In that same time, Delilah had been rolled repeatedly, which was what the homeless people called being robbed. She had lost all of her front teeth in a fight, patches of her hair were falling out from lack of nutrition, and weird purpley brown lesions had leeched up from her skin.
AIDS, Julia thought, though no one said the word aloud because AIDS was a death sentence.
“There’s a group of people living in the woods,” Candice told Julia. “I went out there yesterday to see if they needed help, but apparently they’re living outdoors because they think it’s fun, not out of any dire circumstance.”
Julia handed a blanket to a man wearing army fatigues. His black ball cap said “Vietnam MIA Never Forget.” She asked Candice, “Choosing? Like, camping?” Robin was camping with his family this week. Julia hadn’t been invited, but that was only because it would be weird to go on a sleepover date with his entire family. “Mona doesn’t strike me as the camping type.”
“The sheriff is calling them a cult.” Candice gave an exaggerated frown. Like Julia’s mother, she was a former hippie with a healthy skepticism of authority. “They’re all around your age, maybe a little older. If you ask me, I’d say it’s more like a commune. They dress alike. They talk alike. They act alike. It’s a regular Patty Duke Show.”
Julia suppressed a shudder. More like the Charles Manson Show. “Why would Mona go off with them?”
“Why wouldn’t she?” Candice had finished handing out meals and turned to the blankets. “Their plan, inasmuch as there is one, is to walk the Appalachian Trail to Mount Katahdin, they said, but it sounds more like an excuse to stop bathing and screw like rabbits.”
“I’m in!” Vietnam bellowed.
Julia asked Candice, “Where are they camping?”
“Just past the Wishing Rock.”
So, nowhere near where Robin and his family were camping this week.
“What do you think of that?” Candice asked. She was a retired schoolteacher, still desperate for a young mind to mold. “Leaving home, abandoning all of your worldly possessions, living off the land. Could you see yourself doing that?”
Julia shrugged, though she could more easily see herself walking on the moon. “They’re free spirits, right? That’s kind of romantic.”
Candice smiled. This was obviously the right answer.
Julia grabbed a trash bag out of the box. She went about collecting the empty tins and coffee cups. She had no idea why it didn’t bother her to clean up after these people when retrieving so much as a dirty sock that one of her lazy younger sisters had left on the stairs sent her into fits of rage.
She had started volunteering at the shelter shortly after her fifteenth birthday. It was summer. She was bored. There weren’t any books she wanted to read. Her sisters were driving her crazy. She was sick of babysitting. She was sick of being in charge. She was sick of waiting to be an adult.
“Let’s see if you’ve got what it takes to do this,” her father had told her in the car on the way to the shelter.
“What?” Julia had snapped, because she didn’t know what “this” was, that her father was taking her to the bad side of town where she would be expected to wait on smelly, crazy homeless people.
The shelter was meant to be a Life Lesson, like the time her parents made them all choose one gift from Christmas to donate to the children’s home and it couldn’t be socks or underwear. Julia hated Life Lessons. She hated being forced to do things. She hated being tricked into getting in the car with her dad, who’d told her they were going to check on a new litter of puppies. She was stubborn (like her mother, her father said) and she was contrary (like her father, her mother said) and she was opinionated (like her parents, her grandmother said) and she was bossy (like her grandmother, her sisters said), and those were the only reasons she had stuck it out at the shelter those first few months.
I’ll show him I can do this, Julia had silently seethed against her father, throwing herself into cooking and cleaning and doing laundry in a way that filled her mother with so much wryness that her lips were locked into a permanent zigzag.
“Julia washed dishes?” Her mother’s voice trilled like the bell on a bike. “Julia Carroll, the older girl who lives here in this house?”
What kept Julia going back to the shelter was hard to explain. She didn’t particularly enjoy laundering filthy clothes or scrubbing toilets. And yet, two or three times a week, she forced herself out of bed at seven in the morning and walked to skid row or to the shelter on Prince Avenue so that she could hand out food and blankets or clean up after drug addicts, mental cases, and other lost souls.
Because of how she looked, people tended to want Julia.
The people she served through the shelter needed her.
Candace asked, “Mind finishing up for me, kiddo? I have a meeting with the mayor.”
“Of course.” Julia tossed the trash bag into the van. She grabbed some pens and a stack of papers from the front seat—forms that needed to be filled out, requests for disability and veterans’ benefits and Medicaid.
For the next few hours, Julia did paperwork and made phone calls to state agencies on the stinky pay phone and talked to some of the group about what they were going to do with their lives. Many of Julia’s friends scoffed at her volunteer work (they thought homeless people were lazy), but what they did not understand was that people generally ended up living on the streets not through some deep character flaw but through a cascading series of seemingly minor bad choices—pissing off the wrong cop, hanging out with the wrong people, missing school or work or a parole meeting because they had been too exhausted to remember to set their alarm clock.
Julia wasn’t a psychiatrist, but many of them clearly had some underlying mental health issue, whether it was mild paranoia, depression, or full-blown delusions.
