Throwaway Girls

by Andrea Contos

  His breaths come too heavy to continue, but I don’t need him to. He’s giving me all the details I don’t need, to cover for the things he can’t say.

  All the things that make sense now.

  Madison’s mom referenced the visits from people Madison cared about. People like Jake.

  Jake knew where Madison’s secret safe was. He didn’t bother bringing tools to open it at the motel, because he knew he wouldn’t need them even if dropping it didn’t work — he’d opened that safe before.

  He wasn’t surprised by the edited images I showed him, because he’d already seen them. And then, missing flash drive number ten — the one that had to hold the pictures Madison showed to Chrystal. The one painted with Madison’s pink nail polish. The one Jake took.

  But then, Preston mentioned Higgins Lake, and none of it was about me anymore.

  That night, Jake went home and looked at the drive that held evidence of the things his dad has done, and he didn’t tell. He chose not to believe.

  Everything his silence cost him is clear in his eyes.

  His voice is barely a whisper. “He’s all I have left.”

  Thomas knocks my response from my mouth as his shoulder rams into my ribs, and the gun jerks from my hands.

  I’m weightless just long enough to suck in a lungful of air, and then we slam into the lake, the water so cold it burns.

  My head cracks against the rocky lake bed, and whatever chaos exists above the surface can’t reach me here. It’s just the gurgle of water and the reflection of flames dancing above me.

  Thomas’s fingers dig into my chest, wrap around my throat, holding me under until my lungs ache and stars dance among the water’s ripples.

  But then my knee wedges beneath his ribs, my foot on his opposite hip, and when all the self-defense lessons Mom sent me to take over, I don’t forget to slam the heel of my hand into his nose. I shove myself from his grasp and into the depths of water just beyond the lake’s drop-off.

  The force propels me through the water, and then we’re a tangle of limbs until I dive deeper. The water is shades of gray and black, and panic surges through me when I don’t know if I’m swimming toward the shore or away from it.

  But Jake’s form stands tall on the edge of the water and I surge toward it, just before the last of my oxygen gives out.

  I shove to the surface, gasping, coughing, shivering so hard nothing works right, and blink the water from my eyes. The gun sits just beyond reach, only inches from Jake, black metal on blackened ground.

  I claw at the frozen earth, raking the dirt with my fingernails to pull myself forward, but the mucky ground sucks at my shoes beneath the water and I’m still too far.

  Too late.

  A truck skids to a stop just beyond the peninsula, then two more behind it, and the glow of the headlights creates a halo that surrounds Jake’s body.

  Thomas’s hand closes around my ankle, but before he can pull me under, the gun tumbles over the ground and into my outstretched hand.

  I don’t even blame Jake when he looks away.

  I twist toward his dad, my finger curled around the trigger, and there’s a split second where nothing happens, and then the moment when everything does.

  The gun jerks in my soaked hands and the shot rips through the eerie silence. Thomas stumbles back, the bullet in his side spilling blood from his stomach and between his fingers.

  It’s fitting that, in the end, those hands should be covered in blood.

  A door slams and voices clamor. Mr. McCormack yells my name. But it’s still too late. Too late to stop any of this.

  Thomas blinks twice, his gaze flickering up to me as water and blood trail over the cheeks, the jaw, the eyes, which look so much like his son’s.

  But it’s Madison’s face I see. Willa’s. Tracy, Becca, the girl by the lake and seven others the world may never see.

  I’m too late to change that.

  Too late to save anyone.

  But I’m still the girl with the gun.

  Still the girl who’s going to keep her promise and set all of this right.

  And as my finger squeezes the trigger, I show Thomas Monaghan all the mercy he deserves.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The steady bong of the grandfather clock in Madison Bentley’s marble foyer matches my steps as I climb the stairs to her room.

  Beside me, her mom is silent, a smile stretched thin to cover the wild panic that swims in her eyes. It’s been two weeks since Madison was found. Two weeks since Thomas Monaghan died.

  Two weeks since I killed him, watched him stumble and bleed.

  And no matter how many times I replay that moment, it’s still not enough.

  I’m not sure it will ever be enough.

  The only consolation is that he never believed it would happen. That’s the only thing that explains why he bothered to torch the cabin and take Madison out of it before he did — no one cares about evidence if they’re dead.

  They found Madison in the trunk of his car, the one he thought he’d be coming back to. When he could take her body somewhere no one would think to look.

  When I lie awake, every night, envisioning all the things I couldn’t stop him from doing to Willa, I remember that moment at the lake, when I taught him the true meaning of justice.

  We reach the top step, carpet soft and plush beneath my shoes.

  I don’t want to see Madison. Don’t want to see what Jake’s dad did to her. Don’t want a living example of what Willa went through.

  And I don’t want to see Madison alive when Willa is dead.

  I know she’s dead, even though they haven’t found her. I should have known it from the beginning.

  I’ve spent the last two weeks reliving every second of missed clues and ignored warnings. Remembering that for all the time I spent searching for Madison, all the times I listened to Chrystal yell about missing girls everyone believed left of their own volition, I never questioned that Willa could be one of them.

