Vanishing Girls

  Still nothing. Cursing again—out loud, this time—I shove my phone in my pocket, grab my bag, and take the stairs up to the attic, two at a time. Dara pretends everything I own is too boring for her to borrow, but recently my favorite sweaters and T-shirts have been disappearing and reappearing strangely altered, reeking of cigarettes and pot, sporting new stains and holes.

  Dara hates that her door has no lock and militantly insists that we knock before entering, which is why I swing the door open with no warning, hoping it will annoy her.

  “What the hell?” I say. She’s sitting up in bed, facing away from me, still wearing her sleep shirt, her hair ratty with knots. “I’ve been calling you for like twenty—”

  Then she turns around and I can’t finish my sentence.

  Her eyes are swollen and her skin is splotchy and bloated in places, like overripe fruit. Her bangs are plastered to her damp forehead. Her cheeks are streaked with mascara, as if she fell asleep without washing her face and has been crying all night long.

  “Jesus.” As always, Dara’s room looks as if it’s been the recent victim of a small and concentrated tsunami. I almost trip three times moving toward the bed. The radiators are going overtime; her room is stifling hot, heavily scented with cinnamon and saline and clove smoke and, just faintly, sweat. “What happened?”

  I sit down next to her and try to put an arm around her shoulder, but she pulls away. Even from a distance, I can feel heat radiating from her skin.

  She takes a shuddering breath, but when she speaks her voice is dull, monotone. “Parker dumped me. Again.” She mashes a fist into her eye as if she’s trying to physically press back tears. “Happy fucking Valentine’s Day.”

  I count to three in my head so I don’t say anything dumb. Since they started hooking up or going out or whatever they’re doing, Dara and Parker have broken up three times that I know about. And Dara always cries and freaks and tells me she’ll never talk to him again, and a week later I see her in school with her arms wrapped around his waist, stretching onto tiptoe to whisper something. “I’m really sorry, Dara,” I say carefully.

  “Oh, please.” She whirls around to face me. “No, you’re not. You’re happy. You always told me it wouldn’t last.”

  “I never said that,” I say, feeling a quick flare of anger. “I never said that.”

  “But you thought it.” After crying, Dara’s eyes go from green to practically yellow. “You always thought it was a bad idea. You didn’t have to say so.”

  I keep my mouth shut because she’s right, and there’s no point trying to deny it.

  Dara draws her knees to her chest and puts her head between them. “I hate him,” she says, in a muffled voice. “I feel like such an idiot.” Then, even quieter: “Why doesn’t he think I’m good enough?”

  “Come on, Dara.” I’m losing patience with her performance; I’ve heard the whole monologue before. “You know that’s not true.”

  “It is true,” she says, her voice small now. There’s a beat of silence. Then she says, even quieter, “Why doesn’t anyone love me?”

  That’s the essence of Dara: she’ll annoy the shit out of you and then break your heart a second later. I reach out to touch her and then think better of it. “D-bar, you know that’s not true,” I say. “I love you. Mom loves you. Dad loves you.”

  “That doesn’t count,” she says. “You guys have to love me. It’s practically illegal not to. You probably just love me so you won’t go to jail.”

  I can’t help it; I laugh. Dara lifts her head up just long enough to glare at me before retreating again, like an injured turtle. “Come on, Dara,” I say. I unsling my bag and set it down. No point in rushing now. There’s no way I’ll make it to homeroom at all, much less on time. “You have more friends than anyone I know.”

  “Not real friends,” she says. “I just know people.”

  I don’t know whether I want to hug or strangle her. “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “I can prove it.” I grab her phone from the bedside table, where it’s sitting next to a pile of crumpled tissues stained with lipstick and mascara. She’s never bothered to change her password: 0729. July 29. Her birthday, the only password she ever uses, the only password she can ever remember. I pull up her photos and start scrolling through them: Dara at house parties, keg parties, dance parties, pool parties. “If everyone hates you so much, who are all these people?”

