Vanishing Girls Read online

  Ariana exhales, visibly relieved. “If you need anything—”

  “I’m fine,” I say quickly. “We’re fine.” Already, I regret coming. Even though I can’t make out individual faces, I can feel the weight of people staring. I tug on my hood, making sure my scars are concealed.

  Then the crowd shifts again, and I see Parker, hopping over concrete rubble, coming toward me with a big smile. I’m seized by the sudden desire to run; at the same time, I forget how to move. He’s wearing a faded T-shirt, but I still recognize the logo of the old campgrounds where our families vacationed together for a few summers. At least Ariana has vanished.

  “Hey,” Parker says. He hops off an old ledge into the grass in front of me. “I didn’t expect to see you.”

  It would have helped if you’d invited me, I almost say. But that would mean admitting I care. It might even make it seem as if I’m jealous he invited Nick. For the same reason, I won’t, I refuse, to ask whether she’s here.

  “I wanted to get out of the house,” I say instead. I shove my free hand into the front pocket of Nick’s sweatshirt, gripping my beer with the other. Being around Parker makes me hyperaware of my body, as if I’ve been taken apart and put together just a little bit wrong—which I guess I have. “So. FanLand, huh?”

  He grins, which annoys me. He’s too easy, too smiling, too different from the Parker who pulled over to talk to me yesterday, awkward and stiff-backed, the Parker who didn’t even climb out to give me a hug. I don’t want him to think we’ll be buddy-buddy again, just because I showed up at the Drink.

  “Yeah, FanLand’s all right,” he says. His teeth flash white. He’s standing so close I can smell him, could lean forward six inches and place my cheek against the soft fabric of his T-shirt. “Even if they’re a little heavy on pep.”

  “Pep?” I say.

  “You know. Smells like teen spirit. Drinking-the-Kool-Aid kind of stuff.” Parker raises a fist. “Go, FanLand!”

  It’s a good thing Parker was always such a nerd. Otherwise he would have been stupid popular. I look away.

  “One time my sister nearly drowned trying to surf a kickboard in the wave pool.” I don’t say I was the one who dared Nick to surf the kickboard, after she dared me to go down the Slip ’N Slide backward.

  “That sounds like her,” Parker says, laughing.

  I look away, taking another sip of beer. Standing this close to him, and looking at the familiar shape of his face—his nose, slightly crooked and still lined faintly with a scar, from where he ran smack into another guy’s elbow during a game of Ultimate; the planes of his cheeks, and his eyelashes, which are almost as long as a girl’s—makes my stomach hurt.

  “Look.” Parker touches my elbow and I shift away, because if I don’t shift away I’ll only lean into him. “I’m really glad you came. We’ve never really talked, you know, about what happened.”

  You broke my heart. I fell for you, and you broke my heart. Period, done, end of story.

  I can feel my heart opening and closing in my chest, like a fist trying to get a grip around something. It was the bike ride. I’m still weak. “Not tonight, okay?” I force a smile. I don’t want to hear Parker apologize for not loving me back. That will be worse, even, than the fact that he doesn’t. “I’m just here to have a good time.”

  Parker’s smile falters. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “I get it.” He touches his cup briefly to mine. “Then how about a refill?”

  Across the circle, I see Aaron Lee, a guy Nick was with for a while before the accident: nice guy, decent body, hopeless nerd. His eyes light up and he waves, arm up, as if hailing a taxi. He must think I brought Nick with me.

  “I’m good,” I say. The beer isn’t having its usual effect. Instead of feeling warm and loose and careless, I just feel queasy. I dump the rest of my beer onto the ground. Parker takes a quick step backward to avoid getting splashed. “I’m actually not feeling so hot. I might head home.”

  Now his smile is all-the-way gone. He tugs on his left ear. Parker-speak for not happy. “You just got here.”

  “Yeah, and I’m just leaving.” More and more people are swiveling in my direction, sneaking quick, curious looks before turning away again. My scars are burning, as if a flashlight has been shone on them. I imagine them glowing, too, so that everyone can see. “Is that okay with you, or do I need a hall pass?”

