Hannah Harrington - Saving June

I look away and shrug. “You shouldn’t. I wanted to know.”

“Yeah, but …” Laney looks ready to say more, but she just sighs again and lets it drop, much to my relief.

I open the next drawer, pawing through the mess of papers there. It’s more of the same—old homework assignments, class notes, a flimsy old binder project now falling apart. Nothing of importance. I wonder what my mother is going to want to do with all of this stuff. Throw it away? Or keep the room intact out of sentimentality, like some kind of shrine dedicated to June’s memory?

Okay, that would be totally creepy.

“Hey,” says Laney. She’s leaning over and digging stuff out from under the bed. “I think I found something.”

She resurfaces with a brown paper bag in hand. I sit on the bed next to her as she dumps its contents out onto the bedspread. Two CD cases tumble out. The first case cover has a painting of a man with a cigarette in his mouth, standing in the night under a neon sign, a woman in a fancy dress to the side gazing straight at him. The second cover has a man’s head in black-and-white, overlapped by a series of squares and diamonds and circles, the lettering done in a light blue.

“Tom Waits,” Laney reads off of the first CD’s front, picking it up to examine it more closely. “Hmm. Never heard of the dude.”

“What about the Kinks?” I question. I pass her the other CD.

“Actually, I’ve heard of them. Do you remember that guy? Colin Spangler?”

“Didn’t you date him a few months ago?”

“Yeah, if by date you mean ‘made out with in the back of his mom’s minivan that one time.’ Anyway, he was really into them. They had this one song about, like, a transvestite or something? I’m pretty sure Colin was super-gay. I mean, I’m not judging. But. Definitely gay.”

Did my sister really listen to this stuff? I keep trying to make it fit with the image I have of her in my head, and it doesn’t make sense.

“Where’d she even get these?” Laney asks, shaking the bag like there will magically be an answer inside. Nothing but a receipt flutters out. She smoothes creases from the bag with her hands, and then stops abruptly. I follow her gaze to the black logo emblazoned on the side.

“The Oleo Strut,” I read aloud. “Where is that place?”

“It’s way off on Kilgore,” she explains. “By Stowey’s Pizza. I drive past it all the time, I just never knew what it was.”

She picks up the receipt as I scan the back of the Tom Waits album.

“A clue!” she shrieks, so loud I nearly topple off the bed, then springs to her feet frantically. “Harper, where’s the CD?”

“It’s on top of the stereo,” I say. I watch as she practically dives to snatch it off the desk. “And what kind of a clue?”

“A handwriting sample!” she exclaims. She jumps back onto the bed and hands me the receipt. “Look on the back. That T is unmistakable .”

“You’ve been watching way too much CSI .” I roll my eyes, but flip the receipt over anyway. There’s a note scribbled on the back in faded blue ink.

J.—

Hope you like my picks. Let me know what you think.

—Your Favorite Person in the Universe

It’s the initial that bothers me most. That single letter. No one has ever shortened June’s name like that. And the tone of the note, the signature—it suggests an inside joke, some kind of casual closeness. I crumple the receipt in my fist and toss the balled-up wad over my shoulder.

“You know what we should do?” Laney springs off the bed again, bouncing on her toes. “We should go to this Oleo place!”

“What for?”

“Uh, hello? To see if they might know who bought these? Don’t you watch television? You always start at the scene of the crime.”

“Last time I checked, buying music is not a crime,” I point out. “Actually, they kind of encourage that, with all the illegal downloading these days—”

“Work with me here, Harper.” She rolls her eyes. “I mean, aren’t you curious? This could really lead to something.”

Of course I’m curious. It’s driving me crazy, not knowing. It’s why I called Laney in the first place. I don’t even have to say anything and she can see it, written all over my face.

“Go put on your shoes,” she says, pushing me off the bed, “because we’re totally going, right now.”

Grand Lake is a town split into two sections, with the namesake lake as the epicenter. There’s the east side of Grand Lake, where Laney and I live, primarily consisting of well-kept houses in quiet suburbs, and then there’s the west side, generally considered lower income and populated with more apartment complexes. The east and west sides have two elementary schools and one middle school each, and after that, the kids are shuttled into the town’s sole, centrally located high school.

The whole town centers around the lake. “Grand” is something of a misnomer, since it’s pretty small, and the only stretch of beach is the man-made one behind the iron gates of the Grand Lake Yacht Club, where the town’s upper crust keep sailboats and pontoon boats and have a dining hall for club dinners. The area by the lake was an amusement park in the fifties, with a Ferris wheel and roller coaster and everything, but they tore it down long before I was even born. Now there’s just the park and a few businesses and restaurants, including the waterfront Sterling’s Steakhouse. Laney’s father, Richard Sterling, owns the joint, but we never eat there because Laney doesn’t eat meat, much to her family’s chagrin.

To get to the west side, you have to drive past the lake and through this strip called Windermere Village. Windermere is a shopping area, purposefully kept antiquated with a cobblestone road, the streets lined with gaslights and outdoor sculptures. There’s an old-fashioned ice cream parlor called Duncan’s, a bunch of old family businesses and other little shops. It’s the kind of place where mothers amble with their baby strollers and golden retrievers, and older women wearing fluorescent headbands power walk in pairs.

I don’t usually have much reason to go west past Windermere. As we speed by in Laney’s piece-of-crap car, I watch the newer housing areas give way to dated apartment buildings. She turns down a side road, passing a gas station and a liquor store, and continues down to a two-story building made out of dusty red brick. That’s when I see the sign, lit up in neon-green over the doorway of a store on the bottom level: the Oleo Strut.

A bell above the door chimes as we walk in. There’s a guy behind the counter, looking like he’s in his twenties, sporting Buddy Holly frames and an eyebrow ring. His brown hair is short and spiky. He scrawls something onto a notepad at rapid-fire pace, pausing every so often to fiddle with a calculator—it’s one of those old-fashioned ones, with a ribbon of receipt paper churning out with each button pushed.

“Can I help you?” the guy asks, distracted. He punches a few more numbers into the calculator and scratches the top of his head.

Laney looks at me expectantly, but I’m not sure how to even begin, so she jumps in without missing a beat.

“This is going to sound so weird,” she starts, “but we’re trying to find out the identity of someone who made a purchase from you a few months ago. We know what was bought, but that’s it. Maybe if we gave you the date, you could, like, look back through security tapes or something?”

Now he looks at us, bemused, tapping the pen cap against the countertop. “Yeah, we don’t keep track of that.”

“Well, you look like the type who has an amazing photographic memory.” She pushes herself up against the counter, bending so far over I’m sure her boobs will spill out of her top, and gives her most charming smile. I roll my eyes behind her back. “The Kinks? Tom Waits? Any of that ring a bell?”