Vanishing Girls(7)

“I’m nothing like her,” I say. I leave the kitchen before Mom can respond, almost tripping on the stupid gardening boots in the hall before taking the stairs two at a time. Everywhere are signs of the unfamiliar, little details missing and others added, like several plastic gnome-shaped night-lights outside Mom’s room and nothing but a bare patch of carpet in the office where Dad’s favorite, ugly-ass leather chair used to sit, plus more and more cardboard boxes full of junk, as if another family is slowly moving in or we’re slowly moving out.

My room, at least, is untouched: all the books organized spine-out and the powder-blue coverlet nicely folded and my stuffed animals from when I was a baby, Benny and Stuart, propped up on my pillows. On my bedside table, I spot the framed picture of Dara and me from Halloween when I was a freshman; in it, we’re both dressed like scary clowns, and in our face paint, grinning, we look nearly identical. I cross the room quickly and turn the picture facedown. Then, thinking better of it, I slide the photograph into a drawer.

I don’t know which is worse: that I’m home and so much is different, or that I’m home and so much feels the same.

Overhead, I hear a pattern of creaks. Dara, moving around her attic bedroom. So she is home. Suddenly I’m so angry I could hit something. This is all Dara’s fault. Dara’s the one who decided to stop speaking to me. It’s Dara’s fault I’ve been walking around feeling like I’ve got a bowling ball in my chest, like at any second it might drop straight through my stomach and spill my guts on the floor. It’s her fault I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, and when I do I just feel nauseous.

Once upon a time, we would have laughed together about Dad’s girlfriend, and Dara would have made up a mean code name so we could refer to her without her knowing. Once upon a time, she might have come to work with me at FanLand just to keep me company, just so I wouldn’t have to deal with scrubbing out old-person smell and little-kid vomit from the ancient rides all by myself, and we would have competed over who could spot the most fanny packs in an hour or drink the most Coke without barfing.

Once upon a time, she would have made it fun.

Before I’ve fully decided what I’m going to say to her, I head back into the hall and up the attic stairs. The air is even hotter up here. Mom and Dad moved Dara from the ground-floor bedroom to the attic in the middle of freshman year, thinking it would be harder for her to sneak out at night. Instead she started climbing out the window and using the old rose trellis as her own personal ladder.

Dara’s bedroom door is closed. One time after we had a fight she painted KEEP OUT in big red letters right on the door. Mom and Dad made her cover it over, but in certain lights you can still make out the words shimmering under the layering of Eggshell #12.

I decide against knocking. Instead I fling open the door like cops do on TV shows, as if I’m expecting her to jump out at me.

Her room is a wreck, as always. The sheets are pulled halfway off the bed. The floor is piled with jeans, shoes, sequined shirts, and halter tops, as well as a covering, fine as leaves, of the kind of thing that accumulates at the bottom of a purse: gum wrappers, Tic Tacs, spare change, pen caps, broken cigarettes.

The air still smells, faintly, like cinnamon: Dara’s favorite scent.

But she’s gone. The window is open and a breeze distorts the curtains, making ripple patterns, faces that appear and disappear. I cross the room, doing my best to avoid stepping on anything breakable, and lean out the window. As always, instinctively, my eyes go first to the oak tree, where Parker used to hang a red flag when he wanted us to come play and we were supposed to be doing homework or sleeping instead. Then Dara and I would sneak down the rose trellis together, trying desperately not to giggle, and run, holding hands, to meet him at our secret spot.

There is no red flag now, of course. But the trellis is swaying slightly, and several petals, recently detached, twirl on the wind toward the ground. I can make out the faint imprints of footsteps in the mud. Looking up, I think I see a flash of skin, a bright spot of color, a flicker of dark hair moving through the woods that crowd up against the back of our house.

“Dara!” I call out. Then: “Dara!”

But she doesn’t turn around.





JULY 17


Dara


I haven’t climbed down the rose trellis since the accident, and I’m worried my wrist won’t hold. It got pulverized in the crash; for a month, I couldn’t even hold a fork. I have to drop the last few feet, and my ankles let me know it. Still, I’ve made it down in one piece. I guess all that PT is good for something.

No way do I want to see Nick. Not after what she said.

I’m nothing like her.

Perfect Nicki. The Good Child.

I’m nothing like her.

As if we didn’t spend practically our whole lives sneaking into each other’s rooms to sleep in the same bed, whisper about our crushes, watch moon patterns on the ceiling and try to pick out different shapes. As if we didn’t once cut our fingers and let them bleed together so we’d be bonded forever, so we’d be made not just of the same genes but of each other. As if we didn’t always swear that we’d live together even after college, the Two Musketeers, the Dynamic Duo, Light and Dark, two sides of the same cookie.

But now Perfect Nick has started to show some cracks.

The woods run up against another yard, neatly mowed, and a house staring at me through the trees. Turning left will bring me past the Duponts’ house to Parker’s, and the hidden break in the fence that Nick, Parker, and I engineered when we were kids so we’d be able to sneak back and forth more easily. I turn right instead and get spat out at the end of Old Hickory Lane, across the street from the bandstand in Upper Reaches Park. There’s a four-person band onstage, of a combined age of about one thousand, dressed in old-fashioned straw hats and candy-striped jackets, playing an unfamiliar song. For a moment, standing in the middle of the road, watching them, I feel completely lost—as if I’ve stumbled into someone else’s body, into someone else’s life.