Throwaway Girls

by Andrea Contos

  Everything about the last several days feels like a lesson in things I should’ve known. Clues I’ve missed. All the things I’ve blinded myself to instead of seeing.

  The tendons in Jake’s wrist flex, and I can tell he’s fighting against the urge to shake his sleeve down, the same way my earring is still hidden behind my hand. But this is my responsibility, and right now it doesn’t matter that these earrings are the last present my mom gave me before things were never the same between us.

  Madison. I owe her this.

  I grasp the diamond and backing and tug them both free, then again on the other side. When I hold them cupped in my palm they sparkle in the moonlight. “What does this get me?”

  The guy spreads his arms wide like he’s offering us the world, and I can’t help but wonder if, to him, it is. His gaze snags on Jake’s wrist again. “But it looks like you want what only Syd can get you …”

  My breath hitches. I don’t want Sydney to be dead, but if she’s alive, it means the mystery I’ve been trying to unravel doesn’t exist. It means Madison’s disappearance still makes no sense, my only lead is gone and my only hope of vindicating Mr. McCormack is my word. And if that didn’t mean enough before, it certainly won’t now that I’ve assaulted cops with Nerf balls and fled the scene.

  “Where do we find her?” I hold out my earrings and the girl uncurls from her huddled crouch. Her nails scrape over my palm as she swipes it clean, and somehow, my hand feels heavier.

  She jerks her head to the side. “Check next door. She’s usually with Max.”

  Aubrey leads us out and I check my Mr. McCormack phone as we hurry down the steps. I’m almost grateful he hasn’t contacted me. The only thing I’d have to tell him is his chance for vindication may lie with a girl who isn’t as dead as he needs her to be. If Sydney’s alive, there is no other suspect to take Mr. McCormack’s place. And if the cops are hunting Mr. McCormack, they couldn’t be further from finding Madison.

  Aubrey stays in character until we’re well past the house, then she spins so fast Jake and I both have to pull up short. She pokes a finger into Jake’s chest. “That was awful. I wouldn’t trust you to play an inanimate object. It isn’t good enough that I made you look like an addict if you don’t act like it.”

  He starts to respond but she’s already storming toward the other house. The short version is Jake should absolutely not speak again, and I am on probationary status.

  The front door rushes open and Jake yanks both me and Aubrey backward just before it would’ve knocked us from the porch. Two guys stream out, muttering insincere apologies as they slip down the steps.

  The porch rocks beneath our feet and Aubrey plasters herself to Jake’s chest. She looks so tiny in his arms, all the bravado drained now that her audience isn’t expecting a show.

  They look right together, like if I could replace the background they could be a regular couple.

  “Caroline.” When my gaze snaps to Jake’s it’s obvious he’s been reading something from me he probably shouldn’t have, but all he says is, “Get in the house.”

  The figures inside move in shadows, skirting the moonlight that spills through from uncovered windows.

  We didn’t need makeup. No one here looks at anyone else.

  The sweet, oily scent of kerosene drifts through the room, but there’s no warmth, just cold that presses in from the floor and walls.

  Footsteps thunder down the stairs and I move toward them, following the staggered rows of matted footprints in the carpet.

  The light brightens with each step, until a kerosene heater comes into view and warmth blasts my skin. I head for the rise and fall of voices on the right, where the hall is punctuated by a series of upright flashlights.

  A girl stumbles out the door and into the wall, then she rubs her face even though it was her shoulder that took the brunt of it. She meets my eyes — the first person to since we walked in — and shrugs.

  Without word or gesture, she rights herself and blows by me, chin jutted, shoulders back, and I can’t get in the room fast enough.

  Sydney Hatton lounges on a couch near the back of the room, ankles crossed over her boyfriend’s lap. I have to assume he’s Max. He jerks his head by way of greeting and I nod back, trying not to be too obvious as I scan the open space and the matte-black safe that dominates the room.

  It’s not even that big — the size of a microwave — but it’s hard not to stare at it, knowing whatever’s inside has the power to control lives and disrupt futures. There’s life and death behind those heavy metal walls, and plenty that would make you wish there was no time in between.

  You can get anything you want in The Bricks. That’s what everyone says.

  Except if you want answers, because I’m not going to find any here.

  Sydney’s alive. There is no guy out there kidnapping girls. There’s no suspect who’s not Mr. McCormack for me to find. There’s no secret connection that led Madison to The Wayside — none other than me. And that means Marcel kicking me out — twice — wasn’t for any reason other than he wanted me gone.

  It means my best friend needed me and I wasn’t there, and now she’s gone and I don’t know how to bring her back.

  I don’t know how to fix all the things I’ve broken.

  My throat burns with every chemical-laden inhale, and a thin stream of fresh air whistles through a cracked window. The lightbulb flickers, but even with the strobe effect transforming every movement into stop-motion, Sydney’s spine stiffens.

  By the time I cross the room, her legs are off Max’s lap and his casual pose is a bad cover for the sharpness in his eyes.

