Lost Girls(34)
Same. Except U know, name’s Dylan.
Then my screen filled with about a thousand emojis, laughing, dancing, happy, exactly how I felt.
...
That night, I dreamt about my dad.
He was talking to someone, making plans. We walked along the Santa Monica Pier, somewhere between the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster, the sunset turning the waves orange. I was ten or eleven and clutched a large, pink, stuffed rabbit under one arm, a prize he had won for me earlier in the day. Mom was at work and Kyle was at Magic Mountain with his friends, so this was one of those rare times when Daddy and I went someplace alone together. We’d eaten lunch at the Harbor Grill, strolled along the beach, fed breadcrumbs to seagulls, and took our shoes off to let the Pacific Ocean lick our toes. After that we played games and rode carnival rides, until Daddy glanced at his watch with a determined look on his face.
He took my hand and together we headed toward that part of the pier where people stared down into the water, fishing poles draped over the edge. We approached a man with a scruffy beard and furtive eyes, his hair hidden beneath a Dodgers cap, his clothes rumpled and ill-fitting, as if these weren’t really his clothes but someone else’s. Something about him frightened me and I pulled at Daddy’s hand, trying to convince him to go in a different direction.
“It’s all right. Don’t worry, baby girl,” he said to me, his dark eyes smiling and confident. “You’re safe with me, right?”
“Yes,” I answered. Although I wasn’t sure if he was going to be safe with that strange man.
We moved forward, one step at a time, Daddy nodding at the stranger as we approached. It was one of his barely there nods, the ones he gave people I didn’t know, and it was so subtle I was never sure whether it had happened or not. The smell of fish turned my stomach. My fingers sweated inside Daddy’s hand and I glanced over my shoulder at the carnival lights, wishing I was back there, on the wave jumper or the scrambler. Anywhere but here.
The other man looked down and gave me a smile, the only time he acknowledged I was there. Then he and Daddy stood side by side, talking about fishing and had he caught anything, and what kind of fish swam around here. But in between those casual comments that anyone could make, even one stranger to another, they said other things, their voices lowered, talking in a language I’d never heard before. Daddy nodded from time to time, as if memorizing what he heard, writing things down on that white board in his head, getting all the facts in their proper places.
They said one phrase three times, until I memorized it myself, even though I’d never spoken that language before.
Later, when he was tucking me in bed, Mom still at work, Kyle spending the night at a friend’s house, I repeated those words back to him. I thought he’d be surprised or maybe glad that I’d been able to remember something that made no sense. He just smiled, nodded, and said, “You have a gift for foreign languages, baby girl.”
“I won’t tell anyone else,” I promised him.
“I know.”
We didn’t talk it about it again. I knew that his meeting had been secret and even the words I’d learned were potentially dangerous. His missions were classified and top secret, but they were usually done in Middle Eastern countries, not on the Santa Monica Pier.
I wrote the phrase down, phonetically of course, and spent days trying to translate it. It was Czechoslovak and it said P?í?tí tyden v Tel Avivu.
Next week in Tel Aviv.
Daddy left on a mission two days after that meeting. I watched the news every day when he was gone, trying to figure out what his mission might be, but nothing happened. There were no bombings, no terrorist attacks, no kidnappings. It was a surprisingly calm week for that part of Israel.
That was when I figured out what my father really did.
He stopped bad things before they happened.
Chapter Twenty
Morning came like fire, too bright when it poured in my window, beams tracing lines across the carpet, reaching out as if looking for me. I blinked my eyes open and for a minute all was right. I was me. Rachel Evans. Sophomore at Lincoln High. Sure to fail Miss Wallace’s geometry test, but also sure to hang with my best friend Molly McFadden at lunch, and then sure to watch an episode of Vampire Diaries when I got home. I smiled. I even sat up, stretching, ready to do some jazz splits and lunges before heading down to breakfast.
That was when I remembered what had happened yesterday, how Molly and I had gone looking for those girls on my list, how I just about killed one of them and then found out another one was dead. Talking to Dylan last night almost made it feel better. Almost.
Knowing I had a date with Dylan tonight should have taken away the sour feeling coiled in my gut, but it didn’t. I stumbled to the bathroom where I weighed myself. One hundred and nineteen pounds. I took a few deep breaths, trying to calm myself. I needed to keep my weight down, that was the only way I’d fit in, I couldn’t get over one hundred and twenty-five, ever— Those were the thoughts that kept going through my mind, although every time one of them would appear, I’d try to shove it aside. I wasn’t bulimic or anorexic. Still the memory of that headache and fever returned and I vowed that I would eat every meal from now on, or at least part of every meal. I wasn’t sure my stomach could handle too much food yet.
Dad and Kyle watched me quietly when I walked into the kitchen and loaded my plate with scrambled egg whites and turkey bacon. Mom, who knew nothing and it needed to stay that way, just grinned and patted my hand when I sat beside her.