AFTER
JULY 20
Dara
Are you going to party @ the Drink? Parker told me about it.
The note is wedged under my door when I get out of the shower, written on Nick’s cream-white stationery. (Nick is the only person under the age of a hundred who actually uses stationery, and her handwriting is so neat it looks like each letter is a minuscule piece of architecture. My handwriting looks like Perkins ingested some letters and then puked them onto a page.)
I stoop down, wincing as pain snakes up my spine, and scoop up the note before crumpling it and overhanding it toward the trash can in the corner. The note hits the rim and rebounds into a pile of dirty Tshirts.
I pull on a pair of cotton shorts and a tank top and take my computer onto the bed, clicking quickly away from Facebook as soon as it pops up, catching a brief glimpse of all the messages, unliked, unanswered, posted on my wall.
We miss you!
Thinking of you!!
We love you so much!!!
I haven’t posted since the accident. Why would I? What could I possibly say?
I’m bored to tears alone on a Saturday night.
I’m hopelessly scarred for life.
I’m finally able to bend my knees like a normal person!
I click over to YouTube but keep imagining Parker’s face, the way he squints against the light reflected in the windshield, his nails, trim and neat, the way a guy’s should be. His eyebrows, thick and dark, drawn together. Everyone else in Parker’s family is totally Norwegian-looking, blond and fair and smiley, like they should be out hauling catches of herring on the open ocean, which somehow makes Parker’s dark hair and olive skin even cuter, like it was a mistake.
Suddenly I can’t stand the idea of another night at home, watching stupid videos or queuing up TV shows. I get the old itch, a heat between my shoulder blades, like my skin might suddenly sprout wings to carry me away.
I need out. I need to prove that I’m not afraid of seeing him, or my old friends, or anyone. I’m not afraid of Nick, either, and the way she makes me feel now: as if I’m broken. Every time I hear her blasting music downstairs—indie pop, shiny happy music, since Nick doesn’t get depressed—or shouting for Mom to help her find her favorite jeans; every time I come into the bathroom and find it still humid from her shower, still smelling like Neutrogena; every time I see her running shoes on the stairs or find her field hockey T-shirt tangled up with my laundry, she may as well be hammering a stake into the ground. TOWN: NORMAL. POPULATION: 1.
Maybe she always made me feel that way, but it’s only since the accident that I’ve been able to admit it.
I pull on my best skinny jeans, surprised by their fit. Weirdly, even though I’ve barely left the house, I must have lost weight. But with a studded tank top and my favorite slouchy boots, I look all right, especially from a distance.
When I head downstairs to the bathroom, I see Nick’s door is still closed. I press my ear to the door but hear nothing. Maybe she’s already left for the party. I briefly imagine her standing next to Parker, laughing, maybe competing to see who can throw their beer cans farther.
Then my brain spits out a whole series of memories, flip-book-style, from our lives together: struggling on my tricycle to keep up with Parker and Nick, both on shiny new two-wheelers; watching from the pool deck while they took turns cannonballing into the deep end when I was too small to join them; hearing them burst into laughter because of an inside joke I didn’t understand.
Sometimes I think I didn’t even fall in love with Parker. Sometimes I think it was really all about Nick, and proving I could finally be her equal.
Downstairs, Mom is standing in the kitchen, talking on the phone, probably to Aunt Jackie, the only person she ever calls. The TV is on behind her, barely audible, and I get a jolt when the camera pans to a familiar stretch of highway not far from the place Nick drove us into a solid face of rock. The place is crawling with cops, as it must have been after the accident; the whole scene is lit up with floodlights and sirens, like a nighttime movie set. Words scroll across the bottom of the screen: Cops Launch Massive Search for Missing Nine-Year-Old . . .
“Yeah, of course. We expected a period of adjustment, but—” Mom breaks off when she sees me, points to the Stouffer’s lasagna box on the kitchen table and then to the microwave, mouthing Dinner? In the quiet, I can make out the newscaster’s voice: “Police are searching for witnesses or clues in the disappearance of Madeline Snow, who vanished Sunday night. . . .” I shake my head and my mom turns away, her voice muffled as she passes out of view. “But I’m hanging in there. It’s starting to feel a little more like a house again.”
I punch the TV off and grab Nick’s favorite field hockey hoodie from the peg near the front door. Though it’s likely still in the mid-eighties, with the hood up my scars will be mostly concealed. Besides, it gives me a thrill to wear Nick’s clothes unasked, as if I can shrug on a new identity. The sweatshirt still smells like Nick—not like perfume, since Nick never wears any, but like coconut shampoo and the general, indefinable odor of cleanliness, outdoors, and competency at sports.
