The Grip Lit Collection

by Claire Douglas

  The nurse plunged her fingers into the cradle and the line went dead.

  —tion. Violet’s shoulders fell.

  She spun around grimacing, and the nurse oh-so-sweetly said, “Three.”

  WILLIAM HURST

  WHEREAS EVERYTHING IN Josephine’s cozy, type-A office was organized into baskets, binders, and bins, Douglas’s was ice cold right down to its tile floor and cramped, in what the house’s previous owners had used as a laundry room. The nature of the small space meant Will had to stand uncomfortably close to his dad’s ergonomic chair. Will felt claustrophobic. Everywhere he looked there were computer cables, CD towers, and pollen-tinged dust.

  Much like in his father’s IBM office, there were no personal touches anywhere: no sentimental-value paperweight, not a single frame on the wall. What did his father like? Will had no idea. He could have written volumes about his mother’s preferences, but he didn’t know a thing about his dad’s.

  Douglas was powering on his computer.

  “So what do you need my help with?” Will asked.

  But his father, taking a sip of his (hopefully virgin) seltzer, already seemed too lost in concentration to answer. He steered his web browser to Rose’s e-mail provider and quickly entered her address from memory.

  “You know Rose’s password?” Will asked as the cursor leapt into the next blank box.

  “Not yet. You’re going to help me figure it out.”

  “Me? You’re the computer person. Don’t you have, like, some program that can hack into e-mail accounts?”

  “No. But most passwords are social in nature. People use passwords that are easy to remember. Or they reuse passwords. I’m saying they can be guessed.” His fingers tap-danced over the keys.

  “So what are you guessing?”

  “Figured I’d try the most common passwords to start with.”

  That password is incorrect, the site blipped back in red.

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, you know … 12345. Jesus. Princess. Love. Letmein. A lot of people use the word password itself.”

  Will didn’t know. But he was shocked by his own interest in the subject. It was an aspect of language he’d never thought of. Computer language. The wording of privacy. Even to Will, who bludgeoned everything with vocabulary, it seemed dangerous to put words to something secret. Once he and his dad cracked his sister’s password—once they figured out, definitively, what was going on with Rose—they might be obliged to act. That was the thing about words: they were the stakes that pinned down reality. Occasionally, Will feared language even as he skewered things with it.

  “There are also leet-speak passwords,” Douglas continued. “Those are the ones where numbers are substituted for letters. Like if I type Rose, but I enter a zero in place of the O.”

  That password is incorrect.

  Douglas drummed his fingers on the edge of the desk. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. This is good.”

  “Good?” Will echoed.

  “Yes. I would have been disappointed if Rose were foolish enough to use any of those. And if you’re using any of those passwords, you might as well go out and hand your wallet over to the first person you see on the street.”

  Will was ashamed to think he and his mother had come up with the password ChristLove for his own e-mail account.

  You have too many incorrect answers, Rose’s e-mail said, locking them out.

  “So what do we do now?” Will asked.

  “Let’s use an anonymous IP address and try again. Grab those Playbills,” Douglas said, pointing to the stack at Will’s feet. “We’re going to try every production Rose has ever been in. Plus the name of every character Rose has ever played.”

  Will did as he was told. Rose’s plays came charging back at him in no particular order: Camelot; Act a Lady; Into the Woods; Pygmalion; Dracula; Shakespeare’s Pericles. He and his father tried not only SandraDee and Maria as passwords, but also SummerNights, GreasedLightnin’, VonTrapp, and RainDropsOnRoses.

  “Dad?” Will asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why didn’t you ever do this before?”

  “Because, unlike your mother, I don’t enjoy going through my children’s things. But this is an emergency. Anyway, I think we need to change tracks. Go back up to Rose’s room and bring down any books and CDs you find. Also, take a look in her closet. Take this notepad and write down her favorite clothing brands.”

