Vanishing Girls

  The girl looks maybe half-Asian and has long black hair, worn in multiple braids, and a tattoo of a snail just below her left ear. She looks like someone Dara would know, except that she’s smiling and she has the bright eyes of someone who really likes mornings. Her front teeth overlap a little, which makes me like her.

  “Hey,” she says. “Welcome to FanLand.”

  “I’ve heard that a few hundred times already,” I say.

  She laughs. “Yeah, Greg’s a little . . . enthusiastic about the new recruits. About everything, actually. I’m Alice.”

  “Nicole,” I say. We shake hands, even though she can’t be much older than I am. Twenty, tops. She gestures for me to follow her, and we turn right toward the Cove, the “dry” half of the park, where all the big rides, plus the game booths and food vendors, are. “Most people call me Nick.”

  Her face changes, an almost imperceptible switch, as if a curtain has come down behind her eyes. “You’re—you’re Dara’s sister.”

  I nod. She turns away, making a face as if she’s sucking on something sour. “I’m sorry about the accident,” she blurts out at last.

  My whole body goes hot, like it always does when someone brings up the accident, as if I’ve just walked into a room where people have been whispering about me. “You heard, huh?”

  To Alice’s credit, she looks sorry to have mentioned it. “My cousin goes to Somerville. Plus, since John Parker . . .”

  Hearing Parker’s name—his full name—makes something glitch in my chest. I haven’t thought of Parker in months. Or maybe I’ve been trying not to think about him for months. And nobody calls him by his full name. He and his older brother have been Big Parker and Little Parker for as long as I can remember. Even his mom calls her sons the Parkers.

  John Parker makes him sound like a stranger.

  “Since John Parker what?” I prompt.

  She doesn’t answer, and doesn’t have to, because at that moment I see him: shirtless, straddling an open toolbox and fiddling with something beneath the undercarriage of the Banana Boat, a ride that, true to its name, looks like a giant airborne banana with multicolored sides.

  Maybe he hears his name or senses it or maybe it’s just coincidence, but at that moment he looks up and sees me. I lift a hand to wave but freeze when I see his expression—horrified, practically, as if I’m a ghost or a monster.

  Then I realize: he probably blames me too.

  Alice is still talking. “. . . put you on crew with Parker this morning. I have a shit ton of work to do for the anniversary party. He can show you the ropes, no problem, and I’m around if you need anything.”

  Now Parker and I are separated by no more than ten feet. Finally he ducks under the steel support beams, sweeping up his T-shirt at the same time and using it to quickly wipe his face. He seems to have grown another two inches since I last saw him in March, so he towers over me.

  “What are you doing here?” he says. With his shirt off I can see the half-moon shape on his shoulder blade, a smooth white scar, where he and Dara burned themselves with lighters freshman year while they were drunk on Southern Comfort. I was supposed to do it, too, but chickened out at the last second.

  Stupidly I tug at my T-shirt. “Working,” I say. “My mom forced me into it.”

  “Wilcox got to your mom, too, huh?” he says. He’s still not smiling. “And I’m supposed to play tour guide?”

  “I guess so.” My whole body feels itchy. Sweat moves between my breasts, down to my waistband. For years, Parker was my best friend. We spent hours watching bad B horror movies on his couch, experimenting with ways to mix chocolate and popcorn together, or rented foreign films and disabled the subtitles so we could make up the plots ourselves. We texted in pre-calc when we were bored, until Parker got busted and had his phone taken away for a week. We hopped his older brother’s scooter and piled on: me, Parker, and Dara, and had to abandon it and run for the woods when a cop spotted us.

  Then, last December, something changed. Dara had just broken up with her latest boyfriend, Josh or Jake or Mark or Mike—I could never keep them straight, they cycled in and out of her life so fast. And suddenly she would crash movie night with Parker, wearing short-shorts and a tissue-thin shirt that showed the black lacy cups of her bra. Or I would see them riding the scooter together in the freezing cold, her arms wrapped around his chest, her head tilted back, laughing. Or I would walk into the room and he would jerk quickly backward, flashing me a guilty look, while she kept a long, tan leg draped across his lap.

