“You be careful with that boss of yours,” he added.
“I will.”
“Maybe I’ll see you again,” he added. “But not on a Wednesday.”
“Thanks, Michael.”
He’d given her a lot to think about, and she was confident he would remember her if she needed him again. Her first source, after her roommates!
She walked to the corner and opened Snapchat, just to see where her roommates were. She wasn’t sure how often Fiona checked the app, but it could prove helpful. She could follow Fiona and test her hypothesis. She stared at the map, squinting. Annie, Morgan, and Fiona were all at the same location, and it wasn’t the dorm. Wasn’t even on campus. When did Annie and Morgan ever do anything with Fiona, who kept to herself? She scrolled in and saw that they were at a boutique clothing store on Walnut Street. Shopping? For what?
She stood there a few minutes, trying to decide if this was meaningful. Or if she should go there, since it was eight blocks away. Then it struck her, with horror. If I know where they are, they know where I am. Here, next to the private club that might be a freaking whorehouse.
She turned off her phone, then headed back to the subway along Chestnut Street. She went into the first electronic store she saw and bought a new burner phone.
Eleven
Maggie
Maggie shouldn’t have been surprised that there were three liquor stores so close to campus, but she was. They’d lived in the city, in South Philly, for years, but in that neighborhood, on the exact opposite end of town, the stores were few and far between. Frank had always joked that this was by design, to try to keep their Irish relatives sober, but Maggie knew there had to be strict ordinances about how many licenses were issued, where, and when. In Pennsylvania, liquor stores were technically controlled by the state, but in the last few years, the rules were starting to relax a little, carving out ways for “state stores” to be connected to other stores, so consumers didn’t have to make as many stops. But kids? Catering to college kids with money and a party to go to? That did not seem in line with the goals of the state. This small outpost had a bodega inside it with a few aisles of snacks and magazines as well as an aisle of alcohol and wine.
Maggie stood in line with a handle of vanilla vodka, waiting for the young man behind the counter to ring up the lottery tickets and 5-hour Energy drinks and Doritos of the people in front of her, all of whom looked young enough to be students but weren’t. They wore uniforms—colorful scrubs, a mechanic’s shirt. People who worked in the neighborhood, not people who studied. Still. Three liquor stores on this block. The things you don’t notice on campus visiting day. The things you don’t care about on move-in day. The things that aren’t clear to you until someone calls you from campus and tells you something you never wanted to hear about your child. Drunk. Hurt. In handcuffs. Missing. Or, God forbid, all of the above.
The girl waited for her outside, on the corner. Before she’d agreed to their transaction, she’d asked Maggie who she was looking for. Maggie had hesitated for only a second, then decided she saw enough youthful empathy in her to tell her the truth. She was skinny, tiny as a child, with a puff of blond, curly hair that didn’t quite reach her shoulders. Fine hair that suited her, but she probably hated it, wanted thick straight hair. She wanted the hair of an older girl, not a fairy child. Not what she had. She could never be served, Maggie thought. Never. This girl would be showing her driver’s license and rolling her eyes at servers until she was forty-five. Maybe she was young on the inside, too. Not so tough. It had been pretty easy to convince her.
“My daughter is missing,” Maggie had said. “And it’s imperative that I find her roommate.”
“Oh my God,” the girl said, one hand going up to her mouth. “That’s so scary.”
“Yes, it is.”
“So, the roommate might be missing, too,” she said, her eyes widening.
Maggie hesitated only a second before deciding to agree, to roll with it. “Yes. Their room looked very suspicious.”
“There could be, like, a serial killer on campus.”
Maggie swallowed. “Yes. Do you know a girl named Fiona?”
She shook her head. No. She didn’t live in Hoden House; she lived in Riordan, the dorm next door, with lots of athletes. But they all went to the same parties, texting each other, looking for the ones that had the most alcohol, the most boys. And sometimes, late at night, maybe the most food. Food was probably the most elusive quantity of all, but Maggie knew girls didn’t like to eat in public, in front of boys. That was for later, in the safety and anonymity of their dorm.
