We Run the Tides(18)

Still, I find myself picking wax out of my hair on the way to school.

I have stopped walking by Julia’s and Faith’s houses—instead I take a different route, with Svea and her dour friend, who is dourer today because we are late. The Santa Lucia ritual has set us back several minutes. We walk past the castle, past the house that once belonged to Carter the Great, past the pink house that belongs to the woman who went to Palm Springs for the weekend and impulsively got a tummy tuck. “Who gets a tummy tuck on a whim?” I’ve heard other women comment, as though it was the last-minute nature of her procedure that was most shocking. In the distance, foghorns sound, and near us, leaf blowers make their loud leaf-blowing sound. The streets are empty as usual. But at the entrance to the school, there’s a commotion, and causing the commotion are three police cars.

The headmaster’s secretary is standing stiffly outside the front office. She never stands outside the office. When she sees me ap proaching, her body relaxes, and then tightens again. She asks if she can speak to me for a minute.

I go inside the office. She waits for the door to close. “Maria Fabiola is missing,” she tells me. “She disappeared yesterday when walking home from school. The detectives want to talk to you.”





12


The meeting with Mr. Makepeace and the detectives takes place in a conference room at the back of the office. Probably because there’s more room. There are three detectives waiting to talk with me—a man with tight pants, a man with loose pants, and—surprise!—a woman. She has dyed blond hair pulled severely into a ponytail, and very thin lips. Her eyes are upon me the moment I pass through the conference room door.

“I’m Detective Anderson,” she says. “And you’re Eulabee.”

I agree that that is my name.

“That’s a beautiful name,” she says. “Where is it from?”

It’s evident they’ve decided that she’s going to be kind to me, that she’s going to sweet-talk me so I will give her answers.

“It’s from a painting,” I say. “My dad liked a painting of a woman named Eulabee Dix.”

“Interesting,” she says, showing no interest. She is already looking down at her clipboard, thinking of her next question. “Do you know why we called you in here today?” she asks.

I look at Mr. Makepeace, who nods at me. His blue bow tie bounces up and down.

“Because he told you to call me in,” I say, nodding back at the headmaster.

“And why do you think he did that?” Detective Anderson says.

“Because I used to be best friends with Maria Fabiola.”

“Used to be?” she says. Now she does seem genuinely interested. She puts her pen down, to show that we are about to have a serious conversation. “Why used to? What happened, my dear?”

The dear sounds so forced coming out of her mouth that I want to laugh.

“We had a falling out.”

“About what?”

I don’t say anything.

“Was it about a boy?” she says in a tone that’s meant to convey we can all relate to that.

“No,” I say.

“Oh,” she says, clearly disappointed that she has not tapped in to the root problem with her first guess. She looks at the other detectives.

“You were friends a couple months ago.”

“Things change,” I tell her.

“Don’t I know it,” she says. “Six months ago I was married!” She lets out a laugh that I think is supposed to sound jovial but instead sounds more like a scream.

Mr. Makepeace looks at me, as though he, too, is curious about my falling out with Maria Fabiola. Or maybe he’s just upset because he wants a cigar and this conference room has a “No Smoking” sign that was posted specifically to target him. No one else in the administration smokes.

“You used to walk to school together, didn’t you?” the detective with the tight pants asks.

“Yes, but then we had a . . . difference of opinion about what happened that morning.” I’ve never used the phrase “difference of opinion” before and I like how it sounds.

“What was the difference?” the detective with the loose pants asks.

“She said there was an incident on the way to school, and I maintained that the incident was a fabrication,” I say. Everyone is looking at me as though wondering where I got my vocabulary from. Then they look at Mr. Makepeace, who shrugs, unsurprised, as if to suggest, What else did you expect from the girls at our fine institution?

“So you didn’t walk home with Maria Fabiola yesterday,” Detective Anderson says.

“No,” I say.

“Do you know what route she would have taken?”

“I can guess,” I say. “We used to walk home together. She probably walked toward the ocean and then followed El Camino del Mar to her house.”

“Do you think she took a detour? That she walked by the cliffs?” the third detective asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I wasn’t with her.”

“Does she have a boyfriend?” Detective Anderson asks. It must have been established ahead of time that she would be asking me all the questions that had to do with boys or relationships.

“I don’t know,” I say again.