Morning came and Jake was right. No one knew. Tillie was a girl who had snuck out of her house to solve a mystery. When she woke up from her two hours of sleep she took a picture of her own face.
Maybe she really could be a detective someday. Maybe she could even work for the CIA. Or maybe she could be a photojournalist who traveled around the world documenting wars. Maybe she could follow bands around the country and have her photographs in Rolling Stone. The world looked different. Anything seemed possible—everything.
Tillie brushed her hair that morning in front of the mirror, luxuriating in its length like a movie star. Then she put her glasses on, gave one last glance at her imperfect photo collage, placed her camera around her neck, and turned back into someone a little more like Tillie. She went to the kitchen before her mom had even called her to come.
On her way there she saw that she had received a text from Jake:
how many wizards does it take to change a lightbulb? none. wizards dont need lightbulbs! ha. one of my dads favorite jokes. c u in a couple hours!
She smiled and responded: Witty. See you later, Super Ladybug.
At the breakfast table her mom typed away on her laptop between bites of cereal, and her dad drank his coffee by the window above the sink, watching the bird feeder.
Tillie buzzed high on no sleep, excited for the day.
“Hey, guys,” Tillie said to them, in a voice as chirpy as Jake’s. Her mom looked up at her. It was only 7 a.m. and her face was already creased with what’s-going-on-with-Tillie concern.
“Say ‘cheese’!” Tillie took a picture with the flash on and light filled the room. “What are the birds up to, Dad?”
Tillie’s dad blinked. “I wish you’d take a break with that thing for a while. It’s so early.” He coughed, and mumbled something to himself, and went to sit at the kitchen table. “You used to love to feed the birds out there, remember?” he said, his head tilted downward, as if he were really speaking only to himself. “We’d bring the birdseed by the feeder. They sat in our hands.” He picked up the newspaper and began to read.
Tillie stared at him. A break? From photographs?
Tillie heard Ms. Martinez’s voice from the other day in her head. Your pictures are beautiful.
So she said, “Say ‘cheese’ again!”
Her dad covered his eyes with a hand.
“I sometimes don’t know why Dad ever got her into this Vivian Maier stuff,” he said to Tillie’s mom, as if Tillie weren’t there. He rubbed his stubbly cheek and yawned.
But Tillie was there. And she was into this stuff.
“Who’s Vivian Maier?” she asked.
Her mom gave her a “No idea” look.
Tillie paused. She stopped her flashing, but she kept her camera in front of her face like a mask, peering through the viewfinder, first at her mom’s almost-terrified-with-worry expression and then at her dad’s annoyed one, and she pointed the lens there. You’re right, Dad, Tillie thought. Grandpa should have gotten me into gymnastics instead. If only things had been different, huh?
From behind the lens blocking her flushed face, Tillie said, “Never mind, Dad. You never look at my photos, anyway. So whatever.” She took another picture of her dad’s befuddled expression, let her camera fall against her chest, grabbed a piece of toast off the counter and added, “I’m off.”
Her mom started to say something in response, but Tillie had already turned away toward the door.
* * *
At school, Tillie reported the good news about Joaquin to a delighted Diana Farr, who wanted to know the details of each recorded stare; retrieved the folder with the math paper for Hailey Granito; and found herself exhausted by lunchtime. Sitting at her usual table, she heard, “Hey, Lost and Found!”
For the first time the name kind of annoyed her. She hadn’t been called Lost and Found all week, since she’d started searching with Jake, who didn’t call her that anymore, she realized.
When she looked up to see who was shouting out to her, though, she saw that it was one of the kids at the table where Jake usually sat. His entire table of friends looked over at her, smiling, inviting.
Her head swiveled about for Jake and she saw him standing in the pizza line. He waved his hands around, some change falling out of them as he did, motioning for her to go sit with his friends.
For a brief instant, Tillie wondered if this was all a prank. Still, she got up, straightened her back as best she could, and made her way a few yards over to sit with a dozen laughing faces, some of which she had never seen up-close and in-person before. For a moment she wondered if any of them had been the ones who had laughed at Jake’s impression of her in sixth grade … But she tried to shove that question out of her mind.
“You’re always over there,” said the girl on the end of the table who had called her over. Tillie knew her from her sixth-grade math and science classes: Abby Whatley. Tillie, red-faced, slid in next to her with her lunch tray.
“Yeah.” Tillie laughed nervously.
