“I know that,” I blurted. Cady backed away so fast that her ponytail bounced. I hadn’t meant for my anger to sound like it was at her, pushing her away. “I’m sorry. I’m not... It’s just that Helen’s my sister, and I don’t know what to do about any of this. The rumors aren’t true, and I really want to do something for her, but...you know how Leah and Aimee are. It’s impossible.”
I couldn’t believe I was talking with Cady about this—someone I hardly knew—but the words fell out in a steady stream. Or maybe it was because I didn’t know her very well that I felt comfortable unburdening myself—after all, if she came up to me to tell me about this, it was because she understood how major it was.
“Oh, wow, she’s your sister?” Cady widened her eyes, like everything was clicking in her brain. “That explains a lot. Ugh, Aimee is the worrrrsssst. If it’s any consolation, she’s a shit badminton player. She might fail the unit because she can’t even get the birdie over the net on a serve.”
Unfortunately, that bit of gossip, true as it was, barely chipped away at the feeling of being trapped in emotional quicksand in front of Cady.
“I just wish I knew what to do,” I said, letting out a big sigh.
Cady’s brown eyes darted between my gaze and her friends at the box office. Tommy was waving her back over.
“I’m really sorry, but Tommy...” She trailed off, grabbing my hands in a genuine, comforting squeeze. “I wish I could help more, but I’ll make sure word gets around gym class at least that Aimee’s full of shit about your sister. And I’ll throw Leah under the bus for good measure, because wherever Aimee’s spreading smoke, there’s a fire set by Leah.”
I nodded gratefully. A lump was forming in my throat, both because Cady was being super nice to me and because, as kind as she was, one gym class wasn’t going to make much of a dent in things. I watched Cady dash off to her friends, who all looked impatient to get into whatever movie they were seeing—I didn’t think they were the type to have fake IDs to get into Fire Walk with Me.
I watched them file into the movie theater, and then I was awkwardly alone, worrying about Helen.
When Kyle finally rejoined me, his face was red with exertion, which was kind of weird. The car wasn’t that far away, just on the other side of the building, but he’d been gone for a good five minutes. Something about it bothered me, but I couldn’t figure out what, so I put it out of my mind.
“You’re never going to believe this,” he said, looking at his Converse for dramatic effect. “But I, uh, just now remembered that the bouncer from the Varsity took my fake ID. And, um, I don’t think we can get into the movie without it.”
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was definitely an R-rated movie, and Siegen wasn’t the easiest place to sneak into. Maybe if we were seeing it at the Broadmoor or Bon Marche, but those were second-run theaters and wouldn’t be showing it this week anyway.
Still, I wasn’t thinking about the movie anymore. Aimee and Leah took up so much space in my mind with their attacks on Helen. It felt relentless, like a thousand small cuts chipping away at her reputation.
“Are you okay?” Kyle asked, peering into my eyes. “It’s not the end of the world if we don’t see Fire Walk with Me. I can be up for something else.” He squinted at the board near the box office with the times. “I’m, uh, not sure we can make it to Honeymoon in Vegas, though. Starts in five minutes, so it might be a stretch. And...everything else is an R.”
“It’s not that.” I tried to sound far more upbeat than I felt. “I’m okay if we do something else.”
He let out a whoof of relief, a little exaggerated for effect. “That’s great! I thought you were going to hate me because you couldn’t experience the cinematic mastery of David Lynch.” I let out a small laugh, but my heart wasn’t in it. He leaned closer to me as we walked back to the car together. “Wait, did something happen when you were talking to that girl? Isn’t she from our school?”
So he’d seen me talking to Cady. From where, though?
“No...not exactly. It’s just...”
We stopped right in front of his car. “You can tell me what’s wrong,” he said, opening the door for me. “I don’t judge.”
