Never Missing, Never Found (6 page)

“No,” she says, the very word a challenge. “I don’t mean like him like that, and you know it. You
like
Connor.”

“He’s a nice guy,” I say. Evasive maneuvers, stat. “I hope he doesn’t have a tattoo like Rob’s. Hey, have you ever thought about getting a tattoo? I’ve been thinking about it.”

“You totally like him,” she says. Her face is the sun; I can’t look directly at it, or I’ll get burned. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. A lot of girls like Connor. He’s a big fat flirt.”

I want to ask her to elaborate, but if I ask her to elaborate, it’ll be even more obvious that I like him. Evade, evade, evade. “If I were going to get a tattoo, I would probably get it on my ankle,” I say. “Maybe a butterfly. Or hey, the Five Banners logo. Maybe I’d get a raise. Hey, look, customers!”

I’ve never been so glad in my life to see customers—excuse me, guests. It’s a family, a man and a woman and their little son. “Let me help you,” I tell his parents. “Whatever you need, I can help.”

“I want a Wonderman,” the kid says.

“Wonderman? We have lots of Wondermans!” I say. “Anime Wondermans, stuffed Wondermans, action figures, we’ve got it all!”

Katharina pokes me hard between the shoulder blades. I flinch. “Hey, Scarlett,” she says. “Cover me for a second? I have to make a call.” She’s got her phone in her hand, already unlocked.

“That’s fine,” I say. Anything to get her out of here. Her questioning is starting to make me feel like I’m back at the police station. They questioned me for hours after they found me, trying to gather what had happened to me and how I’d come to be wandering alone and barefoot down the side of a major highway. I can still viscerally recall the shock on their faces when they saw the bottoms of my feet, which were torn and bloody. I hadn’t even noticed. I’d felt nothing.

I match the kid with his perfect Wonderman, and he leaves smiling, which makes me feel like I’ve done a good thing. Their departure leads into Katharina’s return. She’s smiling now too. “All okay?” she asks.

“Fine,” I say. “It was a success.”

“Glad to hear it.” She’s still smiling, and it unnerves me because it’s not a cheerful smile or a glowing smile, the way mine felt. It’s more of a smirk than a smile, really, a twist to her lips that says,
I know something you don’t know.

I don’t ask her anything. She might want me to ask her something, but I don’t want to play into her hand, whatever it is. And she doesn’t say anything, no loaded comments, no leading questions. She just hums and hums something tuneless that matches up suspiciously with the screeching hellspawn.

She stops humming and breaks into a wide smile when someone walks through the entrance to our store. “Cady!” Katharina says. “Glad you could make it. I thought you’d be on lunch now.”

The girl—Cady—grins back at Katharina. “Of course,” she says. “I could use a good surprise today.”

Surprise? I study this new girl as she and Katharina jabber, throwing around names of park people and places. I hear Rob pop up, and the elusive Cynthia, but then I tune out.

Cady’s small and thin, flat as a little kid, though she’s clearly my age, or close. She’s wearing a green shirt and the red-lined name tag that translates to assistant manager, like Connor and Rob, and her bleached-blond hair sticks up in spikes all over her head in a pixie cut. “Hey, I’m Cady,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“No, we haven’t,” I say. “I’m Scarlett. It’s my second day.”

She flutters her fingers at me. Rings are forbidden by the Five Banners dress code, but she’s got on three of them, chunky silver ones. “How do you like it so far?”

“I like the people.” Connor’s smile flashes through my mind, and I worry for a moment that Katharina is going to go off on me and him again, but she doesn’t. “I was into Skywoman a lot as a kid, so it’s kind of cool to be working—”

“Hey!” Cady’s smile is a sudden, bright flash, and it’s definitely not aimed at me. I look over at the door to see Connor standing in the entryway. My heart skips a beat. It’s like Katharina’s prodding has brought my feelings bubbling to the surface, dinosaur bones rising from an oil pit after millions of years under the earth. I’ve read about crushes, and I’ve thought guys were cute before, but I’ve never felt it like this, like I want to burrow in between his arms and stay there for a while. Not so long that I’d feel trapped, but a while.

