How to Disappear(25)
“Are you alone?”
“It’s Sunday morning—where do you think I am?” Olivia says.
“Drive the phone somewhere and crush it. Get yourself a new e-mail and write to Cinderella, okay?”
Cinderella3472 is from when we made up a college girl named Desiree to play with online. Not that we got past setting up her e-mail account and an unfinished profile on TrueLuvMatch.com. Who’s going to be able to find a nonexistent single who never goes to one website where I ever visited, posted, or scrolled past?
Olivia’s voice drops. “What happened?”
“Later.”
Then I trash the phone.
I have totally freaked out my best friend while she was sitting in church, and I don’t even feel bad about it.
I finally get how to do this. Lying and stealing didn’t feel that great, but this was a fire, and I don’t even feel guilty. On the bus back north, winding through farmland, I’m remembering Steve going, “Don’t you think that might have been a wee bit reckless, Nicolette?” I’m thinking, Freaking-A, I’m reckless.
Also, still alive.
I’m on the bus in different sunglasses and a marching band shirt, chomping on a bag of mini Kit Kat bars and a half-quart carton of whole milk to get my fat on.
You can circumnavigate the globe on your tabletop, Steve, but no one, not anyone, not whoever texted me, not a platoon of Texas Rangers or the FBI or a band of scary thugs (or you) will ever find me.
By the time you walk past me on the street, I’ll be some whole other girl you don’t even recognize or know.
Even I will hardly know it’s me.
I feel so maniacally in power, I can’t even sleep anymore. So I sit back in this half-dazed state, scanning the bus for bogeymen and obsessing about where Catherine Grace Davis can get a gun.
25
Jack
When it happens, I’m alone in the motel room that by now is strewn with bottles, KFC boxes, and dirty clothes. Nicolette is using Gmail—great for security, bad for me—but Calvin’s instructions are gold, and the privacy of the computer Nicolette is using is protected by the functional equivalent of a chain lock made of paper clips.
The computer is in the John Muir Branch of the public library in El Molino, California, a hick town in the Central Valley above Fresno.
Yelling “Gotcha!” to myself would be too much like going over the edge. Instead, I start cleaning up and packing with a vengeance. From this point on, it’s all about self-discipline: the kind Nicolette doesn’t have.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
I accidently dropped my phone down a well. (Not really. You know what I mean.) Tell me you’re ok NOW!!!!! Luv u 4ever, Snow
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Somebody got my number, my fault, I gave it out, don’t even. Total terror-fest. Plus I think it had GPS. So. Spooked. Might get another for emergencies. Now that I get you have to throw them out all the time or PEOPLE FIND YOU. Do not trust Law & Order reruns for survival tips. ? ? ?
She’s e-mailed Olivia, aka 1SnowWhite5150, twice, and if I don’t get to El Molino, California, fast, she gets her new emergency burner and she’s gone.
I drive there in the dark, guzzling Red Bull.
I’m in an innocuous grayish Prius I bought for cash off a used-car lot just before it closed as soon as I hit California. Don’s car is by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. I hiked back. I’m not sneaking up on this girl in a car you can hear coming a mile away.
It’s seven a.m., still chilly, and the library doesn’t open for hours. I dig a flannel shirt out of the trunk and cruise. There are FOR RENT signs planted in front of half the apartments abandoned by students taking off for summer.
I want a command post with an ergonomic chair and a mattress from this century, not another sleazy motel. I’m not a guy who throws money around, but I throw some rent at a place in a Victorian house I can get week-to-week. The girl who’s handling the rental seems so relieved to get the place off her hands, she doesn’t care if I’m in town to commit acts of terror.
I sit in the ergonomic chair and stare at my screen while more days of my life go down the tubes.
There’s nothing like a good obsession to keep a guy mesmerized. Four days in, I’m still sitting in the desk chair in boxer shorts, waiting for something to happen. I’m beating myself up for not walking El Molino systematically, street by street, looking for her, when my screen offers her up.
She’s e-mailing Olivia from the John Muir branch again. The rush is like a free fall, like bungee jumping where you’re not supposed to be.
I’m there in five, scouting.
I watch her hands hover over the keyboard, her arms emerging from the sleeves of a giant tee, her face bent toward the screen. The hair that was once straight and blond, now brown and curly, falls over the side of her face as she leans forward. She has glasses now. I see the thin blue vein in the corner of her forehead, watch her push her hair behind her ear. The diamond studs from the photos are gone, her earlobes curved and white.
I watch her breathe.
I don’t let myself feel what I’ve felt since I saw pictures of her that first time, more difficult now that she’s more my physical type, curvier and a little older-looking. She’s still small and beautiful and a killer.