My heart ached a little. I wanted to find a solution to helping Helen, but telling Kyle felt like spreading the rumors further. And I knew if I talked to him about it, Helen would be mortified. Also, more selfishly, I wanted so much to keep the gossipy bullshit away from Kyle, to keep him as the one part of my life that wasn’t infected by the rot Leah and Aimee were spreading. But that was never going to work, not if our relationship was going to be something real.
I slumped into the passenger seat as he drove us out of the parking lot. “Cady didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “She just... Well, Leah and Aimee have been saying awful things about my sister behind her back.” I left out what those things were, because if he didn’t know, I didn’t want to be the one who told him. “And Cady wanted to warn me that she’d heard them, too.”
Kyle’s hands seemed to grip the steering wheel more tightly. Maybe he was tutoring Leah. Maybe he thought she was nice. Maybe he was like Sean in that respect, and wouldn’t believe me.
“Are you sure it’s not just Cady spreading shit?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the road. “She could be egging you on. Getting under your skin by making sure you know that people are talking about your sister. Seems pretty manipulative to me.”
I considered it for half a second. I didn’t know Cady that well, but I did know she wasn’t a liar or manipulative. She’d held up her end of our group project last year, unlike everyone else. You can tell a lot about a person from how they act during group projects. Plus, Leah had been taunting Helen for a while, and Aimee was a known gossip. They were the obvious choice over someone who was consistently nice and honest.
“Yeah, no,” I said, toning my voice down to sound less combative than I was feeling. “Cady’s great. Leah and Aimee, not so much.”
Kyle and I drifted into silence. This was exactly what I didn’t want to happen. I could tell he thought I was one of those girls who hated other girls, and was constantly immersed in gossip. That wasn’t who I was at all, or at least wasn’t who I was trying to be. Revolution girl-style... I was trying.
Then he turned to me and smiled. “Why don’t we forget all about it? Someone in one of my tutoring sessions was telling me about a place where we could get beignets and hot chocolate. It’s across town, but—”
“Coffee Call?” My voice lit up. I was a sucker for beignets. Melissa and I used to go to Coffee Call a lot after orchestra practice, but we hadn’t been there in a while. “I’d be into that.”
Our conversation drifted toward beignets, and how they were different from European doughnuts, and I pushed our talk about Helen out of my head. I needed to get to know Kyle better before I could expect him to understand what was going on with her. And that wasn’t going to happen if I made it sound like I was obsessed with getting revenge on Aimee and Leah. He knew I cared about my sister and was trying to help her, and that was the important thing for now—right?
But no matter how much I told myself that, I still felt like I was letting Helen down.
15
“Athena, where’s your sister?”
Sunlight blazed through the window as I blinked myself awake and focused on the figure in the doorway. Dad never woke us up, not since we were little. Helen was a natural alarm clock.
“She’s at Sara’s.” I yawned, rubbing my eyes.
“Sara’s mother just called. Helen and Sara were gone when she woke up. They aren’t at modeling class, either.”
That was odd. Helen never missed modeling class. I looked at Dad, who hovered in the doorway in sweatpants and a grubby T-shirt, as though crossing into the room would violate my personal space. Sara’s mother had probably woken him up, a suspicion supported by the way his curly brow
n hair was mussed and twisted in all directions.
The wrinkles on Dad’s forehead deepened with concern. He looked exhausted, more than usual for a Saturday. Last night, I’d been genuinely surprised that he wasn’t awake when I got home fifteen minutes past my eleven o’clock curfew. He was a lot more lenient now that his job was so much more tiring.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” I said, trying to sound casual and positive.
“Athena, if you know anything...” Dad’s voice trailed off as he looked at me over his glasses.
I didn’t. At least, I didn’t know where she was right then, at that moment. I knew she’d been acting suspiciously yesterday, though, but she’d only had an overnight bag. And I knew she wanted to go to New York to stay with Mom, but I didn’t think she was desperate enough to run away. I doubted she’d take Sara with her, either.
Dad stood there, eyeing me like he suspected I was hiding something, and I willed myself to think harder.