  Suddenly I was the third wheel.

  “Look.” My throat feels like it’s coated in sand. “I know you might be mad at me—”

  “Mad at you?” he interjects, before I can say more. “I figured you were mad at me.”

  I feel very exposed in the high glare, as if the sun is a big telescope and I’m the bug on the slide. “Why would I be?”

  His eyes shift away from mine. “After what happened with Dara . . .” Her name sounds different in his mouth, special and strange, like something made of glass. I’m half tempted to ask whether he and Dara are still hooking up, but then he would know we aren’t speaking. Besides, it’s none of my business.

  “Let’s just start over,” I say. “How about that?”

  Finally he smiles: a slow process, beginning in his eyes, lightening them. Parker’s eyes are gray, but the warmest gray in the world. Like the gray of a flannel blanket washed a hundred times. “Sure,” he says. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

  “So are you going to play tour guide or what?” I reach out to punch his arm, and he laughs, pretending I’ve hurt him.

  “After you,” he says, with a flourish.

  Parker takes me on a tour of the park, pointing out all the places, both official and unofficial, I’ll need to know: Wading Lake, informally known as the Piss Pool, where all the toddlers splash around in their diapers; the DeathTrap, a roller coaster that might, Parker tells me, someday live up to its name, since he’s pretty sure it hasn’t been inspected since the early nineties; the small, fenced-in area behind one of the snack bars (which for some reason at FanLand have been renamed “pavilions”), which contains the maintenance hut, where the employees go to smoke or hook up in between shifts. He shows me how to measure the chlorine in the Piss Pool—“always add a little extra; if it starts burning off your eyelashes, you’ll know you’ve gone too far”—and how to operate the hand crank on the bumper boats.

  By eleven o’clock, the park is crowded with families and camp groups, and the “regulars”: usually old people, wearing sun visors and fanny packs, who totter between the rides announcing to no one in particular every way in which the park has changed. Parker knows a bunch of them by name and greets everyone with a smile.

  At lunchtime, he introduces me to Princess—actual name Shirley, though Parker cautions me never to call her that—an ancient blond woman who runs one of the four snack bars—excuse me, pavilions—and clearly has a major crush on Parker. She gives him a free bag of chips and me a long scowl.

  “Is she that nice to everyone?” I say, when Parker and I take our hot dogs and sodas outside, to eat under the shadow of the Ferris wheel.

  “You don’t get a name like Princess without working for it,” he says, and then smiles. Every time Parker smiles, his nose wrinkles. He used to say it didn’t like to be left out of the fun. “She’ll warm up eventually. She’s been here almost since the beginning, you know.”

  “The very beginning?”

  He turns his attention to a miniature relish pack, trying to work the green goop out of the plastic with a thumbnail. “July 29, 1940. Opening day. Shirley joined up in the fifties.”

  July 29. Dara’s birthday. This year, FanLand will turn seventy-five on the day she turns seventeen. If Parker makes the connection, he doesn’t say so. And I’m not about to point it out.

  “Still eating alien slime, I see?” I say instead, jerking my chin toward the relish.

  He pretends to be
offended. “Le slime. It’s not alien. It’s French.”

  The afternoon is a blur of rounds: scooping up litter, changing trash bags, dealing with a five-year-old kid who has somehow gotten separated from his camp group and stands, bawling, underneath a crooked sign pointing the way to the Haunted Ship. Someone throws up on the Tornado, and Parker informs me it’s my job, as the new girl, to clean it—but then does all the work himself.

  There’s fun stuff, too: riding the Albatross to see whether the gears feel sticky; washing down the carousel with an industrial hose so powerful I can barely keep it in my hands; downtime between jobs when I talk with Parker about the other kids who work at FanLand and who hates who and who’s hooking up or breaking up or getting back together.

  I finally find out why FanLand is so short-staffed this summer.

