Throwaway Girls

by Andrea Contos

  He’s right. I don’t want him to be. I want to spout off some perfectly reasoned argument for why he’s wrong, but my brain is a wasteland.

  Jake is always my strongest competition in debates, and right now he’s proving why.

  I’m out of the car, dodging puddles, before he meets me at the front bumper and says, “Aubrey doesn’t want to come.”

  She climbs into the front seat and clicks the locks, giving me a wave that looks like an apology, and then I have nothing to keep me from opening the door and walking through it.

  Warmth blankets me as we step inside, scents of buttery pastries and rich roast coffee fighting for domination.

  Jake’s dad is tucked into a corner table and his fingers fly over his phone screen, shadows playing over the square jaw he shares with his son. Bits of gray tease the dark hair near his temples and a cup of coffee steams in front of him.

  As if he senses Jake’s presence, his head snaps up and his arms stretch wide. He says, “Hey, buddy!” like Jake’s still ten years old.

  Jake doesn’t seem to mind. There’s a weightlessness to him right now, like whatever worries he’d been carrying have vanished.

  They hug and I can’t watch, can’t stop feeling like I’m intruding on something not meant for me.

  None of this is meant for me, and an empty place inside me pangs with the realization that I’ve forgotten what it feels like inside my parents’ arms. If there was ever a time I felt weightless in their presence, I can’t remember it.

  “Caroline!” Mr. Monaghan’s thick arm wraps around me in a side-hug, the slight hint of tree bark or something equally manly scenting his cologne.

  My arm jerks up to hug him back and Jake nods like mass hugging was all part of his master plan.

  Mr. Monaghan releases me and ushers us both to his table where he’s got two more coffees waiting. “Jake said lots of sugar and cream.”

  I nod because I’m too busy wondering when they had time to set up a meeting and discuss my coffee preferences.

  Jake slides in next to me and his hand finds my thigh. After what happened in my room, I should tell him to move it, but the heavy weight of it, the heat burning into my skin, makes me feel like we’re on the same side. Like I’m a little less lost than I feel.

  Mr. Monaghan settles into the chair across from me, pinning his cup between his palms. “It’s great to see you again. I wish it was under different circumstances, but I’m glad you’re both here.”

  I can’t keep my gaze locked on his. No matter how much I try, it slides away, and Jake gives my knee a reassuring squeeze. I am terribly, horribly aware of the makeup that sits thick on my skin, and the knowledge that it can’t cover all the ways I’m going to ignore the reasonable advice Mr. Monaghan is sure to give me. Again.

  And I brace for his anger over not having followed it the first time.

  He says, “Let’s get the formalities out of the way. I’m not your attorney, this isn’t a substitute for legal advice, and I still don’t have inside knowledge of the ongoing investigation into Madison Bentley’s disappearance nor Landon McCormack’s alleged involvement. Clear?”

  “Mr. McCormack is not involved in Madison’s disappearance.” The words pop free and Jake’s fingers twitch.

  Mr. Monaghan holds his palms up. “Okay. But regardless of what you think about his guilt or innocence, you should just let the cops do their job.”

  Jake says, “The cops aren’t doing their job though.”

  Mr. Monaghan nudges Jake’s coffee and gives him a small smile. “Did you get a job on the force when I wasn’t looking? If you’re looking at a career in law, I hear judge isn’t too bad.”

  Jake rolls his eyes, not even trying to hide his smile. “Your Dad-jokes game is strong, old man.”

  “Not too old to beat your ass on the football field.”

  “Madden football maybe.”

  Mr. Monaghan’s baritone laugh mixes with the hum around us, but then he glances to me and his face goes serious. “So. Jake said there’s something he thinks I can help with.”

  Jake’s fingers press hard enough to leave bruises, and I try to do what I came here for. “Mr. McCormack is not involved in whatever happened to Madison, and he has never — not ever — done anything to hurt me.”