  When Will returned they punched in the names of all Rose’s perfumes and clothing labels, but it all felt too frivolous and shallow to be right. What private thing did girls guard most closely? Boys. Relationships. Will knew as much from the puppy loves Violet professed in the journal their mom read. Whatever Rose’s password was, it had to do with her boyfriend. Will felt sure of that.

  “You didn’t find any CDs?” his father asked.

  Will shook his head. “Rose listened to music files on her laptop. She took them all with her.”

  Douglas blew out his lips. “No way to know her favorite songs, then.”

  “Rose is into different stuff now,” Will said, thinking of the pregnancy journal. “Maybe you should try the name of a campsite or a hiking trail.”

  They pored over Internet maps of Minnewaska State Park and the Mohonk Preserve. Neither of them acknowledged aloud how many years it had been since they’d hiked any of the looping trails.

  “Try EchoRock,” Will said.

  Douglas made the sound of a game-show fail. “Waa waa.”

  “What about CastlePoint?”

  “No such luck.”

  It went on that way, miss after miss.

  “Remind me,” Douglas said. “What was Rose’s favorite class? What had she changed her major to?”

  “Something in the science department.” Will flushed again. Why hadn’t any of them been listening that first night when Rose came back giddy, ponytail swinging, from the registrar’s office? Because they had immediately started in on the reasons Rose needed to return to theater. Will still remembered his mother’s mid-dinner speech: It’s just plain selfish, Rosette, to throw away the opportunities you have. You can go around talking about how it’s your life and your choice. But a lot of people—professors, agents—have gone out of their way for you. You’re letting them down too. It’s a slap in the face.

  Just then, Will remembered the class schedule he’d swiped from Rose’s room.

  He ran to the upstairs clothes hamper, praying that his mother hadn’t yet washed his corduroy pants. They were still there, under a few days worth of tighty-whities and stale argyle socks. Schoolwork wasn’t the only thing his mother had neglected thanks to the Violet crisis. Will snatched the course list from the pocket and hurried back to the office, where his father was subtly swiveling his chair and biting the inside of his cheek.

  “Class schedule. It doesn’t say her major. Just what she was taking. Here,” Will said, thrusting the sheet at his dad.

  “Hold on to it and read them out to me. I’ll look each class up on SUNY’s website.”

  “ENG393.”

  “That’d be an English class. Is there anything on there that looks like science?”

  “BIO220?”

  “Good, that’s biology. Doesn’t look like Biology is her password, though. Anything else?”

  “GLG293?”

  “Geology. Selected Topics. That was Rose’s new major. I remember now.”

  Will suddenly remembered too. Forgive me, Rose, his mother had said, laughing. I just don’t see it. I really don’t. You want to work for, what? The petroleum industry? You do know they could send you to Niger or something—some primitive, oily place five thousand miles from your beloved Clinique counter?

  “Ha! I’m in!” Douglas cried, slamming a triumphant palm on the desk.

  “Geology was the password?” It seemed all wrong to Will.

  “No. It was that course number you gave me: GLG293.”

  “Really?” Will frowned. Moments earlier, he’d been ready to b
et his life that Rose’s password had sentimental value. At the end of the day, a favorite class was still a class. Surely, people didn’t use passwords that reminded them of deadlines and work to be done; they chose a person, a place, a sweetheart’s birthday—some arrow that struck their memories at the core.

  Cingulomania: a strong desire to hold a person in your arms.

  “Oh no,” Douglas moaned. “Oh no, no, no, no.”

  Will’s scalp crawled. His arms fell asleep at the shoulders. He knew what was wrong the moment he glanced at the screen. There were pages of boldface unopened e-mails. Hundreds of e-mails. Thousands, maybe. Everything from personal messages to spam reminders that there were Facebook friend requests awaiting Rose’s next login.

  “How far back do they go?” Will asked.

  But he knew the answer. They dated back over a year, to when Rose “ran away.” Will was going to have to think about it that way now—in ironic quotations. The English book he and his mom used had a special name for them: scare quotes. It had always seemed a strange term to Will, but there in the ice-cold chaos of his father’s office, he finally got it. There was nothing, absolutely nothing more chilling than a term you needed to put between bars and distance yourself from.

