Left for Garbage

longest of anyone.
    She doesn’t have any old friends from school like other people do. With Denise it’s like her life starts the minute she meets someone new and whatever came before that person is erased. It’s funny the media talks about her past all the time, but what I think is that Denise is the only person I know who doesn’t have a past, not as I understand the past.
    My dad has really been pushing me to move on with my life and concentrate on building a ministry, and I respect and love my dad a lot, but he doesn’t understand this isn’t over for me.
    I loved her, I really loved her. She’s the only girl I’ve ever felt that way about and it messes with my head that I felt so much about her. Maybe I just need to know more about her so I can finally understand her, and in understanding her, I can find something loveable in her again, and even if I can’t take it to my dad to show him I’m not the naïve loser he thinks I am, I’ll know.
    S o I’ve started my own little investigation into the life and times of Denise Brown, not like her sad-sack brother, Seel. That guy’s really lost his stuff. He’s all over Orlando pretending he’s Deputy Dawg. He even carries a little tape recorder in case somebody says something which leads to the big break he still believes is coming, the one that will bring Deeley home and exonerate Denise.
    Personally speaking , that guy gives me the creeps. Denise told me once she didn’t like having Deeley around him because he used to try to mess with her, with Denise, when she was young. She said it back when we were still engaged, back when I believed every word that came out of her mouth.
    Now , of course, I tend to reevaluate but she might not have been lying about Seel. He was very possessive of her and whenever I’d put my arm around her or anything, he’d stomp around the house and kind of glare at me, or make snide remarks, though to be fair so did her mom, and I can’t really say what that was about.
    Anyway , about my investigation …
    I t’s not just for me to understand more about the girl I loved so much as it’s for in case too, in case the police start listening to Mrs. Brown’s twenty ‘exclusive’ interviews a day and take her advice to look harder at me regarding Deeley’s kidnapping, and I guess now they’re saying her death too. Whatever it’s being called, I haven’t missed Mrs. Brown’s comments about “What an angry young man Bobby was, how obsessed he was with Denise, how maybe his obsession led him to taking Deeley away to try and make Denise turn to him in her hour of need.”
    I have had to pray awfully hard to not let anger get the best of me when I hear this stuff. So , yeah, I’ve been talking to people. I found an old girlfriend of hers from Denise’s MySpace account, Linda, who went to high school with her. She’s a really beautiful girl too and I was kind of hoping she might like me, but it turns out she is working on becoming a model, so she said she’s not into dating right now.
    Still , she told me a lot of interesting things about what Denise was like in high school. Linda said Denise’s always been her own person and a force to be reckoned with. She said you never won anything with Denise by your side, whether it was a conversation, an argument, a race home from school, or the last potato chip. Nothing. And if you ever loaned her a few bucks, it was gone forever.
    Denise is the winner, she calls the shots. I asked Linda if that kind of stuff didn’t piss her off and she said , yeah, but she stayed friends with her anyway because of how much fun Denise was to be around, like exciting to be near, even if you were just sitting on a log talking in the woods.
    I knew exactly what she meant . I’d been there, too. Denise can make every ordinary thing come alive. I can’t explain it, because it wasn’t exactly charisma she exuded, it was more like craziness, like watching a perpetual daredevil show. She pushes limits with people and I know that’s probably wrong, but it’s exciting. Linda’s right.
    Linda told me Denise never had much money, her parents not being rich, so she often shoplifted her school clothes and accessories , and she had no qualms bragging about it. Looking good meant a lot to her, which I know already and I even understand, because whenever we went out other guys were always looking at her. It used to upset me but she’d laugh and say, “Bob, you should be proud they’re looking.