by Sarah Gailey
She trails off, red splotches rising on her chest.
“You okay?” Paulie asks softly.
“I don’t know,” Marcelina says. “Sorry.” Maryam’s face softens, and she watches Marcelina carefully. Roya lays the back of her hand against Marcelina’s forehead, maternal. Marcelina flinches away. “I’m fine,” she says. It’s a transparent lie, but we don’t push it. Marcelina will tell us when she’s ready. She always does.
“So what do you guys think Iris is going to tell them?” Paulie asks, expertly redirecting our attention. Marcelina gives her a grateful smile.
“Not a damn thing,” Roya says, reaching to the bottom of the french fry pile to extract an unsoiled wedge. “There’s nothing to tell.”
Paulie rolls her eyes. “Okay, but they’re going to ask if she knows where Josh is, and—”
“And she doesn’t,” Roya interrupts. “None of us do. We all know where some of Josh is,” she adds in an undertone, “but none of us are ever going to know where all of Josh is.”
“Except me,” I murmur.
“Except you,” Marcelina says through a mouthful of fries.
“Speaking of,” Roya says, reaching for my burrito, “are you doing anything tonight?”
“What? Tonight? Why?” I see Marcelina and Maryam exchange eye rolls. They start talking to each other about some makeup trick they want to try, and Paulie joins in on the conversation, even though she almost never wears anything beyond lip balm. And just like that, Roya and I are alone in the middle of the cafeteria. She watches me with raised eyebrows. “I mean, yeah, why?”
“I want to go to the reservoir,” Roya says around a large bite of my lunch. A piece of rice is caught in the divot of her top lip, and she flicks out the tip of her tongue to get it. I steal a sip of Paulie’s water, but it doesn’t make my mouth feel any less dry.
“Sure,” I say. “To, uh … take care of a thing?”
“Yeah,” Roya says. “To take care of a thing. You walked today, right? I can drive us there after sixth period.”
“Okay,” I say, and then Paulie is asking me a question about makeup that I don’t know the answer to, and the moment’s over. Under the table, Roya’s foot brushes against mine, and Paulie has to repeat herself three times before I answer.
“Oh, fuck,” Roya mutters. I glance over, and she’s looking behind me.
Her mom is standing in the doorway, and she doesn’t look happy. She’s wearing slacks and a fitted black blazer—the outfit she calls her “head-bitch-in-charge uniform.” Her badge hangs from her belt and her hair is up in a tight, shiny brown bun, and there’s no two ways to look at it: she’s here in a professional capacity, and she does not have time for games. She points at Roya, then hikes a thumb over her shoulder. Roya stands up, slinging her backpack over one shoulder. She jams her hands into her pockets and stalks out of the cafeteria without saying goodbye to any of us.
As she disappears through the doorway, my phone rings. I look down. It’s Roya’s name and face on the screen. I answer, expecting it to have been a butt-dial, but a muffled version of Roya’s mom’s voice comes through. I put my phone on speaker and rest it in the middle of the table. We all lean forward to listen.
“Were you at that party?” Chief Cassas is asking. There’s rustling. I’m pretty sure Roya’s got her phone in the front pocket of her hoodie.
“Yes.” That’s Roya’s voice, loud and clear. She called me from inside her pocket on purpose, I’m sure of it now. Two things dawn on me at once: First, the fact that Roya knows that we would all lie to her mom to protect her, and she wants us to have our stories straight. Second—the fact that she can call me without looking at the screen.
I bite my lip and try not to smile. She has me on speed-dial.
It’s probably nothing. She probably has all of us on speed-dial.
Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just me.
“I can’t believe this,” her mom is saying. “You told me you were going to be at Alexis’s house. Are you lying to me now? Is this what we’re doing?” Roya says something I don’t catch, and there’s another rustle. “I don’t care if you wanted to go, you know the rules, and—”
“It was worth it,” Roya says. “I’m never going to have another prom night, Mom. I wanted to be with my friends. I would do it again.”