“Hey,” Connor says, still standing in the doorway. I wait for him to come in, to blind us all with his smile, but he just stands there, hovering awkwardly with his hand on the doorframe, as though he’s not sure whether he’s coming or going. “Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” Katharina says. Her grin looks like a shark’s. “Cady just wanted to say hi.”

Connor finally shows a smile, but it’s even less convincing than Katharina’s. It makes me think of the way monkeys bare their teeth in submission. “Well, hi. I have a lot to do today. I should really go.”

A lot to do today? He didn’t have a lot to do today when he was asking me totally unfair questions about his brother.

“Wait.” Cady trots toward him, her smile still bright, and then she’s pulling his face to hers.

They’re kissing.

They’re
kissing.

Cady and Connor are kissing.

Connor is kissing someone, and that someone isn’t me.

I feel like somebody’s kicked me in the stomach and sucked all the breath out of me. I feel like I’m going to throw up.

I look away because I have to look away or I’ll fall over, and I see Katharina watching me. I struggle to compose myself, but there’s only so much I can do against the way I’m feeling right now.

I look back when I hear Connor clearing his throat. He’s pushed himself into the doorway as far as he possibly can without actually being outside. Cady has retreated a few feet and her smile is wavering now, like I’m looking at her through a glass of water. “Cade,” Connor says quietly. “Maybe we should talk.”

Cady shakes her head. Hoop earrings go swinging. “Nope!” she says. “I don’t think we need to talk. I just…I needed to see you.” Her voice trembles, and Connor sighs.

“Cade…” He reaches out and takes her into his arms again, though thankfully they don’t kiss. He just holds her tight against him, and his eyes meet mine over her shoulder. I glance away.

“Cady and Connor started here on the same day two years ago and it was love at first sight,” Katharina says for what must be my benefit, because surely both Cady and Connor know when they met. “Don’t they make the cutest couple?”

All the words I have shrivel up and die in my throat. I nod weakly. The floor is very interesting today.

“We’re—” Connor starts, but Katharina interrupts him.

“Cady was the last person to see Monica the night she…you know,” Katharina says, again for my benefit. A choked sort of sob comes from Cady’s direction, and Connor sighs again.

“The police called me out to talk again today,” Cady says. Even choked up, her voice is small and pert and adorable, like her nose.

“Haven’t you already talked to them?” Connor says. His voice is sober.

“Like three times.”

I look back up to see Cady’s freckles standing out in sharp relief against her paling cheeks. “I don’t know what else they want. I told them everything. Do they think I don’t want to help them find her? I love her. We were friends.” She catches her bottom lip between her teeth. “Are friends. We
are
friends.”

“Cade.” Connor holds her tight against him. I clench my teeth together till my jaw hurts and turn to Katharina so I don’t have to see how perfectly their bodies fit together. I expect her to look triumphant somehow, like she’s won, but she’s doesn’t. Her expression is written in a language I don’t know; I can’t even read that alphabet.

“Don’t worry, Cade,” Katharina says. She’s still looking at me, and now her eyes are burning. “You know what they say: it’s better to be missing than dead.”

After a month in the basement, I began to think of the woman as Stepmother. And I was Cinderella.

She woke me every morning with a yell as the sun’s watery rays were just beginning to stream in through the basement’s one small, high window. She made me brush my teeth every morning, and take a shower every other day so I wouldn’t smell up her clean, clean house. I scrubbed floors and scoured tile and cleaned up after the girls. The girls weren’t really girls; that’s just what Stepmother called them. Really they were women, women who wore lots of makeup and lacy underwear and who sometimes cried in the bathroom when they thought nobody could hear, and nobody could, because by then I was nobody.

She was always watching me. Three times during that first week I tried to run out the door. One of the girls caught me, then one of the men who came to visit the girls, then Stepmother herself. She stripped half the skin off my back as I cried, and she beat me more for crying. “You will learn from this, Jane,” she said over my yelps. “And you will be better for it. Stronger.”

After the first few weeks I stopped trying, both because I didn’t want to get beaten again and because nobody was waiting for me. That’s what she told me, that my parents had given me to her because I’d been bad and they didn’t want me anymore. That sounds ridiculous to me now, but back then I absorbed her words the way my hair absorbed the smell of the girls’ cigarette smoke.