  I pull up a grainy picture of Dara and Ariana—at least I think it’s Ariana, although she’s wearing so much makeup and the picture quality is so bad, it’s hard to tell—surrounded by guys who must be in their early twenties at least. One of them has his arm around Dara; he’s wearing a cheesy leather jacket and would be hot except for his hair, which is thinning, and gelled into spikes. I wonder when this was taken, and whether poor, brokenhearted Dara was with Parker at the time.

  Dara shoves the pillows off her face and sits up, making a grab for the phone. “What the hell?” She rolls her eyes when I hold the phone out of reach. “Are you serious?”

  “Jesus.” I stand up and make a show of shaking my head over the picture. “Ariana looks like a slutty bumblebee in that shirt. Friends don’t let friends pair yellow and black.”

  “Give it back.”

  I take a step backward, dodging her. Dara has no choice but to stand up.

  “Ha,” I say, angling away from her as she once again tries to swipe the phone back. “You’re out of bed.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Dara says. But at least she doesn’t look so much like an abandoned doll washed up on a reef of pillows and old sheets. Her eyes are bright with anger. “This isn’t a joke.”

  “Who’s this guy?” I pull up a second picture of leather-jacket guy. It appears to have been taken in a bar or a basement—somewhere dark and crowded with people. In this one, obviously a selfie, Dara is making a kissy-face at the camera while behind her, Leather Jacket watches. Something in his expression makes me nervous; it’s the way Perkins looks when he locates a new mouse hole. “He looks like he wants to eat your face.”

  “That’s Andre.” She at last succeeds in grabbing the phone back from me. “He’s nobody.” She hits delete, punching hard with a finger, and then deletes the next picture that comes up, and the next, and the next. “They’re all nobodies. They don’t matter.”

  She flops onto the bed again, still deleting pictures, jabbing at the phone forcefully as if she can physically splinter the images into nonexistence, and mutters something I don’t quite make out. But I can tell from her expression that I’m not going to like it.

  “What did you say?” I’ve completely missed homeroom by now and will be late to first period, too. I’ll get detention, all for Dara’s sake, all because she can’t leave anything whole and good and untouched, all because she has to dig and explode and experiment, like a kid making a mess in the kitchen, pretending to be a cook, pretending something good will actually come out.

  “I said you don’t understand,” she says, without looking up. “You don’t understand anything.”

  “Do you even like Parker?” I say, because now I can’t help it, can’t keep back the anger. “Or was it just to see if you could?”

  “I don’t like him,” she says, going very still. “I love him. I’ve always loved him.” I’m tempted to remind her that she said the exact same thing about: Jacob, Mitts, Brent, and Jack.

  Instead I say, “Look. I thought it was a bad idea because of this. Because of . . .” I struggle to find the right words. “You were best friends before.”

  “He was your best friend,” she fires back, and lies down, curling her legs up to her chest again. “He’s always liked you better.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say automatically, even though, really, I always kind of believed that was true. Was that why I was so shocked when Dara was the one to kiss him? When he kissed her back? Even though it was often the three of us, he was my best friend, my giggle-till-you-snarf-soda, my antidote-to-boredom, my talk-abou
t-nothing person. And Dara was mine, too. For once, I was the apex of the triangle, the high point that kept the whole structure together.

  Until Dara once again had to be on top.

  Dara looks away and says nothing. I’m sure in her head she’s the tragic Juliet, about to pose for her final, premortem photo.

  “Look, I’m sorry you’re upset.” I pick up my bag from the floor. “And I’m sorry I apparently don’t understand. But I’m late.”

  She still doesn’t say anything. There’s no point asking whether she plans on going to school. She very obviously doesn’t. I wish Mom could be half as hard on Dara as she is in her school, where, apparently, some of the junior boys just refer to her as “that tough bitch.”

  I’m halfway to the door before Dara speaks again.

  “Just don’t pretend, okay? I can’t stand it when you do.”

  When I turn around, she’s looking at me with the strangest expression—like someone who knows a very juicy, very secret secret.

  “Pretend what?” I say.