On the buckling sidewalk, the girl looked unsteady in her high-heeled wedges, as if they were small blocks of cement that couldn’t quite hold her up.
They crossed the street, and when they were back on campus, under the flapping yellow flags, she held her hand out toward Maggie’s plastic bag and said thanks.
“Oh no,” Maggie said.
“What? I told you where the party was.”
“You’re taking me there.”
“But you have the address! It’s right over there!” she said, pointing. Her voice was whiny like a child’s, too.
“I have to go in.”
“I can’t take you with! You can’t just go in! I thought you were going to, like, stake it out. You know, watch who comes and goes.”
“My daughter is missing. I have to go in.”
Maggie took an elastic from her wrist and pulled her long hair up, into a high ponytail. She smoothed the sides and top by feel. She took a red lipstick out of her purse and put it on, again by feel. No mirror. The girl watched her incredulously.
“Okay, you look a little better, but still—”
Maggie unbuttoned her cotton shirt, letting a tiny bit of her black lace bra show. Right after Frank died, Maggie had gone out in a fit of grief and jealous rage and bought all new underwear. Bras and panties that fit, that matched. No holes. No sensible, Catholic-girl cotton. That made her feel, somehow, whole and desired again. No one to see her that way, but that hardly mattered. She put on her underwear and drank a little wine and watched TV without apology, like the grown woman she was, not the repressed Catholic girl with the alcoholic relatives she used to be.
Maggie pulled the tail ends of her shirt around her waist and tied them.
The girl looked at her sideways, in a way that reminded Maggie of a puppy. “Okay, maybe if it’s dark?”
Since it was, in fact, dark, Maggie sighed. She didn’t have time to explain the world to this girl. That age was on a sliding scale and that if they both lived in a world where a girl who looked eleven could be an adult who needed to drink, then a woman in her forties with the right clothing and Ariana Grande hairdo could look twenty-five. Had she never heard of J.Lo?
“Give me your shoes,” Maggie said suddenly.
“What?”
“We’re trading shoes.”
She looked at Maggie in horror. “Ew, no!”
“I’ll throw in twenty bucks.”
The girl looked down at Maggie’s feet.
“Wait, are those…Allbirds?”
“Yes, and they cost four times as much as what you paid at Target.”
The girl unbuckled her wedges, and Maggie untied her wool sneakers. They were one of the few brands of shoes comfortable enough to work in all day, and she loved them. But she loved her daughter more.
A man passed them on the sidewalk and didn’t even glance down, as if this was a common transaction, women trading shoes. No wonder men made terrible policemen.
“But I’m not going in with you, okay? I can’t.”
“Fine,” Maggie said and handed her the vodka.
“Okay, well, good luck with everything,” she said. “With your daughter and all. She’s probably…just with some guy, you know? Have you thought of that?”
&nb
sp; Maggie smiled at her. “Do me one more favor?”
“Um, okay.”
“Call your mother tomorrow. Call your mother and tell her you love her.” Maggie’s voice broke when she said it, and even here, in the noise of the world, the girl could hear it.
Their eyes met, and the girl’s looked even paler blue, liquid with sudden tears, like the sea. Maggie could see the toddler in her, the little girl holding a melting ice cream cone, a scrape on her knee. Suddenly, she felt a wave of nausea. She was a baby. A baby with vanilla vodka. Maggie bit her lip and said a prayer. That God would understand the bargain she had just made. And that this girl, this young girl from a small town or farm somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania, who hadn’t grown up in the city, who had no older sister to guide her, who didn’t belong on a campus of thirty thousand students, who desperately needed vodka as currency to fit in, would be safe. That she would trade the vodka more than drink it. No matter where Emma was or would be, let this girl be safe and not drink too much tonight.
“I will,” she said earnestly, nodding her head like a third grader and wiping carefully under her eyes. “I promise.”
“And don’t drink more than three shots!” Maggie called after her. “Three! You don’t weigh enough to drink any more!”
