Limerence: Chapter 12

The hallway outside the pool room is empty, and I worry that I might’ve lost them, but then I hear muffled voices floating from the bathroom.

I pad closer, hopeful that it’s her and not someone else’s bathroom break I’m eavesdropping on.

“…maybe too soon,” says a female-sounding voice. “…if this was a good idea.”

I strain to hear more than bits and pieces.

There’s a sniffle. “I just thought…”

“I know. You thought…”

You just thought what?

I get even closer, my ear almost pressed to the wood – right as the door swings open and I come ear-to-face with three frowning Cedarsville students.

“What the hell are you doing?”

I straighten up immediately, but the damage is done. They might as well have caught me with a glass cup in my hands.

I rub the back of my neck. “Oh, I was just…” Already, my face is turning as red as the scoreboard. “…coming to use the bathroom.”

Their frowns deepen, and a tall, wiry Asian girl on the right crosses her arms over her chest. “No, you weren’t. You were trying to listen in on our private conversation.”

I risk a glance at the girl in the middle – her.

She’s frowning too, her big, Bambi-brown eyes glistening with tears. Clearly too upset to be as hostile as her friends.

“Syd’s right. We’re having a private conversation,” says the boy on the left. His box braids hang down his forehead, his back pressed against one of the closed stalls. “Go use another bathroom. I’m sure this fancy fucking school of yours has a million of them.”

I hold my hands up in surrender. “Okay, I know I was eavesdropping. That was wrong but…” I fumble for an explanation. I hadn’t thought about what I’d say to her.

I hadn’t thought much at all.

The girl on the right – Syd, I suppose – moves as if she means to remove me from the bathroom herself, and I blurt out: “I saw you. That night at the vigil. I saw you.”

Syd pauses, and the middle girl’s eyebrows furrow with confusion. “You saw me?”

I nod. “Yeah. Briefly. We made eye-contact for a whole two seconds, and then you took off.”

Her eyes widen with realization. “That was you.”

“That was me.” I glance at her friends. “Once again, really sorry about the eavesdropping, but I recognized you as you were leaving, and I wanted to talk.” I swallow. “About Mickey. Maybe alone.”

Mickey’s name lands like a boulder, all three of them stiffening at once.

Syd recovers first, eyes narrowing. “I don’t know who the fuck you are, but you’ve got a lot of nerve coming in here and asking Liz to talk about her dead boyfriend.”

I freeze.

Boyfriend?

Mickey’s journal had loosely mentioned a girlfriend, but I’d never connected the dots.

Because I’m supposed to be done playing detective.

I’m supposed to be keeping my head down so that I can have a quiet and uneventful senior year.

“You’re right,” I say, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have eavesdropped. This is really inappropriate. I’m going to go and leave you guys to your private conversation. Again…really sorry.”

Syd scoffs. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

I turn, tail tucked between my legs, but just as I’ve touched the door handle, a meek voice calls out, “Wait!”

When I look back, Liz has stepped forward. “You knew Mickey?” She wrings her hands together as she asks.

“Sort of. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but I knew him. We were both scholarship students,” I admit.

Liz lets out a breath and nods. “We can talk.”

My eyebrows shoot up in surprise.

“Liz,” the boy says, “Are you sure? You don’t have to talk to her.”

Liz shoots him a shaky smile. “I’m sure, Alex.”

Both of her friends still look wary of me, but Liz steps forward. “You said alone. I know a great diner close by. You up for some hash browns?”

The scoreboard buzzes in the background, and hesitancy creeps in. “I’m supposed to be watching the meet right now. I’m not sure if I should leave campus.”

Liz nods. “In my experience, these meets take a long time. We’ll be back before the final race starts.”

I take a deep breath.

This is a bad idea.

I’m supposed to be done digging into Mickey’s death.

But Liz might know something I can use against Adrian if the whole ‘quiet and uneventful’ part doesn’t work out the way I’m hoping it does.

And Rick, as little as he’s taught me, has instilled at least one lesson: better to have a knife you don’t need than get cut because you’re without one.

I smile. “Hash browns sound good.”

***

These just might be the best hash browns of my life.