  Every word I speak will get back to my mom and dad, and when they find out all my secrets, I’ll be lucky if I’m ever let out of their sights again. But hopefully, I’m freeing Mr. McCormack. Hopefully, Madison will be home safely before my parents have to read my statement — it’s just one more reason I have to follow this to the end. It’s not just Madison that needs saving. I need to save myself too.

  I tell Mr. Monaghan about me and Willa and The Wayside. About Mr. McCormack and the ride home and the driver’s license. About Chrystal knowing something about Madison. And then, about why my mom can’t know about Willa.

  Mr. Monaghan pauses, his shoulders slumped. “As a father, I’m extremely saddened you don’t feel safe enough with your parents to tell them the truth.”

  His words knock the breath from my body, and I’m barely recovered when he continues, “As a judge, Caroline, I think you need to tell the detectives everything you’ve told me.”

  The gentle pressure of Jake’s hand tells me my leg is bouncing beneath the table and I force it still. “I tried to tell them. Not everything, but enough.”

  The glare of headlights splashes through the windows, and I break the eye contact I’m barely making. “They won’t believe any of it. Detective Harper made it sound like I’m some lovesick Mr. McCormack groupie.”

  He slides his coffee aside and leans closer. “I believe you.”

  I don’t deserve his faith in me. His kindness either.

  I croak out a thank-you and he continues before I have to say anything else. “Here’s how I think I can help. I have a friend who’s an attorney. If you’d like, I can have him contact you and you can provide a statement for him to present to the police. Sound good?”

  A bit of that weightlessness starts to take hold, until Mr. Monaghan adds, “But, Caroline, I need you to understand something. The police can’t search a person’s home without probable cause. If they found your license in Mr. McCormack’s apartment, they had a reason for being there, and it likely had nothing to do with you.”

  Living The Lies

  There are people who come into our lives to disprove the lies we believe about ourselves.

  Sometimes their stays are short — brief collisions as we all tumble through life. The cashier who gives you too much change, leaving you that brief moment to decide if you’re truly the honest person you thought yourself to be. The stranger who tests your bravery when they say things no one should even think.

  But those little revelations, they’re easy to push down, to ignore or forget.

  They’re the rumble of thunder, not the deafening roar of our very selves splitting open against the force of an earthquake.

  The Larrys were thunder, and contrary to what many of them told me, I was smart. At least smart enough to place in higher-level classes with teachers who understood present circumstances weren’t permanent circumstances.

  It was in one of those classes that Brave New World landed on my worn desk, its cover torn and peeling in the corners, white fibers shredding as they curled toward the middle, the inside stamped with the name of a school that was not mine. I’d long since lost any shame in being grateful for someone else’s discards — this time, it meant the tips from one more table went into the stack of bills in the book I’d hollowed out and hidden at home.

  The assignment was to choose, just like the characters in the book: Would we rather live in blissful ignorance or suffer under the truth?

  I chose truth.

  Out of thirty-four students, I was one of two.

  It earned me an A and an acknowledgment from my
teacher, a silent reassurance he would’ve chosen the truth too.

  I slipped the paper into my bag, careful not to crease its edges or wrinkle its form. It was sacred.

  It was proof.

  Proof that I was strong, stronger than the rest of them. And it was hope. Hope that I could leave this place and everyone in it one day.

  I cemented it into my view of myself, built myself around it.

  I chose truth.

  Then Livie proved me a liar.

  Livie wasn’t thunder. Livie was my earthquake.

  It only took one moment, seeing her in my trailer, holding my hollowed-out book, and the ground rumbled beneath my feet and my world split apart.

  If I trace it back, it was there from the beginning. But that night, when I tried to convince my mom to consider John’s deal — that was when it began to unravel. Mom ranted and called me names. “Ungrateful” was the nicest of them. And for once, I didn’t cry. Sometimes, when I replay all the moments, I think maybe I smiled.

