But I need to know.
Diaz calls me back, tells me to stay but I’m not a dog. I push through the brush until I find the girl and it’s—not Penny. She’s a small, pale thing, no more than ten, her knobby knees pointed toward each other, too tall for her age. She stands in front of us, shaking, her face red and tear-streaked. It’s Lana Smith’s sister, Emma.
And then the Youngs are there, and Alek, and another group, and another group, all of them wildly hopeful as they force themselves onto the scene and then—not.
When he realizes who it isn’t, Alek stumbles back, turning in a dazed circle because no person in the world can go through that kind of having and taking away in such a short amount of time and still be okay after. He breathes hard, his face damp with sweat. And then he stiffens—clamps his hand over his mouth and staggers away. Brock runs after him, calling his name. Emma sobs through it all and Lana is suddenly there, like we’re all suddenly here, pulling her little sister into her arms and she’s apologizing to the Youngs for none of this being what they wanted except I don’t know what anyone wants anymore.
“I got separated.” Emma sobs. “I got scared—”
“It’s okay,” Lana says. “It’s okay. She was scared. We’re so sorry. Emma, tell them you’re sorry—” and Emma bleats over her, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry …
Mrs. Young does something I don’t think I could do if I was her. She doesn’t lash out, doesn’t yell or cry. She gathers Emma in her arms and tells her it’s okay, we understand, it’s okay … and then more people, more witnesses to this, all this nothing. It’s nothing. Someone says something about taking a five-minute break and I hear a deputy mutter waste of time and that’s when I decide I have to leave.
I make my way back through the woods and around the lake and the rotten, stagnant scent of the water makes me nauseous. I text Mom, begging a ride home and realize I didn’t even let her know I arrived, like I said I would.
The point of contact comes into view. Helen Turner at the table, on her cell phone, getting the news that it’s not Penny. As much distance as I can put between us is not enough. Being this close to her makes me want to bury myself. God, did my dad hate her. Hated her. I think part of him was always secretly happy she fired him because it proved it, didn’t it, that she was the cunt. Helen is still on her phone when the New Yorker pulls up. Todd’s in the driver’s seat. I climb in and buckle up. I press my hands against the cold air vents until my fingers go numb. He drives us out.
“How’d it go?” he asks.
I think of Leon and how much he must hate me now, when I see a flash of blond hair, a girl on the road. I twist in my seat and it’s—not her. Again. And I don’t know what about it is worse than what happened at the lake, but it is. It is. I duck my head and wipe at my face. Todd reaches over, his hand against the back of my neck long enough for a reassuring squeeze, which makes it harder to stop crying.
“I didn’t sign out from the search,” I say.
“You need to go back?”
“I don’t think anyone’s going to worry about it.”
i need leon to know I’m sorry.
I don’t need his forgiveness. I don’t believe in forgiveness. I think if you hurt someone, it becomes a part of you both. Each of you just has to live with it and the person you hurt gets to decide if they want to give you the chance to do it again. If they do and you’re a good person, you won’t make the same mistakes. Just whole new ones. I grab my phone from my nightstand. I could text it out, but that doesn’t seem right. I hurt Leon to his face so the least I can do is apologize to it.
But first, there’s school.
I get dressed. I stare at myself in the mirror, at my dry and flaking lips. My nails are fine but this isn’t. I pick off pieces of dead skin and then rub a toothbrush across my mouth until it’s smooth. I wash my face and apply my lipstick one layer at a time and then I’m ready. I tie my hair back and wonder how Penny’s mornings start now. They still start, don’t they?
When I come downstairs, there’s breakfast waiting for me. A piece of peanut butter and jam toast, cut into thin strips. It was all I ate, every morning, the entire summer I was nine and back then, I called the strips “fingers.” Peanut butter and jam fingers. Comfort food.
“I wanted you to eat with us,” Mom says.
I don’t know who it’s comforting.
I nibble at the toast while Todd flips through the paper in the seat across from mine and Mom fries them up bacon and eggs. He slaps the paper down and taps it.
“It’s going to rain this week.”
“I don’t believe it,” Mom says.
“It’s right here in the Grebe News, though, so you gotta.”
She sets his breakfast in front of him and then rests her hand on top of his head. Todd gets hold of it before she can move to fix her own plate. He brings her hand to his mouth.
“Love you, Alice,” he murmurs, easy as that.
Mom catches my eye and there’s something guilty on her face, like this is something I should have had in front of me all my life. Todd is different from my father. Dad was thirsty, not given to great displays of affection, like his father and his father’s father before him. A long line of self-indulgent men who couldn’t give love but lived to take it, which isn’t the same as receiving it. They were all in so much pain and that’s always the perfect excuse.
“Next week, they’ll probably put in something about the search party,” I say.
“Probably,” Todd agrees.
Mom settles in with us. “Maybe you could take the night off and we could have some mother-daughter time. Go shopping, end the day at the Ibis McDonald’s or something.”
“What’s Todd going to do?”
“Wither and die,” he says dryly. He reaches across the table and scruffs up my hair. “Seriously? What the hell kind of question was that?”
“I just want to spend some time with you,” Mom says.
