I give her a thumbs-up and sit back, my eyes on the TV screen to extricate myself from conversation. When the bell rings, Jessa kicks my shin a little too roughly with one red Converse, says “Call you later, Im,” and walks off without looking up from her phone. Her sequined hoodie winks under the fluorescents and her tight jeans ripple like a second skin. Thus goes my great hope.
After school lets out at three, it’s a fight to get out the door. February break has made everyone a little manic, and I thread through the crowd with my head down, between the senior boys hurtling themselves against lockers, the band kids slinging around black clarinet cases, the slow-moving art kids with ear gauges the size of quarters. When I make it to the parking lot, I watch Oriel Perotta plow right over the island, running down winter-dead grass, cutting through the dinky skate park the school put up to “keep kids out of trouble.” By “trouble” I guess they mean getting high outside the Burger King on Elm Street, the most likely mischief for Sugarbrook students. Ours is one of two small high schools in town—the other is J. Jefferson Agricultural High, for the aggies from the tobacco farms and cranberry bogs just west of us.
This place would show up under a “Middle-of-the-Road Small Town, USA” Google search. Just down the street from school is the Patty Linden Memorial Park, with a shabby stone fountain where the graduating class dumps laundry detergent every June so it foams over the lawn. Around the park, half of the brick one-story businesses are either on the brink or closed for good. Tommy’s Bicycles hasn’t had a new bike in the window in five years. Larissa’s Hair on Main hasn’t replaced a wig since the nineties, it’s rumored. Jamison’s Bakery shuttered when Mrs. Jamison ran off with a police officer from Malden, and is still for sale four years later. I guess there used to be a big electronics company in Sugarbrook, but a decade ago it moved to Boston. Now almost everyone goes to the city to work. A lot of people take the train out of Sugarbrook Station. In fact, it seems like half of Sugarbrook works at Good Shepherd, like Dr. Van Tassel. It’s just one of those towns.
Once I steer clear of the businesses and the main streets clogged with students’ cars, it’s easy moving through the streets. As I drive east from the middle-class end to the rich-kid end, the pools and trampolines multiply, blocked in by iron gates instead of rough fences. Dad and Lindy and I live right in the middle on Cedar Lane. Down the street and with a considerably bigger fence is the Prices’ house. When we were young, Ma Ma Scott and Jessa’s nanny shoved us together, nurturing a friendship based on our mutual smallness and nearness to each other. That’s all little girls need to be buddies. They don’t even really need to like each other. So back then Jessa and I were friends because, well, there we were, and now we’re friends because we were friends back then. Simple math.
I rattle into the driveway of my pale green house at 42 Cedar Lane and am surprised to find Lindy on the porch glider. She’s wrapped in her cape and rocking slowly with her heels crossed. Maybe it’s the way she hunches down as the wind tugs at her, or the lack of hairspray in her frazzled yellow hair, but all at once I feel worse for her than myself. She doesn’t deserve to be totally in the dark. Maybe it’s selfish to keep my clue and my theory to myself. I’ve got a message from Dad to hang on to; Lindy’s got nothing.
“What are you doing?” I ask as I climb the porch steps.
“I made this flier on the computer,” she says. “I was thinking of printing out a bunch of them, dropping them off at the grocery store and the mall.”
I glance briefly at the paper in her lap and see Dad’s bubble-pipe headshot from No Shirt, No Pulse, No Problem, and in bold font just below, the caption: MISSING. Jesus, I think, sick at the thought of incoming gossip, and look away without reading the rest. Instead, I pick at a loose thread on the glider seat, patterned with squiggly ivy vines. “How will that help? It’s not like Dad got lost in the produce aisle.”
She cups her hand around her chin and drums her fingers against her lips while she looks at me sideways. “I’m exploring all of our avenues,” she says evenly.
“Explore a different avenue,” I snipe. “Stake out a few places before you put a poster up in Wetzel’s Pretzels.” I’m probably picking a fight to squash this twist of guilt on my dad’s behalf.
To my great surprise, Lindy nods. “That seems reasonable. All right, where shall we start?”
I frown, wondering what kind of trap I’m walking into. “Like, together?”
“Sure. We won’t get in anybody’s way. But I’d like to spend some time with you, and if you feel like taking a drive, we can keep our eyes open as we go, can’t we?”
“I guess. . . .”