The girls were mostly nice to me. Not nice where they’d help me leave or answer my questions about what they were all doing here too. But sometimes they’d give me pieces of hard candy or ask me how I was doing or spritz me with their flowery perfume. None of them ever hit me.

I was good. I was a good girl, always a good girl, and finally Stepmother noticed. A month in and I hadn’t spoken to anyone, not for real, nothing besides “Yes, ma’am” or “Excuse me, sir,” and the words were clawing their way out of my eye sockets, pushing my eyeballs out so they goggled. “You’ve been good this month,” Stepmother said. “I want you to continue to be good. How do you feel now, Jane?”

By then I’d realized that Jane
was
a good, solid, sensible name. And good, solid, sensible girls deserved company. Jane missed Melody. “I miss my sister, ma’am,” Jane said honestly, because she did. She wasn’t thinking about what that might mean for her. Or for another girl. It was just how she felt.

Stepmother gave me an appraising look. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Pixie showed up a week later, while I was sleeping; I went to sleep in the basement, curled up tight as a cat on my mattress, and woke to see a strange girl staring at me from across the room, her back up against the wall, her arms crossed tight over her chest. I blinked at her. She blinked back, slowly. She must have been drugged too.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Scarlett. But here my name is Jane.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m Pixie. Where am I?”

I got up and stretched. My back cracked, and Pixie jumped. “It’s okay,” I said. “You’re safe.”

She began to shake. “I don’t want to be here.”

“Shhh. Shhh.” I made my way over to her, slowly, carefully, like I was trying not to spook a rabbit, and laid a hand on her shoulder. It seems absurd now that I wouldn’t realize that I was the one who had put her there, but I didn’t. In my mind she’d appeared out of nowhere, a gift from the universe. “It’ll all be okay. Take a deep breath.”

She took a deep breath, and it shuddered. She took another, and it shuddered less. “How did I get here?”

“It’s okay,” I told her, and squeezed her shoulder comfortingly. “You can be Cinderella too.”

“Are you a missing girl too?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, and spared a sad, fleeting thought for my parents, who didn’t miss me. Melody missed me, though. I knew she did. “I went missing more than a month ago.” Every morning, I made sure to glance at the calendar Stepmother had hanging in the kitchen, the one covered in pictures of doe-eyed kittens. “From near Chicago.”

She took another deep breath, and it didn’t shudder at all. “Okay. Okay.” And then she laid a hand on my shoulder, like it was her turn to comfort me. “At least we’re not dead. You know what they say: it’s better to be missing than dead.”

Everybody is staring at me. Connor and Cady have separated, at least.

“Scarlett, are you okay?” Connor asks, his brow creased in concern.

I’m not okay, I’m not.

“Yeah,
Scarlett.
” Is it my imagination, or does Katharina stress my name? “Are you okay? You look like you’re going to pass out.”

My heart has stopped. My entire core has frozen solid into a block of ice, and if I say even one word, I will shatter into a million pieces. So I nod.

Katharina isn’t the girl from the basement. Katharina can’t be the girl from the basement. Because she’s dead. Because I killed her.

I don’t speak for the rest of the day, a strategy I used at Stepmother’s when I was afraid to say anything lest I throw up. Connor gives me a quick goodbye, his smile a ghost of its former self. Cady rushes out after him, and I bid her goodbye with a limp wave. Katharina doesn’t speak to me either; it’s like she knows what she did with that phrase. Like she knows how she undid me. I catch her watching me from the corner of her eye every so often, though, or at least I think I do. I might be imagining things. I might be going crazy. I might already be crazy.

Fortunately, my job doesn’t really require me to speak. I greet guests with the same weak smile I gave Cady, and answer questions with nods or headshakes. I am a million miles away from Adventure World right now. I am a million miles above the ground, above even the peak of the Dragon King, the tallest, fastest roller coaster in the world.