“Maybe the weekend? I’m trying to prove to Tracey I’m reliable right now, after…” I trail off. “And I just took yesterday off for the search.”
“Before the weekend would be better.”
I study her. “What’s going on?”
“Just do your mother a favor and humor her.”
“Okay. Before the weekend,” I say but I really have to go to Swan’s tonight, to see Leon and try to untangle that mess. “It can’t be today, though.”
I take my time on the walk to school because I’m in no hurry for an aftermath. The air is as sweltering as it ever is. Hard to picture it raining. Hard to picture it any other season but this one, which isn’t even the season it’s supposed to be, really.
The street is quiet for the first half of the walk, but soon the hard, rhythmic sound of feet hitting pavement is at my back. I glance over my shoulder and Leanne Howard is jogging my way. She’s wearing a black shirt and shorts, accented with bolts of neon to tell the world she’s doing this for the exercise and not because she’s being chased. I move off the sidewalk so she can pass, but she breaks when she reaches me, hunching over to catch her breath.
“Whew.” She gasps, straightening, wiping the lower part of her sweaty face on the collar of her shirt. “It’s too hot for this, isn’t it?”
“You’re crazy,” I say.
“Well, it’s maintenance.” She squints at me. “How are you, Romy?”
“I’m headed to school.”
“Mind if I walk with you?”
“Free country.”
But I don’t like it. Leanne falls into step with me. I take her in. She’s young, but she has the same kind of lines Coach Prewitt does, I think. I wouldn’t fuck with her.
“Search party was something else,” she says.
“I left after Emma Smith. What happened?”
“Alek had to be walked out. He was a wreck—”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and nobody had the heart to keep going after that. I think they’d probably do better searchi
ng the highways, honestly,” Leanne says. “But I don’t think they really wanted to find anything yesterday.”
I remember the deputy muttering to himself after the false alarm.
Waste of time.
“Then why would they even bother with it?”
“Combat helplessness,” she says simply. And then, just as simply, “Romy, you have to know they’re looking for a body at this point.”
It stops me. Stops my heart.
No, I want to tell her. You’re wrong. Penny isn’t dead. Penny made it through almost four years of high school beloved by all, except for me and even I was won for part of it—you don’t make it through high school like that and not survive whatever it is she’s gotten into.
“I’ve been thinking about what you asked, when you came down to get your phone,” Leanne says. “That maybe looking for you was the reason we didn’t find Penny. And then I heard some of the kids talking about you at the lake.” She looks at me, pities me. “They were saying it.”
“That surprise you?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
I shrug in a conversation’s over kind of way, hoping she’ll let me continue on without her, but she doesn’t. She’s at my back and then she’s at my side again. It’s too early to start the day with this kind of headache.
“Look, whatever anyone feels about you, it’s no small thing you got found.” She puts her hand on my shoulder and then we’re stopped again. “When I saw you on the road, I was so damned relieved. And it eats me up that we haven’t found Penny yet, but when it comes to missing girls, you barely get that lucky once, let alone twice. Anyone trying to guilt you—that’s bullshit.”
I stare at the ground. I don’t know what to say to the idea that finding me was worth anything to anyone beside my mother, and Todd. And Leon, who’s probably sorry about it now.
“So it wouldn’t have made that kind of difference?”
I want to hear her say it—that, exactly—if it didn’t.
She bites her lip. “Even it did … it wouldn’t have been your fault.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She looks away from me. “Just what I said.”
I pause. “How’d they rule out the connection between us, Leanne?”
“I can’t tell you,” she says. “But I promise you it wouldn’t be your fault. I just wanted you to know, okay?”
I laugh a little. “Well, thanks a lot for that. I’ll just keep that thought close when they’re telling me over and over I’m the girl no one wanted to find.”
I start walking again, try to forget this whole waste of my time, but then she says, “I need my job, Romy.”
I turn. “So?”
“So when Turner tells me I’m not supposed to say something, I don’t,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t whether or not I think it’s right. I still think I should’ve driven you to the hospital that day.” She stops. “But I need my job for my family.”
“I wouldn’t say anything,” I promise and the more torn she looks about it, the more my heart wants to know what she knows. “And no one would believe me if I did.”
It deepens the lines on her face.
“It was Ben Ortiz’s daughter,” she finally says. “Tina.”
Tina.
A name like a razor on my skin.
I know whatever Leanne tells me next is going to cut me open.
It does.
my palm rests against my chest. I knead my skin. I listen for my heart because it went quiet a while ago and I’m not sure it’s there anymore.
Wait for it. I’m waiting. Waiting for the girls coming down the hall. Their voices arrive ahead of them, float sweetly under the crack in the door. I stare at the dirty floor tiles of the locker room and. Wait. For. It. Tina comes in. I stare at her feet as they walk to her locker. I watch her slip out of her shoes and when she starts undressing, let my eyes wander, up her legs, her hips, her soft belly and her breasts.
“Know why half the sheriff’s department was wasting time looking for me when they could’ve been looking for Penny?” I ask.
