Vanishing Girls

  The last card is for a bar, Beamer’s. I know the place. It’s right off the 101, a half mile south of FanLand, and only a mile or so up the coast from where Dara and I had our accident.

  I flip the card over, and right then the whole world sharpens and condenses, funnels down to a name, Andre, and a few numbers scratched in ballpoint. Again, I get that little twinge, like a hidden part of my brain is firing up.I know that number. I texted it less than two hours ago.

  U better keep ur mouth shut or else!!!

  Weirdly, I don’t even feel afraid. I don’t feel much of anything at all.

  It’s not even eleven, and the drive to Beamer’s will take me less than twenty minutes.

  Plenty of time.

  Nick

  11:35 p.m.

  As soon as I pull into the parking lot at Beamer’s, I’m disappointed. I was hoping to see another clue, an immediate sign of Dara’s connection to this place. But Beamer’s looks like any one of the dozens of bars that clutter East Norwalk, only lonelier: this close to Orphan’s Beach, where the currents are vicious and deadly, visitors are fewer and so are businesses. Still, the parking lot is full of cars.

  Flyers in the darkened windows advertise Ladies’ Nights and drinks with names like Fuzzy Nipple and a VIP party uncreatively named Blackout. There’s even a velvet rope in front of the glass doors, which is ridiculous considering there’s no one waiting to get in, and the single patron who lingers in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette and talking on his phone, is wearing dirty jeans and a sleeveless Budweiser shirt.

  I watch Budweiser stub his cigarette out in a bucket presumably provided for that purpose, exhaling smoke through his nose, dragon-style. I’m about to get out of the car and follow him when the door swings open and I see a bouncer, roughly the shape and size of a humpbacked whale, intercept Budweiser on his way in. Budweiser holds up his hand, probably showing him a stamp, and the bouncer withdraws.

  I hadn’t counted on needing ID. But of course I do. For a moment, a wave of exhaustion hits me and I think about turning around, angling the car back in the direction of home, leaving Dara to go to hell.

  But there’s a stubborn part of me that refuses to give in so quickly. Besides, Dara doesn’t have a fake, at least as far as I know. She always bragged she didn’t need one and could flirt her way into any bar.

  If she can do it, I can do it, too.

  I flip down the mirror, regretting now the plain scoop-neck tank top and shorts I changed into before leaving the house again, and the fact that I decided to skip anything but a little ChapStick and some mascara. I look pale, and young.

  I twist around and reach into the backseat. Like Dara’s room, the upholstery is covered in a thick layer of accumulated clothing and trash. It doesn’t take me long to find a sequined tank top, some lip gloss, and even a cracked three-pack of dark eye shadow. I smear on some dark color with a thumb, trying to remember what Dara always said the few times she convinced me to let her do my makeup, and I emerged from the bathroom unrecognizable and always vaguely uncomfortable, like she had slipped me into a whole different skin: Blend from the bottom, go darker in the crease.

  I slick on some lip gloss, take my hair down from my ponytail and finger-comb it, and, after checking to make sure that the parking lot is empty of people, swap out tank tops. Dara’s sequined tank top hangs so low that a bit of my bra—black, thankfully, and not the printed yellow one I usually wear with a coffee stain directly over my left nipple—peeks out from the top.

  I check my reflection one last time and get a momentary shock. Dressed in Dara’s clothes, wearing Dara’s makeup, I look more like her than I would have thought possible.

  I take a deep breath, grab my bag, and step out of the car. At least I changed out of my sneakers to go to dinner, knowing my dad would lecture me if I didn’t. My gold gladiator sandals even have a teensy bit of a heel.

  The bouncer materializes even before I can get a hand on the door, seemingly rising out of the dark murk beyond the glass panes like an underwater creature surfacing. A rush of sound accompanies him out the door: thudding hip-hop music, women laughing, the chatter of dozens of drunk people.

  “ID,” he says, sounding bored. His eyes are at half-mast, low-lidded, like a lizard’s.

  I force a laugh. It sounds like someone’s choking me with a garden hose. “Really?” I lower my chin, the way Dara always does when she wants something, and blink up at him. But I can feel my left leg twitching. “I’ll be five minutes. Less. I just have to give my friend her wallet.”