  For a second, the sun goes behind a cloud, and Dara’s room turns incrementally darker. It’s as if someone has held up a palm to Dara’s windows, and now, in the shadows, she looks like a stranger. “Don’t pretend you aren’t happy,” she says. “I know you,” she goes on, when I start to contradict her. “You act like you’re so good. But deep down, you’re just as screwed up as the rest of us.”

  “Good-bye, Dara,” I say, stepping out into the hall. I make sure to slam the door so hard behind me, it rattles on its hinges, listening with satisfaction as something inside—a picture frame? her favorite mug?—crashes to the ground, a responsive echo.

  Dara’s not the only one who knows how to break things.

  AFTER

  JULY 23

  Nick

  “It still works, you know.”

  I haven’t realized I’ve been staring up at the Gateway until Alice comes up behind me. I take a step backward, nearly planting a foot in the paint tray.

  She pushes a strand of hair back from her forehead with the inside of her wrist. Her face is flushed, and it makes her eyes look light brown, nearly yellow. “The Gateway,” she says, jerking her chin toward the huge metal spire. “It still works. Wilcox gets it inspected every summer. He’s determined to run it again. I think he feels bad, you know, like as long as the Gateway stays off-limits it means it really was his fault. The girl’s death, I mean. He has to prove the ride is safe.” She shrugs, scratching the tattoo below her left ear with one blue-paint-splattered finger.

  When we’re not working the rides today, everyone on shift has been tasked with concealing evidence of last night’s vandalism. Sometime just before closing, a few idiots with graffiti cans went around decorating various signs around the park with crude illustrations of a certain part of the male anatomy. Wilcox seemed unfazed this morning. I later heard this happens at least once a summer.

  “He petitions the park advisory department every year.” Alice sits down on a small plastic bench shaped like a tree stump. It’s rare that Alice sits down. She’s always moving, always directing things and calling out orders and laughing. Earlier today I saw her climbing up the scaffolding of the Cobra to get to a kid’s backpack that had somehow, inexplicably, become stuck in the gears—swinging, spiderlike, between structural supports, while a small crowd of FanLand employees had gathered, some to cheer her on, some begging her to get down, others scouting for Mr. Wilcox and Donna.

  I watched Parker watching her, head tilted up to the sky, hands on his hips, eyes sparkling, and felt—what? Not jealousy, exactly. Jealousy is a strong feeling, a feeling that twists your stomach and gnaws your insides to shreds. This was more of a hollowness, like being really hungry for such a long time that you kind of get used to it.

  Did he ever look at Dara like that? Does he still?

  I don’t know. All I know is that he used to be my best friend, and now he doesn’t look at me at all. And my other best friend isn’t speaking to me. Or I’m not speaking to her.

  Last night, seized by an old impulse, I went up to the attic just to check on her and saw she’d added a new sign to her door. Made of pale-green construction paper and decorated with hearts and badly drawn butterflies, it read simply: DON’T EVEN FUCKING THINK ABOUT IT.

  “Mature,” I shouted through the closed door, and heard a muffled laugh in response.

  “The girl’s dad—his name is Kowlaski, I think, or something like that, something with a ‘ski’—shows up every year and argues that the ride should stay closed,” Alice goes on. “I guess I understand both sides. The ride is really fun, though. At least, it was. When it’s powered up, all these tiny lights come on, so it looks like the Eiffel Tower or something.” She pauses. “They say she still cries out at night.”

  Even though the day is dull and flat and windless, hot as metal, a tiny shiver lifts the hairs on the back of my neck. “What do you mean?”

  Alice smiles. “It’s stupid. It’s just something the old-timers say when they’re working the graveyard shift. Have you worked the graveyard yet?”

  I shake my head. The graveyard shifters—known at FanLand as the grave diggers—are responsible for closing up the park every night, securing the gates against break-ins, hauling trash, emptying the grease traps, and securing the rides and lulling them back into their nightly slumber. I’ve already heard horror stories from the other employees about shifts stretching until well past midnight.

  “Next week,” I say. “The night before”—Dara’s birthday—“the anniversary party.”

  “Lucky you,” she says.

