Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [101]
“You’d do that for me, wouldn’t you?” Bobby had asked.
“Pass the ammunition, stud,” Julie had replied.
Bobby faux-squealed—his goofy Prince imitation that was a hit at parties. It was this absurd chickenlike squawk that started in an upper register, then briefly dipped down a few notes before ascending to the heavens again. It sounded nothing like Prince, but an accurate imitation wasn’t the point. Julie had once admitted to being a Prince fan in her preteen days, and Bobby teased her mercilessly about it. Then the cheesy hand symbols, straight from Purple Rain:
I
Would
Die
4
U
And with that last letter, he pointed right at her. And every time, she’d giggle, despite herself, and call him a dick. But he was just a big goofball, her boy Bobby.
But now, sitting in the empty dorm room…
There were no plane tickets or DayMinder or anything else that would give Julie a clue to where Bobby might have gone. No notes, no receipts. After a while she sat down on his bed. Pressed his pillow to her face. She could still smell him. She started to cry.
U would, wouldn’t U?
She wished she could take back so much of what she’d said at that party…
As it turned out, nobody on campus knew that these twenty students—along with two grad students and two professors—had been off building houses for the poor. Those involved had kept it a secret from everyone, including their families. Like Bobby, they had given their relatives and friends some kind of cover story to explain their absences. An impromptu vacation. A job opportunity. A work-study program on campus. A road trip.
All of it: bullshit.
The university president explained it away as a “secret mission of kindness—these students and faculty did not want to broadcast their good deeds, merely complete them.”
Yeah, Julie thought. Right.
“Secret mission of kindness.”
Did nobody else realize that this whole thing made no fucking sense whatsoever?
At the funeral, the casket was closed. Made sense to everybody. After all, Bobby had been inside a speeding tube of steel that had been hurled toward the earth at a ridiculous speed. Nobody wanted to see what that kind of damage would do to a human body.
Nobody except Julie.
As she sat there in a black dress—the same one she wore to a sorority social, Bobby at her side, just a few weeks ago, and until yesterday a Polaroid snapshot capturing that moment had been wedged in the corner of her mirror—Julie couldn’t stop staring at the coffin. She had no proof, no evidence of any kind. But she knew that coffin was empty. She could feel it.
Gathering proof became Julie’s focus that semester. She stopped attending classes and photocopied newspaper articles about the crash—every piece she could find, no matter where the story may have appeared. The university library had a thriving periodicals section; Julie practically lived there for a week. After that, she traveled to the crash site, which didn’t feel right, either. Had Bobby been here, ever? Had he been in the middle of that pile of burning wrecked steel? Julie didn’t think so. Again, she had no proof other than the unease in her stomach.
When she traveled to the site of the houses that Bobby had allegedly helped build, near Houston, Julie became convinced that someone was following her.
Everything at the house site checked out; the project manager even gave her a tour of the home that the Leland University students (“God rest their souls, all of them”) had helped construct. Guy named Chuck Weddle was the manager, and he claimed to remember Bobby. Weddle even showed her the backyard patio