“Not a fan of designer water?”
But she’s already shot off to the food truck, fast, with a spectacular stride.
I down sixteen ounces. “Thanks. Jesus, it’s hot.” I’m used to a hundred and ten degrees in the shade, but what the hell, it’s conversation. “I thought El Molino was supposed to be balmy.”
“Do you believe everything people tell you? Does this feel balmy?” She extends her arms, palms up, as if waiting for wads of balminess to land in her hands. She shakes her head. “You might be too trusting.”
I’m drowning in sweat and irony.
28
Cat
Every part of me is perspiring. My hair is perspiring.
My concentration is shredded.
He says, “Do you have a phone number?”
My mouth is dry. My eyes are too dry to blink. It’s distracting to look at him.
“My phone got smashed.” Breathe. “I lost it.” Breathe. “So no.”
He tilts his head the way Gertie does when she’s trying to figure out where her doggie treat went after she already ate it. “It got smashed and then it got lost? This phone has very bad luck.”
Smartass.
“I lost it, like, ‘Oh no, my phone is smashed!’ I’ve lost the use of my phone. My phone is deceased. No phone. Is that clear enough for you?”
I don’t mention that I smashed it under my foot before tossing it down a garbage chute. And then I stomped on the next one. Or that I bought a new one later, but I’m scared to crack it out of its box. Even though the guy who sold it to me swore up and down that it’s an opposite-of-smartphone, with no GPS whatsoever.
“Clear,” he says.
I have to get out of this guy’s force field.
“Thanks for the ice cream.” Licking bits of chocolate sandwich off my front teeth with my tongue. Backing away. “I have to go to work.”
“Thanks for the water.”
My mouth is cold sugar, but the rest of me is burning. My tee is clinging to my skin like a layer of moist shrink-wrap.
He says, “What do you do?”
I have to go. I know it.
But he sacrificed his shirt. He doesn’t deserve a hot mess bitch. “Aide for an old lady. Very glam. I cook a lot of soup.”
Soup-cooker for a demented person. She doesn’t remember who I am when I get back from peeing. The perfect job. I got it from a tiny want ad posted by her son, who lives in New Mexico. Who’s not responsible enough to hire a legit aide for her.
“Could I walk you?” he asks. Undeterred by the obvious fact that I’m backing away. Slowly, with a beauty queen hand wave, a slight swivel at the wrist. I’m fast, but it would look weird if I shot out of the park like bears were chasing me.
Left him to eat my dust.
And the whole time I’m speed-walking away, I’m forcing myself not to look back over my shoulder. Sliding into Dunkin’ Donuts in the middle of a bunch of girls who don’t even know I’m with them. Cursing the alarm on the back door.
Asking myself how I ended up in the park with a guy, 50 percent afraid he’d catch me and 50 percent disappointed he didn’t.
Why does every impulse of mine have to be dangerous?
29
Jack
If I’d been paying more attention to the end game—avoiding the Nevada sun rising over a pile of Manx corpses—I wouldn’t be running after Nicolette Holland like a bunglng ass in flip-flops. It’s like getting a penalty called on the touchdown you thought won you the game you bet your life on.
I blew the details, and I feel the failure. I should have had THINK, JACK tattooed down my arm in block print, not this Maori armband thing. (It was the night I turned eighteen. I was drunk off my ass. I’m lucky I didn’t wake up with Donald Duck on my face.) If I’d thought to wear decent shoes, I could have pivoted on a dime. If I’d thought to wear gym shorts, I could have run in her wake and not looked like a guy sprinting away after mugging someone.
When she came out of Dunkin’ Donuts, I should have been closer. When she slunk into the alley, I should have figured out a way to stick to her. There has to be a way to follow someone down an otherwise deserted alley in broad daylight without being spotted. But I gave up. I crossed the street and circled to the place where the alley meets the sidewalk around two corners.
I’m standing in the shade in the Food 4 Less parking lot, back turned to the mouth of the alley, acting like I’m texting. All I had to do is stay on her until I figured it out—it’s not climbing Mount Everest—and I’m still standing here.
I’m so pissed off at myself, I answer Don’s call. I’ve screwed up so badly, why not make it worse?
“Have you got her?” This is what he’s taken to saying instead of hello.
“I spotted her.”
“Where is she? Is it over?”
“This isn’t Yucca Valley Correctional. I can’t walk up to her in the shower and shank her.”
“You were that close?”
“Figure of speech.”
“Figure of speech—straight-A student. You lost her, didn’t you?”
I toy with the idea that I lost her on purpose, that I unconsciously engineered this because I couldn’t decide how much of a virus spore I was. If so, it was poor engineering because when I look up, she’s walking out of the alley and right toward me.
“Shit! Gotta go!”
“Oh no you don’t!”
For a second, I’m more scared of her than of Don. It’s one short, cold blast to the gut. It’s dead Connie Marino and the reminder that this girl isn’t who she seems to be. But despite knowing who she is and the blast to the gut that reasonable people know not to ignore, I’m grinning at her. I’m happy to see her. I’m still suppressing the big, silenced Don’t!—the syllable that’s struggling to get out and get out loudly while I hold my jaw so rigid, it might crack. I’m still freaking turned on.
