Never Missing, Never Found

by Amanda Panitch

  “What?” I said. My heart was beating fast.

  “Nothing,” she said, and looked away. Our dad had already turned and was beating it to the living room. “Thanks for breakfast, but I’m not actually hungry. I think I’m going to go back to bed.”

  I cooked every single piece of french toast and piled them, glistening with syrup and snowy with powdered sugar, on a plate, then tipped them all, one by one, into the garbage can.

  That wasn’t the last time I tried to win Melody over, but it was the most emotion I ever got out of her. She made it very clear she wanted nothing to do with me. Which is why I’m so confused about why she wants to spend time with me tomorrow night. Voluntarily. Without any ulterior motive I can gather.

  I don’t figure it out by the end of the workday, and I’m no closer to figuring out a way to confront her without the possibility of her canceling tomorrow. Whatever happens, I don’t want that.

  On my way home, I stop at my favorite place. I used to call it my thinking spot. Is it entirely wise for me, a teenage girl, to be wandering around alone in the woods when a teenage girl is missing in the area? Probably not. But I can’t bring myself to be afraid of the woods. The dark? Sure. Basements? Obviously. Dark, lonely secret passages? Uh-huh. But the woods are wide and open. Nobody can sneak up on me over the carpet of crunchy leaves and pine needles, and there’s endless space for me to run. And the air is clean. Every breath purifies me.

  Soon after I came home, I spent a lot of time in the woods. I’d ride my bike down the road, get off, and walk for miles, wandering, sometimes hoping, I think, somewhere deep down, that I’d get lost and wander forever. It was the only place I found peace; I certainly didn’t have it at home, where my mom was gone and toddler Matthew was always crying and Melody’s cold stare followed me around like a pet I didn’t want.

  During one of my wanderings I found the cabin. It was located way deep in the woods, off any sort of track, and the smells of rot and mildew made it clear that nobody had been inside in years. My best guess was that it had once been located off a hunting trail, maybe twenty years ago, built and maintained by a pair of hunters, and then one of the hunters accidentally shot the other one and then went insane from guilt and spent the rest of his days wandering the woods, cackling madly. Just like me, except for the cackling thing.

  I made the cabin my own, cleared out the rot and mildew, fixed the windows, lugged in a few old cushions to sit on, and used it to think. It was easier to think there, to think over what I’d done, than it was anywhere else. I haven’t been there in a while, months probably, but I can’t imagine anyone else has found it.

  I’m right. Well, mostly right—one of the windows is broken, and a squirrel or raccoon seems to have made a nest out of one of my cushions. Still, I sit down and close my eyes and let myself think. Melody. Melody. How to talk to Melody.

  An hour later, I’ve come up with a big fat nothing.

  She’s not home when I get there anyway; she’s out, presumably at a bake sale or helping orphaned children cross the street. I tickle Matthew and make him dinner, rice with broccoli and edamame, which he moans about but then downs when I promise him a cookie for dessert. Okay, two cookies, but only if I get a bite.

  Work the next day passes in the most boring way possible. The only Connor I get is a glimpse as I’m leaving for the day and he’s coming back from lunch; the grin he gives me from fifty feet away is enough to make me glow inside. Certainly, my day spent working under Randall, a prematurely balding teenager with a kind smile and a head for sports (if not hair), hadn’t done much to put it there.

  And so evening rolls around. I shower, perfuming myself with some of Melody’s bath oils I pilfer in hopes that unconsciously associating my scent with hers will make her warm to me, and then change clothes a good seven times. Eventually I decide on jeans, a flowered top with a low neck, and some chunky necklaces: an outfit not too nice (so Melody won’t think I’m trying too hard) but not too underdone, either (so Melody won’t think I’m dressing like a slob in order to intentionally embarrass her).

  At seven, I knock on Melody’s door. She opens it—actually opens it, doesn’t grunt at me or yell that she’s busy. I’m enveloped in a cloud of perfume, negating any effects left over from her bath oils. Maybe it’s for the best. Come to think of it, Melody probably wouldn’t look upon my pilfering all that kindly, no matter the motivation. “What?” she says in her usual monotone.

