Throwaway Girls

by Andrea Contos

  I wish I’d known he’d be watching.

  Maybe, if I’d believed myself to be a girl who could move mountains, I wouldn’t have accepted his claims that I wasn’t good enough for her. I wouldn’t have listened when he said she had better options. I would’ve been strong enough to walk away when he threatened to ruin the deal my mom made. To claim — for once — what I needed, and let my mom figure things out on her own.

  I would’ve questioned it, when he said the world would never miss me.

  But now I only wish I had more time.

  To have even one more night like the last.

  I’d stretched the tightness from my muscles, letting the softness of Livie’s bed swallow me, my shower-damp hair pressed against my temple as I filled the conversation with the mundane — school, work, anything but the man from the parking lot, who set me walking away from Livie as the price of my mom’s freedom. “Oh, and we found out today that Mikey’s coming back to the restaurant.”

  She dropped her pencil into her lap, its sharp point littering her page of math homework on its descent. Livie was the only person I’d met who could carry on a conversation while figuring out complex math equations without either suffering. “That asshole who beat up his girlfriend? Why is he not in jail?”

  The bed shook as I laughed, and then tears welled and I had to whisper an apology to Mikey’s girlfriend.

  Livie tossed her notebook to the floor and spun to face me. “What’s funny about that?”

  “Nothing. That’s why I apologized. It’s just —” I twisted the comforter in my hand, testing my new truths. “Your question was kind of naive.”

  It took three tries before she could form the words. “The guy puts his girlfriend in the hospital and it’s naive to wonder how he’s back at work in two weeks?”

  I waited, gave her a chance to acknowledge the differences between her world and mine. I waited, without judgment, to show her I understood why she’d lied. “Yes. It is naive. The only reason he was even away that long was because it violated his parole, Livie.”

  “And your boss just thinks it’s cool to have him work with you?”

  I shrugged. “We complained. My boss gave a bunch of excuses for him and ended it with ‘but none of you are his girlfriend so don’t worry.’”

  “Don’t worry? What the fuck is wrong with him?”

  “Same thing as plenty of other guys.”

  She jumped from the bed, yanking a sweatshirt over her tank top along the way. Her head popped from the top hole, hair flung in every direction. God, she was beautiful.

  She paced the matted carpet and a flush deepened in her pale cheeks. “Well, that’s bullshit. And it’s all the same, you know? We talk about this in class sometimes. About how girls get in trouble because their skirts are too short and distract the male teachers, or all the assholes who are surprised a girl can be good at math.”

  She kicked her notebook on the floor, its pages fluttering open. “Calvin Huckabee gets Janie Roberts pregnant junior year and all those asshole parents could talk about was how she couldn’t keep her legs closed and not one of them mentioned Calvin keeping his tiny penis to himself. It’s all such …”

  “Bullshit?” For all our differences, some things were very much the same.

  She’d done so much to show me that, to prove the places we came from didn’t determine who we were. I should’ve been angrier that she lied, but I did too. I hid all the parts of my life I didn’t think she’d be able to accept.

  But here, now, none of that mattered. She was Livie and I was Willa.

  I didn’t know it at first, not until the pieces started to fall together, but we’d met years ago at a lake — next to a beautiful girl with a necklace of bruises.

  When the guilt of my silence got too much for me, I went to the police to report that I found her. That’s when I discovered someone else already had, her name scribbled in the detective’s notebook, right next to where he wrote mine.

  It may not have matched what he inked onto the paper, but even then, we were Livie and Willa.

  Even then, our worlds weren’t so different. Both of us fighting for a girl no one was trying to find.

  Livie paced as I sat huddled in her bed. “Yes. It’s absolutely bullshit. It’s my world too. And yours. I exist. So do you, and Janie Roberts, and Mikey’s girlfriend. But it’s always the guys that get to make the rules. Why? Why are we supposed to settle for what’s best for them?”

  She paused, shoulders set. “Who gave them the world to run?”

  It was in that moment I knew I could never keep her.

  Livie was born to move mountains.

  So I’d set her free.

  And the next day, when “John” set the rules for me, I’d play by them. I’d end things with Livie, not because I feared him, but because there were mountains out there waiting for Livie to move them.

  In the end, there were mountains for me to move too.

  But I wish I’d thought it through — why John would go to so much trouble to pretend he was someone he wasn’t, why he’d go to such lengths to break me and Livie apart. If I’d paid more attention, I might’ve considered what else he had to hide.

  I might not have been so surprised when I woke to this foreign room and the restraints around my wrists. This room where hazy light streams through the covered windows and settles into the depressions in the plastic sheeting that coats the walls and floors. Where, sometimes, I catch glimpses of a place by the lake that started it all.

  He wanted postcards. A tiny rectangle where I’d say things Livie would understand — things she would believe — and I’d sign my name. So she wouldn’t look for me, he said. So she’d move on.

  The letters I insisted on sending instead were my mountains to move.

  I paid for them — for the opportunity to say goodbye, the chance to rewrite his rules, to give Livie the clues that would scream out his name in a final shout of justice.

