Throwaway Girls

by Andrea Contos

  There’s no guarantee Madison’s mom is headed up here, but there’s no guarantee she’s not.

  I make it out the door and down the tree while the safe slams into my back so hard I’ll have several bruises to show for it.

  It may have answers, or at least clues, and I can’t help but feel a bit lighter than when I stood in this spot just minutes ago.

  But when the light flares bright in Madison’s bedroom before I can even turn to leave, spilling from the second floor to shout into the darkness above me, I still find myself whispering an apology she’ll never hear.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It’s morning, and Mr. McCormack still hasn’t called me. Or texted. Or emailed.

  Bianca didn’t mention him being in jail, so I have to assume he went home last night. And now he’s had part of an afternoon and an entire morning to respond, but both my phones sit silent. No amount of willing them to ring has made a difference.

  The only adult I have heard from is my dad. Just checking in, Caroline. Your mother and I are giving you emotional space.(Translation: I am giving you emotional space because I know what it’s like to be the focus of your mother’s displeasure and I hate it as much as you do.)

  Then he followed it with a phone call, where I convinced him I was fine and safe and coming home soon. I used all his favorite buzzwords, and if there’s one thing I know about my dad, it’s that he’ll avoid confrontations at nearly any cost. I haven’t bought myself forever, but at least another day or two.

  I’ve been targeting my rage at Madison’s safe, and while the slick metal trim on the edges and corners is dented and chipped, it’s still not giving up its secrets.

  I’d set the goddamn thing on fire if I wasn’t so afraid I’d ruin whatever’s inside.

  That’s not a risk I can take, not when it’s my only lead. Not when Madison’s been gone six days.

  The number shocks the air from my body. Six days. How much damage can a person do in six days?

  I shove the thought from my head, tell myself there’s still time and, mostly, that if I’m going to save her, I need to focus.

  The safe has two combination locks — one for each latch — and I’ve tried every combination of numbers that might be important to Madison. My screwdriver managed to warp the metal surrounding them, but even slamming the end with a hammer didn’t work.

  Last night I made Aubrey go to the hardware store with me to rent something with a sharp blade and a vicious motor, but it turns out there are rules about who they’ll give those things to and I don’t fit into any of them.

  I rub the grit from my eyes. It took twenty minutes of convincing before Aubrey agreed to leave me at the motel last night, and another fifteen before she finally pulled out of the lot. I know because that’s how long I had to wait — wedged against the ice machine — before I could stop pretending I rented a room.

  If she finds out I walked to my dad’s vacant rental property three miles away, she might kill me, especially after I made her talk to Madison’s mom last night.

  I made Aubrey recite the conversation, even if watching her relive it sunk my heart lower with every word, especially when she got to Madison’s mom saying how much it meant to her to have visits from “the people Madison was closest to.” I don’t know if it was a reproach because I haven’t, or if she no longer considers me part of that group.

  But amidst the rest, through all the reassurances by Mrs. Bentley that Madison had been acting normally, there was a question, dropped casually into a statement: I told the police how helpful Madison always is. How she took that new student — Tammy? — under her wing when she was having trouble fitting in.

  Here’s what Aubrey knew last night, and I know this morning, and I’m pretty damned sure Mrs. Bentley has known for at least a few days now: there is no new student named Tammy at St. Francis.

  We got three new students this year. One is now the co-captain of the hockey team so I doubt he needs Madison’s help fitting into anything. The other two are girls, but their names are Olivia and Sarah. I’ve never seen her with either.

  But even more important was the way Aubrey looked while telling me about it, the way her gaze fixed on the vacancy sign as its neon letters twitched between blinding and absent. “She just stared at me, Caroline, like she was waiting for me to confirm or deny it, but I was so scared to say the wrong thing. Like if I said no when she needed to hear yes, it might just tip her in the wrong direction.”

  Whatever Madison was doing, she couldn’t tell her mom about it, and she obviously couldn’t tell me either.

  My stomach growls and I nibble another cracker while I gather all the shit I have to bring with me on my three-mile hike back to the motel so Jake can pick me up. He promised to bring power tools. And food. I’d walk seven miles if he’d bring me a bacon cheeseburger.

  But at least walking is action. It’s not sitting in an empty house, waiting while your friends live their lives, doing all the normal things I should be doing. Like showing up to soccer practice. That’s two more demerits. It might be stupid to care when everything else is so shitty, but there’s no way to stop the tally that feels like a bomb countdown in my head.

  Three miles later I’m waiting at a rotten picnic table, my heels digging into the weathered length of the seat and my knees drawn tight, so I can wrap my arms around them to salvage what little warmth I have left. The tiny courtyard behind the motel faces a dense forest, its trees just beginning to discard winter and rebirth spring. Air gusts into a plastic bag and gives it life, sending it tumbling across a battlefield of broken liquor bottles and crushed cigarette cartons.

  The sun tears through the smoky gray sky, sinking warmth into my exposed skin.

  I don’t open my eyes when footsteps crunch behind me.

