Page 12 of Sublimate
“No, he has a private jet and hires pilots. The reason he was able to wander around as a high school kid was because his family had a lot of money,” she told me. She looked up at the sign above us: Whitaker Reading Room.
“Are you still friends with him?”
She looked surprised, but then she blushed. “We weren’t ever friends. I just…watched him. Not in a creepy way!” she insisted, as I had. “He was interesting. I thought he looked like he should have been in a black-and-white movie, like the lead inThe Hustler.”
I didn’t know what that was but it reminded me of Vegas. “He was handsome?”
She nodded seriously. “Very. He was kind of strange with how he acted, though. He was morose—maybe I would say ‘pensive.’”
I wouldn’t have said either one, since I wasn’t exactly sure what they meant. But I nodded because I thought I understood that he’d been sad.
“But he was also a nice guy and he helped people,” she told me. Now she was winding and pulling her hair at double time. That curl had gone almost totally straight.
“Like what? What did he do to help?”
“Well, he got involved with volleyball. The girls’ team at our school was really bad. I know, because I was on it,” she told me. “I was so terrible that the coach suggested that I should go out for cross country instead, but I’m also not a good runner.”
“I never played sports either,” I mentioned.
“Not everyone should. I’m talking about myself,” she clarified. “We were trying to raise money for new uniforms and we sold wrapping paper but no one really bought any, and there was no way that we were going to reach our goal. But he heard some ofus talking about it and he bought like, five thousand dollars of ugly wrapping paper.”
“Five thousand? Five thousand bucks?”
She nodded again. “Then the nicest part was that he started coming to all our games. It was him and some parents, and that was it for our side. He would clap and try to start chants, too. I really, really liked Nolan.”
“Nolan,” I said. “Nolan Whitaker.”
“Are we talking about the same person?”
We were. “I’m not trying to be weird and stalk him. I was concerned,” I said. “And I’ve been thinking about him a lot.” At night, as I curled into the smallest ball possible to stay warm, I would remember how he’d held doors open for me. I had also thought about the silver flask he’d carried in his pocket and how he’d patted the bottom of his cup to get the last drops of liquor.
“I think about him sometimes, too,” she told me, and then she blushed again. “The Whitakers are always making news. Usually it’s for good things, like donations or other charity stuff. Nolan lies low but I’ve seen him around a few times. I doubt he remembers me.”
“What’s your name?”
It was Cadence and I introduced myself, too.
“It’s nice to meet you, Vivi.” She squinted at the letters on my T-shirt. “Does that say…”
I zipped up my coat so she could no longer read where it said “DILF.” “I got it for free. It was probably supposed to be for a man to wear.”
She looked down at her screen again. “Um, probably. I’m going to bet that if he owns a home, he paid cash for it. That means we wouldn’t be able to track a lien against his property. Those are public record and of course, a mortgage is a type of lien.”
She had stated that as if it were obvious and I nodded as if I understood what she meant.
“And I would bet that his house is held in a larger trust, too, so we won’t be able to look for tax records under his name, either,” she said, typing. “But unless he’s actively hiding, he wouldn’t have gone to crazy lengths—aha!” She grinned. “He’s registered to vote and Michigan voter rolls are public. I found his address.”
I would never register to vote, then. As I made that mental note, I saw that her smile of triumph had faded. She was looking at me closely and now she seemed slightly hesitant. Her hand in her hair had frozen.
“I’m not going to his house,” I said. “I just wanted to look at pictures.”
She nodded and typed, then turned the monitor so that I could see the image there. “I know this street. It’s a little north of here and on a peninsula. He overlooks Lake Michigan.”
That was the biggest body of water I’d ever seen. In Nevada, I had been fairly close to the Pacific Ocean, but I had never gone any further west so I had missed it. Now I studied the picture of the house that had a view of that amazing lake. It was nowhereas big as the place I’d thought he owned, the one that had belonged to his grandparents.
But it was also in no way small. In no, no, no way. If I stacked three of Kolter’s houses on top of each other, like a cake I might bake someday, and then tacked his mom’s onto either side of each story, that was more of the size. Plus, it was a pretty house. It looked like it was on a street with neighbors, not close ones but with other people so you didn’t feel quite so middle-of-nowhere.
It was just nice.
