Vanishing Girls(74)

The sirens are going again, so loud they feel like a physical force, like a hand reaching deep inside me to shove aside the curtain, revealing quick flashes of memory, words, images.

Dara’s hand on the window, and the impression left by her fingers.

RIP, Dara.

We’re done talking.

I need to get away—away from the noise, away from those hard bursts of light.

I need to find Dara, to prove it isn’t true.

It isn’t true.

It can’t be.

My fingers are clumsy, swollen with cold. I fumble at the keypad, mistyping the code twice before the latch buzzes open, just as the first of three cars jerks into the parking lot, sirens cutting the darkness into planes of color. For one second, I’m frozen in the headlights, pinned in place like an insect to glass.

“Nick!” Again those cries, that word, both familiar and alien-sounding, like the cry of a bird calling from the woods.

I slip inside the gates and run, blinking away rain, swallowing down the taste of salt, and cut right, sloshing through puddles that have materialized on the sloping pathways. A minute later the gate clangs again; the voices pursue me, overlapping now, drumming down on the sound of the rain.

“Nick, please. Nick, wait.”

There: in the distance, through the trees, a flickering light. A flashlight? My chest is tight with a feeling I can’t name, a terror of something to come, like that moment Dara and I hung suspended, gripping hands, while our headlights called up an image of a sharp rock face.

RIP, Dara.

Impossible.

“Dara!” My voice gets swallowed up by the rain. “Dara! Is that you?”

“Nick!”


Closer now—I need to get away, need to show them, need to find Dara. I push into the trees, taking the shortcut, following that phantom light, which seems to pause and then be extinguished at the foot of the Gateway to Heaven, like a candle flame suddenly snuffed out. Leaves lap like thick tongues against my bare arms and face. Mud sucks at my sandals, splatters the back of my calves. A bad storm. A once-in-a-summer storm.

“Nick. Nick. Nick.” Now the word is just a meaningless chant, like the chatter of the rain through the leaves.

“Dara!” I cry. Once again, my voice is absorbed by the air. I push out of the trees onto the walkway that leads to the foot of the Gateway, where the passenger car is still grounded, concealed by a heavy blue tarp. People are shouting, calling to one another.

I turn around. Behind me, a rapid pattern of lights flashes through the trees, and I think then of a lighthouse beam sweeping through the dark sea, of Morse code, of warning signals. But I can’t understand the message.

I turn back to the Gateway. It was here I saw a distant light, I’m sure of it; it was here that Dara came.

“Dara!” I scream as loud as I can, my throat raw from the effort. “Dara!” My chest feels as if it has been filled with stones: hollow and heavy at the same time, and that truth is still knocking there, threatening to drown me, threatening to take me down with it.

Rest in peace, Dara.

“Nick!”

Then I see it: a twitch, a movement beneath the tarp, and relief breaks in my chest. All along this was a test, to see how far I would go, how long I would play.

All along, she’s been here, waiting for me.

I’m running again, breathless with relief, crying now but not because I’m sad—because she’s here and I found her and now the game is over and we can go home, together, at last. In one corner, the tarp has been loosened from its anchors—smart Dara, to have found a place to hide out from the rain—and I climb over the rusted metal siding and slide beneath the tarp into the dark between the cracked old seats. Instantly I’m hit by the smell: of bubble gum and old hamburgers, bad breath and dirty hair.

And then I see her. She scurries backward, as if worried that I’ll hit her. Her flashlight clatters to the ground, and the metal carriage vibrates in response. I freeze, afraid to move, afraid she’ll startle away.

Not Dara. Too small to be Dara. Too young to be Dara.

And even before I pick up the flashlight and click it on, illuminating a covering of Twinkie wrappers and crushed soda cans, of empty Milky Way wrappers and hamburger buns, all the things raccoons were supposed to have been stealing the past few days; even before the light laps the toes of her pink-and-purple slippers and slips up toward her Disney princess pajama bottoms and finally lands on that heart-shaped face, wide-eyed and pale, the stringy mess of blond hair, the pale blue eyes—even before the voices are on top of us and the tarp disappears so that the sky can fall down on us directly—even before then, I know.

“Madeline,” I whisper, and she whimpers or sighs or exhales; I can’t tell which. “Madeline Snow.”





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Feature: It Happened to Me!

Someone Sold My Topless Pics Online

by: Sarah Snow

as told to Megan Donahue

“All I remember is waking up with no idea about how I’d gotten home . . . and no idea about what had happened to my sister.”

My best friend, Kennedy, and I were hanging out at the mall one Saturday when this guy came up to us, telling us we were both really pretty and asking whether we were models. At first I thought he was just hitting on us. He was maybe twenty-four and pretty cute. He said his name was Andre.