  She left her life behind, everything she’d worked for, in the middle of her senior year, and I didn’t question it. I stood on the St. Francis tightrope, and I didn’t look down.

  I thought I wasn’t like them — the people who’d dismiss a girl going missing, the ones who think there are people who aren’t worth looking for.

  I know better now.

  Madison’s mom clears her throat and nudges open the door, a wince clouding her smile. “Well. I’ll let you girls talk!”

  She mouths, “Thank you for coming,” as she gives my shoulder a squeeze, and I nod because I can’t smile back.

  I step inside Madison’s room and my eyes strain to adjust.

  The warmth and sweetness of the black-raspberry vanilla candles she loves hover in the air, masking the subtle hint of cleaners and antiseptics.

  Madison sits snuggled in the corner, on her favorite chaise, a blanket drawn close. Her knees pull to her chest, her chin resting on arms that circle her legs.

  I wait for a smile that doesn’t come and it’s like a razor to my heart. I don’t even recognize this girl, the one who absorbs shadows instead of radiating light. She was the person you went to when you couldn’t find the bright side, the one who would leave you laughing through your tears. This is the girl who photoshopped Ryan Reynolds into every picture in the quarterly newsletter just because she knew I’d notice.

  But now I’m not supposed to touch her. That’s what my mom told me before I came here today. Because the girl that used to hug strangers as an introduction is gone.

  Thomas Monaghan created this version of her, and I’ll never stop hating him for it.

  The only mercy is that he didn’t treat Madison like the other girls — not at first. Instead he questioned and interrogated, cataloging every bit of evidence she had and tracing where it might be. She
lied to him, about the existence of flash drive number ten. She let him believe he was safe.

  He told her that killing her wouldn’t be the same as the others.

  Mom ran to the bathroom seconds after she told me that.

  The smallest strip of light sneaks over the top of Madison’s windows, where she couldn’t duct tape the curtains to the wall like she did the sides and bottoms.

  The sliding glass door I used to break into her room no longer exists — the one with the faulty latch that never locked properly. Now it’s a single door.

  Heavy steel. The small pane of glass painted black. The deadbolt still shiny brushed chrome.

  “I had them change it.”

  I startle at the sound of her voice, floorboards creaking beneath me. “He’s dead.”

  She nods, just the smallest dip of her chin. “Did you know at any given time in America, there are between twenty-five and fifty active serial killers? The FBI says they only kill about 150 people per year but lots of stats show that number is way underreported.” She sucks in a breath. “Did you know there are currently almost 250 000 girls missing in the US?”

  “I can give you one of their names.” My voice snaps through the quiet. “I can tell you her birthday and how her eyes looked bluer when she wore certain colors. I can tell you what her laugh sounded like, and I can tell you how many days it took him to —”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” Her words shake as violently as her body, tears tracking over her cheeks. “Do you think I haven’t thought about every decision I made? About everything I did wrong? Do you think he didn’t love reminding me of what I should’ve done? Didn’t tell me every detail of —”

  “Shut up.”

  “I know, better than anyone, what she went through.” She shrugs off her blanket and her legs tumble over the side of the chaise, but she doesn’t stand, like she’s afraid the world is too unstable to keep her upright. “And I have to live with it.”

  “You get to live with it.”

  “I tried to help her. I —”

  “Bullshit. You watched her get into that car —”

  “He didn’t force her! How was I supposed to know what —”

  “Stop. Tell the cops whatever you want but don’t lie to me. You knew. You saw him following her.”

  “One time.”

  “One too many.”

  Especially when it happened weeks — maybe months — before Willa went missing. Madison told the cops she saw him in the parking lot of Willa’s diner. She told herself it was coincidence, that he was just looking out for me, making sure Willa wasn’t “trouble.”

  Preston Ashcroft told me that, not Mom. Willa is still a thing we don’t discuss, like if we don’t say her name it’ll be like she never existed.

  I say, “And then you saw him take her, and you went to a stranger in the hopes they might go to the cops because you knew.”

  “Chrystal posted on those forums, and I knew she wouldn’t ignore me. I knew she’d try to help. And I kept all my evidence in your locker and I bought that lipstick with the iris —”

  “You kept evidence in a locker I haven’t opened since I got it and you bought a lipstick? You told Chrystal? Just say it — you did everything you could to pass the responsibility off on someone else. Did it ever occur to you to just tell me?”

  “I didn’t know how. I thought maybe you’d find the stuff in the locker or see the lipstick and ask. I know how stupid it sounds now, but we were keeping so many things from each other and if you knew all the things I did —”

  Her words come through her sobs. “I was so scared you’d never forgive me.”

  “How long was it before you realized Willa never came back? When you saw how upset I was and acted like you didn’t know why. You knew and you did fucking nothing!”

  “I couldn’t be the one to tell him!” She scrubs her tears and freezes, then shudders as she tugs her sleeve past her wrist, covering whatever scars she left the cottage with.