  Maybe I’ve gotten the date wrong. Maybe I’ve gotten this all wrong. Maybe Katharina didn’t talk to Melody at all. “Nothing,” I say, backing away.

  “Wait,” she says, her voice softening. “Are you still coming out tonight? We’re meeting Katharina at nine.”

  A glow fills me, one not entirely unlike the one infused by Connor’s smile. “Of course I’m still coming,” I say. “If you want me to.”

  I immediately regret that, because even if, by some crazy chance, Melody does want me there, there’s no way in all the hells in the world, from the coldest of the cold to the hottest of the hot, that she’d ever admit it to my face.

  I’m right. But she doesn’t deny it either. She just smiles enigmatically. “You look nice,” she says, and closes the door.

  —

  Matthew looks up to me with round eyes. “You’re going somewhere with Melly?”

  “Yes,” I say. It’s 8:47. I’m waiting by the door. Lurking, really, more than waiting; I’m hovering just out of sight in the kitchen so that I can casually sidle out into the hall when I hear Melody coming downstairs. “Don’t look so surprised.”

  “I can’t help it,” Matthew says. “It’s just so weird.”

  “It’s not so weird,” I say. “When we were little, you know, we used to be good friends.”

  His eyes don’t flatten out. “What if she takes you somewhere and kills you?”

  “Matthew!” I reprimand him, though I can’t deny that the same thought has crossed my mind. “Don’t say things like that.”

  His mouth is open again, probably to defend himself with all the murderous thoughts he thinks he’s seen (or, hell, has actually seen) in Melody’s eyes, when I hear her feet tapping their way down the stairs. “Be nice to Jerica, okay?” I say. The babysitter is already parked in the living room, TV on. She doesn’t bother to fake that she cares, unless my dad is here.

  “I’m always nice.”

  “Dude, last week you put a dead spider in her ice cream.”

  “She should’ve let me have some,” Matthew says reasonably.

  I sigh. I don’t have time to argue with him; I’m already moving toward the door. “Fine. But no spiders.”

  “What about beetles?”

  “No beetles.”

  “What about caterpillars?”

  “No caterpillars.”

  “What about…”

  The door closes behind me. Godspeed, Jerica.

  I can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve been allowed in the passenger seat of Melody’s car; I half expect her to point me to the backseat. But she doesn’t. She even unlocks the door for me. I slide in, my butt pressing reverently against the warm leather. I am on hallowed ground; I can practically hear the angels singing Hallelujah.

  Melody revs the engine, breaking the spell. “Oh yeah,” she says. “You have your Five Banners ID, right?”

  “In my wallet,” I say. “Why?”

  She twists her neck to look behind her, bending it into such an awkward angle it looks almost like it’s broken. “Because that’s where we’re going.”

  “We’re going to the park?”

  “Yes,” she says. “That’s what I just said.”

  A sick feeling spreads through the pit of my stomach, working its way into every nook and cranny and fold of my intestines. This could all be some awful practical joke. Melody and Katharina could be planning to do something humiliating to me in front of the first people I’ve gotten to know and like in years and years. In front of Connor.

  �
�What are we doing there?” I ask.

  “Whatever you do in an amusement park,” she says. “You work there. You should know.”

  A night riding roller coasters and eating greasy food and shoving through crowds of tired moms and sweaty children to go to the bathroom? That doesn’t sound like Melody’s idea of fun. “Okay,” I say. I can always run. I’m not that little girl on the sidewalk anymore.

  Not that I think Melody would actually dare to harm me in any (physical) way.

  It’s just that I never thought I’d join the club, either, and look at me now.

  I bet Monica never thought she’d join the club. Nobody ever thinks she’ll join the club. I bet Monica was fully confident she would graduate from high school and move on to TCNJ and earn that degree in special education. She’d down fruity mixed drinks from red Solo cups and go, hungover, to her morning classes and fall in love with a frat guy or a kid in her kinetics class or a girl down the hall in her dorm. Eventually she’d pocket enough credits to graduate in four or five or six years, and she’d move on and make kids’ lives better.

