“You’re right again.”
He moves a little closer. “You going to be okay?”
“Sure.” We stare at each other and there’s something about the concern in his eyes that makes me want to shake myself off. Just because he’s not angry anymore doesn’t mean I’ve fixed this yet, the way it needs to be fixed. “Just ask about Penny if you want to know.”
“But you don’t want to tell me,” he says. “Because you didn’t tell me.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“Well, I can’t force you, and if you don’t—you don’t. But you should know it’d be a weird thing between us. And I wouldn’t like it.”
No, he wouldn’t. I don’t have to tell him, but my not telling him would leave this uncomfortably open, wanting us to return to it, whether or not we ever did. And probably ending us, if we don’t. So I definitely need to lie now.
“I told you we were close, me and Penny.”
“But you didn’t tell me she was here that night.”
“Because she’s not my friend anymore. I mean, we hate each other.” I cross my arms. “In junior year, we had a falling out over a … boy.”
Boy. Tastes like blood to say it.
“She came to the diner on Friday to make sure I—”
The unfinished lie falls from my tongue. To make sure—what? To make sure I … I see Penny at the diner there, her mouth moving, and those things she said to me. I can’t, won’t, give them voice. I force the memory away. I reach for the pettiest thing I can think of because no one has a hard time believing how petty a girl can be.
“To make sure I wasn’t going to the lake later. That’s how bad it is between us. I could bring down an entire party for her just by being there. It made me so mad she came in to my work, got in my space and ruined my night, I thought I’d return the favor. I went to the lake to do that. It’s not a nice story. Especially now. And that’s why I didn’t tell you.”
Leon’s face falls a little as he thinks about it, and maybe I’m not so in the clear after all. Who wants to be with a petty girl? It strikes a fear in me I try not to show.
“I didn’t know she’d go missing,” I say.
“Well—no,” he says. “You couldn’t have.”
“I hate thinking about it because now she’s gone, I see—” I have to redeem myself, but these words taste like blood to say too: “I see … how awful I was.”
His expression softens. “Well, Penny doesn’t seem all that nice in this story, either.” He pauses. “I could talk to Holly, if you want.”
I’m capable of having my own conversations, but this whole night is wearing on me. It’s barely started and I’m tired and I don’t know that I could tell the same lie half as well, especially to Holly. Leon might.
“Would you?” I ask.
“Yeah. Just give me a minute and I’ll lay it out for her,” he says.
He turns to the door and I say, “Leon,” and he turns back and looking at him—
I need to tell him something that’s true.
I want something between us that’s true.
“I like you,” I say. “I didn’t mean to make it hard for you to like me back.”
He hesitates, and then—he moves to me and kisses the side of my mouth before disappearing back inside. It happens so fast, my heart barely realizes it at first, but when it does, it’s like some small part of my world has righted itself.
I’m still her.
When I’m about to go in, the door opens and Holly comes out, an unlit cigarette dangling between her lips. I stand there awkwardly while she lights up. She doesn’t speak to or look at me until after that first, long drag. She savors it.
“I didn’t know you and Penny Young had a history,” she says. “I might have done things a little differently if I had.”
“I shouldn’t have run my mouth at you like that. I’m sorry, Holly.”
She nods. She pats the space of wall next to her. I lean against it.
“You’re right,” she says after a minute. “You’re not my daughter, but I’ll be damned if I don’t worry about you girls. I worry about my daughter and the shit she seems determined to get herself into, lately. I worry about Annette and that loser she’s decided to move in with. I worry about you when you wander off and now I’m worried about this Penny Young, who I don’t even know, because I have a daughter. Anytime something bad happens to a woman close to me, it’s how I think. I have a daughter.”
“You have a son.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not the same.”
“They’re going to find her,” I say. “Alive.”
She tosses the cigarette and grinds it out.
When it’s time for me to clock out, I leave through the front door, try to get a good look at those posters again. My eyes are on Penny and her eyes are on me, until I round the building. I’m unlocking my bike from the bike rack when a truck pulls up beside me. There’s a parking spot so close, I don’t realize the man inside the truck is talking to me until he’s repeating himself.
“I said, where you headed on that bike, this late?” I turn. His arm hangs lazily over his open window. He looks young—early thirties, maybe—but the kind of young that’s been in the sun too long. He sniffs. “Not safe to be out this late around here. A girl’s missing.”
I imagine her getting into a truck like this. Getting into this truck.
“What would you know about that?” I ask him.
He smiles, taps his fingers against the outside of the door for a long minute, and then he shakes his head and drives away.
todd is on the front porch when I get home.
He sits on the lawn chair, his feet propped up on the blue cooler, a half-drunk bottle of beer resting between his thighs. His head is tilted back and his eyes are closed. It looks like a life worth having and it’s strange, appreciating his repose. Whenever I’d see a glass or bottle in my father’s hands, my whole body would steel itself for the inevitable drama of a man who didn’t know when to say when. Todd—I know he’ll stop here, at this one drink, and if he doesn’t, he won’t go past two. I push through the screen door and he cracks his eyes open.
“Your mom’s running errands. How was school?”
“It was school.”
