Vanishing Girls(33)

“What are you doing here?” The question sounds more like an accusation, and Ariana flinches.

“Yeah.” She brings a finger to her lower lip, an echo of an old habit: Ariana sucked her thumb until she was in third grade. “Seeing you at the party reminded me. I have a bunch of stuff for you.” She presses the plastic bag into my hands, looking embarrassed, as if it contains porn or a severed head. “Half of it looks like trash, but I don’t know. There may be something you wanted in there.”

Inside the bag is a jumble of things: scraps of notepaper, cocktail napkins and paper coasters scrawled over with writing, a sparkly pink thong, a half-used tube of lip gloss, one strappy shoe that appears to be broken, a nearly empty bottle of Berry Crème Body Spray. It takes me a minute to recognize everything in the bag as mine—things I must have left at Ariana’s house over the years, things that must have rolled under the front seat of her car.

Suddenly, standing on the porch in front of a dark house with a flimsy plastic grocery bag full of my belongings, I know I’m going to cry. Ariana seems to be waiting for me to say something, but I can’t speak. If I speak, I’ll break.

“All right.” She hugs herself, shrugs. “So . . . I’ll see you around?”

No, I want to say. No. But I let her get halfway across the lawn, halfway back to the maroon Toyota she inherited from her stepbrother, which always smells like her, like clove cigarettes and coconut shampoo. By then my throat feels like it’s being squeezed inside a massive fist, and two words pop out before I can regret them: “What happened?”

Ariana freezes, one hand in her bag, where she has been rummaging for her keys. She doesn’t turn around right away.

“What happened?” I say again, this time a little louder. “How come you didn’t call? Why didn’t you come by to see if I was okay?”

She does turn around then. I don’t know what I was expecting—pity, maybe?—but I’m totally unprepared for how she looks: like her face is a plaster mold on the verge of collapse. Horribly, the fact that she’s about to cry makes me feel a teensy, tiny bit better.

“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what I could say. I felt—” She breaks off. And suddenly she is crying, in big hiccuping gulps, without bothering to try and conceal it. I’m shocked into silence. I haven’t seen Ariana cry since she was in fifth grade, when we bribed Nick into helping us pierce our ears and Nick was so nervous she slipped and drove the safety pin straight into Ariana’s neck. “I’m so sorry. It was all my fault. I was a terrible friend. Maybe . . . maybe if I’d been better . . .”

All my anger has turned to pity. “Stop,” I say. “Stop. You were a great friend. You are a great friend. Come on,” I say, when she doesn’t stop crying. “It’s all right.” Without knowing it, I’ve crossed the space between us. When I hug her, I can feel her ribs poking into me. She’s so thin she hardly feels real; I think of birds, and hollow bones, and flying away.

“Sorry,” she says again, and pulls back, dragging a hand across her nose. Her eyes are raw-looking, as if she hasn’t slept in days. “I’ve just been kind of f*cked-up lately.”

“Join the club,” I say, which at least gets a laugh out of her—the ragged, low-throated laugh Ariana claims to have inherited from her grandfather, a cross-country trucker and lifelong two-packs-a-day smoker.

A pair of headlights sweep around the bend, temporarily blinding. It’s only then I realize how quiet it is outside. Normally, even as dusk falls, there are kids darting across front yards, shouting, playing Wiffle ball, chasing one another in and out of the woods. Not until Cheryl pokes her head out of the passenger-side window and yells, “Yoo-hoo!” do I remember I’m supposed to have dinner with my dad tonight.

Ariana seizes my wrist. “Let’s hang out, okay? Let’s hang out, just you and me. We can go swimming at the Drink or something.”

I make a face. “I’ve had enough of the Drink for a while.” Ariana looks so disappointed I quickly add, “But yeah, sure. Something like that.” Even as I say it, though, I know we won’t. We never used to make plans. Hanging with Ariana was just part of my rhythm, as easy as falling asleep.

It’s like the accident punched a hole straight through my life. Now there’s only Before and After.

Dad taps the horn. He hasn’t turned off the brights yet, and it feels like we’re standing on a movie set. Ariana pivots toward the car, raising a hand to her eyes, but she doesn’t wave. My parents used to love Ariana, but ever since she shaved half her head freshman year and started scamming on tattoo artists to give her piercings for free, they’ve soured on her. It’s a shame, my mom likes to say. She was such a pretty girl.

Now it’s my turn to apologize. “Sorry,” I say. “Dad has custody for dinner, apparently.”

Ariana rolls her eyes. I’m glad she’s stopped crying. She looks more like her old self. “I get it, believe me.” Ariana’s parents got divorced when she was five, and since then she’s had a stepdad and more “uncles” than I can count. “Don’t forget what I said about hanging out, okay? Call me anytime. I mean it.”

She’s trying so hard, I force a smile. “Sure.”

She turns and crosses back to her car, grimacing a little as she passes in front of the glare of my dad’s headlights. I have the desperate urge to run after her, to slide into the front seat and tell her to gun it, to peel off into the darkness, leaving Dad and Cheryl and the patchwork of sleepy houses and empty lawns behind.