All the Rage

by Courtney Summers

  “Penny!”

  I turn to the woods beyond the car.

  How long has it been since I heard her name said like that?

  Like it was being said to her.

  Penny. If she’s back, if she’s in those woods, it can go back to how it was and no one needs to be here that doesn’t need to be here. I move into the trees, where the rain comes lighter and I see a boy in the clearing. Alek, in the clearing. He’s not looking at me, his right arm held tight to his chest. He’s as broken as I’ve ever seen him but I don’t care, wouldn’t care, because I’m looking for her. Alek called her name. She has to be here. Has to. If she comes back, he doesn’t.

  Alek stumbles around when he hears my footsteps, his eyes wide. He loses his balance and hits the ground hard and then he’s just sitting. He buries his head in his hands, his long, thin fingers creeping into his hair, and then he slumps onto his side, curls in on himself.

  He’s drunk.

  He’s drunk and she’s not here. He didn’t find her. I wonder if he was pretending he had. Drove himself off the road knowing she wasn’t here, but wanting to feel the lie just for a second. He unfurls himself slowly, until he’s on his back, staring at the sky, so resigned to this, me.

  “I guess I’ll call your dad,” I say. I’ll call his dad and nothing will come of it. I get pulled over sober, and Alek. He’ll stagger away from this, untouched.

  He closes his eyes for a minute and when he opens them again, says, “Gimme your phone. Gimme your phone, I want to show you something.”

  The sick understanding of what he’s just given away washes over me.

  He stares up at me, focuses enough to enjoy it.

  “Oh, you saw them,” he says.

  “You—” I lower my phone. “You took the pictures.”

  He nods, the back of his head rubbing against the ground, a grin ghosting his mouth. This memory makes him smile, is the only thing that could make him smile right now. I close my eyes and I see Alek, I see my phone in his hands and I don’t want to hold my phone if it’s been in his hands. I don’t want my skin, if he’s seen so much of it.

  “You let me,” he says.

  “No.” I didn’t. I wouldn’t have.

  “You did—” He starts to laugh and his eyes drift closed. “I told Penny you let me and she didn’t care. She told me to … she told me to stop. The last time I talk to her, we fight—” He stops laughing and opens his eyes. “About you.”

  I step away, but I can’t untangle myself from this, what he’s said. I can’t …

  “But you let me, you wanted it.” He tries to sit up, but he can’t, he can’t, and Penny’s in my head, and she’s taking something from me, she’s always taking something from me. A girl at a diner, a girl sitting across from me in a booth. She opens her mouth and she says—“Like you let him. Worthless fucking slit.”

  He looks so much like his brother these days. I want to bury him. The rain is on us both and I want to bury him. He flops uselessly against wet leaves and the mud, too drunk to stand and I walk over, the beat of my heart dulling until it stops and I plant my legs on either side of him. I grab him by the collar and pull him half up so I can push him in the dirt again because I want to be the worthless fucking slit that buries him. He desperately grabs at my arms until I’m on top of him, my knees in the ground on either side of him, he’s underneath me and I’m pressed against him. He calls me that word again and the rain is on us both. I want to bury him. I want to burn a moment of helplessness into him so he can know a fraction of what I felt, what I feel, what’s followed me every moment since, so I You cover cover his her mouth mouth.

  i’ve been away but there’s nowhere I’ve been.

  I stumble out of the trees, use the wrecked car to climb up the bank. Alek is still on the ground in the woods and I feel like I’m crawling through time, a time, and my head is thick with it, my legs and hands numb with it. Something wants out of me, someone, some girl. No. Not her. Not. Her. I slip, come down hard on one knee. I get up slowly.

  When I show up at Leon’s, I’m not myself.

  The rain follows me to Ibis, all the way to Heron Street, to his basement apartment. I walk until I see his Pontiac and then I round a little stone house until I find the door that must be his. I bring my fist to it. After a few minutes, Leon answers and when he sees it’s me, he closes the door in my face.

  * * *

  “i shouldn’t have done that,” he says, backing his Pontiac out of the driveway.

  I sit in the passenger side, picking at the seat belt. I keep my eyes painfully open because if I blink, tears will spill over. He’s taking me home. I’m not sure I was even going to get that much out of him before he saw how drowned I was, before he took in the bandage on my forehead and my mud-streaked legs.

  “You should have.”

  “No,” he says firmly. “No, I shouldn’t have. I don’t treat people like that.”

  “But I do.”

  “Yeah, I guess you do.”

  “You didn’t let me explain.”

  He turns off his street. “You sent me one text message.”

  “You didn’t answer it.”

  “The more I thought about it, the more I didn’t want to.”

  My chest aches. “Why?”

  “You acted like you didn’t know me. You acted ashamed.”

  “No—”

  “Yeah, you did. And when I touched you, it was like—” He winces. “Like I was doing something wrong. You almost had me forcibly removed from a search party—”

  “No,” I say again. “No, you weren’t—they wouldn’t have—”

  “You don’t think that’s how that was going to end?” he demands. “Jesus, Romy, I was the only black guy there and the way that asshole was with me when he thought I was bothering you—I know the kind of look he was giving me.”

