The Mystery of Hollow Places(8)
Maybe that all sounds bad. Machiavellian, Mr. McCormick would say. Maybe it’s just honest. But I’m counting on Jessa for three reasons:
1. She doesn’t have a car, never even got her license, and depends on Chad or her parents or her boyfriends to drive her anywhere.
2. She will never turn down a suggestion to shop on Newbury Street, though I can barely afford the cupcakes.
3. Most important, Dr. Van Tassel—Jessa’s mom, who is all about girl power, and doctors under her maiden name—works at Good Shepherd Hospital. I know for a fact she usually has second shift on Saturdays. And it’s her I really need.
While I’m waiting for an answer I slide my hand into the front pocket of the faux-leather satchel at my feet—a present from Dad for my seventeenth birthday—and rasp my fingers against the rough outside of the stone. Whenever I feel myself start to panic because Dad’s been missing for two days now, I think of the stone and repeat to myself that he’s searching. He’s searching. He’s searching. I wanted to stay home today and start my own search, but Lindy wouldn’t let me, said I’d already missed on Tuesday and, in situations like these, normalcy is the best policy. Whatever she means by that. School won’t be normal for long, not once word gets out.
As far as I can tell, none of my classmates know Dad’s gone. Yet. I spent most of chemistry eyeing Ashley Griffin, who revealed nothing. No sympathetic half smiles, no gossiping behind her purple-painted nails. Of course, she might not even be Officer Griffin’s daughter, but she’s still the type who knows everything before everyone else. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her surprised, not by the box of Plan B that tumbled out of Dominique Melcher’s backpack during study hall or Josh Lopez’s brother’s second DUI. Girls like Ashley Griffin are the mouth of the river of gossip at Sugarbrook High, and the rest of us try not to sink in the current. Say what you will about Jessa (and you can say a lot), but she doesn’t blab secrets.
Not that I plan to tell her about Dad. I don’t plan to tell anyone. I’m not embarrassed or anything—I know Dad must have a good reason for skipping out in the night—it’s just that nothing anyone comes up with will be the truth. They’ll say he ran out on us, or that his murdered body is floating listlessly down the Mystic River. False and false. I don’t want anyone to think of my dad that way.
I flinch as a pencil flips past my face and clatters against the frosted windowpane to my left. Katie Rodriguez and Liz Bash giggle behind me, but Mr. McCormick doesn’t look up. I turn on Jessa, who grins unapologetically.
“Mom’s working at three tomorrow. She’ll drive us in, but we have to, like, get my brother to pick us up after.”
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.