“Have you called Mom?” If Helen was trying to get to our mom’s house, she’d probably prepped a lie for Mom as to why she was on her way.
I was fairly certain that if he was my age and a girl, Dad would have rolled his eyes at me. His adult version, a reflexive frown, made it perfectly clear that he thought Mom had nothing to do with this.
“I’m serious,” I insisted. “I think Helen might try to visit Mom. She asked me a couple weeks ago if I would trade my spot with her, but I said no.”
True enough, and I didn’t bring in anything about the abortion rumors. If we could find Helen—when we found Helen—I would force her to tell him. Until then, gossip was irrelevant.
“I’ll call her.” He left the room, walked down the hall to his bedroom, and closed the door with a firm finality. He never called Mom, unless one of us was sick or injured, like when Helen broke her arm falling off the monkey bars. Or if one of us had done something exceptionally well, like when I scored an eight hundred on the verbal section of the SATs or when Helen won the science fair.
Actually, now that I thought about it, he called her quite a bit.
I got out of bed and crept down the hall to listen.
“Margaret,” I heard him say. “It’s Alan. Have you talked with Helen recently?”
A long pause while Mom said something. If I had to guess, that something was only tangentially related to Helen’s disappearance.
“Mmm-hmm. And you told her that she could visit in the spring, closer to her birthday?”
Another long pause. I wished I’d been savvy enough to pick up my bedroom phone and simultaneously hit the mute button. Dad’s side of this conversation was more questions than answers.
“And you heard from her this morning?” he asked. “Okay, okay, I’m writing that number down. I’ll call you back.”
That sentence gave me the signal to dash back to my bedroom and pretend I’d heard nothing. I sat on my bed with a bounce and tried to act like I’d been sitting patiently the entire time.
“Athena.” Dad took up his post in the door frame again. “Your mother told me she heard from Helen this morning. She said that I’d finally agreed to let her visit sooner, and she said something about getting a modeling contract today. But your mom didn’t ask Helen what she meant.”
It figured. I couldn’t remember the last time my mother listened to the specifics of a conversation when it didn’t involve a long-dead poet. The “modeling contract” piece made some sense, at least given the things Helen had told me after the fashion show, but where would she have gone to try to get one?
I thought about Helen’s modeling friends. If Sara had gone with Helen, Jennifer might still be a source of information.
“Do you or Sara’s mom know if Jennifer went with Helen and Sara, too?” I asked Dad.
He raised his eyebrows in sudden recognition.
“She’s the other brown-haired one?” he said. “I forgot about her.” I trailed him down the stairs to his small half office near the kitchen, where he kept a Rolodex with the names of our friends’ parents. Today, I was glad my father operated in the strict-to-overprotective zone.
Again, I could only hear one side of the conversation. This time, I sensed Dad’s growing impatience with the fourteen-year-old who’d answered his call.
“Jennifer, please,” he said. “No, no. I’m not going to yell at you. No, you’re not in trouble.”
He held the phone away from his ear. Jennifer’s hysterical blubbering came out of the phone at warp speed. I couldn’t tell what she said, and I don’t think he could, either.
“No, they’re not going to be in trouble,” he said reassuringly. “I just want to know where they are. I need to know they’re safe.”
Jennifer’s sobbing subsided, and Dad put the phone back against his ear.
“She went to a casting call in New Orleans?” This time, he really did roll his eyes. “Okay, thank you, Jennifer. Can you put your mother back on, please?”
I didn’t stick around to hear Dad talk with Jennifer’s mother. Back in our room, I looked over at Helen’s bed. She kept her side of the room far neater than I kept mine. She hadn’t taken anything with her other than maybe a change of clothes and her toiletries, so it didn’t seem like she’d be gone for long.
Eventually, Dad reappeared in the doorway. I’m not sure he’d seen the inside of our room so many times in one day since I got the flu last year. He didn’t look nearly as worried this time.