  The whole table shudders when something heavy thumps onto its surface, and Jake says, “Caroline.”

  I spin my vape on the warped table. “Don’t say it.”

  The wood bench groans as he straddles it and lowers down. He mumbles, “Jesus,” and shifts himself a little closer until his legs cage mine. “If I get splinters in my ass you have to promise to take them out. I can’t go to the ER for that. It’ll ruin my reputation.”

  “What reputation?”

  “The one for not getting splinters in my ass.”

  It’s so ridiculously stupid I can’t stop myself from laughing, and he beams back at me, ducking his head to rest his chin on my knee. “You can’t stay here again tonight.”

  I slide out from his reach and point to the battered safe. “I can’t open it.”

  He pauses, then sighs. “Did you try dropping it?”

  “Everything but.”

  He lifts his chin and motions for me to hand the safe over, which I do begrudgingly because while I really want it open, I’m gonna be insanely pissed if he drops the thing on the ground and it pops open like he’s Thor and it’s some magical fucking hammer.

  That’s exactly what happens.

  He angles the corner toward the ground and the bang chops through the courtyard, the hinges twerking just enough to spring the locks mostly free. The left one is still engaged but the arm is so bent it’s useless, and he gives me a smug grin. “I watch that show where people buy the abandoned storage lockers. That’s how they open a lot of the safes.”

  “And you couldn’t have mentioned that last night when I asked?”

  He laces his fingers and stretches them out. “Yeah, I figured you wouldn’t have the right touch anyway.”

  If there was ever a moment I could hate someone while being intensely grateful for their existence, it’s right now.

  I drop to my knees and pry off the rest of the lid. The first thing I pull out is a box of condoms. “Guess I know why you knew where to look.”

  Even the tip of his nose turns red. “Just see what else is in there.”

>   There’s a pack of cigarettes, which I pocket before he can stop me, then another he’s too quick for, and then there are flash drives. So many I have to pour them out in a waterfall of plastic that smacks against the pitted concrete.

  Jake grabs a handful of them. “Wow.”

  “You don’t know what’s on them?”

  “I’d guess photography stuff?”

  “All of it?”

  Madison has always been into photography, headed for college to study it in the fall, and she is the head photographer for the yearbook, but there must be at least thirty drives in the pile.

  He shrugs and cups his hands around the drives before pouring them back into the safe. “Only one way to find out. You want to go to your room and go through them?”

  Since I don’t have a room, that would be difficult. “I already checked out, just in case, and then tonight I’ll check back in.”

  I train my eyes on the flash drives so I don’t have to look at him while I lie, and I toss the last one in the safe.

  He’s still staring at me when I pop up from the ground.

  He grabs the safe and heads down the path to his car. “Food first?”

  “Food first. We’ll go through the flash drives later, when we have time.”

  “We don’t have time now?”

  “Nope. Because now it’s time to find Sydney and her missing boyfriend.”

  Between The Fault Lines

  Things weren’t always bad.

  I remember those days like a fever dream, bits of memories that fade in and out of my consciousness, daring me to trust in their realness, making me question if I was — if I still am — too desperate to remember the truth.

  She told me there were no monsters beneath the bed as she pulled my covers tight, blanketing me with rose-scented cotton and blissful ignorance.

  There are no monsters under the bed. In the closet. Outside the door.

  Sleep tight, little one. I’ll protect you. I’ll always love you.

  She told me the good guys win in the end and people are decent.

  She told me lies.

  I clung to them, held them tight in that place I only viewed from a distance. Close up, I might have seen where all the fault lines lie.

  But as Leonard Cohen said, the cracks are where the light gets in.

  What Leonard didn’t tell me was sometimes you have to be the light, and you’ll be the only one, standing in darkness that feels like forever.

  Until something glimmers on the horizon, a faint spark of hope that promises you aren’t alone, that there are other lights burning.

  There’s power in togetherness. Bravery born of common bonds.

  I was always braver with Livie’s skin only a brush from mine — my kneecaps pressed against my cheek, wet from the slow stream of my tears, and Livie’s comforter pooled around my huddled body like the promise of sanctuary.

  Her fingers brushed my temple, tugging back the strands of hair cemented to my face. “Tell me.”

  I closed my eyes because looking into hers was like facing the sun — sometimes Livie’s fire was too bright. “It’s my problem, you —”

  “Hey. Your problems are my problems. Talk to me.”

  It was the pleading in her voice that cracked me open, made me tell the story I promised to swallow, even though shame bled through every word. “My mom is running drugs.”

  And once I started, I couldn’t stop.

  I told her about John. About the pictures. About the deal. And then my breath caught when I started the rest.

  “You asked your mom?”

  I nodded, tears salty on my tongue. “She said no.”

  “Why?”

  All I could offer was a shrug. “I used to wish she was an addict. Isn’t that stupid? But at least that way there’d be a reason for why she does the things she does.”

  I kicked the covers from my legs, slanted moonlight spilling through the blinds and striping my bare skin.