  Melody pulls into the employee entrance and commands me to flash my ID at the gate. “I don’t want to pay for parking if I don’t have to,” she says as we pull into the parking lot, and I let myself relax a little, let the muscles in my shoulders unwind. Maybe it is really that simple: she wanted to get free parking, and that was worth bringing me along for.

  Walking beside Melody through the gates, I see the park with new eyes, with what I imagine to be hers. The plastic garlands of superhero cutouts aren’t cute, but tacky. All the workers look washed out and pissed off, like they’d rather be doing anything but scooping ice cream or selling hats, which, really, is probably true. The music blaring from the speakers all around clashes with the hawkers at the game stations and the rushing of the roller coasters and the chatter of guests and workers. I’m used to it after working here for the last few weeks, but I suddenly find myself with a headache.

  “We’re meeting Katharina at the Canteen,” Melody says. She’s wincing; the headache must be contagious. “Do you know where that is?”

  My nose wrinkles in response to both Melody’s words and the smell of cotton candy in the air. Ever since I spent that day in Foods and learned that the Foods guys occupied themselves on slow days by peeling dead flies off their stores’ flytraps and flicking them into the cotton candy machines, where they vaporized into the stuff, I, for some reason, haven’t been able to stomach it. “That’s, like, the employee cafeteria,” I say. “It’s way back behind the scenes. And the food is disgusting. Why does she want to meet there?”

  “I don’t know,” Melody says, but that means nothing. “So you do know where it is?”

  “Yeah,” I say. My heart skips a beat at the thought of walking through the now-dark, still-twisty secret passage with Melody by my side. We’ll take the long way around. “This way.”

  Melody doesn’t move. “Kat said we have to go through a secret-passage kind of thing to get there, but that you wouldn’t want to go that way because you’re afraid of it,” she says. There’s no hint of snark or nastiness to her tone. She just speaks like she’s stating a fact, and somehow that makes me feel worse.

  “I’m not afraid,” I say. “I was going to take the secret passage. It’s way faster.”

  She knows I’m lying; I can see the skepticism on her face. To her credit, she doesn’t say anything. She just follows as I turn around, pretending I just realized I was walking in the wrong direction, and doesn’t say anything when I pause in the secret passage’s entrance, feeling for a moment like I’m about to step into the great black maw of some enormous beast. I half hope for Connor to turn up, to lope beside me with his easy smile and tease me about being a Sky-fanatic and offer me the pleasure of his company during my trip through the passage. He would have eyes only for me, of course, and wouldn’t so much as look at Melody, even after she cleared her throat two or three times. She would fall for him immediately, of course—who wouldn’t?—but he wouldn’t turn that dazzling smile on her, wouldn’t let her take that freckled elbow, and so for once in her life she’d be jealous of me.

  I don’t realize I’m smiling until Melody asks me what’s so funny. “Nothing,” I say, and step into the void.

  Connor doesn’t find me. He might not even be working tonight, I tell myself. He might be at home, curled up on the couch, watching a movie. With Cady. Naked. She might be solving the maze of his freckles right now.

  I want to throw up.

  Katharina finds me instead. Right around that merch storage facility where she accosted me before, she appears. And by appears, I mean I don’t see her approach, or hear her footsteps, or smell the floral scent that clings to her hair. She materializes before us like she’s a shadow come to life. “Hey, Melly, Scarlett,” she says. “Glad you could make it.”

  Though it’s not at all cold, Melody rubs her arms like she’s pushing down goose bumps. “It’s creepy back here,” she says.

  “It’s creepier where we’re going,” Katharina replies.

  “The Canteen isn’t really that creepy,” I say. I feel wise, giving information Melody doesn’t have. “Kind of gross, sure, but not creepy.”

  “We’re not going to the Canteen,” Katharina says.

  Of course we’re not going to the Canteen. I tense, my eyes darting, mentally calculating all the different ways I could run. It would be harder now that there’s two of them. I should never have come.