Four years with cauliflower hash browns and sweet potato hash browns and fat-free, low-calorie hash browns has conditioned my taste buds into forgetting what a real hashbrown tastes like.

But these, smothered in cheese and cooked in bacon fat, are the real deal.

“You look like you’re enjoying yourself,” Liz comments as she drowns her blueberry waffles in syrup.

“These are so good.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t been here before,” she says. “I mean, it’s right down the road. Mickey and I used to come here all the time.” The fluorescent lights of Caboose’s Diner illuminate her wistful expression.

Caboose’s, named after Caboose the dog (as the picture of a gummy-looking hound dog on the wall tells me), is a small, old-school diner with red vinyl booths and a glowing neon sign that proclaims: Open 24 Hours!

I’m guessing they do most of their business in the night owl hours because, smack-dab in the afternoon, this place is all tumbleweeds. Even our waitress disappeared into the back for a smoke break as soon as our orders were done.

“Yeah, this place is super cute,” I say. “I had no idea it was here.”

That’s a half-lie. Caboose’s neon lights are nearly visible from campus, but eating out is a rare luxury for me – one that usually means skipping lunch the following week, and seeing how many tiny bags of cafeteria pretzels or protein bars I can stuff into my pockets without drawing attention.

Still, this place is charming.

Definitely worth the week of chalky protein bars.

Just as an awkward silence begins to descend over the table, I clear my throat and ask, “How long were you guys together?”

“About a year,” she replies. “I used to work at this secondhand bookstore, and Mickey came in one day, trying to pawn some of his old textbooks. I slipped my number into one of his books. I never do things like that, but honestly, he was just so cute.” She’s blushing like it happened yesterday. “Mickey is my first – or was, I guess – my first real boyfriend.” The smile on her face wanes. “I’m still not used to talking about him in past tense.”

“It hasn’t been that long,” I reassure her.

Her eyebrows cinch together. “You said you guys weren’t friends, but how well did you know Mickey? I don’t remember him ever mentioning a Poppy.”

“He probably wouldn’t have,” I confess. “We really only hung out to plan scholarship presentations together. We ran in different circles, you could say.”

As in: Mickey had a circle to run in.

“I wouldn’t know,” Liz says, “I never met anyone from Lionswood.”

“Really?”

She nods. “I used to think it was because he was ashamed to be dating a girl from Cedarsville, but lately…” She swallows, her eyes jumping nervously to the empty counter and then back to me.

“What is it?”

“Why did you follow me out of the meet?”

I fidget with one of the paper straws. “Well, I’m not sure I knew why when I did it. I just knew you were connected to Mickey.”

“Who you hardly knew,” she corrects. “So, is it Mickey you want to talk about or Mickey’s death?”

Her face hardens, but those big brown eyes of hers are swimming with pain. This is a raw wound still tender to the touch.

A wound that I am poking right now.

Guilt slithers in.

I’m not even doing this in the pursuit of justice anymore – I am prodding at Liz’s grief because I want leverage against Adrian.

“We don’t have to talk about his death,” I say quietly. “It happened recently. You’re still grieving. I don’t want to make it worse.”

If only I could’ve developed a conscience and some human decency before I dragged Liz out of the swim meet.

She shakes her head. “No. It’s okay. I want to talk about it, and I can’t talk about it with my friends or family anymore, so…I think I need this.” She levels me with a stare. “And for whatever reason you followed me, it sounds like you need this too.”

I don’t refute that.

She takes a swig of her coffee. “You know, Mickey used to have all these friends he’d talk about. He only had good things to say about Lionswood and the people who went there. It was charming…till it wasn’t. He’d cancel plans to edit English papers or pick up someone’s dry cleaning, and I started to wonder why Mickey’s so-called friends treated him more like a butler than a buddy.”

It feels wrong to agree with her and admit Mickey was the lackey she perceived him to be, so I just nod awkwardly. “He was…very passionate about his friends.”

But she shakes her head. “I’m not so sure of that.”

“What do you mean?”

“This summer is when everything changed,” she explains. “It was like…the flip of a switch. Mickey’s entire attitude shifted. He no longer loved Lionswood, he hated it. And he hated everyone who went there. He thought they were all spoiled rich kids who didn’t deserve the things they had.”

