All the Rage(24)

“Oh,” I whisper. My first word in this after.

I try to make sense of her, the deputy. It’s hard to focus at first but when I do, I see brown eyes, curly red hair, a smattering of freckles across a pointed nose. Leanne Howard. Morris Howard’s daughter—he teaches at the elementary school. She’s just shy of thirty.

“You okay?” she asks, but I don’t think she’d ask if I was. I stare at her. “You got a lot of people worried about you, you know that? How’d you get all the way out here?”

Too many questions.

I want—Mom. I reach into my pocket for my phone and only find my lipstick. My phone is gone but I had it last night. I know I did. I look down at myself, at the uneven alignment of my buttons and my heart seizes but—wait. I did that. I did that before Leanne’s car pulled up, remember … I did that because—my shirt was open. And something’s wrong underneath … I remember that too. My bra. I feel it now, undone.

Oh.

“Hey,” Leanne says and she looks past me, over my shoulder. “You alone? How’d you get out here? Can you tell me how you got out here?” My gaze travels from my buttons to my bare, scraped legs, worse than they were from track. “Romy. How’d you get out here?”

“The lake,” I mumble. It comes to me sickly fast, in flashes. Penny. Leaving the diner, biking the highway. The path to the lake—the path. And my feet on it. And the music, music thrumming, bass thumping, thump, thump, thump, I squeeze my eyes shut but that thumping, the pulse pounding in my head, it goes on. The lake. There. I was there. And lights and eyes were on me, and just after the path opened to the water, it cuts to—nothing.

I reach for more but there’s nothing.

I was at the lake.

I’m not anymore.

“Are you hurt?”

I need to be standing. No more … no more questions before I’m standing.

I bring my arm to my mouth and cough into the crook of my elbow before I press my hands to the ground. I get to my knees and bite back the urge to hiss at my raw palms meeting earth. I am hurt. But that has to be where the hurt stops.

“Your mother called us, said you were missing.”

Leanne offers her hand but I ignore it. I find my feet on my own and then I’m standing but I don’t feel like I’m standing.

“My mom—”

“You alone? Penny with you?” she asks. I shake my head and this is a mistake. The world tries to throw me off. Leanne reaches for me. I step back. My body isn’t working the way I need it to, to get out of this. “Come sit in the car. I’ll get the cold air going. I have to call this in and then we’ll get you to a hospital, get you checked out—”

“No.” I’m not letting anyone look at me before I look at myself. “No—” Leanne tries to insist, you need it, Romy, you need to be checked out, and all I can say is, no, no, no and the word gets louder the more she makes me say it, and for once someone finally hears it coming out of my mouth. She says, “Okay, okay—Romy, just—I said okay—”

She grabs my arm. I stare at her hand on my skin. She lets go. I put my hand where hers was, aware of the parts of me that are covered and the parts that aren’t.

I need the places that aren’t covered to be—covered.

“Do you know where you are?” She grabs the bottle of water off the ground, holds it out to me. “Drink that. You need it.”

I look around, wait for the here of this place to reach me, this place I ended up, but the road says nothing. The trees on either side of it say more of the same.

“It’s Taraldson Road. You’re about thirty miles from Godwit—”

“Grebe—” No. Godwit? “But—”

“You know how you got out here?”

Godwit. Grebe. Wake Lake—did I … how—

I’m thirsty, I’m too thirsty to think. I take the water from her and she looks relieved I’m doing that much. I unscrew the cap and drink slowly, small sips. It’s lukewarm but it brings me back a little, just enough to tell her again I’m not going to the hospital in a voice I almost believe.

She crosses her arms. “So what I’m getting from you is you blacked out, you don’t know how you got like this, and you don’t think you should go to a hospital?”

The question goes bone deep. Got like this. This. My thoughts turn into vultures and those vultures circle, one ugly possibility after the other. What happened to me? I can’t—

I can’t think about that right now.

“You know how it is at the lake. What—” I force a laugh and it sounds so wrong. “Take me to the hospital for a hangover? Turner would love that.”

She hesitates, just enough for me to know I have her. Rookie.

“You guys don’t have anything better to do today, really?” I ask. “I’m telling you, Leanne. He’s going to hate it if you waste any time on me, you know that.”

“Well, how about I ask him, huh? I have to call this in.”

She walks to the Explorer and I feel like I’m slowly coming online, all the things she’s said to me so far hitting me a second time.

“What about Penny?”

She doesn’t answer, so I stay where I am while she calls Sheriff Turner, calls me in. My bra shifts in a way it shouldn’t, itching at my skin, and the steady parts of me, what little reserve I have left, disappear. My eyes burn. I blink. After a minute, Leanne comes back, uncertain.