  VIOLET HURST

  VIOLET HEARD THE predawn commotion and assumed a new intake was to blame. Patients had been rolling in steadily over the past few days. Maybe it was a full moon. More likely, everyone had eaten the same bad batch of dirty, unpredictable stimulants. Whatever the cause, people kept coming in either so catatonic that they had to be spoon-fed and sponge-bathed or so manic and dangerously sleep-deprived that they thought they were being hunted for sport. Violet heard the stampede of clogs and assumed the crisis probably involved some thwarted med-seeker. She buried her face in her mattress and her ears in her palms. It wasn’t until morning that the sickening news reached her.

  Jocelyn, Corinna, and Helen were huddled around the same table with trays of the silver dollar pancakes everyone called “sandcakes” on account of the texture. It didn’t help that the maple syrup they were served with tasted more like soy sauce. Violet swung her leg over the bench seat and joined them.

  “Did you hear?” Corinna asked.

  Violet took a swig of pale, lukewarm coffee and shook her head.

  Jocelyn’s eyes widened. She stopped sucking the ends of her hair. “Edie tried to kill herself.”

  Violet’s stomach spasmed and shrank. Possibly, she asked, What?

  “I was sleeping,” Helen said. “But Edie tore the spiral out of her notebook and sliced a huge gash down her arm with the sharp end of it. She used so much pressure that it even cut part of a vein. When I woke up, there was blood everywhere.”

  Violet’s eyes fell to Jocelyn’s cup of tomato juice, which suddenly smelled too strong and looked much too gory. “Is she okay?” she asked.

  Helen shrugged and hugged herself. “That’s what they keep saying.”

  “She’s not on the ward?” Violet’s words were quivery around the consonants. She heard herself and realized she was trying not to cry.

  Jocelyn’s Tinker Bell eyes were wide. “We think she’s somewhere getting stitched up.”

  Violet felt irrationally angry. She cared about Edie, but she suddenly felt she couldn’t relate to her. For everything they seemed to have in common, suicidal tendencies weren’t one of them. Violet had been drawn to drugs and sallekhana because they seemed like the only way to end her mom’s cruelty. Away from Josephine, life seemed possible, exciting even. Violet wanted to live. That was what made her an anomaly at Fallkill. She cared about Edie and Corinna, but she didn’t belong among them. She needed to get out.

  Violet went to therapy and demanded to know the status of her three-day request.

  “I just need to clear your file with a few of my colleagues,” Sara-pist said.

  Violet fought hard not to roll her eyes at the mention of the file. Everything went into the file: what she ate, what she said, how she looked, who she talked to. People watched her all day and scribbled.

  “But I’m better!” Violet insisted. “No acid flashbacks. No urge to hurt myself. To my knowledge, no one’s pressing charges about Will.”

  “I hear you,” Sara-pist said. “But you need to sit tight through the paperwork. Do you think you can do that?”

  Violet nodded.

  “And you’re sure you’re not too vulnerable to go home? Your friend attempted suicide last night, Violet. You came in here angry and crying.”

  “Please don’t hold that against me when you make your decision. I wouldn’t be human, would I, if I weren’t upset for my friends?”

  “No,” Sara-pist said. “You’re right. Of course you’re upset for them. You’re dealing with real emotions and real life. I take that as a good sign. You’re connecting with people—honestly, no lying—even if there’s no guarantee that things will work out. That’s how real intimacy works.”

  “You’ve got mail,” the nurse said when she saw Violet walking back to her room with bleary, red eyes. The joke was twenty years lame, and Violet couldn’t drum up even a polite half-smile.

  The seal. That damn, prissy seal. Today, Violet, who was drained already, felt almost offended by the treble clef. It was such a bold declaration, such a call to duty, and Violet wasn’t sure she was willing to answer it.