  A shudder rattles through me as I pull a folded piece of paper from my pocket, because it’s far too similar to what Detective Brisbane did to me. As it turns out, being on the other side doesn’t feel any better.

  I unfold it and hold it out to Sydney, but it’s obvious she already knows what it is.

  She flops back against the ratty couch, throwing up a haze of dust. “You can’t blackmail me.”

  “What? That’s your response? Your aunt thinks you’re missing!”

  “She’s supposed to.”

  My fingers twitch with the need to crumple the paper and throw it at her. To grab her by the arm and drag her to Chrystal’s trailer so she can see her aunt lying in a recliner with a glass of poison beside her.

  “Your aunt has a million of these flyers posted trying to find you.”

  She shrugs, but her lips press together like a flatlined heartbeat. “No one will believe her anyway.”

  No one will believe her because she’s dead. And Sydney clearly doesn’t know.

  If she doesn’t know that, odds of her knowing what Chrystal promised to tell me about Madison are next to zero.

  I may be leaving this house with nothing, but Sydney deserves to know about her aunt. “There’s something you need to know about Chrystal.”

  Max whispers something in Sydney’s ear before easing from the couch, his eyes never leaving Jake, and when he heads toward a smaller room to the left, it’s only his nod that reveals another man standing guard.

  Sydney smooths her hair from her forehead, creating a dark ring that fades to bottle-blond five inches deep, and then she gathers it high on her head, fanning the nape of her neck with her free hand. “You want to talk, we do it alone.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Sydney’s legs dangle from the sink, rattling the loose cabinet door every time one of her heels strikes it. The strip of light from the cracked bathroom door glares over one side of her face and drapes the other in a veil of black. “Ca-ro-line.”

  She watches me while she stretches out each syllable, and the comment the guy next door made about things that only Syd can get me feels more ominous with every half-second.

  I cross my arms and drop back against the wall. It’s
too close in here, everything hemmed in by a peeling bathtub and a sink too big for the space. “Your aunt says your mom and stepdad are really worried about you.”

  She scoffs, either because of the mom and stepdad comment or because I didn’t acknowledge she knows my name when she has no reason to. Her dangly earrings jump when she shakes her head. “Now she wants to play mommy? Let her be the one to worry for once.”

  Chrystal’s comments ring through my head. About how Sydney’s mom had made some mistakes but she was better now. Now, but clearly not soon enough.

  I know that feeling, what it’s like to live through that moment when you realize you’re on your own, that things can never go back, that the people who are supposed to love you will never be what you need.

  For all our differences — me, Sydney, and Willa too — we were all burnt by the same fire.

  I break the silence. “Are you going to ask me about your aunt?”

  Her shoulders lock tight. “She’s dead, right?”

  When I nod, she says, more to herself than me, “Surprised it took them this long.”

  “Who —”

  “Your girlfriend is gone?”

  I still, frozen in place. She knows my name. She knows about Willa.

  So this is what Syd can get me. Information. Secrets. “She left me.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes, and that has nothing to do with why I’m here.”

  “How did she die?”

  For a second, I forget to breathe, and my brain stumbles over a few responses before I register she’s talking about Chrystal and not Willa. “I think someone poisoned her. I got really sick too. Who is ‘them’? Who would want to kill her?”

  In a blink, the glaze of tears in her eyes disappears, and she’s staring at the rips in her jeans. “She wasn’t always such a mess, you know? And for the longest time everyone just treated her like some nut-job conspiracy theorist. The crazy trailer lady who thinks the cops are killing teenaged girls.”

  “You think the cops killed her?”

  “If you spend your life hunting for the bad guys, you’re bound to find one.”

  “Is that what you’re doing here? Hunting the bad guys?”

  She laughs and her heels thump against the vanity. “Do I look like I’m hunting bad guys? I don’t need to hunt them. They come to me.”

  “For?”

  “Their secrets. Amazing what fine, upstanding citizens will pay to keep their reputation. Nobody expects the crazy trailer lady to keep detailed journals with dates, names and pictures of the men who come slumming down to good ol’ West Virginia to have a little fun.”

  I’m missing a vital clue, but I’m too afraid to admit what I don’t know. “So you have the info your aunt collected, and you’re blackmailing people.”

  She hops from the cabinet and her shoes slam into the cracked tile flooring. “I like to call it building my college fund.”

  “You can’t go to college without graduating high school.”

  “Already have my GED. Now I’m just waiting it out. So what’s your plan, Caroline? Gonna rat me out to my mom and stepdaddy?” She grinds her heel into a pile of ceramic that turns to dust beneath her feet. “I wouldn’t have let my aunt think I was missing if there was another way, but I’m not going back to that house.”

  If I missed the undercurrent of threat in her voice, the way she’s blocking the only exit would make her point clear. Thing is, as bad as I feel for her mom, I don’t want to rat Sydney out. I know exactly what it’s like to not belong in the place you’re supposed to call home, and I know what it’s like to do everything necessary to create a place you can.

  But for all our similarities, we’re not friends, and a rush of anxiety comes over me with the meaning of the words she hasn’t spoken.

