Missing at 17

by Christine Conradt

  “You talk a lot when you’re drunk.” He smiled, but she didn’t. What else had she said? Hopefully nothing embarrassing. Unfortunately, she’d just insisted that she was an open book so she felt compelled to answer his question. Even though his curiosity made her uncomfortable, she liked that he was interested in her answer.

  “She’s a pain in the ass and that’s why my dad left,” she said quickly.

  “Where’s he live?” Toby asked, shoving a bite of hash browns into his mouth. “You mentioned he lived kinda far away.”

  “San Diego. I don’t get to see him that much. I didn’t really get to see him a lot before, though. He’s an airline pilot so he’s gone all the time.”

  “Is that why your mom’s a pain? She complained about him being gone?” Toby’s follow-up question made sense but it wasn’t just that her mom complained. She did—often—but it was more complicated than that. She was a pain in so many ways.

  “Yes,” Candace explained. “But also we just don’t get along. All she cares about is me going to college, and I don’t even know if I want to go to college. Plus, she flips out on me constantly.”

  Toby seemed somewhat relieved by her answer. Candace wasn’t sure why.

  “College isn’t for everyone,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Finally! she thought. Someone who agrees with me!

  “It’s definitely not for me. I can’t imagine sitting in a classroom for four more years. That’s like a prison sentence. Except you can’t get out early for good behavior.” Toby laughed and nearly choked on his coffee. She grinned, not realizing she’d said anything funny. She was just being herself.

  “I have never met anyone quite like you,” he mused as he set his cup down.

  “And you never will,” she said with a smile.

  From the look on his face, she knew he agreed.

  Outside of the gas station, Toby’s pickup slowed to a stop next to Candace’s car—still parked, safe and sound, where she’d left it the night before.

  “And . . . we’re back to the beginning,” he said. “You want to follow me to my place or just GPS it?”

  “I doubt I have enough gas to make it,” she said, and started to fish some cash from the bottom of her purse. Toby smiled and pulled out a twenty.

  “I got it. Just pull up to the pump.”

  Candace sat behind the wheel and watched as Toby put gas in her tank, just like her father used to do for her mother when they were married. When the meter hit twenty, he stuffed the nozzle back in place and leaned down near her window. Candace smiled.

  “I’m actually going to run home and grab a change of clothes before I come over, okay? My mom’s at work so I can sneak in and sneak out without anyone noticing.” Candace felt gross wearing the same outfit she had on the entire day before. Plus, she’d slept in it. Even grosser. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be staying at Toby’s but she figured she’d hang out as long as he’d let her. He didn’t seem to want her to go anytime soon.

  “Will they be sexy clothes?” he asked.

  “Maybe . . .” she said evasively. She liked how he flirted with her. And she also liked that he didn’t try to talk her out of what she said she wanted to do. If she’d told Ian she wanted to run home and get clothes, it would’ve turned into a twenty-minute conversation about why she should just borrow some of his clothes, or worse yet, his mother’s. Toby was just so chill. He went with the flow and she liked that.

  He smiled. “Gimme your phone.”

  She handed him the phone and he entered his address into her GPS before handing it back to her. Then he leaned in and kissed her gently on the lips.

  “See ya later, gorgeous.”

  “Bye,” she said, and noticed he wasn’t driving away. Turning back, she yelled, “What are you doing?”

  He rolled down the window so she could hear him.

  “Being a gentleman and waiting for you to leave first.”

  He was being serious, and it made her laugh. She waved him off. He honked once—a friendly, lighthearted honk—and then backed up, driving off down the street. Candace watched him go. She sat there for a moment in the driver’s seat, thinking about this boy she’d just met. He’s far from a boy, she thought. Ian is a boy. Toby is a man. Maybe this was the kind of guy she should’ve been going for all along—self-sufficient, sexy, smart enough to run his own business. He just might be everything I’m looking for, she mused as she started her car and headed back to her mother’s. But could she cut ties with her old life and start a brand-new one less than fifteen miles away? It wouldn’t be easy. She was sure that by now her mother had called her father and told him about their argument, and that she hadn’t come home last night. They might even be out looking for her. It didn’t matter. In less than five months, she’d be eighteen and then she could do anything she wanted. She’d have complete control over her own life and there was nothing they could say or do about it. Maybe this whole running-away thing, this finding out I’m adopted, is going to change my life for the better, she thought. If so, it’s about time.

