Throwaway Girls

by Andrea Contos

  Jake is confused. It shows in every inch of his face. “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s like … your dad was an awesome lacrosse player, right? And then let’s say little Jake comes along and the only thing he can play is the piano.”

  “My dad wouldn’t care.”

  I sigh. “Pretend your dad has low self-esteem and needs the approval of others to validate him.”

  “Wait. You’re saying she’s like those pageant or dance moms on TLC who force their kids into shows so they can achieve things the parents couldn’t?”

  I really want to know how much TLC Jake watches. “Close enough.”

  “But why does she think anyone would care? Nobody cares that Michael Hughes is gay. Or Ella Ferris. Catalina Hunter has two dads and your mom made them co-chairs for the annual fund drive.”

  “Yeah, see, my mom doesn’t exactly have a problem with people being gay, she has a problem with me being gay — because then I’m not a replica of her. I can’t fulfill her expectations. Though she might not be as nice to Catalina’s dads if they didn’t get her tickets to their Broadway shows.”

  He shakes his head, droplets springing from the ends of his hair to land on his upturned palms. “But it’s not a secret. People know.”

  “Yes. People know. And that’s why my mother being on campus causes me ‘undue stress.’”

  The furrow in his brow grows deeper, and he grabs my wrist, tracing over the scars on my left hand with a wide fingertip. “What are these from?”

  “Fire.”

  His eyes flare wide. “They set you on fire?”

  “No. I set the building on fire.”

  He’s too stunned for speech, so I give him what he’s looking for. Maybe if I’d done the same with Madison, we’d all be tucked away in the classrooms of St. Francis right now. “I spent days being starved and held down and … They weren’t going to let me go, so I made them. The kitchen door handle got a little hot. Skin and hot metal don’t play well together.”

  I pull my hand away because his fingers around my wrist feel far too much like restraints.

  His eyes glass over just long enough for him to blink the emotion clear. “What they did was torture.”

  “Felt like it, yeah.”

  “Can they do that? Legally?”

  “Ha. Who’s monitoring the private organizations people pay to send their kids to? It’s still legal in two-thirds of the states.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Basically.”

  “Wait. Your dad was okay with that? Because he tried to sell my dad a lifetime package to a holistic healing resort once and —”

  “I really didn’t need to know that.” Now I have to apologize to Mr. Monaghan without dying of embarrassment first.

  “I’m just saying, your camp doesn’t sound very holistic.”

  “He doesn’t care who I date. But he’ll never tell my mom that. Just like she’ll never tell him the truth about my ‘vitamins.’”

  I tried to tell my dad what anxiety is like for me. Once. It earned me a lecture about the efficacy of chamomile tea and rhodiola root extract, along with a weekly acupuncture and meditation class. Followed by, You’re allowing your mind to control you, rather than you controlling your mind, Caroline. You’re stronger than that.

  I’d love to shove him into a room full of chemo patients and have him tell them they’re stronger than that. To mind-over-matter their cancer.

  “Did —” Jake sucks in a breath. “Did it work? The camp?”

  This time I do laugh. “Hell no. Sorry, Mom.”

  “Did you want it to work?”

  “I don’t want to change who I am, Jake. I like who I am.”

  Rocks scatter with the force of my footsteps, and I secretly hope a sharp edge finds its way into Jake’s shin, especially after he made me think he could possibly understand.

  But then he’s in front of me again, making me pull up short.

  I glare at him and he holds his hands high, palms out. “I’m sorry. I’m just —”

  His hands fall, his voice quiet. “I’m sorry that happened to you. Everyone always feels sorry for me, because of my mom. But my dad, he always tried to make up for it, you know? He’s always been there for me, whether I was at home or away at school. Anyway —” His breath hitches. “I’m sorry you didn’t have someone like that.”

  He meets my gaze, no hint of a whisper in his voice now. “I’m sorry no one was there for you. And your parents are assholes.”

  I smile despite myself because my parents are assholes.

  But he’s not right about everything. I did have someone.

  I had Mr. McCormack.

  He was the only person who questioned what happened to me. Not even Madison mustered the courage to ask.

  I still don’t know what he said to my mom during the meeting he summoned her to the day after he confronted me about the scars on my hands. I can’t even be sure he figured out what they meant. I do know she never sent me back to that place.

  And that’s where things have been ever since. A tentative and dishonest peace I have to keep long enough to survive graduation — until then, my parents can put me on lockdown for my “own best interests” and take away my college fund for the same. I need to keep them believing just a little longer.

  I start toward the front doors again, the sun just beginning to burst through the clouds.

  I don’t want to think about any of this, much less talk about it. “Anyway, they were so preoccupied with the fire, I was able to escape.”

  Twice, actually. Not that I got far the first time — the fence surrounding the camp put a major crimp in my escape plan. And that’s where I met Detective Harper, who put me in his car and listened to my story like he cared. Like he was as furious and horrified as I was.

  And then he called my parents to tell them he was bringing me home.

  I jumped out of his car at the first stoplight.

  I skip that part in the version for Jake. “And then one thing led to another, and the guy that owns this bar found me on the side of the road. He could’ve left me there like a hundred other cars did, but he didn’t. I’m not too good for a place like this.”