  She wasn’t mine to fix.

  I’d always mourn the person I needed my mom to be, but I couldn’t will her into becoming it no matter how many tears I shed.

  I was not my mother’s keeper.

  I turned and walked out the door.

  I didn’t pack my things or throw my key onto the table. But even with the absence of grand gestures, I think she knew.

  So when I came home from school two days later, I wasn’t surprised to see my curtains tangled in my blinds — evidence my mom had ransacked my room. I wasn’t shocked by the harsh voices cutting through the thin walls before I’d made it within five feet of the front door. And when I opened that door, I wasn’t surprised to see my mom’s scowl etched deep on her face, nor the Larry looming over her shoulder.

  But Livie’s presence felt like a betrayal. A mixing of incompatible worlds. She didn’t belong there.

  She would never belong to that place.

  I didn’t want her to see this part of my life, the people in it. I never wanted her to see it.

  I stumbled back until the step rattled beneath me, and my mom crammed a stack of cash deep into her pocket.

  Livie stood, my book clutched to her chest. “I can explain.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  She rushed forward and tucked my book into my arms. Then her hands framed my face as she said, “I came here to convince her to help the cops, but she was going through your room and she found —” Livie paused, her dark hair wild from the force of the frigid wind. “Don’t leave, okay? Please?”

  “You don’t belong here.”

  Her fingers brushed away my tears. “She was going to take your college money. I couldn’t let her do that.”

  “So you gave her yours?”

  “Not —” She swallowed. “Not all of it. Just enough to make her back off. I’ve been saving longer than you and —”

  She didn’t bother with the rest. Didn’t continue to say things neither of us would believe.

  She gave her money to spare mine. She knew where I lived though I’d never shown her. She couldn’t have walked, but her car was absent.

  That was the first warning of rumble beneath my feet. Livie knew things she shouldn’t, did things she should not have been able to do.

  Livie had hidden things from me too.

  Her gaze traveled past me to the open door — the one that rhythmically smacked the side of the trailer under the force of the wind. “Your problems are my problems, right? That’s the deal.”

  I nodded because that was the deal, but suddenly, the deal didn’t feel like truth.

  She said, “Don’t go, okay?”

  She left me there, standing in the middle of a dying lawn with a limping pinwheel speared in its side, and her footfalls thundered back up the steps.

  My mom raised her voice, only to fall quiet after a few muttered syllables of Livie’s. I hugged my book to my chest as my metal mini-blinds tinkled and popped. If I turned, I’d see them straightened and my curtains untangled at Livie’s hands. If I opened my hollowed-out book, I’d see the money I’d saved tucked safely inside, with a few extra included.

  I’d built myself around truth. But the money, Livie’s presence: these were lies.

  Livie’s lies.

  But then, I had mine too.

  In this, we were the same, showing only the parts of ourselves we’d built, the parts that came from the truest places inside us, leaving the things we never asked for. Never wanted.

  My Brave New World paper sat silently in the backpack resting on my shoulder blades, right where it always was.

  I claimed I’d rather suffer through truth than revel in ignorance.

  Except that day, when dusk crept over the sun and pulled the veil into night, I waited until Livie emerged from my trailer with a duffel strapped over her shoulder. I didn’t question her about the money, about how she knew where I lived. I didn’t force the answers to questions I had every right to ask. I didn’t apologize for keeping her from this part of me.

  Instead, I bathed myself in the truth of who she was. Who I was. The better versions of ourselves we became when we were together.

  She was an earthquake, but one that belonged to me. She created fault lines so the light could shine in.

  When her forehead came to rest against mine, our heated breaths mingling in soft gasps while the world around us spun, I smiled back.

  Our truths change. They stretch and split as we grow, the shedding of them leaving us raw and exposed. If we’re lucky, we’re surrounded by love in those moments when our tender flesh is still rebuilding. If we’re not, we grow scars.