  Seven

  A Near Miss

  Candace’s car pulled past the driveway of her mother’s two-story house and stopped. She sat behind the wheel, staring at the white siding and dark green shutters, the autumn wreath that graced the oversize door, and the two bougainvillea bushes that flanked the front porch. Their papery pink leaves dotted the yard. How many of those pink leaves were hidden between the pages of books tucked away in her closet or the den? When she was little, she and Andrew would sift through the fallen leaves, finding the perfect ones, and then hide them in random books for their parents to find.

  Candace sighed. It was all so familiar yet it didn’t feel like her home anymore. It felt foreign—like it belonged to someone else. It’s bizarre how quickly things can change, she thought. Yesterday morning, I thought it was going to be a regular day at school. There couldn’t be very many times in a person’s life where things changed so drastically. Getting married, graduating from high school, having a baby . . . But at least in those moments you expected your life to change. She had been totally unprepared.

  She got out of the car and peeked into the garage through the window to make sure her mother’s SUV wasn’t there. The garage was empty, coast clear. Hurrying, she let herself in, ran up the stairs, and entered her room.

  Candace took in the room that used to be hers: the puffy duvet with orange hibiscus silhouettes, the shelf with all her books and trinkets she’d collected over the years, the small oak desk where she sometimes did her homework but more often than not, simply messed around online when she was supposed to be working out equations for Precalc. Having just spent the night at Toby’s, Candace noticed how stark the differences between their rooms were. Toby’s room barely had anything that matched anything else: the blankets and pillowcases and sheets all seemed to have come from different places; the curtains were old and ripped; his dresser was missing a few knobs, which meant you had to pry the drawers open with your fingernails. In this room, everything matched. The pale gray curtains and the paint and the pillows and the even the throw blanket that hung lazily over the arm of the overstuffed chair in the corner. It was picture-perfect. And yet, this place couldn’t feel more imperfect. Toby’s bedroom was proof that none of it was necessary. He has mismatched, secondhand stuff and he’s perfectly happy, she thought. It’s time for me to be happy too. It’s time for me to stop living a fake life and to figure out what my purpose is on this planet. I’m going to find out who I really am, what I truly want out of life, and then I’m going to go after it like a madwoman. With a smile on her face, she started stuffing clothes into a duffel bag.

  After pulling as much as she could pack from the closet, she moved to the dresser, where she opened one of the drawers and found her sexiest bra and panty set—a cute Victorian lace number with vintage white trim. He wants sexy, she thought. This is sexxxyyyy.

  Grabbing a few more pairs of underwear and some bras as well as h
er brush, some makeup, and the phone charger hanging from the outlet on her wall, she shoved them into her bag and headed back down the stairs. As she reached the front door, she caught a glimpse of her mom’s car pulling into the drive. Candace froze. What the hell was she doing home? She stood there, unable to move her feet as she watched her mother leap out of her silver SUV. From the speed with which she ran toward the house, Candace knew her mom had spotted her car parked on the street.

  “Dammit!” Candace said aloud. What now?

  Her only way out of the house without coming face-to-face with her mother was to slip out the back door. As quickly as the thought formed, Candace bolted down the steps and raced through the hall into the family room. She ducked behind the wall just as her mother threw open the front door.

  “Candace?” her mother yelled, and immediately ascended the stairs two at a time. “Candace?!”

  Candace could hear her mother’s desperate cries as she carefully and quietly unlocked the patio door and slid the heavy glass to the side. The screen door was also locked. She delicately flipped the lock down, unlatching the door.