There’s a long silence, and I turn the volume on my phone all the way up, thinking that maybe Roya’s covered the mouthpiece of the phone by accident. It turns out to just be a pause in the conversation. Her mom’s answer comes through at top volume, and we don’t miss a single word.
“Do you know what happened to Josh Harper?”
We all wait, holding our collective breath. Marcelina snaps the hair tie around her wrist in a quick, steady rhythm.
“No,” Roya answers simply, and we can hear her mom’s sigh.
“Okay,” Chief Cassas says. “Okay. We’ll talk about the rest of it tonight, then.”
“Fine,” Roya says. “Am I grounded, though? I was going to go to the reservoir with Alexis this afternoon and …” Her voice has gone vague, uncomfortable. There’s a sudden cacophony of rustling, like she’s shoved both hands into her pocket and is fumbling with the phone. We don’t hear the rest of her question or her mom’s answer, and then the line goes dead, and the bell rings.
None of us move. All around us, people stand up, clearing their tables and dropping trash into the row of huge gray garbage cans in the middle of the cafeteria.
“Okay,” I say. “Well. See you guys later?”
“Yeah,” Paulie says. She’s the first to go. She plants a kiss on top of my head, then walks away without saying goodbye.
“Don’t worry,” Marcelina says, running both hands through her hair before starting to put it up in a messy bun. “Roya and Iris are solid. They’ll be fine.”
I stay at the table as they all leave, knowing that I’ll be late for study hall but not caring. I stare at the ten black hearts on the backs of my nails and imagine all of my friends, one by one, lying about whether or not they know what happened to Josh.
If Marcelina’s wrong, and they’re not fine, it will be because of those lies. It will be because they lied to protect me. If they’re not fine, it’ll be all my fault. But I’m too scared to do the right thing and turn myself in, or at least tell them they don’t have to lie.
My friends love me more than I deserve. That’s never been a question. The question is, how long will it take them to realize that?
8.
WHEN I GET TO THE parking lot at the end of the day, Roya isn’t there yet, so I walk up and down the rows of parking spaces looking for her car. My phone is buzzing in my pocket, but I don’t pull it out, because I know what the notifications will be.
Did you hear about Josh?
Do you know what happened?
Did they call you in for questioning?
I heard he ran away from home.
I heard he got kidnapped.
I heard he died.
It’s all anyone can talk about. Josh is missing, and the cops are asking students about it, and nobody seems to know what happened. That gray-haired cop let Iris go after a few questions about the party, but that wasn’t the last time I saw the cop—she’s been pulling kids out of classes all day. Everyone is trying to figure out who was at the party, who saw Josh leave, who he was with. Everyone is trying to figure out if they should be sad or scared, or if they should admit that they didn’t really know him that well, or if it even matters that they didn’t know him. Because if one of your classmates vanishes, even if you never talked to him before, it still hits you. We all know that we can disappear, even if we don’t really feel it in our bones yet. We’ve spent our whole lives being reminded that we can disappear, from don’t-talk-to-strangers to don’t-drive-drunk. But it’s hitting a lot of people now for the first time that other people can disappear. That people they care about can disappear.
That they might be the ones left behind with their grief and u
ncertainty and no idea where to start looking for the person they lost.
I find Roya’s car and lean against the hood. Roya drives a mint-green Subaru that she named Nathan after the guy who owned it before it was impounded and sold at police auction. It’s a good car for driving around in late at night with the windows down, listening to the wind and the crickets.
Last summer, right after she got the car, we all crammed our stuff in there and went on a camping trip a few hours away. I forgot my sleeping bag, so I slept in the backseat with the moonroof open. I woke up covered in dew, only to find Roya curled up in the passenger seat. She opened her eyes and looked right at me and smiled. When I asked what she was doing in the car, she said she hadn’t wanted me to be alone all night. She reached out a finger and tapped my nose, and my entire body felt warm, and then the dew was gone and she winked at me and left to wake up everyone else. I sat there in the backseat feeling the afterglow of the warmth she gave me. I watched her cross the campground, banging a spoon against a pot, and I felt like no one in the entire world had ever felt as happy as I did right then.