Katharina leaves for lunch and doesn’t come back. I don’t know where she goes. They replace her with an androgynous young person named Marley, who has short buzzed hair and a nose stud, who seems perfectly content to spend the shift playing with the plush toys and the occasional game of catch with me.

It isn’t until I leave for the day and go to clock out at the employment office by the entrance that I come crashing back down to earth. “Have a good night,” the girl at the desk tells me flatly, clicking her nails against her desk. Those nails. I remember those nails. I assured that girl my first morning that it was better to be missing than dead, and I said the same thing later to Connor and Rob. Katharina must have heard somehow. Or maybe it was a coincidence. There are always these stories popping up about how a woman loses her engagement ring on the beach during her honeymoon and then, twenty years later, fillets a salmon for dinner and finds her old ring inside. Or twin brothers in Finland who die in separate motorcycle crashes on the same road on the same day, one in the morning and one at night. Coincidences are crazy things.

My stomach is still swimming when I get home, though; if you cut me open right now, you might find an engagement ring bouncing around in my guts. I worked a longer shift today than yesterday, so it’s after eight o’clock, which means Melody is off at one of her many friends’ houses. I can’t remember the last time she spent a night at home. She’s always with her field hockey teammates or student council buddies or one of the French exchange students, doing bonding activities like braiding each other’s hair or painting each other’s nails or whatever friends do when they get together. I wouldn’t know. Anytime I’ve gotten too close to someone, I’ve run away. What if someone found out what happened to my last friend?

“Scarlett,” Melody calls from the living room. “Is that you?”

Huh. She’s home. Maybe she’s sick.

No. Melody doesn’t ever get sick. Flawless people never get sick.

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s me.” I go to the living room, expecting to see Melody finishing up one of her workouts or something, but she’s perched on the edge of the couch, hands folded in her lap, dressed in a fluffy orange-patterned skirt and a tight tee. I ask, “Are you getting ready to go out?”

She dazzles me with a wide smile. “I was waiting for you,” she says. “I thought you might want to go to the vigil with me.” She says this like she’s handing me a gift wrapped with a glittery bow.

I unwrap the gift. It’s empty. “What vigil?”

“They’re having a vigil for the missing girl tonight out at Riverside,” Melody says, her smile wilting a little. “It was in the paper. I was thinking we should go.”

“We?” There’s never been a “we” with me and Melody. “Why?”

“Because you’re my sister,” she says, like it was silly of me even to ask. “To support this girl and say how much we hope she’s found.”

This girl.
I bet Melody doesn’t even know Monica’s name.

I don’t ask her, though.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say, and flee. I need a second to think. Going somewhere with Melody, especially somewhere as emotionally loaded as a vigil, can’t possibly be so simple as just going somewhere with Melody. She must want something, and that something isn’t spending time with me.

I don’t go to the bathroom. Well, technically I go
to
 the bathroom—I clomp toward the bathroom and open and shut the door, but I don’t go
inside
the bathroom. Once I’ve shut the door loudly enough that I know Melody can hear it, I tiptoe back down the hall and into the kitchen, where today’s paper is still scattered across the kitchen table. I unstick it from the coffee rings adorning the wood like the Olympics rings and flip quickly through the pages until I find the article about Monica Jackson.

The article doesn’t tell me much I don’t already know. It reiterates her full name, which I already knew: Monica Rose Jackson. It contains a black-and-white picture of her—her senior portrait, complete with a tense, hesitant smile and rings of eyeliner so dark it looks almost like she has two black eyes. I already know what she looks like, or what she looked like, anyway, before she went missing. Right now she could be buried in the dirt, gray bone flashing through tattered purple remnants of skin, or locked in a basement somewhere, reduced to skin and bone and enormous pits for eyes.

The article reminds me that Monica went missing after her night shift several days ago, leaving her register drawers uncounted. It doesn’t tell me whether someone finished counting the drawers for her or if they were left there, gaping open to the night in some sort of monument.

Probably the former.

There are pleas from her family: a single mother, two little sisters, and an older brother who swears he’s going to kill the son of a bitch who took his sister. A brief résumé of her life: cheerleader, student council member, and the secretary of Model UN. She wanted to go to The College of New Jersey and double-major in physical therapy and special education. The vigil will be tonight at nine outside Riverside High School; candles will be provided.