I shove the phone into my pocket as she crosses the street, step forward to meet her. I say, “Are you following me?” It’s playing with fire, but it’s all I can think of.
“You wish!” she says. But it isn’t nasty, it’s kind of sweet. “How do I know it’s not you stalking me?”
“I do wish.” Then I patiently explain how stalking works, and how I’m not, and miraculously, she buys it. “Are you sure you don’t want me to?”
She twists up her mouth on the left side, like a cartoon character that’s deep in thought. “I’m pretty sure.”
Even with the baggy clothes and what she’s done to herself, this girl is meant to be on the receiving end of following—and not just by twisted stalkers.
“Okay, lucky coincidence. Can I get you a burger?” She looks taken aback. “When you get off work?”
This is a fail, too much too soon. Her eyes are back to scanning the street. She says, “I’m kind of agoraphobic. Do you know what that is?”
“Isn’t that when you can’t leave your house? You might be cured.”
“Read up. Jeez, do you seriously want to debate this? I think I know what I’ve got.”
“Sorry, rude.”
“So rude.”
I touch her shoulder. “What happens if you get to work late?”
She rolls her eyes. But she doesn’t walk away.
30
Cat
He’s standing in the shade in the Food 4 Less parking lot. Hunched over his phone like he’s afraid it’s going to jump out of his hands.
Then he sees me. Springs up. Comes bounding over. Okay, not exactly bounding. Too puppyish for him. Moving very fast and very intentionally.
Toward me.
I tell myself this is okay. It’s an I-found-him thing and, therefore, meant to be. This is an example of the universe providing.
I get that it’s providing the exact thing I’m supposed to avoid.
A human guy.
But it’s like stumbling over a lucky penny, shiny and heads up. The universe doesn’t rain lucky pennies. When it does, you pick one up.
The space between us is closing, like air being squeezed out of a rapidly collapsing lung.
Then he wants to know if I’m following him.
Way too self-confident.
“You wish!” My head is so buzzing, I’m talking on autopilot. “How do I know it’s not you stalking me?”
“I do wish.” J frowns. “Why would I stalk you? You’re not that friendly. And stalking entails lurking—correct me if I’m wrong—and there’s no lurking going on.”
“Great. No lurking.”
Then he wants to go out for a burger. I try to tell him how I can’t. How I’m agoraphobic, which I might have gotten slightly wrong.
But it’s obvious I want to.
It’s like my muscle memory of a come-on smile is too much to overcome.
Great.
I’m transforming backward. Turning right back into the self I can’t be anymore. The self who hops into the back of a guy’s car on a quiet country road because she likes him too much.
The self with no judgment and bad taste in boys.
J tilts his head. “If burgers are out of the question, do we want more ice cream?”
“Seriously, why are you here?”
He groans and looks put out. It’s not his worst look. “Because this is the only place other than Starbucks on Hill where I get any kind of reception.”
“What’s wrong with the Starbucks on Hill?”
J shades his eyes with his hand. Makes a big deal of surveying the parking lot. Looks cute. “Is this your personal domain? Cat-landia, is it? Should I have my passport stamped on my way out of the lot?”
“Stay! Jeremiah, I don’t want to interrupt you.”
“Jeremiah!” He hammers his right fist against his chest. “Shot through the heart. Remind me of my name, and you’ll have to make it up to me.”
I’m debating whether it would be weirder to walk away or weirder to stay, act somewhat cold, and induce him to walk away. Which wouldn’t be a problem if I hadn’t crossed the street in the first place.
“It’s just more ice cream,” he says. “You do eat, right?”
J, you have no idea how much I eat. I ate potato chips for breakfast. In the past week, I’ve baked Mrs. Podolski three pies, two breads, and snickerdoodles.
He says, “You want a sundae? I have Nutella at my place, and cherries.”
Oh God, Nutella! My favorite food group. And he wants to feed me cherries.
No way. I have Nutella at home. I have cinnamon bread I baked Mrs. Podolski to spread it on. I can buy cherries.
What am I doing?
Walking down the street with him is what.
Yes, but if he’s stalking me, why didn’t he follow me all the way home? I live alone in a tiny garage behind Mrs. Podolski’s house. It has a window you can open by pushing it with your pinkie.
If he were here to finish me, I’d be finished.
J says, “Or do you want to cut to the chase and get some beers?”
“No chase! No drinks!”
“Kidding,” he says. “I figured if I couldn’t buy you a burger, most likely I couldn’t get you drunk.”
“Do girls follow you home when you say stuff like this?”
“All the time.”
I sock him on the arm. This seems to make him happy. Everything I say or do seems to make him happy. Just glancing at me makes him grin like an idiot.
He says, “Use your words. You’re unusually violent for a short person.”
I sock him again.
He lives on the ground floor of an old green wooden house, subdivided into apartments. I figure, worst case, I can kick out a window.
31
Jack
I’ve got her.
The surreality of Nicolette Holland walking around my place simulates the sensation of reading in a moving car. The room looks to be expanding and contracting to the rhythm of her pulse, despite my disdain for people who lay claim to weird sensory experiences—unless they’re in the desert with a bag of shrooms.