“Reagan,” her mother had said when Julia had first brought this phenomenon to her attention. “What did he think would happen when he cut federal aid to mental hospitals? They’re all either living on the streets or in prisons.”
Beatrice Oliver. The girl who went to get ice cream and was never seen again. She had been treated for depression, which was an actual mental illness. Julia had read as much on the telex. The Associated Press had sent a reporter to talk to the parents while they searched for their daughter (looking for her body, but no one said it) and the mother had admitted that Beatrice had once been treated for depression.
Julia had seen a psychiatrist her freshman year of college. She hadn’t told anyone because it was embarrassing to admit that living away from her family wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. Toward the end of the session, the shrink had actually yawned, which had helped Julia more than his generic advice (join a group/try a new activity/get a new hairstyle/smile more), because it showed her that her problems were mundane, that the kids around campus who seemed to have all of their shit together were probably suffering from the same boring anxieties, too.
But it also made her wonder. If Julia went missing one day, or God forbid she was taken, would a reporter find out that she had talked to a shrink? And would talking to a shrink signify some kind of mental illness?
“She was took!” Delilah’s harsh voice jolted Julia out of her thoughts. “Mark my words, sister woman.”
Julia looked up from the letter she was writing to Delilah’s daughter. The girl never wrote back, which seemed to disappoint Julia more than Delilah.
“She was took,” Delilah repeated. “Mona No-Name. She was took by a man.”
“Oh,” was all Julia could think to say.
“Not like that,” Delilah said. “He took her like—” Delilah grunted, circling her arms in a grabby, menacing hug.
Julia pulled in her own arms as if the man was grabbing her.
“She’s walking down the street,” Delilah said. “She gets past tha
t old-timey car, and this black van pulls up and the door slides open, and this man, big man, white dude, he reaches out and—” She made the grabbing gesture again.
Julia rubbed her arms to soothe the chills. She saw the black van, the door sliding open, the blur of a clean-cut, all-American boy emerging from the pitch darkness. His arms were out. His fingers turned into claws. His mouth contorted into a snarl that showed razor-sharp teeth.
“Lissen’a me, girl.” Delilah’s voice was a menacing growl. “She was snatched. Any one’a us could get snatched. Any one’a you.”
Julia put down her pen. She stared into Delilah’s rheumy yellow eyes. Heroin. That’s what the needles in Delilah’s kit were for. Kaposi’s sarcoma. That’s what the skin lesions were from. Julia had written several articles about HIV and AIDS for the Red & Black. She knew that the rare cancer could spread to the organs, causing lesions on the brain. Delilah wasn’t lucid in the best of times. Was she relaying some sort of vision, or fever dream? It didn’t seem possible that someone could just be snatched off the street in the middle of downtown Athens.
Then again, it didn’t seem possible a girl could be snatched walking from her parents’ house to get ice cream for her dad.
Not just snatched.
Kept.
Still, Julia gently reminded Delilah, “Before, you said that you saw Mona go into the woods.”
“The van had dirt caked around the tires. Grass and shit. Bet my right tit he took her into the woods.” She leaned closer. Her breath reeked of rot and cigarettes. “Men do things to girls, darlin’. They get some time with ’em, they do things you don’t wanna know about.”
Julia felt every single hair on the back of her neck zing to attention.
“Ha!” Delilah laughed, because that’s what she always did when she got a rise out of somebody. “Ha!” She grabbed her belly. No sound came from her mouth, but her head tilted back in an approximation of hilarity. Her empty gums glistened in the creeping sunlight.
Julia rubbed the back of her neck, soothing down the hairs.
Beatrice Oliver. Mona No-Name. They lived within twenty miles of each other. They were both pretty. They were both blonde. They were roughly the same age. They had both been walking down the street one night. Had they both been seen by an evil man who decided to take them?
The same evil man? Two different evil men? Were those men now both at home with their families? Were they each separately making breakfasts for their kids, or shaving their faces, or kissing their wives good-bye, all the while smiling to themselves as they considered what they would do later on to the girls they had taken?
“Hey.” Delilah poked Julia’s arm. “You gonna finish that? I got places to go.”
Julia picked up the pen. She finished the letter to Delilah’s daughter, signing it as usual with “love,” though Delilah never told her to.
10:42 a.m.—Lipscomb Hall, University of Georgia, Athens
Less than thirty minutes after returning to the dorm, Julia awoke to the insistent beeping of her pager. She blindly rummaged in her purse to stop the annoying noise. Her hand got wrapped up in the yellow scarf she’d meant to drop off at the house for her sister. She finally found the button and stopped the beeping.
She rolled onto her back. She stared up at the dorm room ceiling. Her heart was beating so hard that she could feel it in her throat. Julia pressed her fingers to her carotid artery and counted each thump until the ticks slowly wound down to normal.
