Tillie ate lunch alone. Once a week, Ms. Martinez allowed students to come to her room during lunch and work on their projects while they ate. But otherwise, Tillie parked herself at the end of the lunchroom’s corner table, safe, secure, and solo in the cafeteria’s nook.
There had been a time when she wasn’t always alone. She and Sydney Welch and Zahreen Askari used to ride their bikes all around the neighborhood and play mermaids at every recess. But that was before the winter and spring when she had spent so much time in and out of the hospital that she had to be homeschooled. When she got back to school the next fall, her old friends didn’t seem to understand what she could and couldn’t do—she couldn’t bike, she couldn’t flap her imaginary fins. And Tillie could tell they were disappointed. She’d always been shy, but then seeing that disappointment on her friends’ faces, or noticing the looks strangers gave her when they saw the chair or the walker or the brace or, for a while, the scars and bandages … that made her want to disappear. It became easier to stay indoors at recess, to tell her mom to turn Sydney and Zahreen away when they knocked on her door to hang out.
Everything was easier to manage alone.
As Tillie dug into her plate of tater tots, Jake Hausmann plopped down next to her.
“What’s up?” he said.
As he moved in beside her, Tillie saw a dozen people wave at him from across the room, and he flashed a huge, toothy smile back. It was a wonder Jake didn’t have braces yet.
Out of habit, Tillie picked up her camera and within a split second she took a handful of pictures of his pack of friends.
“Can I see?” Jake asked.
Tillie just sighed. She rolled her eyes and went back to her food.
“Okay, then. Guess not.” He shrugged. “Hey, how do you not get into trouble for that?” he asked her, motioning with his head toward the camera.
“Yearbook,” she said to her feet, telling her usual half-truth. The school had a policy against taking photographs of anybody without their consent. In the early months of middle school the hall monitors had taken away Tillie’s camera every week. She’d even begun to resort to phone photography (which was more discreet but less satisfying), and they had caught her doing that, too. But then Ms. Martinez had asked if she could contribute some of her photos to the yearbook, which Ms. Martinez ran. After that, when a hall monitor or teacher told Tillie she couldn’t take pictures, she simply said, “It’s for yearbook,” sometimes adding, “You can ask Ms. Martinez.” And then, just to be safe, she’d hobble away from the reprimanding adult, exaggerating her limp as much as she could, adding a couple of groans to each pull of the leg, and slowing her pace to that of an overheated sloth. At this point no one even bothered her about it anymore.
Only a few of the photos actually ended up in the yearbook, but Jake didn’t need to know that. Why couldn’t he just go away?
“So check it out,” Jake said, tossing something beside her tray and taking a bite of pizza.
Tillie picked it up. A passport. “David G. Hausmann,” it read, next to an unflattering photograph of a pale, reddish-blond, middle-aged man.
“Is this…?” Tillie flipped through it, not knowing exactly what she was looking for.
“Yup. That’s my dad.” Jake chewed as he spoke. “Not in Toronto. Or else he’d need this.” He smiled a smug grin. “What’s the explanation for that, huh?”
Okay, yes, it was strange that his mom would say his dad was in Canada, but his passport was at home. It was a little off that his dad had left unexpectedly and appeared to be unreachable. But there was also probably a perfectly ordinary reason for it. “Maybe your parents, you know…” Tillie faltered, “miscommunicated.”
Jake dropped his pizza, looked her right in the eye, and said, “Is that why someone followed me to school today? Because my parents ‘miscommunicated’?”
Tillie began to blow this off, but then she saw that his eyes were darting back and forth as if looking to see if someone was following him right then. He seemed genuinely nervous. “Wait. Why do you think—”
Jake cut her off. “Look,” he said, shaking his head, “you found my buddy Ian’s soccer cleats and Aiden’s permission slip right before the Chicago trip. And yeah, those are things, not people, but it’s impressive.”
The memory of him mimicking her walk flashed through Tillie’s mind.
“Isn’t it boring being so detective-y and not having any real detective work to do? Maybe finding Cara Dale’s lost left earring or Hailey Granito’s winter coat is exciting to you, but it all sounds kind of tedious to me, to be honest.”
“Not a detective,” Tillie said through clenched teeth.
“Okay, fine. So you’re an artist, then. Same problem. This school doesn’t exactly lend itself to Mona Lisa–level material, am I right?” He laughed. “So why not help me out with something a little … bigger than Hansberry Middle School?”
Tillie wanted to respond: “Well, you’re kind of right, I would love some new subjects for my photographs,” or, “Yeah, I am curious about the bigger mysteries behind the people in my pictures.” Actually, she really wanted to respond: “Why would you want the help of someone who you think walks funny?” She stayed quiet instead.
“And this is definitely bigger,” Jake continued. “This car stuff … Man. You never think anything high-level bad is going to happen to you, you know? And then it does. And not just bad, but action-movie bad. Scary, even.” Jake shook his head and looked off into the distance. “Life-changing.”
