I love you, D.
I had no proof it was my dad. Jeremy insisted N could be anybody. But I knew this ad was mine. I knew it was from my father, without proof or probability, all the way through to my soul. My father had known about our Friday ritual, and he must have thought it was the perfect way to contact me discreetly. He’d even included the word near, a safe way to refer to my name without actually using it.
After that, I didn’t want to share the ads anymore. I didn’t find them funny, didn’t laugh at the desperation. I was searching for something. I was desperate. Jeremy didn’t really believe my dad had sent me a message, and the only thing I cared about was finding another one. Jeremy stopped bringing the Missed Connections, and I started buying my own. It wasn’t our ritual anymore. It was mine.
I spent every Friday looking for another ad. Once, I’d thought for sure I’d found him.
It’s been nearly a year since my last ad. I’m in town and want to see you. Meet me at our old hangout next Saturday.
I’d gone to Belle Green Park just after sunup. Spent all day watching the parking lot and the trailheads, the neighborhood parents watching me suspiciously as they pushed their kids on the swings. These are the kids you should be making friends with, my dad had said when I’d asked him why we came to this park every Saturday instead of the one at the end of our street. Their parents looked at me now the same way they had looked at me then. Like I didn’t belong there. They were right. At dusk, I walked home alone. And a week later, I found the response to the ad, confirming it wasn’t him.
When I was younger, searching the Missed Connections had always been about finding my father. But now? Sometimes I’d see an ad that so perfectly expressed my own loneliness that I’d clip it out and save it. Study it, searching for whatever it was that made one ad yield a reaction, and another go unanswered. I wasn’t exactly sure who, or what, I was looking for anymore, but sometimes it felt like I was looking for a missing piece of myself.
I read the clipping again and carefully folded it back into the bag, slipping it deep under my mattress. Then I flipped to the ad that had haunted me all day, the one that got me busted in chem lab.
Newton was wrong. We clash with yellow.
Find me tonight under the bleachers.
Nothing like the saccharine pleas I’d come to associate with Friday mornings, this ad left an acrid taste in my mouth. Something about it was just . . . wrong. Not dirty-pervert-at-the-busstation wrong. Not even unrequited-lovesick-nerd wrong. This was something different. Something I’d never seen in the Missed Connections before.
“Nearly!” My mother banged on my door and I jumped. I cursed under my breath and leaped to my feet.
“Nearly, open the door!”
I scrubbed my hands against my shorts, leaving trails of dark smudges.
Breathing deep, I flipped the lock and cracked the door, blocking the narrow opening. Mona stood in the hall holding an empty coffee mug and a full pack of menthols. A full pack meant she hadn’t checked the cookie jar yet. My shoulders relaxed, but only by a fraction. My petty larceny of her tip jar was just a necessary reallocation of household funds—I needed my newspaper fix more than she needed to smoke. But even though my addiction wouldn’t kill me, I still had no intention of getting caught.
She raised a thinly tweezed eyebrow. If I didn’t look at her face, I could pretend her frayed robe concealed flannel pajamas with teddy bears and hearts. If I ignored the rhinestones glued to her eyes, she could be anyone’s mother. But she wasn’t anyone else’s mother. She was mine.
Mona lit up and exhaled a long ribbon of smoke. “I’m going to work.”
I paused, torn between slamming the door in her face and locking us both safe inside.
“Jeremy says we’re late with the rent again.”
She was slow to answer, and for a moment I worried there really might not be enough money this time. Jeremy had bought us a day with his dad’s poker money, but I knew I had to pay him back. Where would we go if his parents evicted us? I looked at her, the what-ifs written all over my face. Her brows drew together, scrunching up the rhinestones and deepening the lines around her eyes.
“Jim hired a new girl and my shifts got cut back,” she said. “I’ll have the money tonight. You can take a check to school on Monday.” Mona looked past me to the personal ads spread across my floor. Her laugh was derisive like she was coughing up bad memories. The same cutting laughter that made me want to keep the loneliest parts of myself hidden. I pulled the door tighter around me, blocking her view of my room.