“Car,” she sighed, and the rest came unbidden: “Bow. Hole.”
Bruno humphed. “Who’s that?”
Liv felt herself blush and wondered how far down her bare chest the pink went.
“It’s nothing.”
Bruno turned to face her, grinning. “Ooh, another Latin lover on the side. I’m jealous.”
She stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a name, right? Carbajal?”
He said it phonetically: Car-bah-hall. Liv felt her throat swelling shut. Could it be that, all this time, Car-Bow-Hole had been a person’s name? Had A had been trying to give them somebody’s name? It made no sense, was bizarre beyond anything she’d ever considered.
She pulled her phone out of jeans still warm from friction.
“Well, this isn’t very flattering,” Bruno said.
“Shh,” Liv replied. Two years of high-school Spanish gave her the foundation to guess the spelling of the name, but to type it she had to take a slow breath and peck each letter with an index finger. Results sprang up, the usual screed of heartless hits and cold-blooded URLs. A municipality in Spain, a California congressman, a street photographer. None of them felt right. Liv used her index finger again, added Iowa. A basketball coach, an obituary.
“Did you forget Señor Carbajal’s full name?” Bruno teased.
Liv closed the browser. She stared into the dark ceiling, feeling disjointed and cold, while her heartbeat thumped hard, like a table-leg baton against helpless flesh. Carbajal, Carbajal, Carbajal, Carbajal—A had repeated it endlessly until Doug had performed the oral surgery to make it stop.
“It’s a word I heard in a dream,” she said. “Doesn’t mean anything.”
Bruno reached for her phone and gently took it, and for some reason, she allowed it. Carbajal was a Spanish name; maybe he knew a variant way of spelling it. Instead, she realized he was only inputting his number. It felt as personal as the physical acts they’d just shared, and Liv looked away. The low, cobwebby ceiling, the janitorial thumps above—these mundanities shielded her from the expansive awfulness beyond.
She shivered and wanted her shirt back. Bruno’s long arm reached behind them and came up with what she’d wanted, plus bra. She sat up and began the upper-body gymnastics of getting into the garments, a routine she’d done thousands of times but that was made newly complicated by watching eyes.
“I know you’ve got problems,” Bruno said.
Liv paused in the adjusting of her bra, but knew it was better not to. She picked up her shirt, grabbed it through the neck hole, and pulled it right side in. He might be correct, but that didn’t mean he had any clue what the word Carbajal had just done to her world.
“You don’t quit your team and start hanging with drama dorks because everything’s going hunky-dory,” he continued. “You’re running from something. And that’s fine. I’m not one of those people who say you shouldn’t. My family sure has. Sometimes running’s the only thing you can do.”
Liv lost sight for a scramble of seconds as she pulled the shirt over her head. Bruno’s role of the Artful Dodger, she thought, was fitting: He’d dodged from town to town with his mom and sisters. More miraculously, he’d dodged the gloom and pessimism he’d earned twice over. And like the Artful Dodger with Oliver Twist, Bruno, if given the chance, might lead Liv somewhere better, if only she could scrounge courage, or desperation, enough to follow. She already had the wrist compass.
She was fully dressed and looked down at herself in disappointment. There had been excitement and possibility to her body when naked. The way it had stretched and flexed, anything had been possible; she could have been any Liv Fleming she’d wanted. Dressed, she was the same hopeless girl she’d been at the start of the day, except for that one unpleasant new thought: Carbajal.
“What happens to Dodger at the end?” she whispered.
“Let’s see. In the movie, he gets back with Fagin, and I guess they keep on stealing. In the book, he gets sent to prison in Australia. In the play, though, they don’t say.”
“What do you think?”
“He’s pretty nice in the play. I think he stays friends with Oliver. Reforms himself. Becomes a proper gent.”
“That seems good. Maybe Nancy doesn’t die, either.”
“And the workhouse hands out better gruel.”
“And Oliver finds his dad. His dad’s not dead after all.”
“Yeah. That’d be nice. Maybe we can convince Baldwin to rewrite it.”
He sighed, zipped his pants, and sat up, reaching for his own shirt. Liv felt a yawning chasm of longing as he leaned away. He was beginning to stand now, angling toward the hat shelves to resume his original task. She wanted to crook her arm across his chest, quick while she could, and pin him back down on a cold floor they could turn warm. She wanted to pull her face into his beautiful neck and inhale the smells of fusty top-hat hair and over-laundered shirt, and then, nursemaid now by trade, kiss around until she could find his pulse in every spot where it beat.
21.
Bruno had to split and pick up his sister. Despite the lateness of the hour, a clutch of Oliver! actors still milled about the parking lot beneath the darkening dusk and a second day of rain. It was three girls from the orphan chorus, bumping umbrellas and thumbing gadgets while talking out of lips almost too blasé to move. Liv, focused back on Carbajal, suspected her presence at the rehearsal was the topic and wished to sidestep all of them, but that would be too obvious—they were directly on the way to the station wagon. Liv snugged her hood down, took out her own phone, and pretended to text.
As she passed the girls, Doug’s name snagged her ear like a fishing lure.
A thing, one of them said. Doug Monk was having a thing.
Liv’s body went stiff as a corpse, and she stumbled. One girl was polling the others on whether they were going to go when Liv caught herself directly in front of them, one of her shoes crashing down in the center of a puddle. The girls stared, too shocked for mockery. Liv forced a chuckle, though it felt now like her stiff corpse had been pitched into the crematorium.
“You’re taking about…” Liv tried just repeating it. “Doug’s thing?”
The girls regarded her skeptically. She couldn’t blame them for being unforthcoming. They knew her views on Baldwin’s play. They kept their responses cool.
“He’s inviting people to something?” one of them ventured.
“We heard it secondhand,” another clarified.
“I’m not even sure it’s real,” the third insisted.
“Oh, right,” Liv said, a blather reply, before continuing toward her car. She opened her phone, dried the screen on her coat, and checked her call records, email, and texts for any notifications. There was nothing. Had she fallen out of favor of so many cliques at once, including the two-person faction of her and Doug, that she would be the last to hear about this? How was it getting out?
Liv climbed inside the station wagon and slammed the door. She turned the ignition, and as the vehicle cycled through its near-death rattles, she swiped through her apps, including the search results for Carbajal. Her social-media presence had fallen fallow in the past four weeks, but no one had yet unfriended or unfollowed her, and she began to skate through the traceries of interconnected profiles.