But it wasn’t, not really. Penny’s absence is changing the landscape and it feels less and less like a place we go to learn and more a place we exist just to soak in the shock of it.
This morning, I watched Alek watch himself on the video announcements. His chin rested in his clasped hands as he mouthed along to his lines about the search party next week as he spoke them on-screen. It was like he was dying in two realities—on TV and in the flesh.
Brock, who always waits for Alek between classes they don’t share, who always plays errand boy for Alek for whatever Alek might need, who always provides a barrier between his best friend and the rest of the world like a personal bodyguard, now filters this routine through her disappearance. Brock waits by doors dutifully, so Alek won’t walk alone, Brock stands in the lunch line and gets two lunches so Alek won’t have to receive sickly sweet condolences from the cafeteria workers who slop food onto his tray, and Brock stands in front of any questions about Penny Alek might not want to answer himself.
“You doing okay?” Todd asks.
“Sure.”
He picks at the label on his bottle. I can tell he doesn’t buy it, but I don’t know what Todd’s definition of okay is. Maybe it’s some impossible standard we’re all going to fail to meet. Besides, I don’t see how I’m not okay, all things considered.
Before he can reply, the phone rings from the kitchen and a half second later, the ring echoes upstairs. The landline is a holdover from Mary’s time. Mom tried to convince Todd to get rid of it because we all have cell phones now—well, most of us—and it’s just one extra bill to pay, but Todd refuses. He says the day one of us needs an ambulance or something will be the day every cell phone in our place dies. The way our luck runs, I t
hink he might be right.
He gets up slowly and follows me in. I toss my bag on the floor while he goes into the kitchen to answer the call.
“Bartlett here,” he says and it makes me smile. I don’t even really know why. I slip out of my shoes. “Uh, just a—hey. Romy?”
I turn and he stands in the hall, the phone cord stretched all the way from the far kitchen wall, the receiver pressed against his chest. He looks at me weird. It makes my skin prickle.
“It’s for you,” he says. “It’s the sheriff’s department.”
* * *
the grebe sheriff’s Department is hidden behind the main street, across the road from the post office. I coast up to the small building on my bike, hop off and rest it flat on the sidewalk, blocking the entrance. I hesitate at the front door, my palm flush against it. It’s not that I expect everything to stop when I walk in. It will go on like however it always does, but whoever sees me—
When I’m gone, they’ll open their mouths.
I exhale and step into the frigid cold of the place, cold enough to make me shiver and rub my hands together. I step through another set of doors and a metal detector and head to the front desk where Joe Conway—the Conways’ youngest son—sits. Todd told me he’s been working here about a month, I guess, and everything gets back to Dan, so be careful what I say. I can’t think of anyone worse for the job. He gives me a toothy smile, eyes flickering over my body. Paul Grey’s kid. That’s what he’s thinking. She—
Whatever thought he has after that, he can’t make me take.
“Leanne Howard said you had my phone. Found it at the lake.”
He blinks. I took the hello right out of him. He looks around, like he doesn’t know what to do about it and he probably doesn’t.
“I’ll just look into that for you,” he says.
He gets up and slips through a frosted-glass door. I lean against the counter. The quiet is unexpected. For some reason, I thought this place would look like in the movies, maybe, Penny’s disappearance being the life in the room, making it frantic, but it’s not. That’s just what I want to see, I think. How can they find her if it isn’t?
When the frosted-glass door Joe Conway left through opens again, Leanne steps out. She’s in full uniform. Her hair is knotted back into a bun and she’s thick on the eyeliner today. She’s got my phone and it’s a relief to have this one thing from that night back where it belongs.
“Do you need my ID?”
“I think you’re who you say you are.”
She sets the phone down on the desk, back facing up, etching in clear view.
Romy Grey.
“Where did you find it?” I pick it up.
“Just off the path, in some bushes, some of the boys did,” she says. “We’ve had it since Sunday night and I told them to call you about it, but—” Big surprise, they didn’t. “When I saw it still sitting there today, I just thought I’d get the job done myself.”
“Thank you.”
“Glad you look better than the last time I saw you. You feeling it?”
I can’t tell if it’s a jab at me or not. I glance at her and she looks soft, not vicious, but a lot of people in this town are a soft kind of vicious. I say sure but instead of leaving, something keeps me where I am, something I need to know.
“Can I ask you about Penny?”
The door behind her opens again and Joe comes out. Before Leanne says anything to me, she turns to him. “Joe, you want to go upstairs and get me those reports I asked you for over an hour ago?”
He turns red. “I was going to do that after I—”
“Don’t give me excuses. Just get them now.”
She watches Joe shuffle off and doesn’t face me until she’s sure he’s gone and I swear she rolls her eyes before she does it. “What did you want to ask me about Penny?”
“You called that weekend, said you didn’t need me to come in.”
“That’s right. I talked to your mom.”
“So what did you find that ruled out a connection between me and her?”
She grimaces. “Romy, I’m sorry but I’m not at liberty to—”
“I need to know,” I say and I can tell she’s readying to refuse me again. “Because a lot of people were looking for me.”
“We were looking for you both.”