  I know I’m being mean, but I can’t help it. Parker ditched me. He’s been avoiding me ever since the accident. He can’t parade back into my life and expect me to throw confetti at his feet.

  “Wait.” For a moment, Parker’s fingers, ice-cold from touching the beer, graze the inside of my wrist.

  Then I pull away, turning clumsily in the uneven grass, dodging areas lumpy with deteriorating stone, pushing through a crowd that parts for me easily, too easily. As if I’m contagious.

  Colin Dacey’s trying to get a fire going in the pit, a blackened depression lined with gravel and nubs of stone. So far, he’s succeeded mostly in sending huge, stinking geysers of smoke toward the sky. Stupid. It’s already too hot, and cops are always patrolling in summertime. Girls back away from the fire, shrieking with laughter, fanning away the smoke. One of them, a sophomore whose name I can’t remember, comes down hard on my toe.

  “I’m sooo sorry,” she says. Her breath smells like amaretto. And then Ariana, barely sidestepping me, smiling huge and fake and overly nice, like she’s a salesperson trying to douse me with perfume, says, “You’re leaving already?”

  I don’t stop. And when I feel a hand close down on my arm, I spin around, shaking off the grip, and say, “What? What the hell do you want?”

  Aaron Lee takes a quick step backward. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—sorry.”

  My anger immediately sizzles down to nothing. I’ve always felt vaguely sympathetic toward Aaron, even though we’ve barely spoken. I know what it’s like to trot after Nick, to worship her from three steps behind. I’ve been doing it since I was born.

  “That’s all right,” I say. “I was just leaving.”

  “How’ve you been?” Aaron says, as if he hasn’t heard me. He’s nervous; that’s obvious. He’s holding his arms rigidly by his sides, like he’s waiting for me to order him on a march. Aaron is six-four, the tallest Chinese guy in school—the tallest Chinese guy I’ve ever met, actually—and in that moment he really looks it. Gangly and awkward, too, like he’s forgotten what his arms are for. Even before I can answer, he says, “You look good. I mean, you always looked good, but considering—”

  Just then, someone screams.

  “Cops!”

  All at once, people are running, yelling, laughing, scattering down the hill and into the trees even as beams of light come cutting across the grass. The chant rises up on the night, swelling the way the crickets did when evening fell.

  “Cops! Cops! Cops!”

  Someone rockets into me, knocking me off my feet; Hailey Brooks, barefoot and laughing, disappears into the woods, her blond hair streaming behind her like a banner. I try to protect my wrist when I fall and wind up crashing down on my elbow instead. A cop has Colin Dacey bent over double, arms behind his back, crime show–style. Everyone is screaming and the cops are shouting and there’s a blur of bodies everywhere, silhouetted against the smoke and the sweep of flashlights. Suddenly there’s a moon-big glow directly in my eyes, dazzling.

  “All right,” the cop—a woman—says. “Up you go.”

  I roll away to my feet just as she gets a hand around the back of my sweatshirt, dropping her flashlight in the process.

  “Gotcha.” But she’s breathing hard, and I know that even on damaged legs I’ll be able to outrun her.

  “Sorry,” I say, half to her, half to Nick, because this sweatshirt is her favorite. Then I unzip and wriggle my arms free, one after the other, as the cop stumbles backward with a short cry of surprise and I run, limping, bare-armed, into the heavy wet darkness of the trees.

  FEBRUARY 11

  D
ara’s Diary Entry

  Today in Remedial Science—wait, sorry, Science Exploration, since we can’t use the word remedial anymore—Ms. Barnes was droning on and on about the forces that keep all the planets circling around the sun and the moons circling around Saturn and all the different orbits carved out like railroad tracks in the middle of a great big piece of nothing, keeping everything from smashing together and imploding. And she said it was one of the greatest miracles: that everything, every bit of matter in the universe, could stay in its little circle, imprisoned in its own individual orbit.

  But I don’t think it’s a miracle. I think it’s sad.

  My family’s like that. Everyone’s just locked up in a spiraling circle, spinning past everyone else. It makes me want to scream. It makes me hope for a collision.

