He jams the phone into his jacket and rises, shuffling over to a receptionist talking into a headpiece. He begs her for the men’s room key, which she shoves through a glass arch. The last thing I need is this loser posting my photo for his pals to ogle. I trail him into the bathroom and kick open the door.
“Give me your phone.”
“This is the men’s room, freak!”
The black thing in my belly flicks. “Give it or I’ll send that mole to the other side of your face.”
“Here.” He holds it up. “Look, I’m deleting it.”
I swipe the phone from his doughy hand and pitch it over the stall wall. His eyes widen at the porcelain clatter, followed by a plop.
“What the…?”
I harden my gut. “Now it’s deleted.”
His mouth opens and shuts soundlessly. Finally, he stalks into the stall, reappearing with his dripping phone. “What do you even care if I send your picture to a couple of my friends?” He pulls paper towels from the holder on the wall. “It’s not like your face isn’t going to be back all over the news by the end of the day.”
I remember Ricker’s weird warnings. What are she and this dork talking about? I squint at him.
He wraps his phone inside a mealy towel wad, shaking his head. “Who would ever guess that in person, you’d be such a bitch?”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, if anything, I’d expect you’d be super happy. Grateful, even.”
“Grateful?” I hiss, my breath hot behind my teeth. “That’s rich.”
“Yeah, grateful. Most people would feel lucky they got out alive.”
I snort, an ugly noise that echoes off the stalls and lingers. “Thank you so much for putting everything into perspective for me, Moleman. What am I even seeing Elaine Ricker for? I could just come see you! But here’s the thing.” I poke his soft shoulder. “Dr. Ricker isn’t a fan of her patients showing up on the Internet. Pictures of them at her office and whatnot. It’s a violation of patient confidentiality. I wonder how she’ll take your little transgression. Drop you as a client, I imagine.”
He jabs his sausage finger in the air at me. “Oh man. Now I get it.”
“Sorry, too harsh? You prefer your abductees with cream and sugar?”
“You haven’t seen the news, have you?”
“I’ve been the news, Dough Boy. And I can tell you, it sucks. So no, I don’t watch much of it these days.”
The mole slides toward his ear in a sickening grin. “Then you don’t know about the body.”
*
The video is at the top of the WFYT Web site. I tap Play on my phone’s touchscreen. Hometown gal–slash–glamorous ladyanchor Paula Papademetriou ticks her voice down a notch, the way she does when she’s talking about Nor’easters, school shootings, and Liv and me: “A couple out walking their dog early this morning stumbled upon a body police believe to be eighteen-year-old Ana Alvarez, who went missing while jogging in the Sheepfold section of the Middlesex Fells Reservation in August of last year. Many are wondering about the involvement of a man arrested for an attack on two local girls in these same woods nearly one year ago.”
The cold and nausea come at once, like they sometimes do, and prickles erupt on my chest. I jam my phone deep in my pocket and take the back stairs one floor up, duck into the women’s room, and lock the door. I tug my cuffs down before pressing my palms against the chilly walls, and sway over the toilet, willing the black, or lunch, or anything to expel itself so I will feel better. Nothing comes.
Get ahold of yourself, Julia. A body in the woods is just another fact.
To normal people, researching facts about abductions, and then your own abduction, labels you all kinds of morbid. But research soothes me. The methodical ordering of gathered facts is a beautiful thing, especially when I order them in ways that make me feel safe. If I put my hand over my heart while I reread the facts I’ve collected in my Mead wide-ruled black marble composition notebook, my heart beats slower. I sway out of the bathroom and down the stairs, leaning outside Ricker’s waiting room. I slide down the wall. The carpet smells of cleaning chemicals and mud from shoes, but it’s not a totally unpleasant spot to sit. “You are good,” I whisper to myself, rubbing my knuckles across my chest with one hand and feeling through my messenger bag with the other. I touch my notebook’s hard taped spine, then a pencil. On a clean page, I draw a circle. Next to it, I draw a second overlapping circle of equal size.
My shoulders fall. I bury my head in the notebook, ignoring passing shins and murmurs.
In the the first circle, I write JULIA. In the second circle, I write LIV.