Vanishing Girls(19)

Lick Me told me last week that he thinks my family has trouble dealing with conflict. He said it with this really serious look on his face, like he was in the process of farting out some really important wisdom. Did he have to get a degree in psychology just to say really obvious shit?

My name is Dr. Lichme, PhDuh.

For example: I caught Nick in my room today. She acted like she was just looking for her blue cashmere sweater, the one that used to belong to Mamu. As if I would believe that. She knows I’d rather wear chain link than pastels, and she knows I know she knows it and was just trying for an excuse. I bet Mom sent her to spy on me and root around to make sure I’m not getting into any trouble.

Just in case it happens again: HI, NICK!!! GET THE HELL OUT OF MY ROOM AND STOP READING MY DIARY!!

And to save you time—the weed’s stashed in the flower pot and my cigarettes are in the underwear drawer. Oh, and Ariana has a friend who works at Baton Rouge, and he says he knows someone who can get us Molly this weekend.

Don’t tell Mom and Dad, or I’ll tell them that their little angel isn’t such an angel after all. I heard what you and Aaron did in the boiler room during the Founders’ Day Ball. Naughty, naughty. Is that why you’ve been carrying around condoms in your bag?

That’s right, N. Two can play at this game.

Love,

Lil Sis





JULY 21


Nick


It’s day two of my FanLand career and I’m already running late. I’m in the kitchen, slugging Mom’s coffee, which tastes alarmingly like something you’d use to clean drain pipes, when the knocking starts.

“I’ll get it!” I shout, partly because I’m on my way out and partly because Mom’s still in the bathroom, doing whatever she does in the morning, creams and lotions and layers of makeup and a slow transformation from pouchy and puckered to put-together.

I grab my bag from the window seat and jog down the hall, noticing that the unfamiliar gardening boots are still lying in the middle of the hall, as they have been for the whole five days I’ve been home. Suddenly annoyed—Mom always used to bug us about picking up after ourselves, and now she can’t be bothered?—I pick them up and chuck them in the coat closet. A fine layer of dirt flakes from the thick rubber soles.

I’m unprepared for the cop standing on the front porch, and for a moment my whole chest seizes and time stills or leaps backward and I think, Dara. Something happened to Dara.

Then I remember that Dara came home last night. I heard her, clomping around upstairs and playing snippets of weird Scandinavian dance tech, as though deliberately trying to annoy me.

The cop, a woman, is holding my favorite field hockey sweatshirt.

“Are you Nicole Warren?” She pronounces my name as if it’s a dirty word, reading off the old camp label still stitched to the inside of the collar.

“Nick,” I say automatically.

“What’s going on?”

Mom has come halfway down the stairs, her face only half made up. Foundation lightens her face, makes her pale lashes and eyebrows nearly disappear, giving her whole face the look of a blank mask. She’s wearing her bathrobe over work pants.

“I don’t know,” I say.

At the same time, the cop says, “There was a party by the construction site at the Saskawatchee River last night.” The cop holds the sweatshirt a little higher. “We took this off your daughter.”

“Nick?” Mom now comes all the way downstairs, cinching her belt tighter. “Is that true?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know. I mean—” I take a deep breath. “I wasn’t there.”

The cop ticks her eyes from me to the sweatshirt and then back to me. “This belong to you?”

“Obviously,” I say, starting to get annoyed. Dara. Always goddamn Dara. Despite the accident, despite what happened, she just can’t help but get into trouble. It’s like it feeds her somehow, like she draws energy from chaos. “My name’s in it. But I wasn’t there. I stayed in last night.”

“I doubt the sweatshirt walked over to the Drink on its own,” the cop says, smirking like she made a joke. It bothers me that she calls it the Drink. That’s our name for it, a nonsense nickname that stuck, and it feels wrong that she knows—like a doctor probing your mouth with his fingers.

“Well, then, it’s a mystery,” I say, grabbing the sweatshirt back from her. “You’re a cop. You figure it out.”

“Nick.” Mom’s voice turns hard. “Enough.”

Both of them are staring at me, wearing twin expressions of disappointment. I don’t know when every grown-up masters that look. Maybe it’s part of the college curriculum. I almost blurt it out: how Dara uses the rose trellis as a ladder; how she probably stole my sweatshirt and then got drunk and forgot it.

But years ago, back when we were kids, Dara and I swore that we would never rat each other out. There was never a formal declaration like a pact or a pinkie-swear. It was an implicit understanding, deeper than anything that could be stated.

Even when she started to get in trouble, even when I found cigarettes stubbed out on her windowsill or little plastic bags filled with unidentifiable pills stashed beneath the pencil cup on her desk, I didn’t tell. Sometimes it killed me, lying awake and listening to the creak of the trellis, a muffled burst of laughter outside and the low roar of an engine peeling away into the night. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell on her; I felt I’d be breaking something that could never be replaced.