Vanishing Girls(40)

Tonight, after I’ve completed the ritual—all four faucets running, a scoop and a half of lemon verbena, wait until the water’s so hot it turns my skin pink, then ease in and turn the faucets off one by one—I take a deep breath and go under. Almost instantly my pain evaporates. My broken put-together body turns weightless, my hair fans out behind me, brushing my shoulders and arms, tendril-like. I listen for echoes, but all I hear is the rhythm of my heart, which sounds both loud and strangely distant. Then a secondary rhythm joins the first.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

The sound reaches me even underwater. Someone is knocking—no, pounding—at the front door. I sit up, gasping a little.

There’s a temporary break in the knocking, and for a moment I think, optimistically, that it was a mistake. Some drunk kid has mistaken our house for a friend’s. Or maybe it was a dumb prank.

But then it happens again, slightly quieter but still insistent. It can’t be Nick; I’m almost positive Nick is home and asleep, no doubt mentally preparing for our family dinner tomorrow. Besides, Nick knows we keep a spare key under a fake rock next to the planter, like every other family in America.

Annoyed, I haul myself out of the tub, moving carefully on legs that go quickly stiff. Shivering, I towel off, then pull on a pair of thin cotton sleep pants and an old Cougars T-shirt that belonged to my dad in high school. My hair hangs wetly down my back—no time to dry it properly. I grab my phone from the back of the toilet. 12:35.

In the hallway, the latticed windows cut the moonlight into geometric patterns. Someone is moving just beyond the glass, backlit by the porch light. For just a second I hang back, afraid—thinking, irrationally, of Madeline Snow, of hysterical rumors about perverts and predators and girls caught unawares.

Then someone cups a hand to the window to peek inside, and my heart contracts. Parker.

Even before I open the door, it’s obvious he’s drunk.

“You,” he says. He leans heavily against the house, likely to keep himself on his feet. With one hand, he reaches out as if he’s going to touch my face. I jerk away. Still, his hand lingers in the air, hovering like a butterfly. “I’m so glad it’s you.”

I ignore the words—I ignore how good they feel, how badly I’ve wanted to hear them. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.” He straightens up, runs a hand through his hair, swaying a little on his feet. “Shit. I’m sorry. I’m drunk.”

“That’s obvious.” I step out onto the porch, easing the door shut behind me, and cross my arms, wishing now that I weren’t wearing my dad’s old T-shirt, that my hair weren’t wet, that I had a bra on, for Christ’s sake.

“I’m sorry. It’s just . . . the whole birthday thing really f*cked me up.” Parker looks at me in the way that only he can: chin lowered, watching me with those huge eyes and the lashes thick as brushstrokes, which on anyone else would look girlish. His perfect upper lip, shaped exactly like a heart. “Remember last year, when we all went to East Norwalk together? And Ariana scored beer from that sleazy guy who worked at the 7-Eleven. What was his name?”

A memory rises up: standing with Parker in the parking lot, doubled over laughing because Mattie Carson was peeing on a Dumpster next to the nail parlor, even though there was a bathroom inside. I don’t even remember why Mattie was there. Maybe because he’d offered to bring Super Soakers he’d borrowed from his younger brothers.

Parker doesn’t wait for me to answer. “We tried to break into that creepy lighthouse on Orphan’s Beach. And we had a water fight. I creamed you. I totally creamed you. We watched the sunrise. I’ve never seen a sunrise like that. Remember? It was practically—”

“Red. Yeah. I remember.” It was freezing by then, and my eyes were gritty from the sand. Still, I was happier than I’d been in years—maybe happier than I’d ever been. Parker had lent me his sweatshirt (National Pi Day), and I still have it somewhere. Ariana and Mattie had fallen asleep on a big flat rock, huddled together beneath his fleece, and Nick, Parker, and I sat side by side, a picnic blanket draped around our shoulders like an enormous cape, passing the last beer back and forth, our toes buried in the cold sand, trying to skip stones across the waves. The sky was flat silver, then a dull copper, like an old penny. Then, suddenly, the sun broke free of the ocean, electric red, and none of us could speak or say anything—we just watched and watched, until it was too bright and we couldn’t watch anymore.

Suddenly I’m angry at Parker: for reviving the memory of that night; for showing up now, when I’d already convinced myself I was over him; for making everything crack open again. For his perfect lips and his smile and those stormy eyes and the fact that even standing next to him I can feel an invisible force moving between us.

Magnetism, my chem teacher would call it. The seeking of a thing for its pair.

“Is that what you came to say?” I look away, hoping he can’t read how badly it aches to be next to him. How badly I want to kiss him. If I don’t act angry—if I don’t get angry—the ache will only deepen. “To take a stroll down memory lane at nearly one a.m. on a Wednesday?”

He squints, rubbing his forehead. “No,” he says. “No, of course not.” I feel a hard squeeze of guilt. I could never stand to see Parker unhappy. But I remind myself that it’s his fault: he’s the one who showed up out of nowhere, after all this time.