They called themselves the Untouchables because it sounded mysterious and exciting, which is what they wanted their lives to look like. The group was now comprised of Callum and Lindsey, and a pair of teardrop earrings, and 6 $50 bills.
They meet up in the fourth floor of a Motel 6 for their first and only official meeting. The Motel 6 sits right next to a Best Western, which leans against a Denny’s. Callum gets to the room first, and sets up for Lindsey. He puts the money and the earrings in the drawer with the Bible, and then sits in the questionably-stained armchair to wait. Callum denies his Mom’s call, which he never does, and anxiety begins to move his body in small ways like a marionette doll, so that his elbows and toes and fingers have to move in fidgeting quivers and can never stay exactly put.
When Lindsey opens the door, Callum gets a shiver of adrenaline, not a quiet or actual shiver like when it’s cold out, but the kind where you shake visibly where you sit for a small, spastic moment. Adrenaline makes Lindsey urgent, and she closes the door with something too much like a bang, and smiles sheepishly at Callum when she turns around. She’s made such a loud noise in such a quiet room.
Lindsey’s phone rings.
“It’s my dad,” she says.
“Yeah, my mom called earlier” Callum looks at his phone, which has received no calls since the first.
“Did you answer?”
“No.”
“Yeah, me neither. Well, obviously.”
Callum smiles—all teeth. “Should we go?”
The two of them leave the motel room; Callum grabs the money and the earrings and puts them in a bag that he brought. He grabs the Bible too, and puts it in the bag, even though the top right part of the cover has basically been ripped off.
The bag goes in the backseat, because Lindsey drives, and Callum called shotgun. The car is old and expected, and blends in almost even with the trees on the side of the road. Lindsey is a good driver, except she refuses to go even 5 miles over the limit. Callum resorts to thinking about other things.
Callum and Lindsey don’t really need the 6 $50 bills. Callum grabbed them from his mom’s wallet in the heat of the moment, when he was sneaking out for real for the first time. He felt like it was a good measure, like a personal safety deposit.
They get to the waterfall as the bottom edges of the sky turn a light blue-grey, trying to sneak in a sunrise without shocking anybody.
The waterfall spurts dark grey almost like iron. The water wrinkles impatiently upon itself like a gargantuan elephant trunk on the way down, and the splash is less momentous than usually promised from waterfalls as integral as this one.
Callum and Lindsey each take an earring from the bag. The earrings are diamond and teardrop and showy; the diamond itself is as big as the fingernail on Callum’s thumb.
Lindsey throws hers, and then Callum throws his, and the splash the earrings make into the lake look exactly like the splash from the waterfall itself.
Lindsey looks at Callum and laughs. The tension has been building in her stomach since she began to drive, and once she begins to laugh, she can’t control herself.
Her face turns red.
Callum sits down, and leans on his elbows. Then he gives up and just lies down in the grass.
Lindsey laughs and Callum watches the sky get lighter, until it’s a pale skin color. Lindsey laughs until the sky is almost white, and Callum never says anything.
They only talk again once they begin the drive back home. This time Callum is behind the wheel, and this time they are a solid 10 miles above the speed limit.
“Thanks for coming,” he says to Lindsey.
“I’m sorry I laughed,” she says, “I couldn’t control it. I went crazy.”
“It’s fine,” he says, “She’d get it.”
“It’s good to throw those earrings away,” Lindsey says. “She wouldn’t have wanted us to keep them around anyways.”
“It’s true,” Callum says. “Elise hated obsessing.”
The earrings were the ones that Elise wore to prom before she left forever. Elise would have hated the obsessing, Callum knew. She left because everyone obsessed over her, and Elise couldn’t handle it. When she left and Callum couldn’t obsess over her any more, he obsessed over the only thing left: the earrings. The ugly, showy, earrings that she had worn to junior prom before she left. That’s over, though. The earrings are at the bottom of the lake somewhere. Callum refuses to cry about it.
Lindsey is thinking about the earrings too.
“Does this mean the Untouchables is over?”
“Yeah,” Callum says. “I think so. We’re kind of down a member, aren’t we?”
“Yeah,” Lindsey says. “She’s gone for real now.”
Later, people will say they see Elise working at a gas station in Toronto, wearing only denim except for a red headband. They’ll say that she works as the fastest waitress at a diner, so fast all the diners want her, that any diner in the country would consider itself lucky to have her. There will be Elise sightings in Toronto, then in Maine, then in Bangkok when someone from their high school class goes on a business trip 12 years later.
None of them are Elise. Callum will later read the Bible he stole from the fourth floor room of a Motel 6, and he will find Elise in the pages. He will come to realize that Elise had fulfilled her purpose; Elise was working for God, he will come to realize. The boys always called her Angel when they brought her home, but they never knew how right they were.
Callum will realize this, and Callum will become a pastor, and the Elise sightings will continue in the Mideast and along the coastlines, and Lindsey will become an accountant.
But now, the sun is finally rising from behind the trees, and this time both Callum and Lindsey answer the calls from their parents.