me, you’d share it.”
“Thanks,” I say then shut up.
“I don’t know about you, Carson, but all this talk about girls is driving me crazy.”
“We should go.” I stare at Gabby’s house. “Where to?”
“I bet I know one place that’s open,” Tim says. “Dort Highway.”
“Dort Highway?” Dort Highway is Flint’s main street for skin bars.
“Think we could sneak into a strip club?” Tim looks sad when I don’t jump on the idea. “I bet you’d find only Flint’s worst strippers working a holiday. Not a porn star among them.”
I want to smack myself in the face at something so obvious. After getting Tim to promise again not to tell about Gabby, and after he gets me to promise we’ll hang out more and hit a strip club on my eighteenth birthday in January, he drives me home in minutes that seem like hours.
I scale the steps like Kong going up the Empire State Building. Screw online avoidance, I need my technology as I search for ‘Callie Bangs’ along with terms like ‘dancer’ and ‘stripper’. This is indeed a day to give thanks for the bounty of information the Internet brings. Within seconds, my almost three year long search is over as I see the name of the LA strip club where Callie will be next month. California, here I come.