  God, Violet craved a little chemical help. How badly she wanted to light something, anything, hit after hit after hit after hit. She needed to flood her bloodstream, change her brain filter, recalibrate, send herself tumbling into far-off oblivion.

  Under these circumstances, cigarettes would have to do. Violet tucked the letter inside her waistband and went outside with a pack Edie had given her from her never-ending carton. She took two quick, deep puffs and immediately felt worse. She watched the smoke coil and turned the letter over and over, wishing she could simply touch a match to it and watch a lifetime of dysfunction brown and curl to ashes.

  In the end, she felt a tug of misplaced loyalty and clumsily slit the envelope with her finger.

  She saw the bright blue ink and Rose’s ruler-straight handwriting. Dear Violet, it read. Damien and I have been talking … If you need a place to crash, you’re welcome here!

  WILLIAM HURST

  “MAYBE SHE JUST changed her e-mail address?” Will asked. He realized it was his nervous tic, saying things that were upbeat and consoling. But it wasn’t totally and completely out of the question.

  Will’s father shook his head and sat up taller in his office chair. “Even so, she would have at least read some of these. She would have written to somebody on her contact list and given them her new address. Her outgoing e-mails stop last October too.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Douglas pushed himself away from his desk and leaned forward with his hands on his knees. “It’s time to go to the police again,” he said, rocking rhythmically, a sick look on his face. “I almost hired a private investigator a few months ago. But everyone kept saying she’d never come back unless we gave her space. Your mother and I decided it was better to focus our resources and attention on you and Violet. Look to the future, we told ourselves. Stop living in the past.”

  Will’s mouth went dry. He wished his mother’s “me-time” would end soon. He and his father were not equipped to deal with this new revelation alone. “So Rose is missing again?” he asked.

  “Not again. If she’s missing, she’s always been missing.”

  Will rubbed his itching eyes. The dust in his father’s office was getting to him. “No,” he said. “No, she’s out there somewhere. She’s writing Violet letters.”

  “I’ve heard,” Douglas said. Will tried not to look surprised. He’d always thought his father was the last to hear about things the rest of the family knew. “Have you read these letters, Will?”

  “No.”

  “No, I haven’t read them either.”

  “Do you think this has something to do with her boyfrien
d, Damien?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about Damien. Do you?”

  Will pointed to himself. His brows shot up. “Me?”

  Douglas kept staring. “Has your mother said anything about him to you?”

  “Just that he sounded really nasty when he called here last year. Damien called Mom a bunch of names. He said Rose hated her.”

  “Yes. I remember how upset she was.”

  “Well, let’s just go through her e-mails,” Will said. “Damien must be in there somewhere. We can find him. We can write to him.”

  Douglas raked his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know, Will. I don’t think we should go messing around in her e-mails, at least not until we call the police. This time last year, they kept saying, No foul play. Nothing suspicious, they told me. Well, what do you call this?” He balled up the sheet of paper where they’d been keeping track of wrong passwords and lobbed it in frustration. “We’ve lost a year. If this Damien is hurting Rose … If he took her against her will … If he’s influencing her … Well then, we’ve given him one whole year to cover his tracks so we can never pin him with anything.”

  There was the far-off sound of his mother’s car keys clinking into the crystal bowl on the entrance table, and a weight lifted from Will’s chest when he heard her footsteps on the hardwood.

  “I wondered where everybody was,” Josephine said. Her hair had big, bouncy fresh-from-the-salon curls, and an odd chemical smell that carried. It took a second for Will to fully absorb the change.

  “You’re blond,” he said.

  Josephine rolled her eyes lightly and laughed. “That’s an overstatement. It’s just a slightly different shade. The stylist said women my age always make the mistake of going darker, but actually lighter makes people look younger.”

  “It’s pretty,” Will said.

  “Thank you, honey,” she cooed, leaning down to kiss him. “I’m glad someone thinks so.” A throat-clear in Douglas’s direction.

  Will’s father didn’t look away from the screen. He blinked once, slow and painful. “Jo, Rose has a year’s worth of unopened e-mails.”