  “ID,” he repeats, like my words haven’t even registered.

  “Look,” I say. He’s keeping the door open with one foot, and I can just make out a portion of the bar behind him, dimly illuminated by badly unseasonal Christmas lights. Several girls are huddled together over some drinks. Is one of them Dara? It’s too dark to tell. “I’m not here to drink, okay? I’m just looking for my friend. You can watch me. I’ll be in and out.”

  “No ID, no entry.” He jerks a thumb toward the sign posted on the door, which reads exactly that. Beneath it is another posted sign: NO SHOES, NO SHIRT, BIG PROBLEM.

  “You don’t understand.” Now I’m getting pissed. And for just a second—white walled inside that hot flash of anger—something clicks, and I get it, and I slip into her skin without meaning to. I toss my hair and reach into my back pocket, extracting the business card I found in Dara’s room. “Andre invited me to come.”

  It’s a huge gamble. I don’t know who Andre is or whether he even works here. He might just be some random sleazeball Dara met at the bar. In the photo on Dara’s phone, he was wearing a leather jacket and watching Dara with an expression I didn’t like. He might have simply grabbed a card to write down his number.

  But I’m coasting on instinct now, listening to a low hum of certainty buzzing somewhere deep in my brain. Why write down a number? Why not text it, or program it into Dara’s phone directly? There’s a message in these numbers, I’m sure of it: a secret code, an invitation, a warning.

  The bouncer examines the card for what feels like an eternity, flipping it back to front, front to back, while I hold my breath, trying not to fidget.

  When he looks at me again, something has changed—his eyes tick slowly over my face and down to my tits, and I fight the urge to cross my arms. He’s no longer bored. He’s evaluating.

  “Inside,” he grunts. I wonder if his vocabulary is limited to the words he needs for the job: ID, inside, no, entry. He elbows the door open a little farther, so I just have room to slip by him. A blast of air-conditioning greets me, and a heavy cloud of booze-smells. My stomach tightens.

  What am I doing?

  More importantly: What’s Dara doing?

  It’s so loud, I miss what the bouncer says when he next speaks. But he puts a hand on my elbow and points, gesturing me to follow him toward the back.

  The bar is crowded, mostly with guys who look at least a decade too old to be as loud and drunk as they are. There are padded red vinyl booths arranged on an elevated platform: one guy is groping his date while she sips a bright-pink drink from the largest cup I’ve ever seen. A DJ is blasting bad house music from one corner, but there are also four TVs mounted behind the bar and baseball playing on every one, as if Beamer’s hasn’t decided whether it wants to go for full-on Eurotrash club scene or sports bar. My danger alarm is going off the charts. There’s something . . . off about the whole place, like it’s not a real place but an imitation of a real place, a hastily constructed set piece meant to conceal something else.

  I scan the crowd, looking for Dara or even someone who looks like a friend of Dara’s. But all the women are older, midtwenties at least. In her journal, Dara mentioned she was working for Andre. But all the waitresses, too, are older: strapped into micro miniskirts and tight tank tops with the Beamer’s logo—two headlights I’m pretty sure are meant to look like nipples—emblazoned across their boobs, looking bored or overwhelmed or just annoyed.


  I think of that picture of Dara on the couch, reclining, eyes glazed over, and my stomach knots up.

  We move down a narrow hall that leads to the bathrooms. The walls are papered with multicolored flyers—Wednesday Happy Hour! Fourth of July Bonanza! Ladies’ Night Every Sunday! and more of the strangely monochromatic signs advertising Blackout—and photographs. I’m half hoping I’ll see a photo of Dara and half praying I won’t. But there must be five hundred pictures on the wall, all of them practically identical—tan girls in tank tops aiming kissy-faces at the camera, guys grinning over tequila shots—and we’re moving too quickly for me to make out more than a dozen faces, none of them hers.

  At the end of the hall is a door marked PRIVATE. The bouncer raps twice and, in response to a muffled command I again don’t hear, swings open the door. I’m surprised to see a woman sitting behind a desk, in an office cluttered with boxes full of plastic straws and bar napkins printed with the Beamer’s logo.