  This—this, I am ashamed of. I can taste it, my shame, his hurt, and like that, the only thing I can say isn’t good enough. But then, it never was.

  I just didn’t realize it until now.

  “You’re right,” I say. “Leon, I am so sorry.”

  “You say that a lot.” He comes to a stop sign and won’t look me in the eyes. “I can’t think of a reason you’d have for doing that to me that’s good enough.”

  The reason is I need him. I need him to get this ghost off me because I still feel her. I still feel her and I want her to stay dead. The car starts moving again. I blink accidentally. Tears. I try to wipe them away before he sees, but I can tell he sees by the sigh he lets out, which makes me feel wrong, like it’s some kind of manipulation. If I know anything it’s that a girl never makes a case for herself by crying. It’s just one more side of herself she’s showed can’t be trusted. He drives on for a little while longer, rain spattering the windshield as he gets us out of Ibis.

  After a stretch of highway, he pulls into an abandoned parking lot where Fontaine’s gas station used to be, before it burned down. He turns the car off.

  “So tell me,” he says.

  The space between us only feels big enough for the truth. I try to quell my rising panic, the kind that makes it hard to breathe. I can’t tell him the truth.

  “Romy,” he says.

  But it doesn’t have to be the truth, it just has to get close enough to sound like it.

  That’s how every lie about me turned itself into something honest.

  “Grebe isn’t a nice place,” I say.

  “So?”

  “They don’t think much of my family and I didn’t want you to have to deal with it.” The way he’s looking at me is suffocating. “That’s all it was at the search party.”

  “You’re saying knowing you would be a problem for me in Grebe.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know how that sounds, right?”

  “Grebe Auto Supplies—” I stop. “You’ve heard of it.”

  “Who hasn’t?”

  “That’s Helen Turner’s business, the whole thing—she�
��s married to Sheriff Turner. Their youngest son is Penny Young’s boyfriend. I pointed him out to you on Monday. Alek Turner.”

  “I remember.”

  “The Turners hate my family and once you get on their bad side, you get on everyone else’s bad side too, so yes, it would’ve been a problem for you.”

  “And what the hell did you do to get on everyone’s bad side?”

  “My dad—”

  “Your dad.”

  “He called Helen Turner a cunt—he worked for her—he drank … he’s a drunk.” I close my eyes briefly. “She fired him. It was bad.”

  He waits for me to say more and when I don’t, he reaches for the keys. “If that’s all you got for me, then I was right. It’s not a good enough reason.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Doesn’t help you don’t even look like you’re telling the truth.”

  It makes me—makes me want to get out of the car. How can he see that—how can he see that, if he can’t see her? Does he see her? I can’t—I turn my face from him so there’s less of it to look at and then, before I can stop myself, “What do I look like?”

  “Romy, come on.” He sighs. “Something’s not right here.”

  No. I’m wearing the red. I’m—I pull at the seat belt, my hands clumsily reaching to unbuckle it and he says, what are you—what are you doing? I taste metal in my mouth. If he can see it—he touches my arm, keeps me in place. I force myself to breathe, to not give anything away.

  “It started with my dad,” I say. “Imagine … you go missing the same night as a girl everyone loves—and you’re the girl everyone hates, and you’re the one who comes back.” He doesn’t say anything, but I don’t know what it means. I don’t know Leon’s silences like I should. “You showed up at the search and—you think I’d hurt you like that on purpose? You’re the good part—”

  “They couldn’t have done anything to me,” he interrupts. “If I’d known why you didn’t want me there, I’d have left to give you the peace of mind. All you had to do was tell me. But you didn’t. You made it so much worse—”

  “You’re right,” I say. “I fucked up.”

  I stare out the window at the sky, waiting for the sun to part the clouds. It’s funny, to go all this time wanting for rain, but now it’s too much.

  “So I’m the good part,” he says.

  I exhale shakily. “Yeah. But how I treated you was ugly and something ugly happened to you because of it and there’s no excuse for that. I’m sorry.”

  I turn to him. He’s not looking at me. “I want you to be the good part too,” he says. “And if you want to be the good part, then don’t ever do something like that to me again, Romy.”

  “I won’t.”

  He turns the keys, gets the car going. He reverses out of the lot. I listen to the hiss of tires as they skim the rain-coated road. Sheet lightning flashes across the sky when we reach the YOU ARE NOW ENTERING GREBE sign.

  “So I’ll see you at work,” he says.

  Our eyes meet. I see myself in his and something inside me locks into place. It’s slower this time, but whatever he thought he saw before—is not there anymore. She’s not there anymore. Impulsively, I reach out and touch his jaw, running my fingertips down that line, and he stops breathing. I lower my hand and get out of the car. I make my way up the walk and when I look back, Leon is still there, his fingers gently wondering over the places mine were.

  i get my stitches out.

  I sit in the doctor’s office with my head tilted up and after it’s over, he declares me good as new. Mom takes me to Ibis and we get milkshakes and sit in the New Yorker in a parking lot overlooking Egret River, watching the rain come down. I don’t talk and she has no words to offer. She reaches over and squeezes my hand. On the way out of Ibis, she comes to a red light and Penny’s MISSING poster is plastered to its pole. It’s weatherworn. Curled at the edges and creased in the center. It feels like she’s been gone forever.