I pull the hood up and cinch it under my chin, stepping onto the grass and enjoying the slick feel of the moisture around my ankles, seeping through my jeans. I feel like a burglar, or someone on a secret mission. My car is blocked in, and I don’t want to ask Mom to move the Subaru, which would then involve a lot of questions and concerned, quizzical looks. I’m not even sure she would say yes—she put a moratorium on driving after the accident.
I drag my ancient bike out from the garage—I haven’t ridden in forever, except once two summers ago, as a joke, after Ariana and I dropped mushrooms and Nick found us flopping on the grass like fish, gasping with laughter. I’m a little unsteady at first, but soon enough, I get the rhythm back. My knees are bugging me, but no worse than usual. Besides, the Drink is only a few miles away.
The Drink is actually a nickname for the Saskawatchee River. Sometime in the previous decade, back when a rush of Realtors and speculators descended on Shoreline County like an army of money-crazed locusts, chewing their way through our land, a development group decided to raze the woods and build a clutter of sleek waterfront stores on its banks: coffee houses, art galleries, and high-rent restaurants, smack-dab in the middle of Somerville.
Construction was approved and materials shipped before the residents freaked. Apparently, for a town built on history, the threat of new buildings and new parking lots and new cars bearing in tides of new people was too much. Somerville managed to have the entire area west of the river declared a piece of national park land. I’m surprised the town board hasn’t mandated we start wearing hoop skirts yet.
Someone was supposed to have cleaned up the mounds of gravel and the piles of concrete. But no one bothered. There’s even an abandoned hard hat, meticulously and mysteriously preserved by the people who hang out there.
I can hear the party almost as soon as I turn off Lower Forge and bump off the road and into the woods, keeping to the path that has been carved through the undergrowth because of a constant Friday-night procession of kids, coolers, bikes, and, occasionally, Chris Handler’s ATV. In the woods, the air is cooler, and leaves slap wetly against my thighs and calves as I jerk along the uneven ground, holding tight to the handlebars to avoid being bucked off. As soon as I see lights through the woods—people moving around, using their phones as flashlights—I dismount, wheeling my bike out into the open and leaning it next to several others on the grass.
The party’s pretty big: forty or fifty people, most of them in shadow, milling around on the slope leading down to the river or perched on broken pieces of concrete. No one notices me yet, and for a second I get this moment of panic, a feeling like being a little kid again on the first day of school and watching the stream of kids through the double doors. I haven’t felt like an outsider in a long time.
I don’t know why you always have to be the center of attention, Nick said to me once, not long before the accident. I’d been wriggling into a pair of leather pants I’d bought and then concealed from our parents by hiding them underneath the sweaters folded at the back of my closet.
Well, I don’t know why you’re so scared of being noticed, I responded. It’s like Nick gets power from being totally, inoffensively correct: nice jeans, tight but not too tight, white T-shirt, translucent but not transparent, just enough makeup so it looks like she isn’t wearing any. I bet if Somerville did start mandating hoop skirts, she’d be the first to sign up and grab one. She’d probably add in a pair of ruffled pantaloons for good measure.
I don’t see Nick, or Parker, either. But when the crowd shifts, I spot a keg and a bunch of red Solo cups stacked in the ice.
I feel better, much more myself, once I’ve poured myself a beer, even though it’s mostly foam. The first few sips dull some of my anxiety, and it’s dark enough that I even take off my hood, shaking out my hair. I see Davis Christensen and Ben Morton standing, pinkie fingers linked, on the other side of a small knot of people. Both of them notice me at the same time, and Mark’s mouth forms an O of surprise. Davis whispers something to him before lifting her cup and extending two fingers in a kind of wave.
I slug back the beer, turn to the keg, and refill. When I look up again, Ariana has materialized, just appeared out of the crowd like something spit up on a tide. She’s cut her hair short. In her black shorts, wedge sneakers, and heavy eyeliner, she looks like a deranged pixie. I feel a sudden squeeze of pain. My best friend.
My former best friend.
“Wow.” Ariana stares at me as if I’m a new species of animal that hasn’t yet been categorized. “Wow. I didn’t expect to see you here. I didn’t expect to see you out.”
“Sharon’s had me on lockdown,” is all I say, because I don’t feel like getting into it. It’s an old joke of ours that my mom is a jailer, and I’m expecting Ariana to laugh. But instead she just nods really fast, as if I’ve said something interesting.
“How is your mom?” she asks.