  I suffered no scars at Livie’s hands, and the ones I bear now hold no truths.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Bricks is not a kind place.

  Even though we’re deep into the night, there’s no peace here. Only restless quiet.

  A massive brickyard stands guard over a row of broken houses whose chain-link fences have long since conceded to nature’s forces. Uncut grass bows over itself in waves, waiting to be brought to life when spring unfolds. Tumbled bricks gather against the curb, and I’m grateful it’s too dark to make out what else might be lying alongside them.

  Jake walks with even more determination than normal, as if the meeting with his dad filled him up somehow.

  I want to feel what he’s feeling — like there’s a safety net waiting to catch us all before we leave this entire mess broken and scarred. I want to feel like Mr. Monaghan will help. I’m grateful to him for handling the lipstick, and for arranging for his attorney to take my statement so I can tell what I know without my parents hearing me say it. But he also believes Mr. McCormack did something, so I can’t trust him.

  I don’t care what reason the cops had for searching Mr. McCormack’s house. Whatever their probable cause was, it’s wrong. And I’m going to prove it. The single best way is to fulfill my promise and bring Madison home. If Sydney truly is missing, at least I have a lead, some connection to help find Madison. If I find Sydney alive, I have to pray she knows what Chrystal promised to tell me.

  Aubrey spent the entire ride in Mabel’s car complaining about the smell of moth balls, but she isn’t complaining anymore. Moth balls, it seems, are preferable to the pungent smells of vomit, piss, and something that makes me think of burning flesh, still clinging to our clothes even after we’ve left the first house. And that one was empty.

  We wind between weeds that force themselves through the cracked sidewalks while the wind tosses empty bottles to clink against the curb.

  The door to the next home is held on by a single hinge that grinds as Jake wrenches it open, and inside the entryway, I step over a literal hole in the floor. A lantern casts a ring of light over peeling wallpaper and rotted floorboards that hold nests of wadded clothing. The faint hint of smok
e clouds the air, masking the damp wood and the bite of wind through broken windows.

  Aubrey murmurs, “If these walls could talk,” like it’s something she’d actually like to hear, but whatever stories are buried here are better left unspoken.

  The scrape of a lighter cuts through the silence and a flame stretches high, skipping shadows over a couple tucked in the far corner. The girl doesn’t look like Sydney, but I’m not sure I could even pick out Jake or Aubrey in this place, let alone a girl I only know through pictures.

  I can’t escape the feel of this place — desperation that worms beneath your skin, wriggling until it hurts.

  I remember it like I remember the singe of searing metal on my palm and the thick press of restraints through my paper-thin gown.

  And then I remember the moment the flame in the kitchen took flight and transformed itself into fire. Sometimes burning it down is the only escape.

  My fingers twitch with the need to do just that when Jake announces, “We’re looking for Sydney,” and a hush blankets the house.

  I want to shove him down the hole at the front door.

  The guy in the corner stretches his legs, jeans pale at the stretched-out knees. “What the fuck for?”

  Aubrey steps forward, and she doesn’t even look like herself anymore. She stretches every muscle taut, and her arms jerk as she hugs them over her chest, her lips pulled back in a grimace.

  There’s a moment when I have to remind myself not to be worried, that Aubrey doesn’t really want what they have.

  Even her voice sounds harder. “What the fuck do you think for?”

  It’s an unlikely stage, but her performance is even better for it.

  He shrugs and says, “We’ll share,” and then his girlfriend nods toward me and says, “I like your earrings.”

  My tongue is already moving toward a thank-you when my brain catches up and my hand flies to my earlobe to shield it.

  The guy scans over Jake and picks out the one thing that’s not negotiable. “Yeah, and I like your watch.”

  Jake isn’t giving up that watch. It’s a TAG Heuer and I should know the model because Jake’s talked about wanting it for years. His dad finally bought it after Jake earned enough credits to graduate with a four-point-something GPA. I should know that too.