“It’s better over here,” Abby Whatley continued, as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on, as if people just moved tables all the time.
Tillie hadn’t sat with friends at lunchtime since Sydney and Zahreen.
“We’re, like, three feet from the smoothies stand, and if the line ever shortens we rush it and get first dibs.”
“Cool,” was all Tillie could think of to say.
Abby Whatley’s arm lifted and swung behind her. Startled, Tillie jumped in her seat a little, but it was just Jake standing behind them, high-fiving Abby in greeting. He looked wide-awake, energized, but his eyes were bloodshot, and Tillie spotted a small gray hair in one of his eyebrows.
“I see you’ve met Abby,” Jake said. “Abby’s always asking me about your pictures and stuff.”
“What?”
“Oooh, yeah, let me see some!” Abby said, reaching for the camera. “The lost objects inside the prison walls of Hansberry Middle School!”
Abby’s tongue stuck out of her mouth a little when she smiled.
Tillie flinched, but let Abby hold the camera. She kept it safe around her neck, though, and Abby’s fingers bumped against the buttons on Tillie’s brown cardigan as they examined the lens.
“Oh, no, no, not the lens, okay?”
“Oops, sorry!” Abby said.
Four other people asked to see it, too.
“Aw, man, you never let me touch it, and I love that vintage-y old thing!” Jake said. He took a bite of pizza and yelled down the table, “Luke, check this old camera out!”
“Okay, okay,” Tillie said, taking the strap off, suddenly surrounded. “But … but don’t take any pictures with it, okay? And,” she added under her breath, “it’s not ‘vintage-y.’ It’s just a full-frame DSLR with a 17-50 zoom lens, not some point-and-shoot or something.” No one was listening, except Abby, who nodded her head as if she knew what Tillie was talking about.
Jake introduced her to all of them. She knew their names, of course—Luke, Emma, Lily, Sean, Sarah, Ian—and their faces had long been documented in the files on her laptop as they’d moved in and out of one another’s social groups over the last year and a half, but they all said hi as if they’d never heard of her and she’d never seen them.
The crowd passed around her camera, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over its manual lens and “old-fashioned” look. It only seemed old-fashioned to them because it wasn’t a phone. And besides, it was just a camera she had found at a yard sale, Tillie wanted to say, but she didn’t know if that was impressive or cheesy.
Jake scooted in between Abby and Tillie as the cluster of kids yelled over one another to be heard. He leaned in toward Tillie, grabbed her arm, and whispered, “What class do you have next? I’ll walk you there so we can talk.”
As she turned to him she saw that not only were his eyes bloodshot, but they were puffy, too, as if he’d been crying.
Tillie tried not to stare as she told him it was art class with Ms. Martinez.
“The love of my life,” Jake said with a mock lovelorn sigh, suddenly the opposite of the frantic person who had just whispered to her, turning back to his pizza crust, and, it seemed, his audience.
“The love of your life? Ew. You’re obsessed,” Abby said to Jake in a quick aside before returning to her own conversation.
Tillie surprised herself by joining in. “She is the greatest.”
“Seriously,” Jake said. “After parent-teacher conferences my dad said she should be an actress or something, not a teacher.”
“Oh, because only ugly old witches should be teachers, with actual warts and stuff,” Abby said, smacking Jake’s arm.
“Yeah, and just because someone’s really pretty it doesn’t mean they have to move to Hollywood or something,” Tillie couldn’t help but add.
“Wait a minute, whose side are you on here?” Jake protested.
“She’s on the side of reason,” Abby went on. “So old women should be teachers and pretty ones should be actresses or models or something? They have to fit nicely into little boxes based on their appearance? You’re sexist.”
“Totally,” Tillie agreed.
“Okay, okay, stop ganging up on me!” Jake laughed and began to get up.
But his laugh wasn’t like the night before. It sounded strained. Hollow.
As he picked up his tray he said quietly to Tillie, “Okay, come on, let’s head out now and the hallways will be clear and we can talk.”
Then he waved bye to his friends and tugged on Tillie’s shirt a little, as if to pull her up.
She pushed his hand away.
He was always putting on a show, she realized. He obviously hadn’t told his friends anything about his dad. Maybe he’d come to her because he was fake with the people who knew him. Watching him smile at his friends and then look to her with secret desperation, she wondered if there were times he’d just been pretending with her the past few days. This must be what he was doing at home, too, with his mom. It was a convincing performance. Tillie didn’t like it.