My forehead crinkles. “I see.”

The attitude shift that Liz is describing is not one I ever saw. Mickey happily ate lunch with those spoiled rich kids till the day he died.

“I thought maybe he was just fed up running everyone’s errands,” she continues, “But a couple weeks before he died, things got…odd. He started talking about the future. How we didn’t need to worry about money because he was going to take care of everything. We were going to be set for life or something. It was weird.”

“Did he say how?”

“Not really. I asked – believe me – but he’d just smile and tell me that he had it handled.” Her entire face scrunches up. “But, the closer it got to…” She swallows as if it’s physically painful to say the word. “I could tell he was nervous about something, but he wouldn’t say what. He started telling me that things could go wrong. He insisted that we stop following each on social media. He didn’t want public association with me if ‘things got dangerous.’”

I feel like I’m trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

I can reasonably assume that Mickey was nervous about Adrian hurting or killing him – it said so right in his own journal.

As to why…

“He really thought you guys were going to be set for life?” I ask.

She nods. “Yeah. And it’s not like either of us have a ton of money. We’re both middle-class, but he was suddenly so sure of it. Whatever idea he had, he was positive it’d result in tons of cash.”

I can’t name a side-hustle that’d throw a teenager in the “never having to worry about money again” category.

At least, not a legal one.

Was he working for Adrian? Did Adrian promise him a ton of money for something?

Adrian would have the means for that though I can’t say what kind of highly-dangerous work he’d need Mickey Mabel of all people to do – and then kill him for it.

It could be a job gone wrong.

Or blackmail.

The realization hits like a lightning strike.

Blackmail.

Maybe Mickey had something on Adrian, something he thought he could leverage for a big payout from the Ellis family.

And Adrian killed him for it.

“You okay?” Liz asks. “You just got all pale.”

I nod shakily. “Yeah, yeah. No, I’m fine. This is all just so…heavy.”

“Well, you’re taking this better than most people,” she says, “I told my parents and my friends, but they think Mickey’s weird behavior is just proof that he had some manic episode that culminated in…well, you know.”

“Did you tell the police?”

Not that it’d matter.

“I tried,” she replies, “They didn’t initially interview me, but I called a couple weeks ago. They said the case was a closed suicide.”

Of course they did.

She rubs at her forehead. “I don’t know. Everyone else is probably right. Maybe I’m just grasping for straws because I don’t want to believe what happened really happened.”

I swallow. I wish I could tell her she’s more right than wrong, but I know it’ll just put the both of us in Adrian’s path of destruction.

“It just wasn’t like him,” she continues. “All that talk about money, about some journal –”

I still. “A journal? Like Mickey’s journal?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she sighs. “I mean, I did get Mickey into journaling this year, but I think this was something else.”

“Like someone else’s journal?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure. He just mentioned it briefly, but whatever it was, I think it had something to do with whatever cash or money he thought was coming our way.”

My stomach flips, the possibility of blackmail seeming more and more likely the longer Liz talks.

I lean forward, my appetite revitalized. “But this journal. He didn’t have it on him?”

She shakes her head. “Not as far as I can tell.”

“And you don’t know anything about it?”

Something passes over Liz’s face. “No, but…you seem to. Or, at the very least, you seem very fixated on whatever it is.”

I reel in my curiosity before Liz gets more suspicious. “I don’t. I just find it weird. Same as you do.” I reach for a less dangerous subject. “Why’d you come to the meet today? You said you never met any of Mickey’s Lionswoods friends.”

Her suspicion lightens, the shadow of grief falling over her face again. “I guess I thought it’d be some sort of exposure therapy for me. Like, if I walked the campus and watched the meet, maybe I’d finally believe he actually killed himself.” She sighs. “I think it just made me sad though.”

Externally, I stretch my hand across the table and tell her, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Internally, my brain is whirring with possibilities – ones that raise more questions than answers.

Was Mickey blackmailing Adrian over some sort of journal or book?

I don’t know what to do with this information. It’s more assumption than fact, and I’m not sure it gives me any more leverage than what I had when I started this lunch.

Unless I can find out why Mickey was trying to blackmail Adrian, it’s not the knife I need.