  “Jesus, Caroline.”

  The gravel slips beneath my shoes, uneven and shifting. “Jesus. Yeah, the ‘counselors’ talked about him a lot too.”

  He nudges my shoulder so I’ll stop to face him. “I didn’t know. Honest. About any of it.”

  “Well, now you’re one of the few people who do, and I sort of wish you didn’t.”

  My hand closes over the door handle and it’s solid and cool against my skin. I take a deep breath and do my best to forget I told Jake Monaghan anything at all.

  Jake blurts, “I fu— Madison and I, a few times.” His fingers cut new paths through his hair. “I had sex with Madison.”

  “Ah.”

  That’s the only response I can muster. Two of my friends. And I had no idea.

  I know his confession isn’t meant to hit me like a punch to the chest, but it does. But I also know how sometimes you just need someone else to shoulder the weight of your secrets.

  Jake’s insistence on joining me today makes far more sense now. But what I don’t know is if he thinks he can truly find Madison or if he just wants to avoid having the cops show up at his locker. Or if he’s just like me, questioning all the decisions that led him here.

  I hate that I’m suspicious of his motivations, but he’s guaranteed to catch hell from his parents and his coach for skipping school and practice, and Jake Monaghan does nothing without careful analysis and reason. Whatever he thinks he’s gaining here is worth whatever he’s giving up, and I can’t imagine how.

  He clears his throat. “She wanted to come over after the study session she was supposed to have with you the night she disappeared. But
she’s never been the one who I —” He pauses. “I never texted her back.”

  “Double ah.”

  He steps into the wedge the building has cut from the sunlight, then he yanks open the door. “Now we both know things the other wishes we didn’t.”

  In The Beginning

  I cried when Larry told me how chefs kill frogs.

  In my defense, I was only eight, and Larry had no idea how to talk to kids.

  I don’t even remember if his name was Larry. Mom had two consecutive boyfriends named Larry, and after the second one left it was just easier to call all the ones that came after by the same name. Most of them never bothered to correct me. Plenty never noticed.

  But I remember the frogs. I remember if you put a frog in boiling water, it would jump right out, but if you start slow, let it get comfortable, then gradually turn up the heat, that poor little bastard would find himself cooked.

  “Before he knows what hit ’em!” That’s what Larry said a second before his meaty palm slapped onto the fold-out kitchen table, rattling the cigarette ashes in the tray and toppling over his can of beer, all before my tears hit my cheeks.

  He scowled at my wet face, the rim of red around his bloodshot eyes narrowing. But his voice dropped into a slightly less growly growl as he said, “It ain’t the worst way to die, sweetheart.”

  Livie slipped me into her life like that frog in a pot of slowly boiling water.

  If she’d come in too hot, I would’ve run. I think she knew that somehow. So she let me ease in. Let me get so comfortable I didn’t realize how my muscles started to relax in the heat of her presence. How protected I felt in that high-walled pot that only fit the two of us.

  I found her in the diner’s parking lot as I left my shift, my apron wound tight around my ticket book and my wad of tips tucked into the heels of my shoes just in case someone decided a seventeen-year-old girl with no one waiting up for her might be a good target. Livie’s sobs cut through the silence before wind rushed through the lot.

  I told myself to keep walking. A crying girl ain’t nothin’ but trouble. Another gem of advice from one of the Larrys.

  But I’d shed enough tears no one was around to listen to and, trouble or not, my footsteps stuttered to a stop.

  I strained to pinpoint the crying in the smattering of cars. There weren’t many since the flower shop in our little plaza was long-since closed. Same for the attorney’s office that never seemed to house an actual attorney.

  I headed around a Chevy’s back bumper and to the left, grinding every footstep into the gravel. Several of the Larrys, in several different ways, taught me about what happens when you sneak up on people.

  Three bumpers later, I found her huddled on the edge of the diner’s walkway, her long legs tucked to her chest.

  I stepped forward, until only a car door’s length separated us. “Hi.”

  She hiccupped on her inhale and looked at me with a mascara-streaked face. “What?”

  “Umm … hi?”

  “Oh.” She blinked at me, twice. “Is this your car?”

  “Don’t have one.”

  “Oh.” Her legs tumbled out in front of her, ripped jeans revealing slices of skin. “Guess I can’t ask you for a ride then.”

  A million thoughts warred in my brain, just like always. A constant battle between my heart and everything the world had taught me. “How’d you get here?”

  Her face changed in a blink of time, sadness flipping to anger with no transition between the two. “I was driving with my boyfriend. We got in a fight and I told him just to let me out here and he did.”

  She wasn’t the first girl to end up on the side of the road for the same reason. “Any chance he’s coming back?”

  “He left me, with no money, in a parking lot. I’d set fire to his truck before I’d get back in it.”

  My mom would’ve gotten back in. I probably would’ve too. I scanned the lot, the way the moonlight glanced over the sleek metal.

  Everyone inside was scheduled to work until close, so there’d be no way to set her up with a ride, and I couldn’t just leave her here. “Where are you headed?”

