Vanishing Girls

by Lauren Oliver

  Parker must hear us, or sense us. He’s pounding down the stairs before I can yell up to him to stop. When he sees Aaron, he freezes. His eyes tick to me, and to my bra, still lying on the musty carpet. His face goes white—and then, a split second later, completely red.

  “Oh, shit. I didn’t mean—” He starts to backpedal. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay.” Aaron looks at me. I know all his moods—but this expression I can’t identify. Anger, definitely. But there’s something else, something deeper than that, as if he’s finally figured out the answer to an impossible math problem. “I was just leaving.”

  He takes the stairs two at a time, forcing Parker to squeeze himself against one wall so Aaron can pass. Parker and Aaron don’t like each other and never have. I don’t know why. The moment they’re together on the stairs feels electric, charged and dangerous; out of nowhere, I’m afraid that Aaron will hit Parker, or vice versa. But then Aaron keeps going and the moment passes.

  Parker still doesn’t move, not even after the front door slams again, indicating Aaron has left. “Sorry,” he says. “I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”

  “You didn’t.” My cheeks are hot. I wish I could reach out and take my stupid bra—pink, with patterns of daisies on it, like a twelve-year-old’s bra—and shove it under the sofa, but that would be even more conspicuous. So instead we both pretend we don’t notice.

  “Okay.” Parker draws out the word, superlong, as if he knows I’m lying. For a second he says nothing. Then, slowly, he comes down the stairs, edging closer, as if I’m an animal who might be rabid. “Are you all right? You seem . . .”

  “I seem what?” I look up at him then, experiencing a hot flash of anger.

  “Nothing.” He stops again, a good ten feet away from me. “I don’t know. Upset. Angry or something.” His next words he pronounces very carefully, as if each one is glass that might shatter in his mouth. “Is everything okay with Aaron?”

  I feel stupid sitting on the couch when he’s standing, like I’m at a disadvantage somehow, so I stand up, too, crossing my arms. “We’re fine,” I say. “I’m fine.” I’d been planning on telling Parker about the breakup—the second I saw his stupid Surf Siders on the stairs, I knew I would tell him, and maybe even tell him why, cry and confess that there’s something wrong with me and I don’t know how to be happy and I’m an idiot, such an idiot.

  But now I can’t tell him. I won’t. Then I say, “Dara’s not home.” Parker flinches and turns away, a muscle working in his jaw. Even midwinter, he has the kind of skin that always looks tan. I wish he looked worse. I wish he looked as bad as I feel. “Well, you’re here for her, aren’t you?”

  “Jesus, Nick.” He turns back to me then. “We need to . . . I don’t know . . . fix this. Fix us.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I say, squeezing my ribs, hard. I feel like if I don’t, I might just come apart.

  “You do know what I mean,” he says. “You are—were—my best friend.” With one hand, he gestures to the space between us, the long stretch of basement, where for years we built pillow forts and competed to see who could withstand tickle wars the longest. “What happened?”

  “What happened is you started dating my sister,” I say. The words come out louder than I intended.

  Parker takes a step toward me. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he says, his voice quiet, and for a second I want to close the distance between us and bury myself in the soft place between his arm and shoulder blade, and tell him how dumb I’ve been, and let him cheer me up with bad renditions of Cyndi Lauper songs and weird trivia about the world’s largest hamburgers or freestanding structures built entirely from toothpicks. “I didn’t mean to hurt either of you. It just . . . happened.” He’s practically whispering now. “I’m trying to stop it.”

  I take a step backward. “You’re not trying very hard,” I say. I know I’m being a bitch, but I don’t care. He’s the one who ruined everything. He’s the one who kissed Dara, who keeps kissing her, who keeps telling her yes, no matter how many times they break up. “I’ll let Dara know you came by.”

  Parker’s face changes. And in that moment I know I’ve hurt him, maybe just as much as he’s hurt me. I get a sick rush of triumph that feels almost like nausea, like catching an insect between folds of paper towel and squeezing. Then he just looks angry—hard, almost, like his skin has suddenly tightened into stone.