  I paid with my blood and my tears, my pain and my grief. With every last ounce of my life.

  I drew upon that place I was born into, that empty, hollowed-out place, and every day I refused to die, I saved another girl that would replace me. I denied him the right to make all the rules. I stripped his power and made it my own.

  I fought. I resisted. I paid with everything I had.

  And when the end came, it wasn’t his hands I felt on the curve of my throat, his breath that billowed over my skin. I closed my eyes and drifted to a place filled only with me and Livie.

  Livie’s hands. Soft, gentle, reverent.

  Her breath, her lips, against my skin.

  Her laughter, sending me home.

  I denied him, this monster, the thing he wanted most — my surrender.

  And with my dying breath, I moved this mountain.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The rain sneaks beneath my jacket and trickles down my skin in wandering rivulets, soaking every layer of my clothing along the way. Each blade of grass glistens beneath the sweep of my flashlight.

  The last time I came through Mountain Man’s property, I had Jake, pepper spray and a tire iron. Today, it’s only me and my rage.

  Mountain Man knows something. He has to. It wasn’t him in that car in the parking lot, but Madison’s lipstick was here, and no one guards a decrepit house with a shotgun for no reason. If he wants to kill me for coming back, I’ll let him try.

  Madison knew too. She watched from that parking lot, taking pictures, while a man took Willa. But she didn’t call 911. If she told the cops later, they didn’t care. It’s been nearly two months since that day.

  The lipstick I found here proves she was looking into it, that she knew something was wrong. And Madison’s mom said she’d been spending time away from home, using the excuse of some new girl she’d befriended while she was really tracking down Chryst
al. Chrystal, who made it her life’s mission to find the person responsible for kidnapping her daughter, her niece, and every girl after them.

  Girls like Willa. And, when she became too much of a threat, girls like Madison.

  That has to be the reason he went after her. Why he strayed from the girls no one would notice to the girl everyone’s trying to find. Even with that level of scrutiny — and he had to know there would be — she was more dangerous to him alive.

  When I add it all together, I’m walking in Madison’s footsteps. She followed the clues and ended up here. Now she’s missing, and I can’t stop wondering how far her tracks will lead me — and I dread what I’ll find when I get to the place where they end.

  Objects I can’t see or name crunch beneath my feet. It’s only when I swallow and pain lances down my throat that I realize I’ve been yelling.

  Shouting a series of challenges for the man with the shotgun to give me what I came here for.

  I drop to my knees where I found Madison’s lipstick and bite down onto the rubbery flashlight handle so I can use both hands to search. Branches scrape my fingers, the cold rain stinging and soothing in equal measure, but there’s nothing here.

  The crumbling house stands defiant against the accusing glare of the moon, and I have to blink the rain from my eyes for it to come into focus.

  Girls may have died in that house. Madison may be in there right now.

  I grab tight to the necklace Willa gave me, the metal warm against my frozen fingertips.

  I left her, and it may have gotten her killed.

  I spin, scanning the tangles of shrubs and weeds, and I yell again, this time, a demand.

  If Mountain Man won’t answer me, I’ll go to the only place that will.

  I follow the crumbling path to the front porch, its moldy pillars opening to a gaping maw of a porch entrance, and I’ve barely climbed the first step when I hear it.

  The click slide click I’ve been waiting for.

  The cadence is off though, awkward and stumbling, and when I turn, Mountain Man’s bright yellow jacket is glossy with rain. His left arm hangs limp, but that doesn’t stop him from leveling the shotgun at me with his right.

  He growls, “You here alone?”

  I nod and slowly pull my phone from my pocket. I unlock it, my fingers slipping, and Willa’s image fills the screen.

  It’s not my favorite picture of her. That honor is reserved for the one I took the morning after we kissed for the first time, when she woke up tucked into my arms, giggling like we’d just played the ultimate prank on the world.

  That picture is mine, and I won’t tie it to this.

  I hold out my phone, even though Mountain Man is probably too far away to see it clearly. “I’m looking for this girl.”

  He grunts and his head swivels like he’s worried the trees might stretch their branches and reach for him. “Get inside.”

  I don’t hesitate, my feet slamming into the rotted boards of the steps.

  If he tells me he killed Willa or Madison, I’ll rip his heart out with my bare hands.

  He wrenches the door open and the hinges scream, and then I’m following a man into a dying house when there’s not a single soul who knows where I am.

  Carpet squishes beneath my shoes and Mountain Man flicks on a flashlight, throwing his shadow against the exposed studs where drywall has fallen away. He nods toward the wall behind me. “Where is he?”

  “She. I’m looking for a girl. Two girls.”

  He shakes his head and droplets spray from his matted hair. “Your boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend. This girl” — I thrust my phone in his direction — “is my girlfriend. And Madison, she came here. I think they’re both —”

  My throat closes tight and I can’t say what I need to say to make him understand.

  In one harsh jerk, he lowers the shotgun and his jaw works, shaggy mustache brushing against his beard below it. “Chrystal’s dead.”

  “I know. I didn’t kill her.”

  He says nothing, but his eyes disappear beneath hooded shadows.