  “Not far. Like a fifteen-minute drive.”

  The trilling chirp of cicadas filled the silence while I calculated how much it would cost me in cab fare for that kind of drive. Even if it was a dollar, I couldn’t spare it. The water was days from shutoff and my school-clothes fund kept drifting back to a pile of change.

  Sometimes though, when I begged and cried in his office enough, Davey would let me pick up extra shifts.

  The breeze twisted between the cars and sent my hair tumbling against my face as I bent to pull some of my tips from my shoes.

  “Are you going for some kind of weapon? Should I run?”

  The smile that lit her face transformed her. But it wasn’t just the change it made in her that was so striking, it was the way it made me feel. Like I’d lit a torch in the darkness. Like I’d been let in on this delicate secret, something to be cherished and revered.

  Later, I’d learn my reaction wasn’t unique. I’d watch the same emotion play over other faces when she invited them into her world.

  But by then, it didn’t matter.

  I’d planned to walk home from work that night, but it would’ve meant leaving her behind.

  Some people you don’t walk away from.

  We took the bus to her house. When she invited me in, I said yes.

  And even now, even knowing how it ends, I’d do everything the same.

  Chapter Four

  I step into The Wayside and sunlight filters in from the handful of small windows, bits of dust dancing in the rays. I blink away the spots in my vision, and when the darkness evaporates, I’m standing in the last place I saw Willa smile.

  I unclench my fists as the door behind Jake thumps shut and Madison’s missing person poster falls limply against the bulletin board. It’s different than the one tacked all over St. Francis, but it’s even weirder that someone would post it here at all. I need to find even a single reason Madison would venture here. Or a single reason that doesn’t include me.

  I weave through tables and toward the bar, Jake trailing behind me.

  The curves of the bottles behind the bar draw me closer, promising a way to bury all those thoughts that keep bobbing to the surface.

  The barstool scrapes against the floor as I pull it back and slap my ID onto the shiny bar, avoiding my reflection in the gloss.

  The Wayside may look sketchy as hell, but the inside is clean, despite the stains and gouges in the floor, the cracks and tears in the vinyl booths. The bar’s varnish may have worn thin, but the food is better than decent — even on packed weekend nights. And the drinks are outstanding — depending on who’s doing the ordering. The Wayside doesn’t exactly cater to outsiders. I don’t know the guy tending bar, so I do my best to look like I’m not seventeen and holding a fake ID.

  His stubby fingers peel it from the bar and a sheen of sweat breaks out over my skin as he tilts it back and forth in the muted light. He gives a slight nod and my heart lifts.

  Then his gaze travels to Jake and his mouth pulls into a frown.

  A chameleon, Jake is not.

  He’s undergone years of conditioning. A lifetime of respect that’s as much given as earned. A confident expectation that the world will bend to him, because it always has. And it’s never more apparent than when he’s surrounded by people who’ve had to bend themselves to the world.

  I give the bartender a defeated shrug and hold out my hand, and he graciously lets me keep the ID he should be confiscating.

  A half second later, a large frame flirts at the corner of my vision.

  Very large. Marcel is as tall as he is broad. He also has cameras all over the parking lot and has undoubtedly been waiting for me to come inside and explain why I�
��m here.

  Getting into a car with a man like him, even if I was fleeing camp and an inept cop, was probably not my smartest move. He lectured me about it nearly the whole ride, and that was when I realized getting into a car with a man like him was one of my best moves.

  Marcel jerks his head toward his office in the back but his gaze zeroes in on Jake. With a single slow shake of his head, Marcel freezes Jake in place.

  “He stays out here.” It’s meant to be a whisper, but instead it’s a low rumble, his voice too heavy for anything less.

  I don’t know why, but I say it’s okay for Jake to come with us. That he’s cool and I vouch for him. Maybe it’s because of what he said in the parking lot. Or just because I don’t want sole responsibility for making sure Madison makes it home alive.

  Marcel nods and his heavy boots thud against the floor as he leads us toward his office, where the lights are bright and the air tastes like warm cinnamon. He shuts the door most of the way but not fully — that’s one of the rules: we’re never in here together with the door shut.

  When he first laid down the rule, I laughed, told him it was obvious he was my second, better dad. The comment pulled one of those trademark belly laughs from him as he laid his arm next to mine, his skin a midnight black and mine so pale it’s nearly translucent, and said, “Don’t think anyone’s buying that.”

  Marcel leans against his desk, his gentle tone at odds with his words. “You can’t be here, baby girl.”

  I stammer through several breaths and finally manage a “What?”

  There were times I had to stow away in his office or the back break room so it wasn’t obvious an underage girl was hanging out in a bar. But never, not once, has Marcel turned me away.

  He blinks twice, and I don’t miss the glossiness in his eyes, or the way they dart to Jake. “I’m not saying never again, but right now, you and me, we need to keep a low profile.”

  I look anywhere but at him. The couch where I’ve slept more than once. The big recliner in the corner where he lets me read. The tiny, scratched-up desk he found on Craigslist so I could do my homework “the way homework is supposed to be done and not all slumped up on the damn couch.” My tiny corner of refuge when I couldn’t stand to be at home.