  “You girls,” Mom says, staring at it. “Such fast friends.”

  The nostalgia in her voice forces memories I don’t want. Me, at the dinner table with my head ducked, texting frantically with Penny on my phone, and—when dinner was over—in my room talking with her until I could see her at school, and then school. Seeing her at school.

  After Dad was fired for calling Helen Turner a cunt and Alek and I got paired for that English project, Alek wanted it difficult, wanted it as awful as it is now. He held me responsible for my father so it was only fair I hold Penny responsible for him. I don’t know why it’s the girls who always seem to have to take on that kind of burden. After my dad got fired, it was my mom who got the brunt of the town’s pity and disgust, never him.

  I must have impressed Penny, must have made a good case for myself because she talked to Alek and he got nicer. It was like I wasn’t my father’s daughter—I was one of them. We were fast friends, too fast … and both of those girls went missing and now neither of them exist.

  The light turns green. When we get back to Grebe, it’s different. Ugly. This place is always ugly, but in a way I could at least count on. I can’t count on anything, now that he’s back.

  when todd drives me to work Tuesday, I ask him if he heard anything about Alek.

  “Like what?” he asks.

  Like if he was in a wreck because he was drunk driving. If he spent the night in the drunk tank. If they took his license away. But I just shrug and say, “Anything.”

  “Nope.”

  We pull up to Swan’s, which is some kind of dingy picture, the rain bringing the outside of the building down a few shades in color. I climb out of the car and thank Todd for the ride.

  “See you in a few hours,” he says. I cross the parking lot as quick as I can and when I step in through the back, to the kitchen, I’m only half-soaked.

  “Hi,” Leon says as I shake myself off.

  “Hi.”

  He smiles, a very tentative smile. A smile that is still not sure it’s what I deserve. A small gift. Tracey steps out of her office and smiles at me too. “I hope you’re ready to work. The rain’s been driving people in like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Hey there, stranger,” Holly calls. I turn. She holds up a newspaper. “You’ve been gone so long, I almost forgot what you looked like ’til I saw this.”

  “What?”

  I take the paper from her and my stomach sinks. The Ibis Daily, a week old, and there I am in black-and-white. It must have been before Leon arrived at the search because I don’t see him—just me with my arms crossed, staring at a sea of people, all wearing the same shirt, all looking for one girl. But the girl that I’m looking at is undeniably, unmistakably me.

  On the front page.

  I tighten my grip so the paper doesn’t shake and give me away because all I can think about is who might’ve seen this, about how they know what I look like now. No—just how I look in black-and-white. I live in color. There’s no red in this photo, it’s still mine. I could—I could cut my hair, if I wanted. I might have a scar now. I touch my forehead. If I don’t, I could make one.

  “Sorry the search didn’t turn out,” Holly says.

  I crumple the paper and toss it in the recycling bin. I grab my apron and tie it and try to get my head back in the game. When I step into the diner, the fluorescent lights flicker and I hear someone from the kitchen groan before the door swings shut. Just be Tracey’s luck to trade the AC trouble for power outages.

  I scan my station and there’s a man in a corner booth waiting on me and he looks familiar in a way I can’t totally place. I don’t like faces I can’t place almost as much as I don’t like the ones I can. I pull the pencil and pad from my pocket and walk over.

  He nods at me, his brow furrowing.

  “I know you?” he asks.

  “No,” I say but I take a closer look at him. There’s something about him, something frustrating about him because I think I do know him. He’s in a plaid shirt. One of his legs is half-str
etched into the aisle. There’s a hole in his jeans. He’s young, early thirties, maybe. The kind of young that … that’s been in the sun too long. The man in the parking lot, the one in the truck.

  Not safe to be out this late around here. A girl’s missing.

  He seems to remember it the same time I do, snaps his fingers. “Well, damn. Didn’t know you worked here. You’re awfully young to be working here.”

  “Can I take your order?”

  “How young are you?”

  “I—” I shake my head a little. “The special today is the club sandwich and it comes with soup. The soup of the day is tomato.”

  “I’m just making friendly conversation,” he says.

  “I’m just trying to do my job.”

  “Well, what if I tip better when you talk?”

  I press my lips together. He grins and leans back in his seat, turns to the window. The rain has eased up a little. “I’ll have that special, with a cup of coffee. Black.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ain’t you going to write it down?”

  “I’ll remember.” But I write it down as I go, narrowly missing Claire on my way by. Watch it, Romy, she tells me. By the time I’ve put the order in, I feel wrong. He just makes me feel wrong. Holly notices. She’s getting ready to go out for a smoke.

  “What’s up?”

  I take her over to the door and point him out. The guy is staring at the ceiling now, tapping his fingers along the table. “That guy there.”

  “What’d he do?” Holly asks sharply, because she’s like that. Been here long enough to look out for us girls better than we look out for ourselves. I don’t know what to say to her, though. That he makes me feel wrong isn’t a good enough answer.

  But I think it should be sometimes.

  “I just don’t like him.”