All the Rage(28)

“You know what the hardest part of being a parent is?” Mom asks after a minute. “It’s not being able to…”

She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to. She’s said this to me before. It’s this: it’s not being able to protect your kid from The Bad Stuff. To stand by, helpless, while they’re suffering and not being able to do a damn thing about it. But that’s life and life happens. Only one thing’s going to stop it.

“If I were the Youngs, I don’t know what I’d do. You were gone, Romy. I lost my mind. I can’t even tell you how it felt to sit here and not know where you were or if you were okay…”

“I’m sorry.”

“I thought you just … had enough of everything. And then I thought—of course she would. Of course she would. Why wouldn’t she? I could’ve done so much better.”

“Don’t start that again,” I whisper.

But once she starts, she can’t stop. “I kept trying to justify it. It’s better to have two parents, even if one … isn’t much of one. And I’d see you shouldering it all. You just accepted it. That’s so unfair.”

“It’s not that simple.”


It couldn’t have been. It was complicated. We were all so much more complicated than that because if we weren’t—

Then it should have been so much easier.

“Maybe,” she says. “But it shouldn’t have been like that. And now you just take everything on and you don’t ask me to take it from you, even when you can barely stand it. You scare me, Romy. You take the car and you just go. You get drunk at Wake Lake and picked up off a road and you don’t remember anything about it.”

For her, I should paint a party, a crowd, music, stars in the sky, a girl dancing in the middle of it all, wanted. Maybe she’s drunk but maybe in this version—people looked after her. Except even my mother wouldn’t fall for that. Not me, not in this town.

“Romy.” The way she says it, I know what question is coming next and I want to be gone from here before she asks it. “If anything happened to you, please tell me.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You were in the bathroom for a long time.”

“Don’t—” I force it out. “Don’t make it into something it wasn’t.”

“But you’d tell me? You would tell me if … something happened to you. If you woke up on that road, and something wasn’t right? Because I’d help you … I’d…”

No. I nod and twist away from her, because I can feel it, the guilt she’s carrying and I don’t want to feel it anymore. I don’t want to feel anything.

“You really don’t know how you got on that road? Penny wasn’t with you?”

“Don’t make me say it again,” I say.

“We have to take you down to the sheriff’s tomorrow,” she says. “You’re going to have to say it again then … unless something comes to you. Maybe something will come to you.”

“Maybe,” I say.





leanne howard calls while I’m asleep, tells Mom they received new information ruling out a connection between me and Penny but she wasn’t at liberty to say what it was. I want to know what it was. I want to know why one girl came back and one didn’t. Todd says Grebe is leveled by Penny’s disappearance and when I look out the window, our street is quieter than usual. Everyone stayed inside their houses, kept there, silent by the shock of it.

“They’re doing a hell of a search,” Todd tells us. “I saw Dan Conway at the drug store this morning and he said they’re covering ground and air—getting a helicopter. There were a few reporters and news cameras trolling around the lake too. Penny was supposed to end up in Ibis at her mother’s house and she never got there.”

I pick at some loose threads on the couch and try to picture it. Penny on her way to her mother’s in the dark, and me, headed in the opposite direction under that same sky.

I hope she’s still missing by Monday.

Another one of those thoughts in my head, so easy it has to have come directly from my heart like I hate you and I hope it’s not a girl. I hope she’s missing. What kind of thought is that to have? It’s not that I don’t want her to be found, but I want my moment to expire first. I want everyone so distracted at the start of the week no one’s thinking about me, how I was at the lake, however I was at the lake, because I don’t want to find it out from them. At all.

But if it’s bad, I’ll find it out from them no matter what.

“How Dan finds this stuff out, I’ll never know,” Mom says from the kitchen. I wonder if Dan Conway’s heard anything about me.

“Didn’t I tell you? His son, Joe, works at the sheriff’s department now,” he says. “Just makes coffee by the sound of it, but they’re paying him well to do it.”

“Joe Conway? They’re letting him work there?”

“Well, come on. The Turners always look after their sycophants,” Todd says. “No matter how goddamn stupid they are.”

Todd eases himself into the recliner across from me, wincing. His back is hurting him bad and he won’t say it’s because of all the time he spent in the car, searching for a girl who isn’t even his daughter. I should apologize to him, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I ask him if he needs anything instead.