  Lick Me told me last week that he thinks my family has trouble dealing with conflict. He said it with this really serious look on his face, like he was in the process of farting out some really important wisdom. Did he have to get a degree in psychology just to say really obvious shit?

  My name is Dr. Lichme, PhDuh.

  For example: I caught Nick in my room today. She acted like she was just looking for her blue cashmere sweater, the one that used to belong to Mamu. As if I would believe that. She knows I’d rather wear chain link than pastels, and she knows I know she knows it and was just trying for an excuse. I bet Mom sent her to spy on me and root around to make sure I’m not getting into any trouble.

  Just in case it happens again: HI, NICK!!! GET THE HELL OUT OF MY ROOM AND STOP READING MY DIARY!!

  And to save you time—the weed’s stashed in the flower pot and my cigarettes are in the underwear drawer. Oh, and Ariana has a friend who works at Baton Rouge, and he says he knows someone who can get us Molly this weekend.

  Don’t tell Mom and Dad, or I’ll tell them that their little angel isn’t such an angel after all. I heard what you and Aaron did in the boiler room during the Founders’ Day Ball. Naughty, naughty. Is that why you’ve been carrying around condoms in your bag?

  That’s right, N. Two can play at this game.

  Love,

  Lil Sis

  JULY 21

  Nick

  It’s day two of my FanLand career and I’m already running late. I’m in the kitchen, slugging Mom’s coffee, which tastes alarmingly like something you’d use to clean drain pipes, when the knocking starts.

  “I’ll get it!” I shout, partly because I’m on my way out and partly because Mom’s still in the bathroom, doing whatever she does in the morning, creams and lotions and layers of makeup and a slow transformation from pouchy and puckered to put-together.

  I grab my bag from the window seat and jog down the hall, noticing that the unfamiliar gardening boots are still lying in the middle of the hall, as they have been for the whole five days I’ve been home. Suddenly annoyed—Mom always used to bug us about picking up after ourselves, and now she can’t be bothered?—I pick them up and chuck them in the coat closet. A fine layer of dirt flakes from the thick rubber soles.

  I’m unprepared for the cop standing on the front porch, and for a moment my whole chest seizes and time stills or leaps backward and I think, Dara. Something happened to Dara.

  Then I remember that Dara came home last night. I heard her, clomping around upstairs and playing snippets of weird Scandinavian dance tech, as though deliberately trying to annoy me.

  The cop, a woman, is holding my favorite field hockey sweatshirt.

  “Are you Nicole Warren?” She pronounces my name as if it’s a dirty word, reading off the old camp label still stitched to the inside of the collar.

  “Nick,” I say automatically.

  “What’s going on?”

  Mom has come halfway down the stairs, her face only half made up. Foundation lightens her face, makes her pale lashes and eyebrows nearly disappear, giving her whole face the look of a blank mask. She’s wearing her bathrobe over work pants.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  At the same time, the cop says, “There was a party by the construction site at the Saskawatchee River last night.” The cop holds the sweatshirt a little higher. “We took this off your daughter.”

  “Nick?” Mom now comes all the way downstairs, cinching her belt tighter. “Is that true?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know. I mean—” I take a deep breath. “I wasn’t there.”

  The cop ticks her eyes from me to the sweatshirt and then back to me. “This belong to you?”

  “Obviously,” I say, starting to get annoyed. Dara. Always goddamn Dara. Despite the accident, despite what happened, she just can’t help but get into trouble. It’s like it feeds her somehow, like she draws energy from chaos. “My name’s in it. But I wasn’t there. I stayed in last night.”

  “I doubt the sweatshirt walked over to the Drink on its own,” the cop says, smirking like she made a joke. It bothers me that she calls it the Drink. That’s our name for it, a nonsense nickname that stuck, and it feels wrong that she knows—like a doctor probing your mouth with his fingers.

  “Well, then, it’s a mystery,” I say, grabbing the sweatshirt back from her. “You’re a cop. You figure it out.”

  “Nick.” Mom’s voice turns hard. “Enough.”

