I walk out before he can signal a guard to march him back to his cell. I’ve never seen the cell, but I can imagine myself in it.
5
Cat
I climb out of the pipe under a white-hot sun.
My skin is slick with perspiration, the palms of my hands burnt from pushing the chains at the mouth of the pipe out of my way. Shoulders scraped raw from my night slamming against the inside of the pipe. Sun beaming fire to my scalp. Dead muscles coming back to life, not that enthused about walking.
I smell like a football player’s gym bag.
And this upsets me only because I’m afraid it’ll make it hard to hide. That no matter how well hidden I am, someone will smell me.
I’ll be betrayed by my BO.
That, and the sound of my stomach demanding nutrition.
This is how far I’ve come from a life with lavender-scented body wash in it.
Things change so fast.
I tell myself to get a grip.
But my palms are charred and my fingernails broken from actual gripping. It seems like God’s laughing at me for thinking I could get a grip on any part of this.
I lower myself off the truck and into a field crisscrossed by derelict railroad tracks. A couple of sheds, tin roofs reflecting the relentless sun, not one person in sight. And all over, NO TRESPASSING signs warning of armed patrols and watchdogs.
Oh God, oh God, dogs!
They come from out of nowhere. Small, muscular Dobermans. Clipped ears, clipped tails, and fast.
I run at that fence with a shot of adrenaline so massive, you’d need a horse syringe to hold it. The pain just feels like motivation.
The dogs snarl and jump at my sneakers with what look like werewolf fangs. Do these dogs get to tear trespassers to pieces until someone shows up to view the carcasses and bury what’s left?
There are more pressing questions.
Such as, what if they know where I am, and they’re on their way here?
How much easier for them could I make it? Hanging off a rickety fence like a midnight dare at cheer camp, a slow-moving target as they reach for their guns.
I know guns; people in Cotter’s Mill hunt.
I know that the ones they were waving, silhouetted in the moonlight, are for going after people, not Canada geese.
Steve was always dragging me off into the great outdoors to fish. Or, at least, cook the fish. The worst was hunting season, a buck tied to the hood of the SUV on the way home. But as sexist as he got with me, Steve made sure I knew my way around firearms.
But I don’t see any stray rifles lying around. (As if I’d shoot a dog—I wouldn’t.) What I see is a flat, wide sky, a blue lid with fat clouds stuffed underneath, pressing down, closing me into a tight Texas box.
A box I have no idea how to get out of.
I could make it over this fence so fast, but there’s razor-edged tape up there that could separate your fingers from your hands if you grabbed it.
Watch enough crime shows on TV, and you know this gruesome stuff.
Wake up caked in blood a thousand miles from the scene of the crime, and . . . what? Pray that the pickups driving by aren’t them is what.
I poke my sneakers into the fence’s unforgiving little holes and scramble toward the slim opening of the loosely chained gate. Pull it shut. Walk toward the row of trees that shields the lots behind them from the street.
Trying not to be the out-of-place moving speck that draws the hunter’s eye.
Trying to look as inconspicuous as if I were cutting fifth period back home, sneaking under the bleachers and over the fence behind Cotter’s Mill Unified High School with Jody Nimiroff and Olivia so we could get Big Macs for lunch and sneak back into school for sixth period.
That’s what seemed like life-and-death two days before.
Scarfing down fries in time to sprint back to school unnoticed.
Avoiding Saturday detention.
That life is over.
If I don’t stop crying like a helpless baby, so am I.
Over. Done with. Dead.
I have to deal.
I’m dealing.
6
Jack
It takes everything I’ve got not to gun the car past the prison gates and fishtail out of there.
Don’s envelope is pressing against my chest like a dead weight, like a rat corpse you pick up by the tail and chuck into the incinerator. It pokes me through my shirt. I’d reach down and scratch, but I won’t risk a move that could make the car jerk and give the Highway Patrol any excuse to stop me. Face it, when those guys see my name on my driver’s license, they’ve been known to come up with a bogus excuse to pat me down.