  “So there’s this guy Donovan.” Parker starts into the story while we’re taking a break between shifts, sitting in the shade of an enormous potted palm. He keeps swatting at the flies. Parker’s hands are constantly in motion. He’s like a catcher telegraphing mysterious signs to an invisible teammate: hand to nose, tug on ear, tuck the hair. Except the signs aren’t mysterious to me. I know what all of them mean, whether he’s happy or sad or stressed or anxious. Whether he’s hungry, or had too much sugar, or too little sleep.

  “First name or last?” I interrupt.

  “Interesting question. Not sure. Everyone just calls him Donovan. Anyway, he’d been working at FanLand forever. Way longer than Mr. Wilcox. Knows the whole place inside and out, everyone loves him, really great with the kids—”

  “Wait—was he here longer than Princess?”

  “Nobody’s been here longer than Princess. Now stop interrupting. So he was a good guy, okay? At least, that’s what everyone thought.” Parker pauses dramatically, deliberately making me wait.

  “So what happened?” I say.

  “The cops busted down his door a few weeks ago.” He raises one eyebrow. His eyebrows are very thick and practically black, like he has vampire blood somewhere far back in his ancestry. “Turns out he’s some kind of pedo. He had, like, a hundred pictures of high school girls on his computer. It was some crazy sting operation. They’d been tracking him for months.”

  “No way. And no one had any idea?”

  Parker shook his head. “Not a clue. I only met him once or twice, but he seemed normal. Like someone who should be busy coaching soccer and complaining about mortgage rates.”

  “Creepy,” I say. Years ago, I remember learning about the mark of Cain in Sunday school and thinking that it wasn’t such a bad idea. How convenient if you could see what was wrong with people right away, if they wore their sicknesses and crimes on their skin like tattoos.

  “Very creepy,” he agrees.

  We don’t talk about the accident, or Dara, or about the past at all. And suddenly it’s three o’clock and the first shift of my new job is over, and it didn’t totally suck.

  Parker walks me back to the office, where Mr. Wilcox and a pretty, dark-skinned woman I assume is Donna, the woman who hoards all the Cokes, are arguing about additional security for the anniversary party, in the good-natured, easy tones of people who have spent years arguing without ever essentially disagreeing. Mr. Wilcox breaks off long enough to give me another hearty slap on the back.

  “Nick? You enjoy your first day? Of course you did! Best place in the world. See you tomorrow, bright and early!”

  I retrieve my backpack. When I reemerge into the sunshine, Parker is waiting for me. He has changed shirts, and his red uniform is balled up under one arm. He smells like soap and new leather.

  “I’m glad we get to work together,” I blurt as we walk into the parking lot, still crowded with cars and coach buses. FanLand is open until 10:00 p.m., and Parker has told me that the night crowd is totally different: younger, rowdier, more unpredictable. Once, he told me, he caught two people having sex on the Ferris wheel; another time he found a girl snorting coke off a sink in one of the men’s toilets. “I’m not sure I could handle Wilcox all by myself,” I add quickly, because Parker is looking at me strangely.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I’m glad, too.” He tosses his keys a few inches and catches them in his palm. “So you want a ride home? I think the Chariot’s missed you.”

  Seeing his car, so familiar, so him, I have a quick flash of memory, like an explosion in my brain: the windshield fogged up, patterned with rain and body heat; Parker’s guilty face; and Dara’s eyes, cold and hard, gloating, like the eyes of a stranger.

  “That’s all right,” I say quickly.

  “You sure?” He pops open the driver’s-side door.

  “I have Dara’s car,” I say quickly. The words come out before I can think about them.

  “You do?” Parker seems surprised. I’m grateful the lot is crowded, so my lie isn’t immediately obvious. “All right, then. Well . . . I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” I say, willing away another image of that night, of the way it felt to know, deep down, that everything had changed; that nothing would ever be the same between the three of us again. “See you.”

  I’ve already started to turn away—lingering, now, so that Parker won’t see that I’m headed toward the bus stop, when he calls me back.

  “Look,” he says, all in a rush. “There’s a party at the Drink tonight. You should come. It’ll be super low-key,” he goes on. “Like twenty people, max. But bring whoever you want.” He says the last part in a funny voice, half-strangled. I wonder whether it’s a hint, and he’s asking me to bring Dara along. Then I hate myself for having to wonder it. Before they hooked up, there was never any weirdness between us.