“Okay,” she called back over her shoulder.
Maggie watched her walk inside the row home, heard the shrieks from inside as she brandished the bottle toward a friend. Just in time for shots. Just in time for a wake-up cocktail mixed with a little Diet Coke. Just in time to pour a bit into the jungle juice, to add its sweetness to the darker swirling mess inside.
The party was just a few blocks from Emma’s dorm, but it was darker here and louder. Not a frat house; there was no flag outside. But this was an elevated kind of housing, something Maggie hadn’t noticed on her tour. Maybe it was reserved for seniors. Great, she thought. Boys who looked thirty. Girls who looked twelve.
The whole block pulsed with rap music and laughter. Rap had always confused Maggie. All those words. All those rat-a-tat rhymes. It was like listening to a podcast at double speed, trying to catch up, trying to make sense of it all before the next tangled stanza appeared. But she also knew the messages weren’t meant for her; she wasn’t supposed to understand it. The puzzle of it all, the speedy glory of figuring it out, belonged to another generation, like the crossword did to hers.
Now, the songs in different houses, different parties, competed with one another, overlapping, like jumbled code. Were these all students in these rentals? And if there were faculty, staff, someone else here, how could they stand this level of noise?
She waited a few minutes, then walked in. A crush of bodies dancing in the small, dark living room. Arms in the air, beer dripping from cups, foam running down their arms. Sticky, like toddlers. Maggie wanted to put them into a bathtub and scrub them down.
In the back, the kitchen, and beyond, a courtyard deck. She moved through the room, trying to avoid being spilled on, and stepped into the kitchen. Coolers on the floor, plastic bags of ice in the sink. Her feet stuck with every step, which made her wince. It was dark enough that no one noticed her but light enough that she could see—and she didn’t recognize anyone. She said a small prayer that the girls would be outside and not upstairs. She really didn’t want to know what was going on in the bedrooms.
She smelled pot, tobacco, and something sweet she couldn’t put her finger on. Perfume, she guessed. Some awful, sugary, celebrity perfume. If it was a hair product, she’d recognize it—they all had such distinct, annoying scents, especially dry shampoo. Girls would come into the salon, and she’d know exactly what they used on their hair. If it was anyone else’s house, it could have been honeysuckle or herbs, something growing, but she didn’t think the occupants of this house owned flower pots. From the looks of things, they didn’t even own furniture. No sofa in the living room, no table in the kitchen, no folding chairs in the courtyard. But there were twinkling lights hanging above. Row after row, carefully strung. For what they paid for them, Maggie knew, they probably could have bought four chairs. But for what?
Maggie had only seen all of Emma’s roommates together once, but she had a picture on her phone of the girls outside the dorm room on move-in day. They’d laughed and posed in front of the Hoden House sign, and Taylor had called out “Hottie House!” She didn’t need to open her camera app again, in the dark, to look at it. How many times had she stared at it after leaving her daughter, memorizing it? What a girl looked like the exact day she grew up. Maggie had gone home and studied that photo at night, as if wondering if the wings, the parachute, the launch pad would be visible. Could Emma handle it? Was she ready? Of course she was. Emma had a good head on her shoulders, was organized, smart, studious. But what about the others? Had they been ready, able, tough enough? Or were they like the girl Maggie had just met?
The photo in her memory contained the practiced poses of girls raised on social media. The tilted heads, the bent arms, the knowledge of their best angles. One dimension. Even in video, they didn’t quite seem whole or real. But how did these girls look in the actual world? When someone wasn’t watching, when they weren’t posing, when vodka and pot and who knows what else—cocaine? molly?—softened it all and exposed the parts they didn’t want seen? The double chins, the flyaway hairs, the big ears hidden by flat-ironed hair. When it all became obvious that they were human, mortal, what would they look like? If they became real again, suddenly, standing right in front of her, would Maggie even recognize them? Yes, she thought as she moved toward a young woman standing near the fence, close to the keg, she would. Unlike the police, unlike another parent, unlike a girl who’d seen them sometimes at a party.