  She knows my name because Chrystal did. Because Chrystal kept records and details and pictures about fine, upstanding men who came slumming down in West Virginia. And one really unfortunate night, Mr. McCormack was stupid enough to order me into his car and drive me home.

  I say, “Landon McCormack. He’s my teacher, and he didn’t do anything wrong, but the cops are trying to pin stuff on him.”

  Stuff. It’s a stupid, inconsequential word that doesn’t carry nearly the weight it needs to. I shove my hand in my back pocket and pull out my cash, and I can’t escape the irony that I’m paying off Sydney to protect Mr. McCormack from the information I’m using to blackmail him.

  I’ve never bribed anyone before, and judging from Sydney’s stare, my thin pile of twenties isn’t the going rate.

  She takes it anyway. “You don’t tell the cops or my mom where I am, or that I’m alive, and I’ll make sure any info on your teacher disappears.”

  It’s not good enough. I want to see what info she has and watch her set it on fire.

  “What if someone else finds you?”

  “Who’s looking?”

  Fragments of my conversation with Chrystal lodge in my consciousness.

  Nobody’s looking for Sydney.

  They think she ran away.

  That’s what they always think.

  Always.

  That word feels too inconsequential too, because it implies so much more than it is. Always means it’s happened before. More than once.

  And that makes sense. If it happened before, it taught Sydney exactly what to do to make her disappearance seem real. Even if it meant making it real enough to fool her aunt, who’s apparently devoted her life to uncovering the truth.

  I try to summon outrage that Sydney tortured her aunt with her fake disappearance. Instead I can only remember I stole the identity of a dementia patient to cover my own.

  I clear my throat and my head spins when I suck in a lungful of kerosene-sweetened air. “I was looking. I promised and I meant it. I was looking for you.”

  She blinks, and even her shadow goes soft around the edges. “I guess you were.”

  Her gaze drops to the floor. “That teacher of yours, he meets up with some married chick. That’s why he comes down here. Not condoning it, but it’s better than most of the assholes in Aunt Chrystal’s records.”

  She pauses before she says, “She wasn’t crazy.”

  I wait, my next breath completely dependent on the words she’s hinting at speaking, because they may be the only thing that leads me to Madison.

  Her fingers throttle the door handle, and the stream of light inches wider. “If you want to find missing girls, start with ones that don’t look like you. Or the ones that do, but know not to bring their boyfriend and his ten-thousand-dollar watch to The Bricks.”

  It’s like listening to Chrystal all over again: the Black and Brown girls, the “white trash.” The ones who are nothing like me, nothing like Madison. The ones who pay the price for the life they were born into.

  Sydney nods, like she can hear my thoughts. “Start with Rebecca Wilder and Tracy Bast. But I’m not responsible for what happens.”

  I repeat the names in my head until they don’t sound real anymore, and then I finally summon the courage to ask the question I came here for. “My friend is missing. I found a matchbook, and it had your aunt’s number in my friend’s handwriting on it. Your aunt said if I found you, she’d tell me what she knew about her.”

  “Seems like your friend’s got plenty of people looking for her already.”

  “Not in the right places.” I wait until she meets my eyes. “I’m trying to help. I’m looking, not just for Madison, for all of them. Please.”

  Her sigh is resigned. “I don’t know what happened to your friend, but if she got Aunt Chrystal to give up her phone number, I’d bet she found something she shouldn’t have. People like that have a habit of disappearing.”

  I barely manage a nod, because I don’t know whether to be sick over what this means for Madison, or gratef
ul I still have a lead to follow.

  And because I’ve got nothing left to lose, I say, “You really think it was the cops who killed your aunt?”

  She flings open the door and steps backward into the room, and until my eyes adjust she’s just a dark form framed by the flicker of light. “Before Becca disappeared, she told her friends she met an older guy. One who promised to make the petty theft charge against her disappear. You know anyone besides cops who can do that?”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I know everything there is to know about Rebecca Wilder and Tracy Bast. At least everything that’s available online.

  I fell asleep with the sun spreading into the sky and my laptop heating through the comforter, dragging me into the somber quiet of dreams.

  It lied to me though. My dreams weren’t quiet.

  They swam with pictures of missing girls and unanswered questions. And then reality ripped me awake with a wave of panic and the endless tick of a clock that won’t slow its pace no matter how hard I beg. Because time, for Madison, is running out.

  It has to be.

  I toss aside the covers and press the heels of my hand to my gritty eyes until rainbow spots clog my vision and my stomach rumbles.

  Getting Jake and Aubrey out of here made me believe in the power of prayer, because only divine intervention could explain how they left without me shoving them out the door and barricading it behind them.

  That, and an appeal to Aubrey’s determination when I pointed out she’d miss practice, and to Jake’s honor when I reminded him he promised to talk to his dad about drug testing the glass. If the cops are truly involved, I need to know how far they’re willing to go.

  And based on what I found last night, I need to worry.

  Chrystal may have been a bar waitress with a flip phone, but she knew the basics of a computer with internet access. And she certainly knew how to post in forums. Including the details of her daughter Mandy’s disappearance four years ago.