  “Yeah, all right.” He takes two steps backward before turning around. “Tell her I’m looking for her. Tell her I’m worried about her.”

  “Sure.” My voice sounds unfamiliar, as if it’s being piped in from somewhere a thousand miles away. I broke up with Aaron. And for what? Parker and I aren’t even friends anymore. I’ve screwed up everything. Suddenly I think I might be sick.

  “Oh, and Nick?” Parker pauses at the foot of the stairs. His expression is impossible to read—for a second, I think he might try and apologize again. “Your shirt’s on inside out.”

  Then he’s gone, sprinting up the stairs, leaving me alone.

  JULY 29

  Birthday Card from Nick to Dara

  Happy birthday, D.

  I have a surprise for you.

  10 p.m. tonight. Fantasy Land.

  What comes down, must go up.

  See you at dinner.

  Love,

  Nick

  P.S. It’ll be worth it.

  AFTER

  JULY 29

  Nick

  On Dara’s birthday, I wake up even before my alarm. Tonight is the night: when Dara and I go back in time. When we become best friends again. When everything gets fixed.

  I haul out of bed, pull on my FanLand T-shirt (clean, thankfully) and a pair of jean shorts, and throw my hair into a ponytail. My whole body is sore. In the short time I’ve been at FanLand, I’ve already grown stronger, thanks to carting trash and scrubbing out the Whirling Dervish and jogging the claustrophobic network of FanLand pathways. My shoulders ache like they do after the first few weeks of field hockey season, and I have both muscles and dark, splotchy bruises I haven’t noticed.

  In the hall, I can hear the shower running in Mom’s bathroom. This week she’s been going to bed at 8:00 p.m.—right after the evening news, and the daily reports about the Madeline Snow case: whether Nicholas Sanderson, the police’s only kind-of suspect, is hiding anything; whether it’s a good or a bad thing that the police haven’t turned up her body; whether she might, possibly, still be alive. Anyone would think Madeline was her kid.

  I take the stairs to the attic, staying on my tiptoes, as if Dara might startle if she hears me coming. All last night, I thought about what I would to say to her. I even practiced whispering the words to my bedroom mirror.

  I’m sorry.

  I know you hate me.

  Please, let’s start over.

  Surprisingly Dara’s bedroom door is open a crack. I ease the door open with a foot.

  In the murky half-light, it looks like a weird alien planet, crowded with mossy surfaces and solid, unidentifiable heaps. Dara’s bed is empty. The birthday card I left for her last night is still arranged neatly on her pillow. I can’t tell whether she’s read it or not.

  For years, Dara has been falling asleep in the den—we’ll find her the next morning on the couch, enfolded in a blanket, an infomercial spouting off about an all-in-one kitchen knife or a bathroom toilet seat warmer. Once, last year, I came downstairs to the stink of vomit, and found that she’d puked in Mom’s Native American clay pot before falling asleep. I cleaned her up, wiping the corners of her mouth with a damp towel, picked off the fake eyelash clinging, furry and caterpillar-like, to her cheek. At one point she just barely woke up and smiled at me through half-lidded eyes.

  “Heya, Seashell,” she said, using the nickname she’d made up for me when she was a kid.

  That was me: the family janitor. Always cleaning up Dara’s messes.

  Dr. Lichme used to say that maybe I liked it, just a little.
He used to say that maybe helping solve other people’s issues kept me from thinking about my own.

  That’s the problem with therapists: you have to pay them to say the same dumb shit other people will tell you for free.

  I thud down the stairs, not bothering to be quiet this time. My left knee is killing me. I must have banged it on something.

  When I come downstairs, Mom is just emerging from the bathroom, towel-drying her hair, wearing nothing but work pants and a bra. She freezes when she sees me.

  “Were you in Dara’s room?” she asks, watching me closely, as if she doesn’t trust me not to morph into someone else. She looks awful, pasty-faced, like she hasn’t slept.

  “Yeah.” When I go into my room to get my shoes, Mom follows me, hovering in the doorway as if waiting for an invitation.

  “What were you doing?” she asks carefully. As out of it as she’s been, there’s no way she hasn’t noticed that Dara and I have perfected the art of circling around each other without touching, vacating rooms just before the other person enters, alternating patterns of wake and sleep.