I know her pulse because she said my ice cream was giving her brain freeze. My index finger is pressed to the indentation under her right temple.
“No, I’m happy to report that you’re still a sentient being.”
“Because there’s blood flow to my brain? Guess again. Blood flow is overrated. The sweet old lady I work for could run a marathon in her walker, but she doesn’t know my name or what I’m doing there half the time.”
God, this girl is good, whether she’s making this up or if it’s true; she’s even better if it’s true.
“What are you doing there?”
“Stealing her jewelry.” She smiles up at me and nibbles on the cherry I stuck on top of the spray-can whipped cream. Of course she’s the girl who’d be stealing jewelry off defenseless old ladies. At least it’s a step up from playing with a blade.
She yelps, “Don’t look at me like that! That was a joke. If she ever had any jewelry, it’s buried in her garden anyway. She buries teaspoons. I have to dig them up and put them back when she’s asleep. I don’t want to embarrass her.”
The girl who steals jewelry from old ladies or the girl who has a nighttime protocol for sparing her senile employer’s feelings?
I watch her eat the grotesquely oversize sundae I made because I wanted to keep her in my apartment for as long as possible, ladling on caramel and chocolate sauce and scoops of mint chip. I scrolled through years of her photos online to figure out what kind of food would tempt her. As it turns out, anything with sugar does it for her. She had a Twix appetizer.
Let’s just say, she’s not the kind of girl who eats only reduced-fat lettuce leaves.
She licks green ice cream off her lower lip. In the bedroom, I have a duffel bag full of weapons any one of which could finish her off before the remnants of the sundae turn to slush. I try to visualize using each one on her. I don’t get further than picturing myself shooting her from a distance, and then only when I imagine her flattened into two-dimensionality, a laminated paper target with a frozen face and immobile limbs.
She says, “For sure this is my dinner. Thanks. I might not have to cook myself anything to eat for days.”
“I don’t cook. If not for In-N-Out, I’d have to eat grass and leaves.”
“I spent yesterday making peach cobbler and five quarts of borsht. Do you know what that is? Beet soup. It’s what the lady I work for wanted for breakfast.”
“What’s the matter? Did you learn to cook in a giant family and forget to divide?”
When I ask her a question I know she’ll have to answer by making things up, it feels as if I’m torturing her, playing with her the way a cat bats a gopher back and forth across a patio before devouring it.
“Six kids,” she says. She doesn’t miss a beat.
“I’d lose track of their names.”
“My parents were highly practical. Angie, Bonnie, me Cat, Davey, Edie, and Frank. Which is a lot of alphabet to stuff in a trailer.”
“Don’t you call them mobile homes?”
“You’re such a know-it-all! Has anybody ever mentioned this to you?”
All my friends and a couple of disgruntled teachers might have mentioned it.
“Ours was definitely a trailer,” she says. She has it down. “Not as bad as it sounds. But you know what? Homeschooled. We never got out of there!”
It’s a brilliant idea: no Reunion dot com or googling of the graduating class list or having to tie herself to a specific location where any curious person could find out she never was. She is, I realize, driving where this goes, dishonest and hypnotic.
I say, “Is this trailer nearby?”
“No! They disapprove of me. Religious zealots. I had to take off before they shunned me. I can’t go home.” She frowns, and if I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was real. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
She abandons her sundae to walk around the room, pausing at the wall of
bookshelves, touching the spines of the books. “You read a lot of poems.”
“This is a sublet. They’re not mine.”
“You’re subletting from a girl, right?”
“And you know this because . . . ?”
“This shelf. Emily Dickinson. Sylvia Plath. In school, when we did this poem she wrote, it was like contraception day in homeroom. You know, boys to the right, girls to the left. Yay abstinence, but if you succumb to sin and personal degradation, say hello to this condom.”
I touch the pocket of my jeans containing my wallet and silently greet the condom.
“Interesting school.”
I watch her remember that she just said she was homeschooled. Her face registers something and then smooths itself out.
“Waaaay down south,” she says, returning to her sundae, blocking her mouth from view behind a heaping tablespoon of mint chip. “I got sent there for part of a year so I’d have a school experience beyond the inside of a trailer before college.”
“Good move.” And I don’t mean her imaginary parents sending her to an imaginary Southern high school.
“This poem,” she says, “it was about how much she hated her father. Which was a lot. The girls were all having fits about how good it was. The guys were all puking.”
“What were you doing while all this puking was going on?”
“Remember me? Educated in a tin can. I’m borderline illiterate.” She looks as thoughtful as a person can when lighting into a quart of ice cream. “If she’d have just gotten herself out of Dodge and hung with people who were nice to her and shoved her dad out of her mind . . . That’s what you have to do sometimes . . . Instead of writing poems about it . . .”
“You do know she killed herself?”
“That’s the stuff I pay attention to, are you kidding me? Did you know she married a guy who, after she killed herself, married another poet who killed herself? So the question is, did he constantly marry suicidal women, or did he marry regular women and drive them over the edge?”
How to Disappear Page 9