  “The girl,” I prompt her, because now I’m curious. And it’s a relief, weirdly, to talk about the girl, long dead, long broken up into echoes and memories. All morning, the talk has been of Madeline Snow. Her disappearance has sparked a three-county-wide manhunt. Every newspaper is plastered with her image, and the flyers have just multiplied, sprouting like fungus over every available surface.

  Mom can’t get enough of it. This morning I found her sitting in front of the TV, her hair half-straightened, clutching her coffee without drinking.

  “The first seventy-two hours are the most important,” she kept repeating, information I’m sure she’d regurgitated from a previous news report. “If they haven’t found her yet . . .”

  A digitized clock in the upper right quadrant of the TV tracked how long it had been since Madeline had vanished from her car: eighty-four hours and counting.

  Alice stands up, shaking out her legs, though she can only have been resting for five minutes. “It’s just a ghost story,” she says. “Something they say to the newbies to freak them out. Every park has to have a resident ghost. It’s, like, a law. I’ve closed shop here plenty of times, and I’ve never heard her.”

  “Didn’t Mr. Kowlaski . . .” The question sticks in my throat, huge and gummy. “Didn’t he once tell you that you reminded him of her?”

  “Oh, that.” She waves a hand. “Everyone thinks he’s lost his marbles. But he hasn’t. He’s just lonely. And people do crazy things when they’re lonely. You know?” For a moment, her eyes laser-beam onto mine, and I feel a tiny hitch of discomfort in my chest. It’s like she knows something—about Dara, about my parents, about how we all fell apart.

  Then Maude comes stalking down the path toward us, shoulders hunched, like a linebacker charging toward a touchdown.

  “Wilcox sent me,” she says, as soon as she sees us. She’s out of breath and annoyed, obviously, to have been sent to deliver messages. “Crystal didn’t show.”

  Instantly Alice turns businesslike. “What do you mean, she didn’t show?”

  Maude scowls. “Just what I said. And the show’s in fifteen. There are already, like, forty kids waiting.”

  “We’ll have to cancel,” Alice says.

  “No way.” Maude has a BE NICE OR LEAVE pin staked to her T-shirt, just above her right nipple, which is both (a) hypocritical and (b) definitely not part of the FanLand d
ress code. “They already paid. You know Donna doesn’t do refunds.”

  Alice tips her head back and closes her eyes, as she does when she’s thinking. She has a thin neck, and an Adam’s apple as pronounced as a boy’s. Still, there’s something undeniably attractive about her. Her dream, she told me once, was to run FanLand after Mr. Wilcox. I want to get old here, she said. I want to die right on that Ferris wheel. At the high point. That way it’ll be a quick trip to the stars.

  I can’t imagine wanting to stay at FanLand, and don’t know what she sees in it, either: the endless procession of people, the overflowing trash bags and sticky pulp of mashed-up french fries and ice cream coating the pavilion floors, the toilets clogged with tampons and plastic barrettes and spare change. But lately I can’t imagine wanting anything. I used to be so sure: college at UMass, then a two-year break before graduate school for social sciences or maybe psychology.

  But that was before Dr. Lichme, and lipstick-toothed Cheryl, and the accident. And those dreams, like my memories, seem to be floundering, caught in murky darkness somewhere just out of reach.

  “You can do it.” Alice turns to me.

  I’m so surprised that it takes me a second to realize she’s serious. “What?”

  “You can do it,” she repeats. “You’re Crystal’s size. The costume will fit you.”

  I stare at her. “No,” I say. “No way.”

  She’s already gripping me by the arm and piloting me back toward the front office. “It’ll take ten minutes,” she says. “You don’t even have to say anything. You just have to swan around on a rock and clap your hands to the music. You’ll be great.”

  Once a day, a group of FanLand employees does a musical performance for the little kids in the big sunken amphitheater. Tony Rogers stars as the singing pirate, and Heather Minx, who is four foot eleven in a pair of platform wedges, dons a huge, ruffled parrot costume and accompanies him with various well-timed squawks. There’s also a mermaid—Crystal, normally, strapped into a shimmery, sequined tail and wearing a fine nylon long-sleeved top with the image of a bandeau shell bikini imprinted on it—to clap and sing along.