Because Maggie O’Farrell would recognize their hair. First and foremost, yes. And there it was. Dark-brown hair. Long and swinging, with a tiny amount of copper in the undertones, not gold. And not colored, not altered in any way. Virgin hair, the rarest thing. Proof that there were still plenty of girls left in the world who didn’t try to become blonds, who didn’t spray their ends with lemon juice in the summer or try to layer on something neon, fake, and bright like they’d stolen it off of My Little Pony. Shiny brown hair, Anglican. Touched far more often by spotlight than by sunlight. The hair of the girl in the middle of the picture. Taylor.
Twelve
Emma
Emma decided not to follow her roommates for three very simple reasons. One: her feet hurt. It was too close to Uber and too far to walk in her Converse, and the number two reason occurred to her as she headed toward the train station—there was nowhere to hide. If they’d been closer to campus, it could have been an accident, running into them, but how would it look now? Still, as she wove through the terminal at Suburban Station, joining a small parade of students and business people, all of them ignoring the homeless men sitting near the walls, lumpy and smelly and dark as bags of trash, a third smaller, stupid, completely annoying reason roared through her, inflaming her cheeks with embarrassment and anger. Her hair had always had a tiny hint of red in it, mixed with the mostly gold highlights that came out every summer, and when she blushed, as she was too prone to do, it just made everything about her look red. Red as a slap, red as a scab.
She flushed not from effort or fear or flirtation—all of these caused it, too—but from hurt. They were all together without her. Shopping. Having fun. Eating lunch. Talking shit about her. They were hanging out without her, and it didn’t matter if one of them was a slut or they were all basically sluts, if Fiona had recruited every single one of them. It stung. How stupid she’d been to think they just all had their own busy lives! What a freaking idiot to think they were just busier than she was! She felt like an absolute fool, the youngest always, still behind in the ways of the world.
Riding the train, the truth of it all sunk in hard, filling her chest with a tight kind of dread. What else were they hiding from her?
When she got home, she deleted everything on her iPhone that wasn’t essential, disabled the GPS, and put it in the top drawer of her bureau, underneath her pajamas. She’d only open Snapchat from the dorm from now on, to find information, not to give any away. They would never know when she left or where she was going or what she was doing. They could be secretive? Well, she could be, too.
On her laptop, she disabled iCloud, turned off location services. She taped over her camera, disabled the microphone, cleared her cache and her search history, and emptied the trash permanently.
She’d never had a long-term boyfriend to hide something from. Not a parent. No one. Her mom never snooped; she didn’t believe in it. Maggie wasn’t a pushover, she wasn’t a fool, but as Emma had overheard her telling her aunt Kate before carpooling kids to a concert on the Parkway, she wasn’t going to look through her daughter’s stuff like it was evidence. Kids needed some privacy, too.
Emma was unpracticed at something most teens were good at, but she was about to get very, very good at covering her tracks. She would use the library computer and her burner phone. No one would know what she was really up to. This was an investigation now, and it was important that no one around her had any idea what she was doing until she knew what shape it was taking. Especially because, despite Taylor’s gossipy half-drunk confession, which, when she recalled her exact words, “she’s your roommate, so I just assumed that you knew,” she realized could simply be a way of her lording it over her. I’m closer to her than you are. You sleep next to her, close enough to hear her prayers, yet don’t know what’s in her fucking heart. They clearly were sticking together. Four against one was crappy odds.
Then, as she started to Google the owner of Beck’s and look up the Facebook profiles of everyone named Cara Stevens, another sickening thought crept in. That none of her roommates cared what she was or wasn’t doing. She wasn’t a threat or a problem. No one would ever think to search her computer or phone. If they were worried about what Emma thought, would Fiona even have the guts to dress how she dressed and come and go as she did? If Taylor cared, would she have told her what she’d told her? Well. She’d show them, wouldn’t she, she thought as she messaged the Cara Stevens in Vancouver first.
Where She Went Page 6