I don’t know what’s in this envelope, but I know enough not to let a cop find it on me.
I count the minutes, miles, and tenths of a mile to the first turn-off. I pull into a bar and grill that looks least likely to have electronic surveillance, as if the security cam at the Jack in the Box could see into my car and call me out me for taking step one in Don’s deranged plan.
Tearing open the envelope, I have the feeling I get when I’m crouched in the scull at the starting block, just before the starting pistol fires, waiting to pull back on the oars and launch across the water.
Bang. There she is, staring out from under the envelope’s flap. A girl with long hair and doe eyes, all narrow shoulders and collarbone and small breasts.
Hello, Nicolette.
I’ve lost it. I’m seeing thought bubbles over her head that aren’t there: “Don’t.” “You aren’t going to, right?” “Guns don’t kill people; assholes kill people.”
I think, At least she’s got a sense of humor. Then I think, Stop hallucinating.
Her face is heart-shaped, freckles across the nose, and a wide mouth. She’s not completely confident when the camera catches her eye, but she gives up the suggestion of a grin. There she is in the next picture, prancing around in a cheerleader uniform. She could be junior varsity, that’s how young she looks—young and in-your-face pretty. This girl doesn’t even look as if she’d kill a spider.
The Weedwacker that keeps me in line starts up in my gut.
This is fucked. Heavy-duty guys like Karl Yeager aren’t supposed to hand small-time hoods at Yucca Valley Correctional school portraits of future dead girls, with the girls’ addresses printed on the back. A penciled annotation says it’s Esteban Mendes’s house—surprise, surprise—with a note to stay away. I’m happy to oblige.
Why go to her house when I’ve got the address of her school, her Tumblr, her Instagram, her Pinterest board of fancy dresses, and her defunct three-year-old blog where her last entry was about Twilight? (She was thirteen. She liked it. She was Team Jacob.) I have her log-in and her password for a dozen different sites: BUTTERcup9. Apparently, no one told her it’s smart to change things up.
I unwrap her driver’s license. I don’t mean a scan of it: it. Sixty seconds later, I’m in the men’s room at the back of the lounge with my Swiss Army knife, slicing the license into pieces small enough to flush. It’s a liability. She’s a missing-killer-crazy-girl, and I have her driver’s license on me?
Think, Jack.
I pull out the ID my friend Calvin and I trade back and forth for emergencies and buy a beer. I’ve held on to this ID for most of senior year. My mom won’t let me drink, whereas Calvin can take a beer out of the refrigerator in his kitchen. Calvin is the only person I talk to about Don. His older brother, Gerhard—the guy with the legitimate claim to the twenty-one-year-old ID—goes to MIT.
I want to call Calvin up, but how would that conversation go? First I’d listen to him moan about how his girlfriend, Monica, might leave him when he takes off for Caltech in August, then he’d listen to me explain how I’m supposed to kill somebody?
Not with a whimper but a bang.
What’s wrong with me? Don’t say genetic predisposition, I already know that. On one side, we have Art Manx, whose family crest might as well say, Live
by the sword, die by the sword. On the other side, meet Isabella Rossi Manx, the sweetest insanely strict mother alive, but weak as jelly at the center.
You learn from the Killers-’R’-Us side of the family that weak-as-jelly has its pitfalls. You are never weak as jelly. Then you take the envelope, and you want to bang your head on the bar you shouldn’t legally be sitting at.
Don thinks this is happening.
I sit there eating old peanuts, making myself visualize this Nicolette creeping up behind Connie Marino. I imagine the soft skin of Connie’s neck peeling open, gaping like a thin-lipped mouth, drooling blood. I picture Connie lying on a linoleum floor, bleeding out while this twisted little cheerleader, this tiny evil Nicolette (5' 2'' according to her license) stands over her, laughing.
But the image that keeps interrupting is a cheerleading Nicolette bouncing around with pom-poms, so compact, so deceptively delicate, doing cartwheels in a lit-up stadium during a night game.
