All the Missing Girls(70)

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CORINNE WASN’T AT FAULT, but she wasn’t innocent. That’s what Monica—and everyone else—implied. Corinne incited passion and rage, lust and anger. Someone couldn’t help himself. But she brought it on herself, obviously. That’s what you say to convince yourself: It will never be me.

She didn’t know her place.

She incited too much passion.

It’s typically men who commit murder in the heat of passion. Their fingers tightening of their own accord around our slender necks. Their practiced arm swinging forward in an arc, beyond their own intention, into our fragile cheekbones. Passion. Heat. Instinct.

Women are more deliberate. Adding to silent lists of slights, tallying the offenses, building a case, retreating inward.

Passion belongs to the men. Statistics say an unplanned attack will likely come from them. So the investigation started there: Jackson, Tyler, Daniel, her father.

But the police were wrong to start there, with statistics. They needed to start with Corinne, needed to know her first. Then they would’ve seen that perhaps there is nothing more passionate than loving someone in spite of yourself. Didn’t matter who you were. If you loved Corinne, it was all passion.

What the detectives wanted were facts. Names. Events. Grudges and slights that could boil over into a girl losing her life outside the county fair. Hannah Pardot exposed that Corinne—the real one. But I didn’t know whether it really mattered. Whether that one was any more real than the one I knew, the one living inside my head. A haunting, blurred image, twirling in a field of sunflowers. I never could grasp her, but she was the realest person I knew.

Jump, she’d said. And then she leaned in close, so only I could hear, and whispered, If I were you, I’d do it.

But I didn’t.

The facts. The facts were fluid, and changed, depending on the point of view. The facts were easily distorted. The facts were not always right.

What would she do? they should’ve asked.

After I said no.

After Daniel pushed her away.

After Jackson abandoned her.

What would she do if we all pushed her away in a single day? If she had nowhere else to go? What would she do?

I can feel her cold fingers at my elbows, and her whisper becomes a scream: Jump.

You want to believe you’re not the saddest person on earth. That there’s someone worse, someone there with you. Someone suffering beside you through the unfathomable darkness.

Jump, she said, like I had no future.

But she was wrong. So wrong.

Because when I was standing on the edge of the Ferris wheel cart, my breath lost to the wind and Tyler waiting for me down below, everything became so strikingly clear.



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I WANT TO TELL someone about that night. About Corinne. About what she said.

About me.

But I don’t know how. It’s impossible, really. They’re not separate things. They come in pairs. One event gets tied up in another and you can’t tell one story without the second. They’re forever entwined in your mind.

Two days before the fair, standing in her bathroom, Corinne holding the test in her hand. “Ninety seconds,” she said, not letting me see. The ticking of the clock from her bedroom nightstand. “Tick-tock, Nic.”

“I’m glad you think this is funny,” I said.

“Moment of truth.” She looked first, and I had the sudden urge to rip it from her hands.

She smiled, flipping it around.

The two blue lines, and my stomach rolled again. I sank to my knees on her perfectly white tiled floor, leaning over the toilet. She rubbed my upper back. “Shh,” she said. “It’ll be okay.”

I sat on the floor and watched as she stuffed the test deep inside the box of Skittles already in her trash can. “Don’t worry,” she said, her mouth twisted into half a smile, “my mom had me when she was eighteen, too.”

I shouldn’t have let her talk me into taking the test right then, in her bathroom, with her standing over me. She shouldn’t have been first. Not before Tyler.

“I have to go,” I said. She didn’t stop me as I stumbled out of her room, out of her house, down to the river, where I sat and stared at the rushing water and cried, because I knew no one else could hear me. I called for Tyler to meet me there, and I made myself stop crying before I told him.

Two days later, and I see Tyler from the top of the Ferris wheel, and I think for just a moment that I have everything.

Corinne dared me to climb on the outside of the cart, and I wanted to do it. I wanted to know it was as easy as letting go, and say no. I wanted to feel the rush, the power, the hope—everything my life could be.

But then I felt her breath in my ear: Jump, she said, and in that moment, I was scared of what Corinne might do. How dark she really was, deep inside. My life was just part of the game for her. A piece to move, to see how far I could bend. How much she must’ve hated me, hated every one of us, underneath it all.

I was scared that she would push me, that Bailey would never tell, that everyone would think I wanted to die when I wanted nothing more than to live in that moment. For Tyler below, and for the life we might have, all the possibilities stretching before me, existing all at once.

But then I’m thrown off balance, the world skews sideways, the sting of the fist on my face.