Page 16 of The Night I Lost Him

I didn’t want to leave my room. I couldn’t. I had to figure it out. I had to stay right there until I figured out where I needed to go. Jamie was out there, somewhere, calling for me, and I had to find him. I didn’t feel like eating, anyway. I shook my head.

Jesse closed his eyes briefly. “Please,” he said, “We’ll only be gone for half an hour. Then you can come back to…this. Caden, I’m begging you. Do you think he’d want you to sit here and neglect your health? I know he wouldn’t. We don’t, either. You’ve lost weight. You aren’t eating. You’re barely sleeping and every time you do, you have nightmares. You can’t keep going like this. I think you need to talk to someone.”

He didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t need therapy, I needed to find Jamie. I guess since he mentioned it, I did notice that the pants I was wearing were a little loose. And he was right. If Jamie knew I was starving myself, he would yell at me. I just…wasn’t hungry. “Fine. I’ll go to breakfast with you.”

He looked like I’d just handed him a gold medal. I refused to take a shower before we went. I’d had a shower the day before, right before going to court. I didn’t care enough to take another. I threw a t-shirt on, kept the sweatpants I was already wearing, and slid my feet into my tennis shoes without bothering to tie them. He didn’t complain about my fashion choices as I followed him out of our dorm.

People were watching us as we passed through the quad. He was taking me to the diner right off campus, I knew without him even telling me. It was where he’d always taken me when I had an existential crisis. But none of the game losses, the worrying silently in my mind over who I really was, the girls who wouldn’t stop panic-texting me while I felt horrible for leading them on in the first place, none of it compared to losing Jamie. Nothing could ever compare to that kind of pain, and it wasn’t something an omelet was going to fix.

I ignored the stares as we walked. I knew I’d already managed to attract plenty of attention to myself. Even if word of my courtroom fiasco hadn’t spread, people could still see it. Most of them had heard about how badly I’d freaked out the night Jamie went missing. And even if they weren’t aware that I’d flipped my lid at the police station, they knew I was the one who’d realized he was missing. I was the one who was looking for him first. I was the one who insisted something was wrong before anyone else even suspected it. I was out there before the sun came up and after it set, combing the woods, the town, looking for anything that would lead me to him.

We walked into the diner, but I still didn’t feel like eating. I ordered some coffee, then balked. Jesse ended up ordering me the omelet I always used to order when he took me there on a bad day. It wasn’t just a bad day, though. If they were all right and I was the one who was wrong, it would effectively be the end of my life.

The server left, and I glanced around. Even in the diner, people were watching, whispering. I didn’t even care. I didn’t care if they’d heard about the scene at the courthouse or the police station freak-out. If I could have him back, I wouldn’t care who knew. I just wanted him beside me. I wanted to hear his voice again, for real. If it faded in my dreams, would it fade in my mind, too? If I never found him, would his face fade, his smile?

I shook the thoughts off and sealed them up before I could start crying in the diner. I couldn’t think about that, or I couldn’t go on. The server brought our coffee. I put two packs of sugar in mine and nothing else. I could feel Jesse watching me, but he didn’t say anything. He probably didn’t know what to say. I just stared out the window in silence.

She brought our food out a few minutes later, and I started picking at mine. “Caden, you need to eat,” Jesse said finally, but not in a scolding way. I knew he was speaking out of concern. “You can’t keep going like this, and you know Jamie wouldn’t want you to.” I did know that. But every time I ate, it wanted to come right back up.

I could tell that my friend was growing more and more worried, so I started putting the food in my mouth and chewing, one bite after another. I stared at the table and tried to keep my mind blank until I managed to eat most of the omelet. I finished my coffee and continued to stare at the table, thinking about the times I’d been there with Jamie. Jesse paid for our food, and I didn’t even have it in me to argue about paying for my own. I mumbled a thanks to him and we walked back to the dorm in silence.

I flopped back onto my bed as soon as I entered the room, landing amongst all the papers and photos while Jesse headed into the shower. He had classes that day. Technically I also had classes, but I wasn’t going to any of them. I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I failed. Without Jamie, it all meant nothing.

Jesse came out of the bathroom and asked me if I needed anything before he left. When I told him no, he gave me one more worried look and headed to class. I grabbed my pillow and hugged it to my chest, imagining that it was Jamie, cuddled up to me on my bed again. I closed my eyes, wishing on everything that when I opened them, it would be him, and it had all just been a bad dream.

I drifted off a little bit, but thankfully not enough to dream, until there was a knock at my door. When I opened my eyes, it was still just a pillow in my arms. “Caden? Are you ok?” It was Amber’s voice that drifted through the door, but I knew she wasn’t alone.

No. I wasn’t ok. Did I seem like I was ok? Did I look like it? Everything I cared about was gone, ripped right out from under me the second I wasn’t looking. I knew I was ruining my position on the hockey team. I knew my grades were slipping. I had friends, but they all thought I’d lost it completely. The person I loved most in the world was, if I was to listen to everyone around me, gone forever.

Maybe they knew better than me. Maybe I was jaded, and my mind was clouded with denial. Maybe I just wouldn’t acknowledge it. I couldn’t, because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to because if I was the only one with any hope left, and I gave up, then it would all be over. Even the people who loved him had memorials, cried, said goodbye. They told me to accept it. I was the last one who would look for him. I was the only hope we had of ever finding him.

There was another knock at my door. I sighed as I realized Jesse had locked it behind him. I dragged myself off the bed and opened the door to find Caitlin and Amber standing there. I sighed right in their faces and walked back over to my bed, plopping down face first so I didn’t have to look at them. I supposed that Jesse and Jeff were having the girls try to reason with me alone because they thought maybe if they sent the females it would come out gentler, and they needed a new approach. I knew Caitlin, though, and I doubted it would be gentler.