  “Candace!” her mother called out again, and Candace could tell she was exiting her bedroom. In a few seconds, she’d be down the stairs searching the first floor. She needed to haul ass if she was going to get out of there.

  Hearing her mother’s footsteps thudding down the stairs, Candace slid open the screen door and, leaving it open, crossed the backyard, past the shed she’d helped her father build three summers ago, past the lawn darts that Andrew never put back in the bin, and pushed open the gate. Sure that her mother was only steps away from spotting her, Candace darted down the driveway and hopped into her car.

  She turned the key in the ignition. Nothing but a low growl from her engine. Don’t do this to me! she ordered as she glanced up to see her mother coming out the front door.

  “Candace, stop!” her mom yelled. But Candace had no intention of stopping. She turned the key a second time and the engine roared to life. Candace yanked the transmission into drive and with squealing tires, started off down the street as her mother reached the curb.

  Worried that her mother would jump into her own vehicle and follow her, Candace glanced in the rearview mirror. She was surprised at what she saw. Instead of running toward her SUV parked in the drive, she saw her mother lower herself to the curb and hold her head in her hands. Candace’s foot touched the brake and her eyes narrowed as she tried to see what her mother was doing. As her car approached the corner, her mom’s image became too small to tell but Candace was pretty sure that her mother was sobbing. Right there, in front of their house, where all the neighbors could see, she was crying. A pang of guilt shot through Candace. A lump formed in her throat and her eyes began to sting. She never set out to hurt her mother, or anyone else. She just wanted to be left alone—to do her own thing.

  She doesn’t care about me anyway, Candace told herself. If she did, she would’ve told me I was adopted a long time ago. She’s probably crying because she loves to be in control and right now she’s not. Even as Candace tried to alleviate the heavy feeling of guilt, she knew deep down that everything she was telling herself was a lie.

  Of course her mother cared about her; of course she was the reason her mom was sitting on a curb. But that just made her want to leave even more. She hated all the feelings swirling around inside her: guilt, embarrassment, regret. She’d made so many mistakes that those feelings never left her. Every time she looked at her mother, she saw the disappointment, the things she hated in herself; the things she wished she could change but just couldn’t seem to get on top of.

  I need this, Candace told herself. I need to start over, totally clean, completely new, with someone like Toby who gets me. I need to find the thing—the thing I’ve been missing, even though I’m not sure what it is. I need to stop feeling like I’m failing all the time. Her mother was the reason she felt like that. Candace knew her mom wanted her to get better grades, be more involved with her brother, choose some traditional path to success and follow it. Candace just couldn’t do those things. She didn’t want to. She wanted a father who still lived in the house with them and the freedom to figure out who she was. Instead, she had a mother who drove her father away, who lied, who let her make a fool of herself in front of her peers. The bottom line was that she didn’t know how to stop the fighting as long as she was living under the same roof with her mom.

  No! She’s not my mom. She never was.

  When she was around Toby those feelings were gone. She felt excitement about the future, she felt connected and grounded, she felt beautiful and mysterious. She liked how he raised his eyebrow when she talked as if he only half believed what she was saying. She liked how she’d caught him watching her in the mirror as she brushed her teeth with her finger earlier that morning. She liked how he didn’t seem to let anything bother him. Here was a guy who’d had a pretty tough life, at least from what she could gather, and she was sure she hadn’t even scratched the surface when it came to his past. Yet, he had bought her a silly chocolate rose after knowing her less than five minutes just to cheer her up. She liked how she felt when she was with him. And although she hated hurting her mother, it made no sense to leave the person that made her forget about her problems and go back to a place she knew she was unhappy. Eventually, her mom would have to come to that understanding as well.