I make myself see her kneeling on the linoleum floor next to Connie’s corpse, swishing her crazy hands in Connie’s blood and laughing, getting blood on her pom-poms. I stalk her, catch her from behind, drag her away.
Shit.
I can’t do this. I can’t pretend I’m going to do this or let Don think for five more minutes that I’m doing this.
7
Cat
I’m bolt upright on a broken-down lounge chair, with a death grip on a pointy stick. Concealed between old, disgusting mattresses and bloated garbage bags in a vacant lot rimmed with trees.
The stick is for rats (saw them) and snakes (didn’t). But it feels like a hundred degrees, and it’s Texas, and don’t rattlesnakes crawl out of the ground to cool off and bite people in weather like this?
I would.
If Olivia were here, she’d be weaving together strips of plastic bag. Making us a tent and matching shoulder bags. She’d be distracting me with ghost stories. I might be the bouncy one with the pom-poms, but she was the one who was with me 24/7 when my mom died. The picture she drew of my mom with a sparkle-marker halo and wings, sitting on a cloud, looking down at me and waving, had a permanent place under my pillow. Until Steve steamed out the wrinkles and framed it.
I want my friend.
I want my picture.
I want to be home, where I can never go again.
If I were in Cotter’s Mill right now, I’d be at Olivia’s house, listening to Katy Perry. We’d be copying each other’s math.
At twilight, I’d run home along the lake. Yellow light would be pouring out of my house like the steady beam that glows from a lighthouse. Rosalba, who cooks for us, would pile food onto my plate, complaining that I’m too skinny. And when Steve got home late, I’d cut myself a thin, tiny slice of the tres leches cake Rosalba and I baked. Sit with him. Feed Gertie tiny scraps of meat off his plate while Steve pretended not to notice.
I force myself not to let images of home eclipse the landscape where I actually am. This works for about thirty seconds.
Then I start torturing myself with mental tours of Cotter’s Mill Unified.
These are the trophies from when cheer squad took second at State twice in a row.
That’s the dark stairwell where my first kiss with Connor happened. And happened. And happened.
Here’s the principal’s office where Steve had to show up and use the phrases “harmless prank” and “Of course I take this very seriously” more than once. While I pretended to be contrite, also more than once.
After we made over Maura Brennan in the locker room and her mom had conniptions that I dyed her hair blue-black and pierced her ears twice each. (“Stop saying how good she looks!” Steve said. “What were you thinking?”)
After we cut and went ice-skating on the lake all day. (“So if this Connor does something, anything, you do it too?”)
And when Mr. Kirkbride decided that doing our math homework together was plagiarism??? (“There’s going to come a time when I can’t fix things for you.”)
It’s like some part of my mind is stuck, acting as if the worst thing I ever did is make Maura Brennan look good.
As if it didn’t happen.
But this is now. It happened. My hair is caked with blood, my stomach screaming for me to put something in it now.
And between now and when (if) I come up with a plan more immediately workable than buying a new face and fingerprints and passport (hatched in the cement pipe), I need water and a Hershey bar, a sun hat, and a place to hide.
And as basic as those things are, I have no idea how I’m going to get them.
Steve always says to have faith, and the universe provides. This is what you’d expect from a guy who got from Havana to Miami Beach on a raft that was basically a tabletop.
I used to believe him.
But the obvious fact is, I have to provide for myself. I can’t just sit here forever, slamming the ground with a stick whenever I hear the sound of rodents. It’s not like I’m going to spear one and eat it for lunch.
I peer out at the street through the wall of trees. Pickups going eighty miles an hour billow dust to waist-high clouds, skidding around curves.
Across the street, there’s a Five Star Gas and Mini-Mart.
I run into the street like a crazed squirrel. Trying to make it through the door of Five Star’s mini-mart without getting spotted, run over, turned in, or shot.
It seems like a whole lot of trouble for candy. But what’s the alternative?
The guy behind the counter takes one look, and the obvious question of how I got this way might as well be printed on his forehead.