It’s a good car.
I nearly jump out of my skin when the car alarm starts going off. I leap away from the hood, looking around frantically as the horn honks an irregular STOP-THIEF rhythm. There’s a beep, and the honking stops, and I turn to see Roya doubled over with laughter. She’s got her hands braced on her thighs, and her hair falls in a thick black curtain around her face. When she throws her head back, the sun glints off her smile.
“That,” she gasps, “was hilarious. You looked like you were gonna pass out.”
“Yeah, it was great for everyone involved, asshole,” I say, trying to look pissed but failing to hold back a smile. She slings an arm around my shoulder and gives me a squeeze, then folds herself into the car. She immediately rolls down the windows and cranks the air-conditioning, then gets back out of the car.
“It’s like … a billion degrees in there,” she says, slipping off her blouse and tugging at the tank top she’s wearing underneath so it’ll lie straight. Since the new dress code was instituted, this is standard procedure for most of us—the second we’re beyond the reach of administration, we change into clothes that will keep us from dying of heat exhaustion. I’ve already got my shirt and jacket stuffed into the top of my backpack.
I don’t watch her tug at her tank top. Best friends don’t stare at each other as they adjust their clothes. I wouldn’t ever think to notice something like the way the scooped neck of her shirt moves across her skin as she pulls on the straps. I don’t notice anything like that at all.
“Hey, let’s get going. You’re contributing to global warming,” I say in that way that’s half teasing, half previous-generations-have-left-us-a-planet-in-crisis. Roya shrugs, then reaches an arm into the car to see if it’s livable in there yet. She climbs in a moment later, and I get into the passenger seat, and neither of us buckles our seat belts because the metal is still too hot to touch. The air-conditioning isn’t cold yet—it’s like standing in front of a giant’s mouth and letting him breathe on you. We leave the windows down as she starts to drive. The wind whips Roya’s hair back and lifts it into wild, twisting tentacles. She leans her head toward the window and lets the breeze hit her full in the face. She’s glowing—not magic-glowing, just. Happy-glowing.
“What?” she says.
“What?”
“You’re looking at me.”
“Nah,” I say, and she grins. I rest an arm on the windowsill and then snatch it back, rubbing the spot where the metal burned my skin. “So how did things go with your mom?”
“Eh, shitty,” she says. “Could be worse. She’s pissed about the party, but not as bad as I would have thought, to be honest.”
“For real? I thought she’d freak out.” Roya’s mom is a decent-enough person, but she’s high-strung and incredibly strict. She raised Roya to be fierce and independent, and I know she’s really proud of how Roya turned out, but they go head-to-head a lot. Some nights the group text lights up with Roya’s fury at her mom’s rules; other nights she needs a place to stay so they can both cool off.
It’s not that her mom is mean or abusive or anything like that. She’s never raised a hand or even her voice to either of her kids. She tries her best not to bring her work home, but the way Roya explains it, her mom sees the worst of people. She wants to protect her family however she can.
But sometimes that protectiveness makes her hold on to Roya and her little brother with too tight a grip. Roya bucks against it, hard and often. Her brother usually just ducks his head and gets quiet, which makes Roya even angrier.
“Yeah, it’s kind of weird,” she says. “I thought she’d freak out too. I already knew that I was gonna tell her I was at the party,” she adds, darting a glance at me out of the corner of her eye. “I mean … she was going to find out sooner or later. But I put it off until today because I figured, you know.”
“You figured she’d be so pissed that you’d have to camp out at my house for the rest of the week?”
“Pretty much,” she says. “But I told her why I lied about it, and I told her that I didn’t regret anything, and she kind of cooled off right away.”
“Wow.” We turn off the main road and onto a two-lane, oak-shaded stretch of asphalt that winds around the hill up to the reservoir. The leaves turn the bright summer heat into dappled shade. I reach forward and turn off the struggling air conditioner, and the car fills with the green-smell of the trees that line the road.
