Vanishing Girls(6)

But I know that isn’t fair. He left even before things got shitty. I’ve tried to understand it a million times, but still, I can’t. Afterward, sure. When Dara got metal pins in her kneecaps and swore she would never speak to me again, and when Mom went silent for weeks and started taking sleeping pills every night and waking up too groggy to go to work and the hospital bills kept coming, kept coming, like autumn leaves after a storm.

But why weren’t we good enough before?

“Sorry about the mess.” Mom gestures to encompass the table and the window seat, cluttered with mail, and the countertop, also heaped with mail and groceries half unpacked from a bag and then abandoned. “There’s always so much to do. Ever since I started work again . . .”

“That’s okay.” I hate hearing my mom apologize. After the accident, all she did was say I’m sorry. I woke up in the hospital and she was holding me, rocking me like a baby, repeating it over and over. Like she had anything to do with it. Hearing her apologize for something that wasn’t her fault made me feel even worse.

I was the one driving the car.

Mom clears her throat. “Have you thought about what you’ll do this summer, now that you’re home?”

“What do you mean?” I reach over and take a bite of the toast. Stale. I spit it out into a balled-up napkin, and Mom doesn’t even lecture me. “I still have shifts at the Palladium. I’ll just have to borrow Dara’s car and—”

“Absolutely not. No way you’re going back to the Palladium.” Mom turns, suddenly, into her old self: the principal-for-one-of-the-worst-public-high-schools in Shoreline County, the mom who broke up physical fights between the senior boys and made absentee parents get it together, or at least do a better job of pretending. “And you’re not driving, either.”

Anger itches its way up through my skin. “You’re not serious.” At the start of the summer, I landed a job behind the concessions kiosk at the Palladium, the movie theater at Bethel Mall just outside of Main Heights: the world’s easiest, stupidest job. Most days the whole mall is empty except for moms in spandex pushing baby strollers, and even when they come to the Palladium they never order anything but Diet Coke. All I have to do is show up and I get $10.50 an hour.

“I’m dead serious.” Mom folds her hands on the table, her knuckles gripped so tightly I can see every bone. “Your father and I think you need a little more structure this summer,” she says. Amazing that my parents can only find time to stop hating each other to team up against me. “Something to keep you busy.”

Busy. Like stimulated, that word is parent-speak for: supervised at all times and bored out of your mind.

“I’m busy at the Palladium,” I say, which is a complete lie.

“You mix butter into popcorn, Nicki,” Mom says. A crease appears between her eyebrows, as if someone has just pressed a thumb to her skin.

Not always, I nearly say.

She stands up, cinching her bathrobe a little tighter. Mom runs summer-school sessions Monday through Thursday. I guess since it’s Friday she didn’t bother getting dressed, even though it’s after 2:00 p.m. “I’ve spoken to Mr. Wilcox,” she says.

“No.” The itch has become a full-blown panic. Greg Wilcox is a creepy old guy who used to teach math at Mom’s school, until he chucked academia for a job managing the world’s oldest, most pathetic amusement park, Fantasy Land. Since the name makes it sound like a strip club, everyone calls it FanLand. “Don’t even say it.”

Apparently she isn’t listening. “Greg said he’s short-staffed this summer, especially after—” She breaks off, making a face as if she’s sucking on a lemon, meaning she almost said something she shouldn’t have. “Well, he could use an extra pair of hands. It’ll be physical, it’ll get you outside, and it will be good for you.”

I’m getting pretty sick of my parents forcing me to do things while pretending it’s for my benefit.

“This isn’t fair,” I say. I almost add, You never make Dara do anything, but I refuse to mention her, just like I refuse to ask where she is. If she’s going to pretend I don’t exist, I can do the same for her.

“I don’t have to be fair,” she says. “I’m your mom. Besides, Dr. Lichme thinks—”

“I don’t care what Dr. Lichme thinks.” I shove away from the table so hard the chair screeches on the linoleum. The air in the house is thick with heat and moisture: no central air. This is what my summer will be like: instead of lying in Dad’s spare bedroom with the AC cranked up and all the lights off, I’ll be sharing a house with a sister who hates me and slaving away at an ancient amusement park solely attended by freaks and old people.

“Now you’re starting to sound like her, too.” Mom looks totally exhausted. “One is enough, don’t you think?”

It’s typical of Dara that she can become not only the topic of but also a force in the conversation even when she isn’t in the room. For as long as I can remember, people have been comparing me to Dara instead of the other way around. She’s not as pretty as her younger sister . . . shyer than her younger sister . . . not as popular as her younger sister . . .

The only thing I was ever better at than Dara was being ordinary. And field hockey—like running a ball down a field is a great basis for a personality.