  Both of them are staring at me, wearing twin expressions of disappointment. I don’t know when every grown-up masters that look. Maybe it’s part of the college curriculum. I almost blurt it out: how Dara uses the rose trellis as a ladder; how she probably stole my sweatshirt and then got drunk and forgot it.

  But years ago, back when we were kids, Dara and I swore that we would never rat each other out. There was never a formal declaration like a pact or a pinkie-swear. It was an implicit understanding, deeper than anything that could be stated.

  Even when she started to get in trouble, even when I found cigarettes stubbed out on her windowsill or little plastic bags filled with unidentifiable pills stashed beneath the pencil cup on her desk, I didn’t tell. Sometimes it killed me, lying awake and listening to the creak of the trellis, a muffled burst of laughter outside and the low roar of an engine peeling away into the night. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell on her; I felt I’d be breaking something that could never be replaced.

  Like as long as I kept her secrets, she would stay safe. She would stay mine.

  So I say, “Okay. Yeah, okay. I was there.”

  “I don’t believe this.” Mom turns a little half circle. “First Dara. Now you. I just don’t fucking believe it. Sorry.” This directed at the cop, who doesn’t even blink.

  “It’s no big deal, Mom.” Ridiculous that I’m defending myself for something I didn’t even do. “People party at the Drink all the time.”

  “It’s trespassing,” the cop says. She’s obviously enjoying herself.

  “It is a big deal.” Mom’s voice is creeping higher and higher. When she’s really angry, it sounds like she’s whistling instead of speaking. “After what happened in March, everything is a big deal.”

  “If you were drinking,” the cop goes on, she and Mom like a tag team of shitty, “you could have been in a lot of trouble.”

  “Well, I wasn’t.” I shoot her a glare, hoping she’ll shove off now that she’s gotten to play bad cop this morning.

  But she remains resolutely, squarely where she is, solid and unmoving, like a human boulder. “You ever do any community service, Nicole?”

  I stare at her. “You can’t be serious,” I say. “This isn’t Judge Judy. You can’t make me—”

  “I can’t make you,” the cop interrupts me. “But I can ask you, and I can tell you that if you don’t help out, I’m going to write you up for partying at the Drink last night. Sweatshirt proves it, as far as I’m concerned.” For a moment, her expression softens. “Look, we’re just trying to keep you kids safe.”

  “She’s right, Nick,” Mom says, in a strangled voice. “She’s just doing her job.”

  She turns back to the cop. “It won’t hap
pen again. Will it, Nick?”

  I’m not going to swear off doing something I didn’t do in the first place. “I’m going to be late for work,” I say, shouldering my bag. For a second, the cop looks like she might stop me from going. Then she sidesteps me and I feel a rush of triumph, as if I really have gotten away with doing something wrong.

  But she grabs my elbow before I can pass her.

  “Wait a minute.” She presses a flyer into my hand—from the way it’s folded, it looks as if she’s been carting it around in her back pocket. “Don’t forget,” she says. “You do good, I do good for you. See you tomorrow.”

  I wait until I’m halfway across the lawn before unfolding the flyer.

  Join the Search for Madeline Snow.

  “We’re going to talk about this later, Nick!” Mom calls.

  I don’t answer her.

  Instead I fish my phone out of my bag and key in a text to Dara—who’s still asleep, I’m sure, her hair tangled on a cigarette-scented pillowcase, her breath still smelling like beer or vodka or whatever else she managed to flirt off of someone last night.

  You owe me, I write. Big-time.

  www.FindMadeline.tumblr.com

  HELP US FIND MADELINE! JOIN THE SEARCH.

  Hi all,

  Thank you for all of the outpouring of support you’ve shown to the site, the Snows, and to Madeline in the past few days. It means the world to us.

  Many of you have been asking how you can help. We are not currently accepting donations. But please join our search party July 22 at 4 p.m.! We will assemble in the parking lot at Big Scoop Ice Cream & Candy, 66598 Route 101, East Norwalk.

  Please help spread the word to friends, families, and neighbors, and remember to follow @FindMadelineSnow on Twitter for the latest updates.

  Let’s bring Madeline home safely.

  I’ll be there!!!!!

  posted by: allegoryrules at 11:05 a.m.