  One more thing that Dara ruined because she felt like it, because she had an itch, an urge, a whim. He’s so fuckable, I remember her saying one morning, out of the blue, when we’d all gone across the street to Upper Reaches Park to watch his Ultimate Frisbee game. Did you ever notice that he’s undeniably fuckable? As we were watching him run across the ball field, chasing the bright red disk of the Frisbee, arm outstretched—the same boy-body-arm I’d known my whole life was transformed, in an instant, by Dara’s words.

  And I remember looking at her and thinking that she, too, looked like a stranger, with her hair (blond and purple, then) and the thick dusting of charcoal eye shadow on her lids, lips red and exaggerated with pencil, legs stretched out for miles underneath her short-shorts. How could my Dara, Little Egg, Nosebutton, who used to wrap her arms around my shoulders and stand on my toes so we could pretend to be one person as we staggered around the living room, have turned into someone who used the word fuckable, someone I barely knew, someone I feared, even?

  “It’ll be just like old times,” Parker says, and I feel a hard ache in my chest, a desperate desire for something lost long ago.

  Everyone knows you can’t go back.

  “Yeah, maybe. I’ll let you know,” I say, which I won’t.

  I watch him get into his car and drive off, waving, smiling big behind the glare, and pretend to be fumbling for keys in my bag. Then I walk across the parking lot to wait for the bus.

  BEFORE

  FEBRUARY 9

  Nick

  “Ow.” I open my eyes, blinking furiously. Dara’s face, from this angle, is as big as the moon, if the moon were painted in crazy colors: coal-black eye shadow, silver liner, a big red mouth like a smear of hot lava. “You keep poking me.”

  “You keep moving. Close your eyes.” She grabs my chin and blows, gently, on my eyelids. Her breath smells like vanilla Stoli. “There. You’re done. See?” I stand up from the toilet, where she’s installed me, and join her at the mirror. “Now we look like twins,” she says happily, putting her head on my shoulder.

  “Hardly,” I say. “I look like a drag queen.” Already I’m sorry I agreed to let Dara do my makeup. Normally I use ChapStick and mascara—and that’s only for special occasions. Now I feel like a kid who went crazy at a carnival face-painting booth.


  The funny thing is that Dara and I do look alike, mostly—and yet, everywhere she’s delicate and well-made and pretty, I’m lumpy and plain. Our hair is the same indeterminate brown, although hers is currently dyed black (Cleopatra black, she calls it) and has previously been platinum, auburn, and even, briefly, purple. We have the same hazel eyes spaced a little too far apart. We have the same nose, although mine is a teensy bit crooked, from where Parker accidentally clobbered me with a softball in third grade. I’m actually taller than Dara is, though you’d never know it—currently, she has on a pair of crazy wedge platform boots with a translucent dress that barely clears her underwear, plus black-and-white-striped tights that on anyone else would look idiotic. Meanwhile, I’m wearing what I always wear to the Founders’ Day Ball: a tank top and skinny jeans, plus comfortable ankle boots.

  That’s the thing about Dara and me: we’re both similar and worlds apart. Like the sun and the moon, or a starfish and a star: related, sure, but at the same time totally and completely different. And Dara’s always the one doing the shining.

  “You look beautiful,” Dara says, straightening up. On the sink, her phone starts vibrating and does a half turn next to the toothbrush cup before falling silent again. “Doesn’t she, Ari?”

  “Beautiful,” says Ariana, without looking up. Ariana has long, wavy blond hair and a facial-cleanser-and-Swiss-Alps kind of complexion, which makes her tongue ring, nose ring, and the tiny stud above her left eyebrow always seem out of place. She’s perched on the edge of the bathtub, stirring her warm vodka orange juice with a pinkie. She takes a sip and gags expressively.

  “Too strong?” Dara asks, faking innocence. Her phone starts going again. She quickly silences it.

  “No, it’s great,” Ariana says sarcastically. But she takes another sip. “I was looking for an excuse to burn away my tonsils. Who needs ’em?”