  “We’re pregaming in one of the storage buildings,” Katharina says, like she senses my spike in stress. “Relax, girl.” She trills a silvery laugh. It floats above us, sparkling like a bubble, wavering and threatening to burst at any moment. “Come on. This one’s my favorite.”

  Despite my best instincts, I follow. Melody already thinks I’m a coward. I need to prove her wrong, because Melody would never be friends with a coward.

  The storage building is dark and dust fills my lungs and I will probably be crushed beneath a tower of boxes before anyone has the chance to hurt me, but then Katharina pulls a string and a light flickers on and I see that the piles of boxes are steady and I blow the dust out of my lungs and I can breathe again.

  “There aren’t any cameras in these buildings, or at least none that work,” Katharina says, her voice echoing from somewhere in the back. She’s pushed her way through the boxes and piles of old clothes, opening a narrow, mazelike path to the back of the long room. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to follow her, but I sneak a glance at Melody and she’s leaning up against the wall, the thin sheet metal warping behind her, her arms crossed over her chest. Good. If Melody’s not following, I don’t have to either. I, too, lean up against the wall and cross my arms. Not because that’s what Melody’s doing. I just feel like crossing my arms.

  Katharina continues, “So it’s the perfect place to hide out for a while.” Her voice grows louder as she moves back toward the front, back toward us. “And it’s not like anyone’s going to be looking for anything in here.” She jerks her head at the box of broken snow globes. “I mean, why?”

  “What’s that?” I say, declining to answer. She’s carrying something behind her back. A gun. A knife. A garrote. But she swoops her arms around front with a flourish to reveal three red Solo cups, liquid sloshing at the top.

  “Drink up, ladies,” she says, handing Melody and me each a cup. Melody uncrosses her arms to take it. I do too. She doesn’t drink. I don’t either.

  Katharina shows no such hesitation. She tosses her head back and takes a big gulp, two, three, then brings her cup down with a wince and a sigh. “Good stuff,” she says. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

  “What is it?” Melody asks, peering deep into the cup like there’s treasure buried at the bottom.

  “A mix,” Katharina says. “Everything I could take without getting caught. It’s good, though. Strong.”

  That seems to be all Melody needs. She takes a sip, then grimaces. “Strong is ri
ght,” she says, then takes another sip. I half expect her to stick her pinky out.

  I’m not going to wait for Katharina to interrogate me. I raise the cup before me, as if I’m toasting them, and drink.

  I haven’t drunk much alcohol in the past. I’ve had a few glasses of wine at family events, Christmas dinners and graduations and one memorable evening at six years old when the soon-to-be-fired family babysitter passed out and left her half-empty bottle next to her on the floor. I tried a sip of vodka once, just out of curiosity, from my dad’s rarely used liquor cabinet. But drinking is something that happens mostly in social settings, and to have social settings you have to have friends. A seventeen-year-old drinking alone is possibly the most depressing thing in the world.

  All this to explain that I’m not expecting the trail of fire that flows down my throat, or the smoke my burning flesh pushes out through my nose, or the heat that flares up in the pit of my belly. I choke, but most of that first sip is already down; only a trickle of clear liquid dribbles back into my cup. Everything burns for a moment and then zips shut, like a cauterized wound, and I’m left with a scorched aftertaste and a faint sense of being stunned.

  “You don’t drink much, do you?” Katharina sounds faintly amused. “Go slow. Or else go fast and just chug. Either way works.”

  I need to catch my breath first. “It’s good,” I say, but even I can hear the woodenness of my words.

  “Kat’s right,” Melody says. She’s still sipping away, like there’s nothing in her cup but water. “You have to get used to it. You probably shouldn’t drink it all either. You have to build a tolerance.”

  There’s no judgment in her voice. That encourages me to take another sip. It still burns going down, but I confine my reaction to a grimace. “I’ll be okay,” I say. It’s true. I’m already feeling okay. Very okay, actually. There’s a lightness tingling in my brain I’ve never felt before, and I somehow don’t feel as conscious of Katharina’s and Melody’s eyes on me as I did earlier. Melody crosses her arms again and leans back against the wall, but I stay standing free, loose, floating.