The two of them followed me into the room and shut the door behind them. When they said nothing, I finally peeked over in their direction. They were still standing near the door, looking around with wide eyes. I pulled myself up to one elbow with another sigh and looked around, finally taking in what they were seeing. When I realized what they were looking at, even though I’d already known it was all there, I assumed Jesse had sent them. Because even looking around myself I had to admit it looked a little crazy.

Glancing back at my friends, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was only in my own head that things weren’t adding up. Was it just because I didn’t want them to add up? My room was starting to look like a version of Weird Wally’s secret shrine. There were photos spread out all over- on my bed, the nightstand, my dresser. Photos of anything I thought might be evidence, and some that just made me remember. Photos of the club that had made it onto the news. Photos I’d taken outside of it at various times, of his bike, of campus. I’d made a map of our lives with the photos, trying to track the times Wally had been there, had followed us, had been watching without us knowing. I was trying to track the fear Jamie hid so well versus his true happiness. Trying to piece together the parts that I’d somehow missed.

There were sheets of notepaper scattered among the photos. Notes about the pictures themselves. Things I’d remembered Jamie telling me Weird Wally had said to him. Copies of the messages I had screenshots of. All of them were pieces of a puzzle I was trying to put together while I worked out clues from everything in my head.

I’d felt as though I was playing detective, and that somehow all of it would help me figure out what I was missing. But as I looked around, I was suddenly able to put myself in my friends’ shoes, and I could see why they thought I’d gone over the edge. I looked like a stalker, too. I looked crazy, obsessed. Because I was obsessed. Obsessed with finding the person I loved.

Amber and Caitlin moved forward, sitting on Jesse’s bed as they continued to stare at me. I looked back at them from my own bed, but I didn’t move or speak. It had been a horrifically eventful couple of weeks for me and getting kicked out of the courtroom the previous day had been the cherry on top. I knew just from the walk to the diner and some of the whispers I’d heard on the way that word about it had already started to spread. I hadn’t expected anything less. There were plenty of students there. I knew it was the biggest courtroom outburst those law students had ever seen. Hell, it may have been the biggest outburst the deputies had seen. Regardless, everyone was going to know about it soon.

My eyes rested on Amber. She’d lost her best friend too. I knew it was a different kind of love, but she’d loved Jamie as well, and she’d known him longer than any of us. She’d been his best friend for two years before I’d finally spoken to him. She’d trusted him with the keys to the planetarium in a move that could have had her kicked out of school if he’d ever abused her trust. She’d been his crying shoulder throughout college, the one who’d known all along that even though he acted like he didn’t care when people were assholes to him, sometimes he did care. She’d known about Wally before I even set foot in the club. I knew she was carrying guilt, just like me, because we hadn’t been able to stop it. Knowing that we shouldn’t blame ourselves didn’t really help. Because we knew. The club knew. The security knew. The cops knew. His friends knew. And none of us had been able to stop it in the end.

Amber had met his mom and sister before I had. She was the only person at school besides me who knew his whole story, and she was hurting, too. We were the two who knew him the best, and she still thought I was losing it. Did that mean I should listen to them? Was my grip on reality actually slipping away? Was I just as lost as Weird Wally, only in the opposite way? Had I fallen out of reality in the other direction? Looking around myself, at the scattered notes and jumble of photos, the possibility seemed plausible, even if I didn’t want to admit it.

When Amber finally spoke, though, I realized they weren’t there for an intervention. Jesse hadn’t sent them there to scope out what he’d been forced to look at for the past couple of weeks. They were finally ready to hear me out. “Caden,” she breathed, “Explain it to us. We can see how strongly you believe it, so tell us what you’re feeling. Right now, we don’t have any real reason not to believe what they are telling us, and it seems to everyone that you just don’t want to believe it. But if you have something, if you have a real reason to feel the way you do, we want to know. You said no one was listening to you, and all your friends agree, maybe we haven’t been listening closely enough. Maybe we haven’t been open enough to understand. But we want to. Please, tell us. We want to hear you.”

Well, they’d obviously been talking about me behind my back, but even though I’d just attacked a person in the middle of a courtroom, and my dorm room belonged to a person obsessed, they still concluded I was correct when I insisted they weren’t listening to me. I’d always known that they were amazing friends, but Amber’s words more than solidified that fact in my mind even though they’d been looking at me like I was slipping away from them since Jamie disappeared.

It was the most validated I’d felt since that night. I slowly dragged myself up to a sitting position, afraid I was getting ready to sound like the crazy guy in the movies with all the diagrams and notes to prove his conspiracy theory. Because, well, that was apparently the guy I’d become. But wasn’t that guy usually right?

I clung to that fact, but I still couldn’t get that phone call out of my head, even though the words were the last things I’d ever wanted to hear. I wanted to block it out even though I knew I’d needed to hear what he was saying. I needed to figure out where he’d been, but there hadn’t been any obvious clues in his horrifying descriptions, just jumbled words that pierced my heart and left it there, bleeding and open.

Mama, mama, I need help. I’ve done something bad. I’m sorry, mama, I didn’t mean to. He…I loved him. I did. I just wanted him to understand. I brought him with me, but he didn’t listen to me. He wouldn’t listen, and I kept fighting him to just make love to me, he made me do something bad. He did have those feelings, I know…I didn’t mean to…

He did not have those feelings. And the beginning of the phone call, the thought of what he seemed to say he’d done to Jamie, is really what eventually had me wrapping my fingers around his pale, skinny neck. That wasn’t making love. It was rape.

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