All the Rage(61)

“Mom, don’t—”

Because I don’t need her to tell me because— “But it’s not enough.”

I know.

I knew it before she did.

“And you,” she says. “You feel how you want to feel about your dad. It’s not ever going to be wrong, you understand me?”

I don’t know what to say. She continues to prep and I try to do the same but it’s hard to focus. Todd comes home forty minutes later with all the groceries. I keep my eyes on my cutting board, don’t realize there’s anything worth looking up for until Mom asks, “What is it?”

I turn. Todd stands in the kitchen doorway, the handles of the plastic grocery bags twisting slowly in his grip. He looks paler than I’ve ever seen him, paler than he gets when he’s in the worst kind of pain. He sets the groceries down and runs his hands over his mouth a couple of times before he finally speaks and when he does, he says— He says, “They pulled Penny Young’s body out of Gadwall River last night.”





ARE YOU OKAY? he asks.

I CAN’T SEE YOU TOMORROW, I tell him.

He says, I UNDERSTAND.

He says, IF YOU NEED ANYTHING …

But what could I need?

What could I need, that she doesn’t anymore?





MISSING GIRL FOUND


A headline terrible enough to stop hearts and a story to crush them. A story the Ibis Daily isn’t supposed to have yet. They missed the weekend print edition, but put it on their Web site and that’s what Todd shows us, the crumpled printout someone passed to him at the grocery store, like a note in class.

A family friend, who does not want to be identified, says the body of 18-year-old Penny Young was recovered from the Gadwall River early Friday night. The Young family was notified of the discovery earlier this morning.

The Grebe and Ibis Sheriff’s Departments would not confirm this, but said they will hold a news conference Sunday at 1 p.m. to discuss the latest developments in the case.

Young, who divided her time between her mother’s residence in Ibis and her father’s residence in Grebe, was last seen at a party in Grebe. She was reported missing by her mother when she did not arrive at her house the next morning.

I smooth the paper out on my desk and then I press my left hand flat against it. I reach for my nail polish. Before I tore the label off, this color was either called Paradise or Hit and Run. I wonder what it would be named if they had to call it what it really is. The color of your insides. The stuff your heart beats. Nothing you can afford to lose. I lift the brush and watch the red drip unhurriedly back into the bottle.

“Romy,” Mom calls.

I run the brush against the edge of the bottle’s opening, until the bristles are barely coated. I start at my pinkie finger and paint it carefully. My hands don’t shake. Not even a little.

“Romy, it’s starting soon.”

The first coat is dry by the time I’m on the last nail of the first hand. I move onto the next one. And then the second coat. I don’t go outside the lines. If you don’t go outside the lines, not once, you’re even more the person you’re trying to be, maybe.

And then I’m ready.

“Romy, it’s starting now.”

I sit on the couch between Mom and Todd. The sides of my legs touch theirs. I lean forward, my fresh-painted fingernails against my fresh-painted lips.

There’s a table of officials stretched across the length of the television screen, all of them somber. A man I don’t recognize stands at a podium, too tall for its microphone. I want to reach through somehow and adjust it for him. He thanks an audience I can’t see for attending and when he tells us what happened to her, his voice doesn’t shake.

Not even a little.

He says the body of a girl was located in Gadwall River by two campers. He says they noticed something tangled in a tree’s low-hanging branches in the water, upstream from their camping site. The postmortem indicated the body was likely held under by those branches, likely submerged until the rainfall made the river wild and moved what was left of her just enough to be seen. The postmortem indicated that the deceased died from suspicious, nonnatural causes, but no further information regarding that will be released at this time, so as not to jeopardize the ongoing investigation—into the death of Penny Young.

Mom puts her arm around me and holds tight like she wants to be sure it isn’t a mistake, that they are definitely talking about some other girl that’s not me.

I listen as the man runs through every little thing they did to try to make this ending happier. Interviewing every student at the party—which I guess is what they call it when Sheriff Turner sits across from you at a table and tells you that you’re fine—the ground and air searches, following up on two hundred phone tips, volunteer searches. For all the good it did. When the world wants a girl gone, she’s gone.

“Jesus,” Todd says when the news conference ends. He turns the TV off. “Everything they did when the ground was dry and they couldn’t find her. Now all that night is completely washed away. I don’t know what they have to go on.”

I feel Mom looking at me. She moves a strand of hair from my face.

“You okay?” she asks.

I stare at the blank TV screen and everything feels far away.

“If it’s a suspicious death, what does that mean? Someone put her there? In the river?” My voice sounds stupid and my head feels that way too. Someone put her in the river after they—what? “I don’t understand what that means.”