  “Casey,” the bouncer says. “A girl for Andre.” After shepherding me inside, he immediately abandons us. The door seals out most of the noise from outside. Still, I can feel the pulsating bass rhythm, beating up through my feet.

  “Sit down,” the woman—Casey—says, her eyes glued to a computer screen. “Give me a second. This fucking system . . .” She works her keyboard like she’s trying to punch it to death, then abruptly shoves her computer aside. She’s probably forty, with brown hair streaked blond and a smudge of something—chocolate?—on her upper lip. She looks like a guidance counselor, except for her eyes, which are a vivid, unnatural shade of blue. “Okay,” she says. “What can I do for you? Let me guess.” Her eyes sweep over me, landing on my chest, like the bouncer’s did. “You’re looking for a job.”

  I decide my best bet is to say nothing. I just nod.

  “You eighteen?” she says. I nod again. “Good, good.” She looks relieved, as if I’ve passed a test. “Because it’s state law, you know. You have to be twenty-one to waitress, since we don’t serve food. But for the private parties, we get to bend the rules.” She’s speaking so fast, I’m having trouble keeping up. “You’ll have to fill out an application and a disclaimer, stating you’re telling us the truth about your age.”

  She slides a piece of paper across the desk to me. Conspicuously, she doesn’t ask for my ID, and the “application” just asks for my name, phone number, and email address, and to sign a statement guaranteeing that I’m of age. When I started work at FanLand, I thought they might ask for a DNA swab.

  I hunch over the paper and act like I’m puzzling over it, when really I’m buying time and trying to figure out my next angle. “I don’t have any waitressing experience,” I say apologetically, as if it’s just occurring to me. Behind Casey are a series of gray filing cabinets, some of them wedged open because their contents no longer fit. And I know that somewhere buried among all the files and invoices and cheesy Beamer’s desktop mouse pads is Dara’s application, the confident scrawl of her signature.

  I’m now sure. She sat here, in this chair. Maybe she worked here, before the accident. And it’s no coincidence that on the night of her birthday, she vanished without taking her cell phone. It all leads back to this place, to this office and to Casey with her bright smile and cold, dazzling eyes. To Andre. To those pictures and his threats.

  You think this is a fucking joke?

  I need to know.

  Casey laughs. “If you can walk and chew gum at the same time, you’ll be fine. Like I said, we don’t ask our hostesses to serve. It’s against state law.” She leans back in her chair. “How did you hear about us, by the way?”

  She keeps her voice light, but I can sense a sharp undercurrent running beneath the words. For a split second, my mind goes totally blank; I haven’t prepared a cover story, and I have no idea what, exactly, I’m supposed to know. I feel like I’m fumbling to grab something slick in cold water: all I get is a rough shape, blunt edges, no details at all.

  I blurt, “I met Andre at a party. He mentioned it.”

  “Ah.” She seems to relax fractionally. “Yeah, Andre’s our GM and recruiter. He’s in charge of our special events. I should warn you, though”—she leans forward again, crossing her hands on the desk, doing the concerned guidance counselor right before she drops the bomb, You’re failing chemistry, you didn’t get into college—“we don’t have any upcoming parties. I can’t say, in all honesty, when we’ll be up and running again.”

  “Oh.” I do my best to look disappointed, even though I’m still not sure exactly what she means by parties. “Why not?”

  She smiles thinly. But her expression stays guarded. “We’re ironing out some kinks,” she says. “Staffing problems.” She emphasizes the last word slightly, and I can’t help but think of the message Andre sent me, or sent Dara: u better keep ur mouth shut or else!!!

  Is Dara one of his problems?

  For a second, I imagine that Casey knows exactly who I am and what I’ve come for. Then, mercifully, she looks away, returning her attention to the computer. “I won’t bore you with the details,” she says. “If you want to go ahead and write down your phone number, we’ll give you a call when we need you.” She jerks her head toward the one-page application, which I have yet to fill out, and just like that, I know I’ve been dismissed.

  But I can’t go yet—not when I’ve learned nothing.

