Sadie(47)

The bells over the door spastically announce the old man’s entrance and I expect Cat to be behind him, maybe, but she’s not. I follow him to the counter with my peanut butter and water and that, combined with the gas—even with Cat’s contribution—lightens my wallet too much.

Money burns fast. Knowing that doesn’t get easier with age and it’s worse when you learn it young. The beauty of childhood is not entirely grasping the cost of living; food just appears in the fridge, you have a roof over your head because everyone does and electricity must be some kind of sorcery, like right out of Harry Potter or something, because who could ever put a price on light? Maybe it’s not even that you believe in magic. It’s that you never really had to think about any of it before. Then one day you find out you’ve been walking the razor’s edge all along.

“Th-thanks,” I tell him.

When I get back outside, Cat is nowhere to be found but the line that’s formed behind my car is looking more than a little pissed off. I get inside it and pull forward into a parking spot and that’s when I notice all her stuff is gone from the front seat.

“What the fuck,” I murmur. I get back out of the car. The place seems busier than it did a second go, people moving in and out of the store.

I cup my hands around my mouth. “C-Cat?”

A few heads turn my way, but none of them are her. I jog around the building to the bathrooms and a sign on the door says to ask for the key inside—but Cat didn’t do that. She got out of the car, walked behind the building and now she’s … she’s gone.

The back of the station faces a steep incline toward a field of wildflowers. It stretches about a mile before it meets highway. There’s no one I can see. My chest gets tight. Did something happen? Did someone …

Did someone take her?

I look back, my heart thrumming, skin buzzing. I picture Cat, this girl I don’t even know, finding herself here, trying to open the door. She sees she needs the key. She needs the key, and she’d go get it, but there’s someone behind her, someone comes around from behind her— No.

Stop.

I remember my fumbling search through the loneliest, emptiest places in Cold Creek, shouting out her name perfectly, solidly, holding out for that moment my voice would fracture because the fracture would mean I wasn’t alone, that Mattie had come back.

It was the only time in my life I wanted to stutter.

I kept calling for her, kept searching. I couldn’t let myself stop looking, couldn’t let myself cry either, because never in my life would I risk crying where Mattie could see because for Mattie, I was supposed to be strong.

I remember the moment when I finally gave in, when I no longer had the strength to push against reality. I let the tears come and as soon as I did, I got a text from May Beth.

The police are here. You need to get back.

A woman brushes past, startling me.

“’Scuse me,” she mumbles as she opens the bathroom door. She has a key in her hand.

Where the fuck is Cat? I run to the front of the station and push through the doors harder than I can keep myself from doing. The bells go crazy. The old man’s head jerks up in alarm.

“D-did you see a g-girl?” I ask. “She was w-with me. I c-can’t f-find her.” He frowns. “She was b-blond, c-curly hair…?”

He snaps his fingers. “Didn’t know she was with you. I saw her. She hitched a ride with some fella in a yellow truck. They pulled out while you were in here.”

I take a step back.

“O-okay. Thanks.”

“You bet.”

I walk back to the car and the panic inside me fades into confused embarrassment.

I bring my fingers to my lips.

Cat ditched me.

I mean, I don’t care.

It wasn’t like we were—

It’s not like …

When I get back to the car, I realize the backseat is a different kind of messy than it was before I picked her up …

She was going through my things, looking for—what?

I pull the door open and see blood. My stained shirt unearthed from where I stuffed it under the seat, now crumpled in a heap on the floor mat, the switchblade beside it. I slam the door shut and get back in the driver’s side.

I hope whoever she ended up with wasn’t a worse person than me.





THE GIRLS





S1E4


WEST McCRAY:


Cat Mather lives in Topeka, Kansas.

She was once a missing girl.

The first thing I find when I Google her name are desperate, public Facebook posts from her maternal aunt, Sally Quinn, asking after her niece’s whereabouts. Those posts are nearly two years old. Shortly after she put them up, Sally informs her friends to cease all searching; Cat has essentially divorced herself from her family and wants nothing to do with anyone and that’s that. She’s just a runaway.

Cat, in a lot of ways, is what I expected Sadie to be. Restless, reckless, dramatic. Her own Facebook profile is full of pictures with her tongue sticking out, her hair dyed bright, bold colors. She’s often wearing shirts with the anarchy logo on them. At least, she was then. That was when she was around to share status updates with not-so-subtle allusions to personal unhappiness. Fuck this family, one says. Stop the planet, I want off, says another. She was gone not long after that last one and spent the next two years moving from place to place, until just a few months ago, when she got caught behind the wheel of a stolen car.