“But maybe if they hadn’t been looking for me, they would’ve found her and maybe that’s the difference.” I swallow. “Or maybe it’s not … but I need to know.”
“Oh … Romy, honey—” No. I hate that. Honey. I didn’t ask her for that. I step away from her kindness, clutching my phone. “If I could tell you, I would. I’m sorry, but I—”
“Forget it, I get it,” I mutter because if she won’t give me what I need, she doesn’t get to look at me like she’s sorry for me. “Thanks—for my phone.”
Leanne seems like she wants to say something more, but Joe comes trundling in with a folder full of papers. He eyes us suspiciously. Leanne looks away.
“You have a good day, Romy,” she tells me.
“todd said leanne called,” Mom says, when I come home. “You get your phone?”
“Yeah.”
“I told you it’d turn up.”
I go to my room, find my phone’s charger, and plug it in. I lay on my bed and fade out for the time it takes to get enough power to run and then I inspect it. The screen is okay, but its back and sides are a little worse for wear, scratched up. It’s strange looking at it, knowing they found it while they were searching for Penny, anything about her.
I turn it on and the notifications chime, one after the other.
Voice mails first.
Five frantic messages from my mom.
Romy, where are you?
We’re getting worried …
By the last, she’s in pieces and she’s pleading, come home, please, and promising, I’m not mad at you.
Todd calls too. We’d really like to hear from you, kid.
It doesn’t go down easy, this proof of being loved.
The last message is from Leon.
Hey, Romy. I hope you get this. Pause and static. There’s a hum in the background, like he’s driving and he probably was. Please get this and call when you do. Please. Um. Pause. I don’t want to hang up. He laughs, awkwardly. So call when you get this. Or maybe I’ll see you first … that’d be okay too. I really hope you’re all right.
This is what it would’ve been like for Penny’s family.
This is what it’s still like for them, for her mom and her dad, for Alek. Their love, desperate messages sent out to the universe, waiting to be returned and her silence—
Her silence.
I stare at my phone until it starts to blur. The first tears fall, bring focus, and that’s when I notice the last notification. 1 UNSENT E-MAIL.
An e-mail, waiting for me to send it.
But I haven’t sent an e-mail from my phone in a very long time.
Did I leave a note for myself, and I was so drunk I put it there? It seems stupid, reaching, but who else would—I fall through the thought before it’s complete, hit the ground hard.
Who else would, if not me?
I find the e-mail and open it.
In the TO field, the address of GHS’s student announcement listserv. Any time a student has an announcement—club meetings or volunteer work opportunities or tutoring offers and now, searches for missing girls—they’re invited to put it on the listserv and it goes out to the entire school: the faculty, the student body. After students started sneaking trash talk about teachers and each other in their messages, a code of conduct was written up and Principal Diaz got tough. Every time someone fucks around on the listserv, the entire school loses some kind of privilege. To further prevent any misuse, signing up has also been open to parents. It’s our choice whether we want to show them the kind of monsters they’re raising.
There is no message in the body of the e-mail. What’s the point in sending a blank e-mail to everyone
in school? But then I see the attachments at the bottom—
Photos. From my phone.
Only the file names are visible. All the possibilities of what they could reveal become a vise around my heart, makes the question of whether I did this … or someone else that much worse. I check the sent folder to make sure nothing got out—that this wasn’t the last e-mail in a long line of e-mails, but it’s empty. Nothing was sent.
I go to my photos and as soon as I’m there, I glimpse thumbnails, tiny bursts of colors, shapes that make people, a night. I let it sink in. My phone screen dims, conserving its battery, while I try to find the will to tap the screen and pick a photo.
It brightens when I finally do.
I’ve hated having my photograph taken since I was eleven. There are albums full of me before that age, this smiling, happy kid, playing it up for the camera. After that, it’s all hands in front of face and Mom, don’t. She thought it was natural; a girl gets to be a certain age and she doesn’t want to see herself anymore. But it wasn’t that. I didn’t understand who I was looking at. I could see the beginnings of a takeover, a body turning, growing, changing into something that didn’t feel like it belonged to me and every moment since then I’ve spent trying to hold on to the pieces of myself I still understand.
The girl in the photo is a waste of a girl.
A wasted girl on the ground, folded in on herself, her head against her knees and she’s surrounded by a small crowd with their backs to the camera and I don’t know who I feel more betrayed by—them or her.
I make myself numb as I switch to the next photo and the camera is closer to the girl, too close, at a nauseatingly perverse angle. The girl’s shirt is loose and wrinkly and dirty, her hair is half out of the ponytail it was tied in, and the parts of her face that are visible look wrong, like she’s so far from where her body happens to be.
I switch to the next photo and she’s staring right at me now—the camera. Her eyes are half-open and I feel it, she’s dead. She’s dead. I feel her deadness, feel her stuck between two places, the party and the rabbit hole beneath her.
Fall, I think. Be anywhere else.
In the next photograph, her hands are at her shirt, fumbling with its buttons. No, no. I ache at the picture after—a first button is undone, her hand snaked past her collar, resting against her skin. In the next shot, the camera is even closer. Another button is undone.