  “How much are we talkin’?” Toby asked as he adjusted the crate he was sitting on and watched Keenan run his finger over the VIN number on a motorcycle they’d stolen two weeks prior. It was a nice bike—a Yamaha only about a year old. Parked for several days in front of a house near the freeway on-ramp, it had been easy to load into Toby’s truck in the wee hours of the morning. No one had seen a thing.

  “Thirty K each,” Keenan said, and let his words sink in for a moment. It was dark and cool in the garage with the door pulled down to keep potentially meddling neighbors or a patrolling cop car from catching a glimpse of what they were doing.

  “Hand me that Dremel.” Toby gave Keenan the small hand sander and continued to think over the grinding noise as Keenan slowly made the bike’s identifying numbers disappear. Thirty thousand dollars was a lot of money, but Toby knew that kind of cash didn’t come easy. For a job to net serious money, there had to be some serious risk involved. And since the plan had germinated with Pedro, risk was a given.

  “All I have to do is drive?” Toby asked.

  “Yep. Get us in and out fast. Pedro and I will do the dirty work.” Dirty work. Toby didn’t like the sound of that. As a matter of fact, he didn’t like anything about this plan.

  “How do you even know they’re gonna leave the cash there by itself?” Toby asked, trying to find holes in the plan. Keenan turned off the sander and gave his cousin an incredulous look.

  “Because Pedro’s sources are good,” Keenan retorted, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Toby heaved a sigh, not convinced. “Look,” Keenan explained. “The best part of this whole thing is that Dawson can’t go to the cops. I mean, what is he gonna say? ‘Hey, Officer, I’d like to file a police report. A bunch of illegal drugs I planned to sell got ripped off’? Come on, once we’re out of there, we’re golden.”

  Toby leaned back and sipped his beer, which was starting to get warm. Dawson was known for being ruthless and vindictive. Even if they could pull off the robbery, there was a possibility that Dawson would find out who was behind it. And if he found out you were the one who screwed him over, you were as good as dead.

  “I just don’t get why someone as smart as Dawson would leave drugs and money unattended like that. Doesn’t make sense,” Toby said, trying to bring Keenan’s attention back to the flaw in the logistics. From the way Keenan looked at him, Toby could tell he was frustrated with the questions.

  “Because when you hide something, you think it’s fucking hidden, okay? That’s the point of hiding it. So you can go about your business and not sit there and guard it.�
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  Toby rubbed the stubble on his chin. He knew if he pressed any harder, it would turn into a fight. Keenan could be explosive and the last thing Toby wanted right now was to piss his cousin off. Finally, Toby just shrugged.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Keenan asked, referring to the shrug.

  “I don’t know,” Toby replied cautiously. “I’m doing okay with the other stuff.” The truth was, Toby didn’t feel like thinking about what Keenan was proposing. His mind was on Candace and whether or not she would actually come back. Toby knew there was a good chance that the time he spent with her had already come to an end. Neither had sought out the other. They’d just both been in the same place at the right time. But he’d been drawn to her immediately—her sad brown eyes and turned-up little nose that had become crimson from sniffling. Even with the gloom she carried with her, she was still a bright white blossom tucked there among a field of weeds.

  He’d enjoyed the time they spent lying side by side as the party wound down in the early morning hours. He liked sitting across from her at the diner. She was a refreshing change from the other girls he knew, the ones that showed up at his parties either drunk or high. Those girls were always conniving to find ways to spend some time alone with him. One even passed him on the way to the bathroom, grabbed his arm, and slipped a wrapped condom into his hand before whispering that she was “ready anytime he was.” Toby didn’t blame them for liking or wanting sex. How could he? He liked it too. It wasn’t that they were trying to find a way to fall into bed with him; it was more that that’s all they seemed to want. In ten years, Toby figured those same girls—and guys for that matter—would probably be doing the same thing they did now. Going to the same parties, getting loaded every Friday and Saturday night, just to get through their zombie-like existence Monday through Friday. They had no aspirations, no dreams, nothing besides a disturbing contentment with using drugs and sex and alcohol to escape their own choices.