“I called the modeling school director, Mrs. Brouillette,” Dad said. “Apparently, this casting call is legitimate, at least as legitimate as those things go. Only girls with signed permission slips were supposed to go, and Helen apparently forged my signature. Sara must have forged Mrs. Lewis’s, as well. Why the hell Mrs. Brouillette didn’t tell Sara’s mom about this when she called the school earlier this morning, I don’t know. That woman hasn’t got an ounce of sense.”
“So you think Helen went to New Orleans?”
“I know she did,” he said. “Mrs. Brouillette called the casting office to confirm after she spoke with Mrs. Lewis. She was very excited that Helen was the only girl to get a callback from the Ford rep. I don’t understand why she’s so excited, considering she let Mrs. Lewis and me think Sara and Helen had run away. And there’s no way I’m letting my daughter model swimsuits at car shows.”
I laughed for the first time this morning. “Dad, Ford is a modeling agency. One of the big ones.” Helen had been obsessed with them since she found out they were Christy Turlington’s agency.
“How big?” he asked in a measured voice, as though weighing the twin options of letting her benefit from a trip that she’d taken without permission and grounding her for the next six years for putting him into a state of panic. “Big as in Sears and Roebuck, or big as in Vogue?”
“Vogue,” I said. “She could be a real model, and not just one at the mall. Brooke Shields is one of their models.” I surprised myself. Somehow, I’d absorbed enough from Helen’s fashion obsession to know this random fact. She knew which agencies, like Ford and Wilhelmina, represented all the big models, but Brooke Shields was the only one Dad might know.
“Do you know why she’d do this?” he asked, shaking his head. “It seems like a foolish risk, and that’s not like her at all. She could have at least asked me.”
I cringed inwardly. Telling Dad about the rumors would betray Helen, but not telling him meant lying.
The weight of the decision pushed down on me. Helen didn’t want Dad to know, and I didn’t want to tell him, either. She’d come to me for help, and I’d tried. I hadn’t been super effective, but I’d tried. Bringing Dad into the situation would inevitably make things worse—he might be able to confirm to the school that Helen had been abortion-free all summer, which would prevent her from being expelled, but a parental intervention sent a signal of weakness to the student population, a drop of blood in the
sea for all the swimming sharks. That was what Helen didn’t want, and I wasn’t going to put her in that position.
But that was before she disappeared. Waiting to see if things got better, trying to find other solutions—those things hadn’t worked. And lying to Dad might make me feel solidarity with Helen, but it wasn’t going to help her in the end, either. Or me, for that matter, if he found out I’d lied.
“Yeah.” I sighed. “I do. I think she feels desperate.”
I told Dad the stories circulating about Helen. That Leah and Aimee first told people that Helen had sex with Drew Lambert, then embellished with the abortion story. That it cost Helen her spot in the pro-life club, which caused another eye-rolling episode, since he landed somewhere to the left of Al Franken on the political spectrum. I told him everything, including trying to get Sean to help, going to the fake abortion clinic with Melissa, and failing to get Helen to read what Eddie Vedder had written.
I’d never had such a one-sided conversation with Dad before. By the time I reached the end, his face had frozen with his mouth turned down and his eyebrows drawn together.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he asked once I’d finished.
“Helen asked me not to,” I said. And besides, Leah can’t be stopped, I thought. Not when she trades in believable lies.
“You know that’s not a good excuse,” Dad said, giving me one of his patented stern-father looks. “You say this Leah girl’s responsible for it. Why haven’t you two gone to the guidance counselor or the dean of discipline about her?”
Ah, Dad, so naive. Parents always thought that bullying had some easy solution.
“Because we don’t have any proof,” I said, exasperated. “And because we didn’t think anyone would believe us. Helen hoped it would just go away.” That wasn’t technically true, since I knew she wanted to get back at Leah in some way, but Dad didn’t need to know that. “I hoped it would, too, but it hasn’t yet.”
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