I wonder if there’s a guidebook somewhere about how to write an article about a missing kid. My dad didn’t save any of the articles or
MISSING
posters or record any of the TV broadcasts from after I went missing, but it wasn’t like it was hard to type my name into Google and see what popped up. My life, too, had been reduced to a series of sound bites: four nine, seventy pounds, black hair, brown eyes. Loves comics. Allergic to shellfish.

“Scarlett?”

I jump, and the pages of the newspaper whisper to the floor. “Dad.”

“I was just putting Matthew to bed,” he says. “What are you up to?”

I kneel and gather the pages back into a loose packet. “Reading the news.”

“About the missing girl?”

“She has a name, you know,” I say, a bit more frostily than I intend.

“I know,” my dad says. “Monica Rose Jackson. I know her name. I’m sorry.”

I shake my head. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

“It’s okay.” He glances at the paper in my hands. I drop it on the table, where it falls apart again. Everything I touch falls apart. “Are you going to go to the vigil? I’ll go with you, if you want.”

“It’s okay,” I say, and then, seized with an uncharacteristic recklessness, I add, “I’m going to go with Melody.”

“Really?” He sounds skeptical. “You and Melody?”

I raise my imaginary shield. “She offered.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Okay.”

The first choice I made in the basement, and the second choice I made in the Five Banners employment office. This is the third choice. Not just to go to the vigil with Melody, though that’s a choice in itself. No. I choose to continue trying, to continue hoping, to continue swimming against the current in the hope that Melody will change. That she’ll realize she’s been wrong about me all along, that she’s my sister and she loves me.

I’m wondering if I’ve made a mistake, if I should actually run up to my room and hide, when Melody comes in, her hands clasped together in midclap. “So we’re going?” she says. “You’ll drive?”

So much for hiding. “I can drive,” I say.

My dad looks from me to Melody, from Melody to me. “Are any of your friends going, Melly?”

Melody shakes her head. Her ponytail sways side to side. “Nope, just me and my sister!”

It kills me how skeptical he looks. “We’ll be fine,” I tell him. How hard would it be for him even to consider that this is a new start? I know as well as he does that Melody plans to use my proximity to the Five Banners folks to learn as much as she can about the missing girl—Monica—and then probably toss me away afterward, like a used tissue. It’s just that, maybe, as she’s doing all that, she’ll discover that she likes me after all, which would lead to braiding each other’s hair and painting each other’s nails. Not that I would want to put my hands on anyone else’s gross feet, but still.

“Okay,” my dad says. “Just be smart.” He’s looking sternly at Melody. “Be safe.”

I interject what I hope sounds like a carefree laugh. “We will,” I say. “How ironic would it be to go missing at a missing girl’s vigil?”

He doesn’t laugh, or even smile. “Melly.”

She rolls her eyes and crosses her arms. Her own imaginary shield. “I’m not an idiot. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

“No one said you were,” my dad says.

I should link arms with her. No, that would be too much. “We should go,” I say.

She sweeps from the room without a backward glance. “Let me just pee.”

“Scarlett, really.” My dad, again. “Be careful.”

“I promise.”

I began to say it over and over, every time Pixie complained, every time she cried. “It’s better to be missing than dead.” “It’s better to be missing than dead.” “Pixie, it’s better to be a missing girl than a dead girl.”

Pixie was not a quick learner the way I was. She ran for it the first time we got upstairs, and Stepmother caught her and beat her with a belt. She ran again that afternoon, and Stepmother caught her and beat her again. She ran again that night, limping a little this time, and Stepmother caught her and beat her yet again.

That night Stepmother gave me some gauze and medicinal cream, telling me quickly what to do with them, and I cleaned Pixie’s back as she whimpered, telling her to keep quiet, because Stepmother didn’t like when we were loud. She didn’t like the men to hear us down there. I talked to her as I cleaned. It was to distract me as much as it was to distract her; the blood and strips of flesh painting her back made bile burn my throat. “You know the League of the Righteous, right? I read all the comic books and watched all the shows.” She nodded. “Who’s your favorite?”