Tina’s fingers pause behind her back, stop seeking the clasp of her bra. She doesn’t say anything, just raises her chin in a way that dares me to go on. Dares me to say out loud how she was at the sheriff’s department that Saturday night, telling them what she did to me so they’d start looking in all the right places for Penny. I stand, my legs trembling like a newborn colt’s until I feel it, a soft thud in my chest—my heart, coming alive—and I get steadier.
“You put me on that road. You dragged me out to that road,” I say. “You wrote rape me on my stomach and then you left me there.”
She holds my gaze. This is what I want to happen: I want the girls to realize she’s the thief who stole that time from Penny. I want them to round on her. I want them to eat her alive without once opening their mouths. I want this to be the end of Tina Ortiz, but the things I want to happen never do. No one makes her guilty. No one makes her pay. Even the sheriff wouldn’t do that. Not to his good friend’s daughter.
“Nice story,” she says.
Thud, again, louder now and not so soft. Tina goes back to fumbling for her clasp. This is how little it matters to her, as little as it did the night she stood over me and wrote on my skin.
“Besides, anyone would have done it,” she says quietly, so only I can hear it.
My heart pleads with me to do something about this, so I can breathe around it. Tina and that road.
She put me on that road and invited people to my body, anyone.
What happens next is something I don’t remember deciding to do but knowing, after, that I would do it again and again, a thousand times.
I shove her into the lockers, drive her into that metal as hard as I can. The sound she makes is better than any song I’ve ever heard. I want it on repeat. I dig my nails into her arms, feel her softness give in to me. Her eyes widen and she shoves me back and then there’s a space between us, enough to paralyze me with all of the things I could do to her next. I could raise my hand and hit her in the face or bring my knee into her stomach, take a fistful of her hair and rip it out of her skull. You don’t get to do this when you’re a girl, so when the opportunity for violence finally presents itself, I want all of it at once. That same stillness seems to come over her too, and for one second there is nothing—and then—
Inside me goes wild, turns all of me into a weapon. I was born to hurt and so was Tina. I strike her, break her skin, but she doesn’t just stand there and let it happen. She comes back at me as hard and in the ways I want her to, in the ways only Tina would.
At first, the only thing I feel are the parts of her I’m trying to ruin. Then her elbow finds my center and steals my breath and everything is alive in me after that. Everything. Every blow she lands, I return however I can. It’s messy. It’s my foot on her bare toes and the sound she makes, it’s her hand in my hair, it’s those strands free of my scalp.
Girls are shouting, girls are too scared to pull us apart. Tina pushes me into a row of lockers, some of them open, and my forehead meets the edge of metal, and there’s pain but what is pain even, really—this is release, nothing worth stopping for.
We are not going to stop.
Someone will have to stop us.
It isn’t until Coach Prewitt comes in with Principal Diaz that I realize there’s blood in my eyes. She’s bleeding, a girl whispers. I’m bleeding. I bring my hand to my forehead and the tips of my fingers are soaked in myself.
I lower my hand and Tina is across the room from me and she looks like hell. There’s a scratch on her shoulder and a bruise on her cheek. I did that. But … I stare at my hand again, the red. Her bared stomach. This can’t be over.
I haven’t written on her yet.
I lunge for Tina, but Diaz grabs my arm and shouts, “Hey, hey, hey! Enough!”
Tina stumbles into Prewitt, her eyes wide and terrified, like she was never fighting back because now is exactly th
e time to act that way. I should act that way, but I can’t.
I want to hurt her until I feel finished.
“What is going on here?” Diaz demands, her voice echoing ferociously around the room but before anyone can say anything—and Tina’s mouth is open enough to do it—she takes a look my face and changes tack. “Ortiz, get dressed and go to my office.” She shakes her head. “Disgraceful. This is—” She casts around for another word, finds none. “Disgraceful. I expect better from all of my students, but you two—”
“Grey started it,” Tina says. Did I?
“I said get dressed, Ortiz,” Diaz snaps. “Grey, follow me.”
She leads me out of the locker room, the sound of her heels clacking on the floor. I bring my hand to my head again. The cut is above my right eyebrow and the bleeding hasn’t stopped yet. Diaz glances at me. “It’s all over you.”
I look down. She’s right. My collar … everywhere.
“Where are we going?” I ask, a little thickly. Blood doesn’t make me woozy at all but the adrenaline from the fight is fading and this is so strange.
It’s strange, feeling it all come out of me like this.
“I’m taking you to the nurse’s office to get that cleaned up,” Diaz says. “I don’t know what possessed you. That was an awful display.” Awful, I think, and then I laugh, just a little. Diaz rounds on me. “You think this is funny?”
I press my lips together and look away. I think it’s hilarious. There’s a girl out there everyone thinks is dead and maybe she is because you know all the ways there are to kill a girl? I do. But I’m supposed to worry about whatever trouble this stupid little fight at school is going to bring me beyond the satisfaction I felt while I was in it.
In the nurse’s office, DeWitt looks me over. I wait for him to tell me I’m old enough to take care of myself, but instead he inspects my forehead with gentle hands and says it’s beyond any of us.
the stitches seem so unnecessary once most of the blood is cleaned away and I can see the cut, but Dr. Aarons numbs my forehead and says it’s deep enough and hold still.