  “Is Andre here?” I say desperately, before I’ve made the decision to ask. “Can I talk to him?”

  She has gone back to typing. Now she stiffens, her fingers hovering over the keys. “You can talk to him.” This time when she looks at me, she squints, as if seeing me from a far distance. I look away, blushing, hoping she won’t see the resemblance to Dara; now I regret making myself up like her. “But he’ll tell you the same thing I did.”

  “Please,” I say, and then, so she won’t suspect how desperate I am, quickly add, “it’s just—I really need the money.”

  She scrutinizes me for a second longer. Then, to my surprise, she laughs. “Don’t we all?” she says, winking. “Okay, then. You know where to find him? Down the stairs across from the ladies’. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. And don’t forget to drop off your application with me before you leave.”

  “I won’t,” I say, standing up so quickly the chair screeches against the floor. “I mean, thanks.”

  Back in the hall, I pause for a moment, disoriented in the sudden darkness. Up ahead, the disco light is whirling, sending showers of purple light around a mostly empty dance floor. The music is so loud it makes my head hurt. Why would anyone come here? Why did Dara come here?

  I close my eyes and think back to the days before the accident. Weirdly the only thing that comes is an image of Parker’s car, and that fogged-up windshield, the rain fizzing on the glass. We didn’t mean to. . . .

  I open my eyes again. Two girls spill out of the bathroom, holding hands and giggling. As soon as they start down the hall, I slip after them, noticing for the first time a dark alcove immediately across from the LADIES sign, and stairs leading down to the basement.

  The stairs corkscrew around a small, bare landing and abruptly turn from wood to concrete. Another few steps, and I’m deposited in a long, unfinished hallway with cinder-block walls and a paint-splattered concrete floor. The whole basement feels forgotten and disused. In a horror film, this would be where the blond girl goes to die in the opening scene.

  I shiver in the sudden chill. It’s cold down here and smells like all basements, like moisture barely contained. Naked bulbs encased in mesh hang from the ceiling, and the music is nothing but a dull thudding, like a monster’s distant heartbeat. Boxes are heaped at the far end of the hallway, and through one half-open door I see what must be the staff changing room: grim gray lockers, several pairs of sneakers lined up under a bench, and a cell phone buzzing forlornly, performing a quarter-turn rotation on the wood when it does. I get the sudden, prickly feeling of being watched, and I spin around, half expecting s
omeone to jump out at me.

  No one. Still, my heart rate won’t return to normal.

  I’m about to return upstairs, thinking I must have misunderstood Casey’s directions, when voices down the hall crest sharply, suddenly, over the music. Even though I don’t hear a single word, I immediately know: an argument.

  I continue down the hall, moving carefully, holding my breath. With every step the itch in my skin gets worse, as if invisible people are leaning forward to breathe on me. I remember, then, the time Parker dared Dara and me to walk across the graveyard off Cressida Circle at night when we were kids.

  “But go quietly,” he said, dropping his voice, “or they’ll reach out and—” He seized me suddenly by the waist and I screamed. Afterward he couldn’t stop laughing; still, I never did walk across the graveyard, too afraid that if I did, a hand would reach out and grab me, pulling me down into the rotten earth.

  I pass another door, this one gaping open to reveal a dingy bathroom with caulk oozing like thick caterpillars between cracks in the wall. By now the voices are louder. There’s a final door, this one closed, a few feet farther on. This must be Andre’s office.

  The voices abruptly go silent and I freeze, holding my breath, wondering if I’ve been detected, debating whether I should knock or turn around and run.

  Then a girl says, quietly but very clearly, “The police grilled me for, like, four hours. And I didn’t have anything to tell them. I couldn’t tell them anything.”

  A male voice—Andre—replies, “So what the hell are you worried about?”

  “She’s my best friend. She was drunk. She doesn’t even remember getting home. And her sister’s missing. Of course I’m fucking worried.”

  My heart stops beating for the space of a breath, a name: Madeline Snow. They’re talking about Madeline Snow.

  “Lower your voice. And don’t feed me some horseshit. You’re trying to cover your ass. But you knew what you were getting into when you signed up.”

  “You said everything would be private. You said no one would know.”