  I hold out my phone again, my hand shaking. “This girl. Have you seen this girl? Ever? Have you ever spoken to her? Helped keep her here? Madison’s lipstick was in your fucking yard. Chrystal said she knew something about her. Are you working with him? The guy from the picture? This girl —”

  It’s not just my body that’s trembling. It’s my voice, rising higher with each new sentence.

  He turns and stomps away, his heavy boots bouncing sprays of water from the soaked carpet, leaving me in an empty room with the fading light of Willa’s picture on my phone.

  I scramble to catch him, and before I can ask where he’s heading he leads me out the back door.

  The rain slows, a miserable drizzle that casts a haze over the thin, trampled path Mountain Man barrels through. More than one creature scrambles at our approach, rustling into shrubs and tall grass bent low from the forces of winter.

  Darkness takes on new meaning here, my world reduced to the beam of my flashlight trained on the yellow slicker a few steps ahead.

  I don’t know how long we walk, how many miles he leads me through clustered trees and open stretches that used to hold homes.

  He doesn’t turn back to me when he says, “We think he works out here. Found another girl’s bracelet along the lakeshore once. Cops came out, said they couldn’t prove it was hers. Said maybe someone planted it to make it look like she didn’t run away.”

  I’m silent so long — stunned he said so many words at once — that he glances back to me. I search for a sign he’s lying, but there is nothing in his expression, just a muddled blend of sadness and anger, and I almost feel bad about what Jake did to his arm and ribs. “So, what? Now you patrol the woods searching for him?”

  He holds a branch high so he can duck beneath it. “Been searching ever since that girl showed us the picture of him. I’d kill him if I could find him here.”

  Madison. Madison showed Mountain Man a picture — a picture clear enough to identify the killer, one I haven’t seen — and he’s been hunting him ever since. Waiting.

  There’s more silence until the scene widens and we step into a small clearing that overlooks a lake. Raindrops ripple the surface and the rising crescent moon seems twice as bright in its reflection.

  My mind whirls, trying to splice together the pieces to form a whole story. But I can’t get anything to stick. Thoughts slide away before I can make sense of them, because every part of me is focused on the small inlet far in the distance. On the tree that proves everything has come full circle.

  Tonight it’s a blackened skeleton, lower branches twisting to the frosted ground, but years ago it kept watch over a soft bed of lush green grass filled with a rainbow of wildflowers. And irises.

  Those twisted branches made the perfect stepping stones to the higher ones, so easy even a fifteen-year-old girl with a handful of pills could navigate it.

  Willa’s handwriting is stark in my mind. Sometimes I think about where it all started.

  I thought she meant the parking lot at her diner, where I pretended to be someone else. A person who had never seen her before.

  I never told her I watched from that tree the day she found the girl on the shore. Never told her if she hadn’t come along, she would’ve found me lying in the grass too. Never told her that was the day I fell in love with her — when she showed me there’s strength in tenderness, that compassion exists in even the worst of circumstances.

  But somehow, she knew. She knew I was there, and in her letters she was trying to tell me.

  She was trying to tell me where she was. Where he’d taken her.

  And I failed her, from the moment I forgot about the girl we both found. Again when I didn’t think to look for her.

  Mountain Man
’s gruff voice thunders through my head, something about “coming on out of there,” and the cold shocks my legs, water creeping up my thighs. I gasp, flailing backward until his thick fingers capture my arm and yank me upright.

  He drags me from the lake I stumbled into, and I crumple to the ground, mud sucking at my fingers, my body shuddering. I’m too late to save her, but I can avenge her.

  I can make him sorry.

  I drag my gaze up until I meet Mountain Man’s eyes. “The girl on my phone, did you ever see her?” When he shakes his head no, I say, “And Madison’s lipstick? That’s because she came to see you?”

  “She came around here on her own, looking for Chrystal.” He works his jaw again, and I can tell he’s still debating how much to tell me. “Near as we can figure, he knew Chrystal was onto him. We kept thinking it was the cops. Had to be the cops. All her books pointed to it.”

  I want to ask questions, but words won’t form right and I struggle to take in everything he’s telling me.

  “She got a glimpse of him though. That rich girl did. Took that picture. ’Cept we didn’t know who he was, not until we seen your boyfriend. So we got your name from The Wayside, found your school, then him.”

  No. I can’t make myself believe Jake killed Willa or Madison. I can’t believe the boy I know, any part of him, is capable of that.

  Only …

  He followed me. He searched my room. Took Willa’s letters. He swore he didn’t hurt Madison.

  Mountain Man’s jaw ticks, teeth grinding together. “Looks just like him.”

  One by one, pieces drop into place like tumblers in a lock.

  Madison knew what she captured in her photos — knew who she captured.

  She suspected and she said nothing.

  She found Chrystal instead, sharing part of her knowledge but not all. Not the part about who the man in that car was.

  Because of Jake. Not because it was him she captured through her lens, but because it would destroy Jake — and that was more than Madison could handle.

  Chrystal and Mountain Man couldn’t figure out who the man was — not until they saw Jake.