  She retreats into herself again, a closed-tight ball of legs and locked arms. “You don’t know what it was like. I’ve loved Jake for as long as he’s loved you, and I’ve had to sit and watch. He obviously had feelings for you and you ignored it. You had everything I wanted and you didn’t even care. And I tried to tell him once — how you were in love with someone else — and he wouldn’t listen.”

  “So you were going to show him? Follow me around taking pictures as proof?”

  Her head drops, hair draping over her face to create a wall, a cage, around her eyes. “I thought if he could see it, how the two of you were, that he’d finally realize you were never going to love him back. And we were good together, me and Jake. I know you, Caroline, and I know him, and I knew the two of you would never work. So yes, I followed you. And then I saw …”

  Her gaze focuses on the empty space where posters used to cover her walls. “And then I saw what I saw, and …”

  She shakes her head. “I went to the police station so many times. Once I even made it inside and then I … I just couldn’t. It couldn’t be me. Jake was barely with me, and I couldn’t be the one he thought of when he found out who his dad really was.”

  She was right to be afraid. I’m not sure Jake will ever be able to look at me again. The closest he’s gotten is the letter he stuck in my locker — a single folded sheet of paper, the edges jagged and ripped from his notebook — that read I’m sorry.

  I wanted to write him one back but I can’t bring myself to say I’m sorry for killing his dad. I’m not. And I can’t make myself forget the things he hid, so I bought him a vape, and cartridges in vanilla and mint. I think he might need it. I don’t think he believes I’m the ocean anymore.

  “Was it worth it, Madison? Is Jake here now?”

  I want to destroy everything in this room. Burn it all down. Every memory of what happened on that lake, every moment I held the last belongings of twelve girls in my hands.

  My hand lands on the strip of duct tape fastening the curtain tight to the window, eclipsing the light that strains through the cracks in the edges.

  It rips free from the wall, clinging to my skin, ripping away layers of my fingerprints. Splotches of paint tear free, ravaging the soft lavender to reveal the deep burgundy layers beneath.

  Madison’s sobs tell me I should stop but I can’t. Can’t keep my hands from grasping the other side, the bottom, and finally — as the rod tumbles from the brackets and crashes to the floor — the top.

  I don’t stop until the tangled mess at my feet goes still and sunshine burns, bright and heavy, into the room.

  I force myself to look at her. To see the yellowed bruises and the purple beneath her eyes.

  I force myself to witness what Thomas Monaghan has made her into.

  And even now, I can’t bring myself to tell her that — when faced with evidence that might have saved her — Jake warned his dad instead.

  Her sobbed apologies float away like the sprinkles of dust dancing in the rays of light piercing her room, because nothing she says can change anything. No amount of sorry can undo what’s been done. And there’s nothing in me that can grant her the reprieve she’s begging for.

  She whispers, “I wish he would’ve killed me.”

  She stares at her upturned palms like they might hold answers. “I let her die. I look at it now and I don’t know how. And when I heard you, in the cabin, screaming my name, I swear, Caroline, I prayed you wouldn’t find me.”

  I drop in front of her, my hands on her knees, and I don’t remember I’m not supposed to touch her until it’s too late. But she doesn’t pull away, and for a second, I can see the girl she was before.

  I say, “He did this. Not you.”

  I’ll never understand how I’m supposed to forgive the unforgivable. I can never forget the things she didn’t do for Willa. But I also
know what it’s like to wish the world would go on without you.

  I know what it’s like to claw yourself back from that place. And how, sometimes, it takes a display of compassion to show you it’s worth it.

  It’s only because of what Willa taught me that I’m able to squeeze Madison’s knee and force her to meet my eyes. “You survived. You get to live. You want to atone for what you did?”

  I nod toward the window, the glare of the light. “Start with living. Don’t let him win.”

  I need to start living too, and I can’t do that here. That hasn’t changed.

  I whisper, “I love you,” and despite everything, the words still come easy.

  She nods, her voice so quiet I barely register she’s speaking. “I met her.”

  My hands lift from her knees, and then I’m standing because we’re too close for this conversation, and it’s too soon for me to hear it.

  “When?”

  “A few weeks after you guys started dating, I think.” She pauses for a fresh onslaught of tears. “You were so happy, and I just wanted to know — I wanted to see what kind of person could transform you like that. I just … I wanted to see what that looked like. To love someone who loved you back.”

  I hug my arms across my middle, holding myself together so I don’t fall apart, because I can’t stop wondering if that was the night she saw Thomas Monaghan at the diner. If she smiled at Willa, knowing he was out there. “And?”

  “And she talked to me. Even when I acted like a fucking lunatic and asked if she ever felt invisible and even when I started crying. And then as I was walking out —”

  I shake my head because I know what comes next. The girl I loved — the one that loved me back — would never let someone suffer alone.

  She never stopped hoping people could be more than what others thought them to be. And despite the articles and news reports and headlines that reduce her to a numbered victim — a placeholder for any number of girls that could’ve taken her spot — I know who she was.