She had been dreaming about Beatrice Oliver again, except this time, instead of watching Beatrice from afar, Julia found herself standing in for Beatrice. She was talking to her father—Julia’s father—about his toothache, then she was volunteering to go to the store for ice cream, then Julia’s mother was giving her some cash, then Julia was walking down the street, only instead of standing in for Beatrice Oliver, she was suddenly Mona No-Name, and it was dark and there was a chill in the air and she saw an old-timey car and then a man’s sweaty hand clamped around her mouth and her feet were lifted off the ground and she was dragged into the dark, menacing maw of the open van door.
Julia put her hand to her mouth, wondering what it would feel like to suddenly be silenced. She traced her fingers along her lips, and the touch got lighter and before she knew it, the sweaty, evil man slipped her mind and she was only thinking of Robin. His soft lips pressing against hers. The surprisingly rough texture of his cheek brushing against her neck. His big hands so tender on her breasts, and the feelings this brought because he knew how to touch her. He wasn’t grabbing her or twisting her or humping her like a stray dog. He was making love to her.
He was going to make love to her. Julia decided it right then and there. Her mother, who seemed to relish having frank and awkward conversations about everything from sex to drugs, had told Julia that it was okay to be intimate with whomever she wanted; the important thing was to make sure that she really wanted to.
Julia really wanted to have sex with Robin Clark.
Not that she needed her mother’s permission.
Julia rolled over onto her side. Nancy Griggs, her roommate, had left for pottery class twenty minutes ago. Julia had pretended to be asleep. They had gotten into a huge fight over the weekend because Julia had lectured Nancy about not staying out late at the bars and making sure that someone trustworthy walked her back to the dorm.
Nancy had rolled her eyes, which had made Julia turn strident, which never helped any situation. Even as she yelled at her best friend in the entire world, Julia had been aware that she sounded like her mother. For the first time in her life, she didn’t care. Beatrice Oliver probably could’ve benefited from a strident lecture or two about checking your surroundings, making sure you didn’t get snatched off the street by a depraved madman when you walked to the store late at night to get ice cream for your father.
“Go to hell,” had been Nancy’s clipped response. “Just because you have a boyfriend now doesn’t mean you know jack shit.”
That was what Nancy was really angry about. Julia had never been in love before (was she in love?). She had never had a steady date (Robin was steady). In their nearly fifteen-year friendship, Nancy had always been the one who had the boyfriends, who was worldly in all the ways that Julia could only read about.
Julia was reminded of one of her grandmother’s sayings: Your jump rope has turned into a leash.
“Robin!” Julia bolted up in bed, heart racing again, too much saliva in her mouth. She grabbed the pager from her purse. Maybe it was Robin. Maybe he was standing by a pay phone in the woods right now waiting for her to call. She pressed the button to make the number scroll. Julia wanted to throw the pager across the room. Not Robin, but probably one of her stupid sisters, who had left the message 55378008, which upside down spelled BOOBLESS.
“Very funny,” Julia muttered, thinking at this time of day it had to be her middle sister, Pepper, because her goody-goody baby sister would never miss school.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, letting her feet tap the floor. She stared at Nancy’s messy side of the room. They had bought their sheet sets together at Sears, and picked out the curtains and various posters that decorated the dorm with money they’d both saved from babysitting. Julia could remember how adult they’d felt—they were out on their own! Spending their hard-earned money! Taking care of themselves like real adults!—and then Julia had gone back home and eaten Chinese take-out her parents had paid for and washed the clothes they had paid for in the machine they owned and felt terrified because she really didn’t have the ability to support herself at all.
Julia walked two steps and sat down at her desk. She stared at the sheet of notebook paper where she’d started to write a love letter to Robin. She had quoted the Madonna song about kissing in Paris and holding hands in Rome.
Should she really have sex with him? Was Robin the
right guy to do it with? This time last year, Julia would’ve given it up to just about anybody. Why was it suddenly so special?
She used her pencil to trace the song lyrics.
Kiss you in Paris . . .
Now probably wasn’t the best time for a love letter, especially since Robin wouldn’t be back until the end of the week. She couldn’t be one of those silly girls who dropped their entire lives for a boy. She should be studying for her massive psych final. She should reread her Spenser paper for her noon class with Professor Edwards. She should be honing her story pitch for the Red & Black because five weeks had already passed since Beatrice Oliver had been abducted and Julia would have a hard enough time convincing Greg and Lionel and Mr. Hannah that the story was still news.
She tapped her pencil against her mouth. She stared at the Polaroids taped to the wall in front of her: Nancy shooting a bird; her sisters doing bad cartwheels in the park; her parents dancing at a party (slow dancing, but it looked romantic instead of weird); a shot of their turtle, Herschel Walker (an underappreciated Mother’s Day gift), sunning himself on the front porch.
A beautiful young girl was walking down the street when suddenly. . .
Julia felt shaken by a thought. Was Beatrice Oliver a virgin, too? Was the person who took her (who was keeping her) the first person she would ever have sex with?
Would he be the last person, too?
“Shut up!” a girl yelled down the hallway. Her Alabama twang was muffled through the closed wooden door. She sounded like she was teasing someone, and Julia felt an instant, almost visceral dislike without even laying eyes on her. “No, you did it, you goose.”
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