  It wasn’t sanctuary I wanted. I wanted to feed this fire in my hand, the one I’ve always been so careful not to blow out. So afraid I would lose it if I didn’t keep feeding it.

  But in that room, I wasn’t scared. If my candle blew out, flame giving way to snaking tendrils of smoke, Livie would give me light again.

  “If she were an addict, Livie, I wouldn’t have to know the truth.”

  She didn’t ask what it was. She gave me space.

  “You want to know why she said no? Because she’s not going to some halfway house. Because she doesn’t trust the cops. Because this person or that person would find her. Because” — I sucked in a breath — “this is how she ended it: ‘Maybe my ungrateful daughter will just have to use some of that money she’s been saving up to leave me behind and get me a decent lawyer instead.’”

  Livie’s eyes flew wide. “She wants you to give up college for her?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not even the point. It’s not the truth.”

  Her head fell, finger tracing over a swirl in the bedding. “What is the truth?”

  “I don’t matter.”

  Her head snapped up. “Don’t you dare —”

  “No. I don’t mean it like that. I mean —” The words I’d always run from now begged to be used. “My whole life I’ve wished for her to be someone else. For her to be the person I needed her to be. But she’s not. She won’t ever be. And I can’t fix her.”

  I grabbed Livie’s hand, her fingers soft and delicate in mine. “It doesn’t matter what I say or what I do or don’t do. The only thing that controls her decisions is her. And the truth is I’m not leaving her behind. She was never there at all.”

  Livie’s hands framed my face, threading through my hair, and then her lips touched mine. We tumbled on the bed, my skin electrified everywhere it touched hers. And there, beneath the weight of her body, in that moment when her tongue found mine and the softness of her lips made me shudder, I mattered.

  She pulled back, her cheeks flushed, gorgeous green eyes shining even in the quiet darkness. “Who am I?”

  “You’re Livie.”

  “And who are you?”

  Who did I want to be — that was the real question. Did I want to be the throwaway girl everyone forgot before she even started to live?

  I shifted until she lay next to me, that beautiful dark hair fanned in a black pool, and I let my hand settle on her knee.

  This was who I wanted to be. Exactly this.

  I leaned closer, until the sweetness of cherries scented every breath. “I’m the girl who’s not afraid to do this.”

  I kissed her again, saying all the words I couldn’t. But in the second before, just for the briefest moment, she smiled.

  She smiled because she was proud of me. Because together, neither of us would ever have to know darkness again.

  I carry that light inside me even now, in this dark place where I can no longer search for the fault lines I was once too afraid to see.

  Chapter Twenty

  There’s a party for the students of Walton High School tonight — the school Sydney Hatton is officially enrolled in — and thanks to the shocking number of students who have no concept of online privacy, I know exactly where it is.

  Walton and St. Francis may be less than an hour from each other, but the distance is the smallest thing separating them. Their worlds are unrecognizable to each other — haves and have-nots where the former have nearly forgotten the latter exist, unless they need their houses cleaned, their dry cleaning delivered, their plumbing fixed.

  First rule of the St. Francis tightrope: don’t look down.

  But something connected those worlds for Madison.

  Jake and I spent dinner crammed in a booth, looking through three full flash drives from Madison’s stash and found nothing but smiling classmates and generic yearbo
ok-style photos. That’s when we gave up and started quizzing each other on Walton’s students. The odds of someone talking to us will be better if they think we go to Walton and, more importantly, that we don’t go to St. Francis. The odds of us getting our asses kicked is far less too.

  Taking the car from my dad’s rental property would be much better than Jake’s SUV, but I don’t know how to explain why I have access to it, so I’ll settle for parking way the hell down the street.

  As it turns out, we don’t have a choice.

  Cars line the dirt road on both sides, from the two-lane highway crossroad to the driveway of the party host — Davis Worth, baseball captain, and judging from his Snapchat pictures, an aspiring rapper and Eminem clone. Judging from his YouTube videos, he’d be wise to stick to baseball.

  Jake wedges the Rover into the corner of a liquor store parking lot and glances around with the same expression as when I first took him to The Wayside.

  Except this time, I understand his concern.

  Empty bottles roll through the lot and the store’s back wall is a canvas for any number of gang signs — a rainbow of colors in sharp, jagged lines.

  My laptop, everything worth taking from my room, and all of Madison’s flash drives are in that car.

  Jake hits the lock button twice.

  We leave the shelter of the flourescent glare and plunge into a blue-black night, grass slick beneath my shoes and the gentle buzz of insects filling my ears. It feels like it should be too cold for insects. Too early. And all at once I’m off-balance, stuck between the need to race toward graduation and pleading with life to take me back to when things were different.

  To when Willa was still here. To when I knew Madison was alive.

  Jake grabs my hand, warm and steady, and leads me around the sloping ditch that bends toward a placid stream, its surface rippling when the wind tickles it.

  A herd of guys jogs around us and one flicks his lit cigarette into the air, a burning beacon that fades just before it meets the ground. One of them turns to give Jake a nod, and he returns it too quickly and with way too much authority.