I say, “No bike helmet. Stupid, huh?” That’s the best I’ve got. Flirting is out of the question in my current situation. “Could you please tell me how to get to downtown?”
Even though I don’t know what town it is yet. I only know it’s Texas from the license plates.
The cashier points and tells me only to hitch with the ladies.
I thank him by lifting four supersize Almond Joy bars out of the rack under the register while he’s distracted. Proving that old shoplifting skills never die. No matter how sorry you were at the time.
I really was sorry. I was only eight, but I took enough nail polish to open a salon before anybody noticed. And it is like riding a bike—you don’t forget how.
At least last time I took things, everybody thought some variation on the theme that I was filling the void after my mom’s aneurism. The tiny flaw in her brain that killed her. Everyone except for Steve, who said, “You didn’t do this because you’re sad, did you?”
I said, “I like nail polish.”
Steve patted my shoulder, signifying his recognition that he was stuck dealing with me forever. Or so I thought.
He said, “I’ll buy you all the nail polish you want, but don’t ever do this again.”
I didn’t.
Until now.
I have to stop thinking about how nice Steve was to me and how much I want to go home, or I’m not going to make it.
I slide the key off the counter. Drink rusty water out of the sink in the gas station’s bathroom until I start gagging on it. Then I stuff a candy bar into my mouth. Oh God, chocolate and coconut and almonds. Which could be fruit and protein if you leeched out all the sugar.
It does feel morally worse than stealing bread probably would, but try sticking a loaf of bread down your yoga pants.
I say thank you to the universe.
I apologize to the universe for caving to despair (big sin) in case any divine forces are watching.
I don’t apologize for any necessary thing I did or am about to do.
There’s no mirror, but even in the dull reflection of the stainless steel towel dispenser, you can tell my face made contact with a blunt object.
I try to scrape the dried blood off my face and out of my hair with wet paper towels, watching it darken the white washbasin in the already half-dark ladies’ room. I wash with the pink soap in the dispenser and dry
off with my hoodie.
It’s not that I’ve never had blood in my hair before. I have. A cheerleading move that I might have pushed too far.
Olivia sitting in the ER, holding my hand while the doctor stapled my head shut. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked, tears streaming down her face. “Summer said it wasn’t even in the choreography. Why do you keep doing this?”
Oh God, Olivia, I don’t know. Not then, and not now.
This time it takes me longer to get the dried blood out of my hair than it took to wreck my life.
That took three minutes.
No more than five minutes, tops, and my previous state of oblivious faith and my family and my face gave way to this. A fugitive girl with a forehead caked in blood.
8
Jack
The whole way driving back to the prison, I’m getting angrier and angrier at everything about Don, and about my family, and the fact that I’m saddled with a last name everybody in Nevada recognizes. I’m saddled with the memory of my dad packing his bag with enough firepower to bring down a cartel.
I slam the steering wheel and mentally shout out rhetorical questions for Don:
Like you think I’m going to track down a cheerleader and end her between prom and graduation—are you out of your freaking mind? You tell me to jump, and I jump on someone’s neck?
Who does that?
I, of all people, know the answer: bad guys who are nothing like me do that. Vigilantes with no respect for the law or human decency do that. They see blood, and their eyes glaze over as they set off on lethal adventures.
I kissed my dad good-bye when he set out to hunt, waiting for the limo to pull up and take him to the private airport. Because the TSA guys at McCarran International don’t like it if you have too many ounces of shampoo or a sniper rifle in your carry-on. I wasn’t supposed to notice him packing this rifle, but even disassembled, it was hard to miss.
He was just another guy in shades off to neutralize an irritant, solve the fucking problem, kill his prey. My plan was to ignore heredity and environment, and become his antithesis. I was the model guy, attending the closest thing to prep school a city that runs on vice can offer, battling Dan Barrons for every honor in the place. I was home on school nights, heating up nutritious dinners my mom left for me as she powered her way through night law school and setting out a striped tie and regulation button-down blue shirt for the next day.
How to Disappear Page 2