“Yeah,” she says. “I think she understood. She wasn’t happy, but … she seemed to get it.”
We’re quiet for the rest of the drive to the reservoir. Roya pushes her sunglasses up on top of her head. She accelerates into each curve, one hand gripping the shifting knob even though the car’s an automatic. There’s no one else on the road—we’re alone out here, just us and the trees, and it’s another one of those perfect moments. I try to hang on to it, try to tell myself I’ll never forget this. I know that eventually it’ll blend into whatever picture of summer-in-high-school I’ll have when I’m old, but for now, it’s high-res. Roya’s hair tangling in the wind. The tree branches arching overhead. Her fingers drumming on the steering wheel. The birds that wait on the road until what feels like the last possible second before flying out of the way of the car. Her smile when she glances over and catches me staring.
It’s a perfect moment, and it almost doesn’t feel like I killed a boy, and I want to bottle it. But then we pull into the parking lot for the reservoir, and it’s over, and the tide of guilt starts rising again. My fault, my fault, my fault.
The reservoir used to be a gravel quarry. It’s weird to think of a whole quarry just for gravel. I kind of always figured gravel was just … around. But I guess it wasn’t just around fifty years ago, so some company came and used dynamite to core the hillside like an apple. And then they let it fill up with water and told kids to swim in it. Instead of calling it what it is, which is a hole in the hill, we call it a reservoir. We call it that even though nobody is ever going to use the water in it for anything other than swimming and telling scary stories about bodies being dumped in there by the mafia.
Because the reservoir isn’t really a reservoir, there’s no infrastructure to it at all. There’s no guardrails anywhere, no parking lot, no changing stalls. There are some trees that you can go into if you have to pee or dry off or make out with someone, and there are a few flattish outcroppings of rock that are good for sunbathing. Other than that, it’s just the hole—deep and dark, without a shallow end to speak of. There’s a long rope ladder that hangs down into the water, so you can climb out once the cold seeps into your bones. The water is always cold, and it’s a relief from the heat, but it’s unbearable after the first ten minutes or so. The rope gets replaced every year, and every year it’s made of the same frayed, knotted plastic material. Everyone who grew up near the reservoir knows the awful feeling of it digging into their bare hands a
nd feet as they shiver their way up to where their towels wait in the sun.
The flat rocks are crowded with towels. Every so often, someone gets up from their towel to jump in the water. A long trail of wet footprints leads from the top of the ladder to the broad, blinding patch of sun. Roya and I slip our shoes off and walk past the patchwork of beach towels. We settle in a splotch of shade at the edge of the outcropping, dangling our feet in the air over the water and watching people jump. A scrawny kid stands at the edge looking down. His friends are yelling from the water. He’s got his arms wrapped around his ribs, and he keeps walking up to the edge and then flinching away.
Roya cups her hands around her mouth. “You gotta run at it!” she shouts. The kid looks over at her—he can’t be older than thirteen. “Close your eyes and run!” Roya says, then waves her hands at him, egging him on. His eyes flick down to her legs, dangling over the edge of the rock. She’s wearing shorts, and the dusky brown of her skin glows against the dark rock. “Do it!” Roya shouts, and a few people lift their heads from their towels to stare.
The kid nods, jogs backward, and screws up his face. Then he runs, his arms pumping, and like a cartoon character, he runs straight off the edge of the rock. He seems to hover in the air for a second, and then he’s yelling, and then there’s a splash and all his friends cheer. Roya cheers too, clapping her hands and peering down into the water below us.
“Way to go, kiddo!” she cries, and she’s grinning at him, and the poor kid is looking up at her like she hung the moon.
“You know he’s in love with you now, right?” I say, and she laughs one of her big laughs, the kind that makes other people smile even though they didn’t hear what was funny in the first place. Below us, the kid is getting splashed by his friends.
“He won’t be scared to jump next time, though,” Roya says, kicking her feet. “That’s the key to doing stuff you’re scared of. You gotta run at it.”