  I shove my feet into my sneakers, which have over the summer become deformed, distended into shapelessness by water and sweat.

  “It’s her birthday,” I say, like Mom doesn’t know. “I just wanted to talk to her.”

  “Oh, Nick.” Mom hugs herself. “I’ve been so selfish. I never even think about how hard it must be for you to be here. To be home.”

  “I’m okay, Mom.” I hate it that my mom gets like this now: one second, fine; the next second, all mess and crumble.

  “Good.” She holds the back of her hand against each eye in turn, as if she’s pressing back a headache. “That’s good. I love you, Nick. You know that, right? I love you, and I worry about you.”

  “I’m fine.” I shoulder my bag and edge past her. “Everything’s fine. I’ll see you tonight, okay? Seven thirty. Sergei’s.”

  Mom nods. “Do you think—do you think it’s a good idea? Tonight, I mean? All of us sitting down together?”

  “I think it’ll be great,” I say—which, if you’re counting, is already the third lie I’ve told this morning.

  Dara’s not in the den, although the blankets are all balled up on the sofa and there’s an empty can of Diet Coke lying on the ottoman, suggesting that she did spend part of the night downstairs. Dara’s like that, mysterious and undirected, always appearing and disappearing at will and never noticing, or maybe just not caring, that other people worry about her.

  Maybe she went out last night for an early birthday celebration and wound up sleeping on some random guy’s couch. Maybe she woke up early in one of her rare bouts of penitence and will come through the front door in twenty minutes, whistling, makeup-free, bearing a big paper bag full of cinnamon doughnuts from Sugar Bear and a trayful of Styrofoam cups of coffee.

  Outside, the thermometer is already at ninety-eight degrees. There’s a heat wave due this week, a massive, record-breaking blast of oven-temperature air. Just what we need today. Even before I get to the bus stop, I’ve chugged through my water bottle, and even though the air-conditioning on the bus is on full blast, the sun still seems to beat through the windows and turn the whole interior the murky, musty warm of a dysfunctional refrigerator.

  The woman next to me is reading a newspaper, one of those obnoxiously thick ones packed with flyers and coupons and pamphlets advertising sales at a nearby Toyota dealership. The headlines are, no surprise, still given over to the Snow case. On the front page is a grainy picture of Nicholas Sanderson leaving the police station with his wife—both of them walking head down as though against a driving rain.

  Nicholas Sanderson just moments after he was cleared of involvement in the Snow disappearance, reads the caption.

  “It’s a damn shame,” the woman says, shaking her head so that her chin shakes, too. I turn away and look out the window, watching as the coast and its commercial clutter come into view and beyond it, the ocean, white and flat as a disk.

  The FanLand sign is partially obscured behind a gigantic mass of balloons, like a multicolored cloud. A short distance away, the owner of Boom-a-Rang, Virginia’s Largest Firecracker Emporium, stands outside, smoking a thin brown cigar, looking doleful. In my nine days at FanLand, I have not yet been able to determine the reason for Boom-a-Rang’s hours, which seem whimsical to the point of insanity. Who shops for fireworks at eight in the morning?

  Inside the park, it’s chaos. Doug is herding a group of volunteers—none of them older than thirteen—toward the amphitheater, yelling to be heard over the constant thrum of preteen chatter. Even at a distance of twenty feet, I can hear Donna shouting into the phone, probably telling off some food vendor who forgot to deliver a thousand hot dog buns, so I steer clear of the office, figuring I can drop off my bag later. Even Mr. Wilcox looks miserable. He passes me on the footpath leading down to the Ferris wheel but barely grunts in response to my hello.

  “Don’t mind him.” Alice skims my back with a hand as she jogs past me, already sweating freely, a long sheath of napkins tucked under one arm. “He’s a stress case this morning. Parker called in sick, and he’s freaking out about staffing.”

  “Parker’s sick?” I think of the way he looked last night in front of the wave pool, with the colors patterning his face and transforming him into someone unrecognizable, with the light throwing up fingers to the sky.

