All the Rage(50)

“Search party was something else,” she says.

“I left after Emma Smith. What happened?”

“Alek had to be walked out. He was a wreck—”

“Really?”

“Yeah, and nobody had the heart to keep going after that. I think they’d probably do better searching the highways, honestly,” Leanne says. “But I don’t think they really wanted to find anything yesterday.”

I remember the deputy muttering to himself after the false alarm.

Waste of time.

“Then why would they even bother with it?”

“Combat helplessness,” she says simply. And then, just as simply, “Romy, you have to know they’re looking for a body at this point.”

It stops me. Stops my heart.

No, I want to tell her. You’re wrong. Penny isn’t dead. Penny made it through almost four years of high school beloved by all, except for me and even I was won for part of it—you don’t make it through high school like that and not survive whatever it is she’s gotten into.

“I’ve been thinking about what you asked, when you came down to get your phone,” Leanne says. “That maybe looking for you was the reason we didn’t find Penny. And then I heard some of the kids talking about you at the lake.” She looks at me, pities me. “They were saying it.”

“That surprise you?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

I shrug in a conversation’s over kind of way, hoping she’ll let me continue on without her, but she doesn’t. She’s at my back and then she’s at my side again. It’s too early to start the day with this kind of headache.

“Look, whatever anyone feels about you, it’s no small thing you got found.” She puts her hand on my shoulder and then we’re stopped again. “When I saw you on the road, I was so damned relieved. And it eats me up that we haven’t found Penny yet, but when it comes to missing girls, you barely get that lucky once, let alone twice. Anyone trying to guilt you—that’s bullshit.”

I stare at the ground. I don’t know what to say to the idea that finding me was worth anything to anyone beside my mother, and Todd. And Leon, who’s probably sorry about it now.

“So it wouldn’t have made that kind of difference?”

I want to hear her say it—that, exactly—if it didn’t.

She bites her lip. “Even it did … it wouldn’t have been your fault.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She looks away from me. “Just what I said.”


I pause. “How’d they rule out the connection between us, Leanne?”

“I can’t tell you,” she says. “But I promise you it wouldn’t be your fault. I just wanted you to know, okay?”

I laugh a little. “Well, thanks a lot for that. I’ll just keep that thought close when they’re telling me over and over I’m the girl no one wanted to find.”

I start walking again, try to forget this whole waste of my time, but then she says, “I need my job, Romy.”

I turn. “So?”

“So when Turner tells me I’m not supposed to say something, I don’t,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t whether or not I think it’s right. I still think I should’ve driven you to the hospital that day.” She stops. “But I need my job for my family.”

“I wouldn’t say anything,” I promise and the more torn she looks about it, the more my heart wants to know what she knows. “And no one would believe me if I did.”

It deepens the lines on her face.

“It was Ben Ortiz’s daughter,” she finally says. “Tina.”

Tina.

A name like a razor on my skin.

I know whatever Leanne tells me next is going to cut me open.

It does.





my palm rests against my chest. I knead my skin. I listen for my heart because it went quiet a while ago and I’m not sure it’s there anymore.

Wait for it. I’m waiting. Waiting for the girls coming down the hall. Their voices arrive ahead of them, float sweetly under the crack in the door. I stare at the dirty floor tiles of the locker room and. Wait. For. It. Tina comes in. I stare at her feet as they walk to her locker. I watch her slip out of her shoes and when she starts undressing, let my eyes wander, up her legs, her hips, her soft belly and her breasts.

“Know why half the sheriff’s department was wasting time looking for me when they could’ve been looking for Penny?” I ask.

Tina’s fingers pause behind her back, stop seeking the clasp of her bra. She doesn’t say anything, just raises her chin in a way that dares me to go on. Dares me to say out loud how she was at the sheriff’s department that Saturday night, telling them what she did to me so they’d start looking in all the right places for Penny. I stand, my legs trembling like a newborn colt’s until I feel it, a soft thud in my chest—my heart, coming alive—and I get steadier.

“You put me on that road. You dragged me out to that road,” I say. “You wrote rape me on my stomach and then you left me there.”

She holds my gaze. This is what I want to happen: I want the girls to realize she’s the thief who stole that time from Penny. I want them to round on her. I want them to eat her alive without once opening their mouths. I want this to be the end of Tina Ortiz, but the things I want to happen never do. No one makes her guilty. No one makes her pay. Even the sheriff wouldn’t do that. Not to his good friend’s daughter.