That distracted me for a day. It was nice, too. Reminded me of all those times—well, it really wasn’t a lot of times. We’re so hot and cold. So on and off. But the point is, opening the cards was nice. I even started matching them up with previous years. Wendy never threw any of the cards away. She had them all stuffed in garbage bags under her bed.
This cross-referencing didn’t have a purpose, but it kept me busy. Kept my mind off of all the ways I was driving her away.
Anyway. That birthday she turned twenty-two.
I came by again for Christmas that year. Came early. Got a little tree. Bought some cookies from the nearby grocery-store bakery, I even found a Christmas carol playlist on my music stream.
No Wendy.
Fine, right? You wanna play hard to get? I can play hard to get.
So that next summer I did not show up for birthday twenty-three.
Well. I didn’t show up early, anyway. But I was there on the day.
Did I stay two weeks, like last time, though?
No. I was strong. I was in control. I left the next morning and drove all the way back to my stupid farm in Nebraska.
Then I started calling her.
Well, first I posted on the board online. That’s where we make plans. The board is an anonymous place. You don’t get a name when you post. Well, I guess you could have a name—there’s a place for one on the form when you make a reply. But if you use a name you are relentlessly ridiculed by every other anonymous person online. ‘Oh, you’re too good to be anonymous like the rest of us, you fucking loser?’ Shit like that.
So I posted our code—this is something we’ve had in place since before we were even friends. It’s how Chek and I used to communicate when Wendy was a teenager. We go to the board, we post a new message, and we wait. That message is only visible for about… oh, maybe… twelve hours. Then it falls off the front page, becomes archived and it’s pretty much impossible to find after that. So you gotta post another one if you don’t hear back.
I know it sounds like there isn’t a chance in hell of communicating with people like this, but it actually works—if you’re following the board. And Wendy and I have been chatty on that board for years. We’re into it. Probably because we’re losers. Trolling an image board on the chans is kind of a good time in our sad, pathetic world. So this method has worked well with us. If we’re both on at the same time, we chat sometimes. Anonymously, of course. We have a little meme war, we shitpost about other anonymous losers, we sometimes even say things like ‘good night’ and ‘see ya around.’
Anyway, I posted. I waited. She never showed. I posted next day, next day, next day… nothing. She never showed.
So I was thinking, Is she mad at me? Like, that walkout was for real? Or is she somewhere remote with no internet access?
This wasn’t a true red flag for me a couple years ago because obviously we go long stretches of time with no communication at all. But right now, in the present day, the fact that Wendy is not on the boards is freaking me out because when she left me after our little New Year’s date, we had a plan.
We don’t usually have a plan. We wing it. We see where things go.
So this whole year has had me on edge because if we want the plan to work, we can’t be together.
Which, again, is why we have the board. That’s our number one way to contact each other. It’s typically quick and easy because we’re supposed to check the board once a day. It’s like a little nighttime routine.
But we have two other ways. In our world, the backup plan always has a backup plan.
So then I called her.
But I wasn’t actually calling her, I was calling a service. We change phones so often, we almost never have each other’s numbers. So we set up a service. You push in your code, you get a beep, you leave a message. The person you’re leaving that message for checks in, uses their code, and they get your message.
So I left a message. I said, “Are you really fucking mad at me over this Zero girl shit? Because that’s fucking stupid.” And I hung up.
Probably not the best way to defuse the situation we were in at the time, but I was starting to lose my patience with her. Plus, this was before I came up with the plan.
I checked the service every hour, on the hour, for like a week. And at the same time, I was also posting on the board every eight to twelve hours, trying to get her attention.
She did not check my message and she did not reply to my posts on the board.
Right. She was mad.
That was fine. We’ve got yet another way to make contact. The third, and least desirable, way is located in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. This little podunk town likes a good museum. They have like four of them. There is a country club, there is a Walmart, and there is even a tiny airport. It’s so fucking American, you want to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and eat apple pie the moment you arrive.
It’s a nice place, actually.
But we don’t stop there because of the pie, or the history, or the whatever. It’s pretty much just halfway between Wendy’s little Kentucky cabin and my stupid Nebraska farm. And it’s got a little roadside motel that consistently gets five-star ratings from travelers. So, ya know, if you and your long-distance soulmate are looking for a little hookup time, you can’t go wrong with the Americana Inn in Mount Pleasant.
The guy who owns this place is called Wendell. His family has been running the Americana since nineteen fifty-three. And he likes us. He remembers faces. This is kind of a bad thing in our line of work, but what are ya gonna do? Kill the guy?
Nah. We embraced Wendell and his fam at the Americana. Made it our little hangout. And we set it up so that we can leave each other letters there at the front desk.
That’s the third way Wendy and I stay in touch.
So once I realized she wasn’t gonna post on the board and she wasn’t gonna check my messages I got in my truck and drove to Mount Pleasant. And sure enough, Wendell told me that Wendy came by about a month back and she left me an envelope.
I know it’s taking me forever to get to the fucking point, but all of this rambling has a fucking point and here it is:
Christmas #22. The card she left me in Mount Pleasant was a goodbye of sorts.
She didn’t say she never wanted to see me again. She didn’t say she hated me. She didn’t really end things, but… I could tell this was an ending.
She was moving on.
It wasn’t the good kind of moving on, either.
It was the self-destructive kind.
And it was a cry for help because she left me a phone number. A real fucking phone number.
I got a room and called her up and she and I talked for an entire night. I’m talking nine hours on the phone. She was obsessed with the idea that there was a cure for her out there.
And OK, this is not as far-fetched as it sounds. She’s not really crazy because that’s what the whole Purge was about when Chek was killed. But Megan Machette was working on a cure for what the Company had done to the kids, not a cure for Zero girls. And for whatever reason Wendy had gotten these two things mixed up. She was absolutely, one hundred percent positive that there was a cure out there that would fix her.
And if she could just find this cure, she would stop being Creepy Wendy and start being the person she was meant to be.
It killed me. That entire conversation broke my fucking heart. “Wendy,” I said. “Just tell me where you are and I’ll come get you, and we can do this together.”