The Neighbor's Secret(29)

The friends had known, though. The friends always knew.

But Laurel didn’t have an eating disorder. Her appetite, larger than even Mike’s, was a running family joke. Last night, she’d downed three helpings of lasagna with a huge side of salad and then belched healthily, because she’d known it would make Hank laugh until he fell off his chair.

Unless it was disordered to eat so much? Had they drawn too much attention to her big appetite, made it a thing?

That swirling anxious feeling Annie had while reading about Fiona was because she knew something was off with Laurel. She just didn’t know what.

Laurel did seem self-conscious in her body, at least compared to Sierra. When she’d worn the miniskirt, she’d hunched over, tugged down the skirt.

And when Annie had asked Laurel what flavor cake she wanted for her birthday in a few weeks, Laurel had claimed to not need a cake at all.

Most teenage girls were uncomfortable in their bodies, though, and maybe Laurel was experimenting, trying to shed childhood traditions in favor of more grown-up ones.

None of it meant that Laurel had an eating disorder.

Annie shouldn’t make up issues. Laurel enjoyed food, she wasn’t obsessed by it.

(Which is probably exactly what the family of the girl who had been hospitalized had thought.)

The computer part—the late-night typing—was troubling. And what did research mean anyway? There were any number of horrible places on the World Wide Web where a teenaged girl might conduct “research.”

Annie had just seen a news report about a police officer who’d made a fake profile for a fourteen-year-old girl. Within hours, literally hundreds of creepy older men had contacted her.

Laurel knew all of the stranger-danger rules, had sat through a billion school assemblies about internet safety and Annie had drilled them in at home, of course—but what did every parent say after their child had emptied her piggy bank to run off to some motel room with a total stranger?

If this happened to us, it could happen to ANYONE.

But it didn’t happen to anyone. It happened to kids with distracted parents. Kids without boundaries. Kids who had a hole of need inside of them.

A memory broke free from deep inside of Annie, floated up to consciousness.

His cold hand pressed against her bare knee. A mocking peal of laughter slipped through the open window from outside.

In a frantic swoop, she zipped open Laurel’s backpack and shook out its contents on the couch, fired up her computer, typed in the password—the family rule was that passwords were shared, and even though now Annie wanted to congratulate herself for sticking to that rule, she didn’t deserve any praise.

Why had she not checked over Laurel’s shoulder?

Parents were instructed to make clear to their children: this is my computer, not yours, but Annie and Mike believed that their children deserved privacy, which was a form of respect, and Laurel was a good kid and—see? Look.

Her online search history seemed innocent and appropriate: Wikipedia. Science journals and how-to videos about makeup application and bleaching her hair to better hold dye. Her school notebooks still told the story of an engaged student: equations and paragraphs about Greek mythology and a complicated table with rows and columns of letters: A, A, AB.

Cryptology? Some sort of Boolean language?

Now that Annie could see all of Laurel’s homework—the books and the notebooks and that chart spread over the couch—she had to agree it was a lot.

The leftover lasagna was a brick in her stomach. Annie turned on the kettle for mint tea.

Laurel was almost fourteen. It was normal to be moody with her family. She had solid friendships, and had failed to turn in one assignment. There was no eating disorder, nor any evidence of a lurking predator.

Scurry off, chickens. Nowhere to roost here!

The whistle on the kettle blew and Annie switched off the stove, reached for a chamomile bag instead of mint to better ease the acidic burn that had risen in the back of her mouth.

But even after she sipped it, the sour taste in the back of her mouth grew thicker.





CHAPTER TWELVE



“Fall Fest.” Melanie’s voice through the phone was raspy from a cold. “I’ll never forget Fall Fest because that’s where we saw the Nearys. The mom and son, remember?”

Lena closed her eyes.

She regretted how she’d presented Annie’s invitation to Melanie like a little gift. My new friend Annie wants me to go to Fall Fest.

The subtext was that Melanie didn’t need to worry so much about Lena’s loneliness because, see? Lena had been invited to something!

(Maybe Lena had also been showing off. Hearing about Melanie’s social calendar—her golf dates and cocktail and girls’ lunches and couples’ cruises—gave Lena a hollow left-out feeling.)

“You can’t remember?” Melanie sounded worried. “It’s happening to me too. I couldn’t think of my second-grade teacher’s name last week. I loved her so much, I wanted to be her when I grew up, and it’s just—poof—gone.”

“It’s okay, Mel.”

“Let me help. Bill had a conference downtown, so I came to stay with you, and Rachel was three or four. We got to the park early, before all the events started and there they were, the Nearys. The boy had golden hair cut in bangs and a bob, like Little Lord Fauntleroy. It seared into my mind because you don’t see that haircut every day.”