This was one of the many reasons why being alone was easier—you didn’t have to see all that was wrong with people. The antisocial life had its pluses.
Tillie took her camera back as several kids begged, “Pleeease let me take some pictures with it tomorrow!” Tillie nodded, but knew she wouldn’t. No one took pictures with her camera but her. That would be like … someone else speaking with her voice. But she’d let them look at it again, if they wanted. She got up, leaving her tray, pulling her bad leg up at a weird angle. Without being aware of it, she must have grimaced, because Abby said, “Hey, are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine, totally,” Tillie assured her as Jake, tapping his feet and fidgeting wildly behind her, motioned with his head for her to follow, and they made their way out of the cafeteria.
Jake led Tillie to the hallway corner. They dropped their backpacks at their feet and leaned against a locker. A few yards away from them, two eighth graders held hands and whispered. Toward the end of the hall, Cara Dale put on some makeup in her locker mirror and flashed a hallway pass at an ornery hall monitor. Other than that, the hallway was empty.
Jake laughed again, but at nothing. The same empty laugh from earlier.
Tillie forced herself to scan his eyes and she saw they were wet.
“I was up all night,” Jake said, his breath rapid and panicked. “I just … It’s been a week now. And I still don’t know where he is, ya know? And last night, I mean, it was crazy, but it didn’t actually lead to anything. And it was stupid. I know. It was stupid. A waste of time.” Jake smacked his own head.
“Hey,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder to quiet him, and then swiftly bringing it back down to her side. “I have an idea,” she said as calmly as possible. “Let’s look through the photos we have, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.” Jake nodded hard and fast.
“Can we sit?”
“Yeah.”
They slid down the lockers and clicked through her photos.
School. Squirrels. Jim. Cubicle Man. Car. School.
Beside her, Jake’s skinny legs wobbled side to side. He bit his nails. It caught Tillie off guard how worried she felt about this behavior. About him. She wanted to make it all better. She wanted her pictures to fix everything.
“Wait,” Jake said. “Go back to the car.”
“It’s too blurry. If you zoom in you can see most of the license plate number, but not the last digit.”
“I know, I know, you said, but look.” Jake grabbed the camera.
“Careful,” Tillie warned as Jake furiously scanned the photos of the blue Chevy.
And then Tillie saw his whole body unwind. His limbs went still. He exhaled audibly. “Got something.”
Tillie took the camera back and they looked together. All she saw was a blurry shot of the side of the car. “What?” Tillie asked, frustrated, seeing nothing.
“Zoom in on the window.”
She did so. The inside of the car wasn’t visible. The shot only revealed a reflection of light and a little white sticker in the bottom corner. A sticker … with bar codes. “The bar codes?” Tillie turned to him.
Jake smiled. A real smile this time, though his eyes still looked slightly crazed, like in a cartoon when spirals replace pupils. “It’s a rental,” he said. “The bar code sticker means it’s a rental.”
Tillie stared at the sticker. She hadn’t known that about cars (she didn’t know anything about cars, and didn’t particularly care to). But if Jake was right, then they had a path forward.
“Time to research Templeton rentals,” Jake said as the bell rang, the cafeteria doors burst open, and a sea of kids swarmed the hallway. “How much you want to bet this leads us to Cubicle Man? I bet you anything.”
They stood up.
“We have a lead,” he murmured, more to himself than to Tillie. “We have a lead.” Jake turned and bounded off to his next class.
Tillie moved slowly and steadily in the tidal wave of students. She turned toward the stairwell and clutched the stairway’s banister as she headed toward art class. Out of pride, she’d long refused to take the school elevator. Some people really needed it. She didn’t. One foot up. The other foot up to match. Repeat. Take a photo on each step. Repeat. Forget Jake’s eyes. Repeat. Forget his bitten-down nails. Repeat.
When Tillie handed Ms. Martinez her collage, Ms. Martinez smiled, and said, “Look at that. Just lovely.”
The mistakes had made it better.
As class started and a lecture on Matisse began, Tillie took out the small camera she’d brought in her pocket and, hiding the camera behind a propped-up textbook, she clicked through pictures from the past two weeks that might help in the search for Ms. Martinez’s glasses. It was a search that might not be as exciting as a conspiracy or a night out in the darkness, Tillie thought, but it was one that wouldn’t make her feel so many baffling, elating, exhausting things.
It was a lost thing no one would cry about if it couldn’t be found.