  Alice is already twenty feet in front of me. “Guess so.” She turns around but continues to half step down the path. “Wilcox is having a hissy fit, though. And don’t even get close to Donna. Someone missed her morning dose of happy.”

  “Okay.” The sun is blinding. Every color looks exaggerated, like someone has turned up the contrast on a big remote. I feel weirdly uneasy about Parker, about how we left things last night. Why did I get so upset?

  I have another flashback to Dara, to his car, to the night the rain came down in heavy sheets, as if the sky were breaking off in pieces. I blink and shake my head, trying to dislodge the memory.

  “You’re sure he’s okay, though?” I call out to Alice. But she’s too far away to hear me.

  By 10:00 a.m., it’s obvious that even Mr. Wilcox has underestimated the crowds. The park has never been so busy, despite temperatures inching past 103 degrees. I refill my water bottle a half-dozen times and still don’t have to pee. It’s like the liquid is evaporating straight from my skin. As a special treat, and because our little musical number has become something of a sensation, at least for the under-six crowd, we’re doing three different shows: ten thirty, noon, and two thirty.

  In between shows, I wrestle off the mermaid tail and collapse in the front office, the only interior space with a functioning AC, too sick with heat to care that my underwear is visible to Donna, while Heather removes her parrot costume and paces the room, cursing the weather and fanning out her underarms, wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of Spanx.

  It’s too hot to eat. It’s too hot to smile. And still the people come: rushing, pouring, tumbling through the park gates, a flood of kids and parents and grandparents, teen girls wearing bikini tops and cutoffs, and their boyfriends, shirtless, shorts slung low over bathing suits, pretending to be bored.

  By the time two thirty rolls around, I can barely keep a smile on my face. Sweat is dripping between my boobs, behind my knees, in places I didn’t even know you could sweat. The sun is relentless, like a gigantic magnifying glass, and I feel like an ant sizzling underneath it. The audience is nothing but a blur of color.

  Heather mimes her attack by the sock puppet. At that exact moment, the strangest thing happens: all the sound in the world clicks off. I can see the audience laughing, can see a thousand dark cavernous mouths, but it’s like someone has severed the feedback to my ears. There’s nothing but a dull rushing sound in my ears, as if I’m on a plane several thousand feet in the air.

  I want to say something—I know I should say something. But this is my time to stand up, to try and inter
vene, to save Heather from the dog, and I can’t remember how to speak, either, just like I can’t remember how to hear. I push myself to my feet.

  At least, I think I get to my feet. Suddenly I’m on the ground again, not face forward, as I usually fall, but on my back, and Rogers’s face appears above me, red and bloated. He’s shouting something—I can see his mouth moving, wide and urgent, while Heather’s face appears next to him, minus the bird head, hair plastered damply to her forehead—and then I’m weightless, floating across an expanse of blue sky, or rocking like a baby in my dad’s arms.

  It takes me a minute to work out that Rogers is carrying me, the way he does before a performance. I’m too tired to protest. Mermaids don’t walk.

  Then his voice, gruff in my ear, popping through the static silence in my brain: “Take a deep breath now.”

  Before I can ask why, his arms release me and I’m falling. There’s a shock, electric and freezing, as I hit water. It’s a hard reboot: suddenly every feeling powers back on. Chlorine stings my nose and eyes. Underwater, the tail is impossibly heavy, clinging to my skin like a tight casing of seaweed. The pool is absolutely packed with kids and rafts, little legs churning the water to foam and bodies passing above me, momentarily blocking the light. It takes me about a second to realize that Rogers has just thrown me, costume and everything, straight into the wave pool.

  I kick off the bottom of the pool. Just before I resurface, I see her: briefly submerged, eyes wide and blond hair extending, halo-like, from her head; briefly visible in between legs scissoring to stay afloat and kids diving beneath the crashing of the waves.

  Madeline Snow.

  Forgetting I’m underwater, I open my mouth to shout, and just then I break the surface and come out heaving, spitting up water, chlorine burning the back of my throat. The sound has powered back on, along with everything else; the air is filled with shrieking and laughter and the crash of man-made waves against concrete.