What was he talking about?
“Okay.” Tillie gave in. “Who followed you? What’s going on?”
Jake leaned in toward her and spoke quickly. “Okay. I know you think this is ridiculous, but it’s just true that two days in a row now, on my walk to school, a blue Chevy—the same blue Chevy—has rolled along a little ways behind me for two blocks. I didn’t mention it yesterday because I thought I was being paranoid. But then, today, it happened again. Making the turns I make, slowing down just enough so I might not notice … This morning I took out my cell and put it on selfie mode, like a mirror, and tried to see who was driving—”
“Good thinking.” Tillie couldn’t help but cut in.
“But once again no luck. I should’ve just turned around and run toward it,” Jake chastised himself. “The big question is: Why would someone follow me? That’s what you were going to ask, right? What does that have to do with my dad?”
Tillie’s silence served as an admission.
“The answer is, I don’t know. I have some ideas, but I don’t know.”
And it could all be in his head, she thought.
“This is what I do know: My dad suddenly goes out of town. To Canada, supposedly. But his passport is at home. His phone isn’t on, but it looks to me like he took a charger with him. My mom is saying one thing, his work another. And then a car starts following me—yeah, yeah, I know, it sounds paranoid”—he cut Tillie off before she had the chance to say anything—“but it’s not only that. The day after he leaves, I start getting calls from a blocked number. But when I answer, whoever it is hangs up. Now, why would that happen?”
Tillie didn’t know what to say. It sounded like it could all be in his head, sure. But if it wasn’t, if these things held any truth, it was pretty creepy.
“Look,” Jake whispered, leaning closer. She could smell the pizza on his breath. “Maybe he left out of nowhere because he had to run away from something. Maybe whoever followed me, whoever called, is looking for him. Maybe he’s in serious trouble.” Jake began to speak even faster, as if letting Tillie get a word in would make it all fall apart. “Or maybe he saw something he shouldn’t have seen. A crime. Someone doing something at work that they shouldn’t have been doing. Something illegal, maybe? Maybe he’s hiding out somewhere, waiting for it all to be resolved. Maybe my mom knows, and she’s trying to protect me from all of it, and that’s why she’s lying.”
He’s had too many movie nights, Tillie thought. “I don’t know…”
Jake’s friends yelled his name and he looked up, smiling broadly, like he didn’t have a care in the world, and motioned “one sec.” Then he turned to Tillie, his face brighter than it had been a moment ago, as if he were suddenly aware he was on a stage and had an audience.
“I really just don’t know…” Tillie repeated. “Isn’t it possible your parents are in a fight? Or there are just … ‘domestic’ issues or something? And the car and the phone are just … in your head?”
Jake leaned over his backpack and pulled out a big blue book with a gold floral design on its cover.
“I knew you might say that. So I think you should look at these.” Jake opened up the book. “I think they’ll be helpful. I think you’ll see what I see.”
Before Tillie could protest, he had pushed her tray out of the way and shoved the book right in front of her. Her eyes fell upon an array of happy faces decorating worn, yellowed pages: beaming faces, faces with tongues out, faces talking over piles of food on a beautifully set table. In the first pages, there was a woman in almost all of them. She had velvety brown hair in loose, wavy curls, and a gap-toothed smile that matched the shape of Jake’s. The man in the pictures had strawberry-blond hair, wore glasses, and was too thin. In the first pictures he seemed to be kissing the woman all the time. In front of the Lincoln Memorial he had his face buried in her hair as she giggled, her head thrown back. In one, he had his lips puckered on hers as they sat in front of a lit birthday cake, spreading frosting on her cheek with a finger.
Tillie couldn’t help but smile at it.
As the pictures went on, the woman grew a big, round belly, and the kisses started to move away from her face and toward her belly button. Soon Jake arrived and the man transformed into a master of goofy camera faces. In a lot of the pictures, Jake looked upward and cracked up hysterically at the crossed eyes and stuck-out tongue of the man holding him. The pictures started to be dominated by the man and Jake. Page after page depicted the man and Jake laughing everywhere they went—at Cubs games, at Millennium Park, wrestling on the beach, playing board games.
Tillie flipped through the album in silence. Everyone was smiling so much. It was like none of them had ever been sad.
When she finished, she saw that Jake was still looking right at her. Once again, his eyes were wide. And they seemed to be begging her.
“See? See how happy we are? I know my dad,” Jake said. “My dad would never just leave. Not without talking to me. Something is wrong. Will you please help me?”
Tillie sighed. He was impossible to say no to.
“Fine,” she said, averting her eyes from the photo album, from Jake. “I’ll look for him.”
He whispered, “Yes!” and broke into a little victory dance, lifting his hand for a high five—until she stopped him with:
“But I work alone.”