by Kara Thomas
“Has anyone heard from Ari?” Emily turns and addresses the group, looking desperate for an excuse to stop talking to me. Callie and Sabrina sit down on the last unoccupied milk crate, their backs pressed against each other’s so they can both fit.
Callie’s gaze flicks downward. It’s one story I’ve never been able to piece together from her Facebook profile alone, why she and Ariel Kouchinsky don’t talk anymore.
Ariel wrote me a few letters when I first moved to Florida; flowery envelopes adorned with so many Disney stickers that the mailperson could barely read my address. Ariel’s parents didn’t let her call me—her father was a mean bastard who always barked at us to get out of the house and go ride our bikes.
A year or so ago, I noticed that Callie unfriended Ariel. Or maybe it was the other way around.
“You invited Ari?” Sabrina takes a pull from the cigarette in her fingers, the end glowing orange. “That’s awkward.”
“I don’t care.” It’s not Callie who speaks up. It’s the guy in the Steelers hat. The one I don’t know. Up by the fire, I can get a better look at his face. It’s wide, with reddish-brown stubble up his jaw. He’s heavier than most Fayette guys, and his wide mouth is unsmiling.
I realize I do recognize him from somewhere—Ari’s profile pictures, before she deleted her account a couple months ago. This guy is her boyfriend. Or was her boyfriend. From the sound of it.
He crushes his beer can and throws it into the fire. Next to me, Emily checks her phone, her lips pinching with worry.
“Have you even heard from her, Nick?” she asks the guy. He shrugs.
“Her pops banged on my door this morning asking if she was staying with me,” he says. “I guess she took off.”
Emily frowns. “Took off where?”
“The fuck would I know?” Nick cracks open another beer and leans back in his Adirondack chair. It occurs to me that this is probably his farm, and I feel even more like an intruder now.
He catches me staring at him, and my face burns so hot, I feel as if I could disintegrate. I avert my eyes and look to the fire.
“I hope she’s okay,” Sabrina says quietly. Callie is still looking at the ground, bending the front part of her flip-flop. She lets it go, and the rubber thwacks against her foot.
“You know how she’s always talking.” Nick takes his hat off and mashes it between his hands. “Saying she’s gonna leave and get her own place.”
Ariel is the second oldest of five kids. Her sister Katie is only ten months younger than her; they were always fighting. Once, Callie and I went over to see the mutt that had followed their father home from work at a construction site. Ari and Katie fought until they were both in tears over what to name him. When Mr. Kouchinsky heard them screaming at each other, he got his shotgun off the mantel and went out back where the dog was tied up. Ari grabbed his pants leg and screamed until Mrs. Kouchinsky had to come downstairs and rip her off him.
When her father came back inside, he said it was a mercy because the dog had been badly starved and infested with mites and fleas. We all clung to each other on the couch, crying hysterically, while Mr. Kouchinsky walked by as if he hadn’t even seen us.
I don’t blame Ariel for wanting to run away. Sometimes I think I would have too, maybe, if I’d had to stay in Fayette. Followed in my sister’s footsteps. But I’d be kidding myself if I thought I could survive on my own like Jos did.
My sister was the one who could weasel an invite to someone’s house for dinner, while I whined through my chapped lips about how I was hungry and wanted macaroni and cheese. Joslin was the one who would fall off her bike and get right back up, while I wailed over a scraped knee. To this day I’d sooner go hungry or subsist on potato chips than work up the balls to go through the drive-through, out of fear I’ll do it wrong.
Ari will never make it on her own, I think. She was even needier than I was, always breaking into tears because she forgot her lunch bag on the bus. Our first-grade teacher had to leave a box of tissues on Ari’s desk because she would forget to wipe her nose, snot dripping down her face as she traced the letters in our handwriting books.
There’s an ache in my chest. I wish she were here right now, clinging to me with her bony fingers and nails bit down to the cuticle.
“Ari would have told me if she was leaving.” Emily plucks the tab off her beer, wincing and slipping her torn thumb nail between her lips.
Ryan speaks up, and I notice that he’s not drinking his beer either. “My uncle hasn’t said anything. If it was serious, her parents would have reported her missing.”
An image surfaces in my mind: a photo on the front page of the county newspaper. Officer Jason Elwood, in full uniform, as one of the pallbearers at Harvey Elwood’s funeral. Ryan’s father. He’d been a firefighter; four other men had died with him. It had been a three-alarm at an abandoned warehouse. Almost half of Fayette’s fire department had been gone in less than an hour. Ryan had been five years old.
His uncle Jay wasn’t assigned to Lori Cawley’s murder, but he came to the trial to support the officers who had to testify. The entire police department did.
Ryan’s gaze flicks toward Callie. Something about the way he looks at her makes the smallest sliver of jealousy move through me. Danny, Joslin’s boyfriend, used to look at Jos the same way.
“You love him more than you love me,” I whined one night when Jos slipped under the covers after being out late, smelling of sweat and cigarette smoke and something else I couldn’t place. I expected her to pinch me and say she’d always love me the most, but instead she hissed, “Knock it off. You sound like Mom,” and rolled to face the wall.
I’d always thought that was the first crack, the beginning of the chasm between us. But now I think it must have started earlier—when my father was taken away and I suddenly couldn’t sleep alone without waking in hysterics. Jos probably thought it was pathetic that I had to sleep in the bed with her.
Just like Callie resents being stuck with me now.
Around the bonfire, everyone slips back into their private conversations. Next to me, Callie whispers to Sabrina, “I can’t believe Ari would just run away.”
“Well, wouldn’t you? If we weren’t going to college, and had to stay here for the rest of our lives?”
Callie pulls her knees up to her chest. “I don’t want to think about that.”
“You don’t have to,” Sabrina says. “Less than two months, babes. And we can leave this place behind forever.”
Callie finally looks up. She looks right at me. And I know exactly what she’s thinking.
As long as Tessa doesn’t screw everything up.
Maggie is washing dishes as I pad quietly down the stairs in the morning. She looks up at me and sets her sponge down. My stomach dips. She and Rick were asleep when we got back last night. Did she figure out that I drove her minivan home because Callie got obliterated?
But she smiles. “You girls—I’m so glad you finally spent some time alone together. You have fun?”
“Yeah,” I lie. “Do you mind if I take a walk? There’s a couple people I want to catch up with.”
“Of course not.” She wipes her hands on a dishrag and turns the faucet off. “Can I drive you?”
“No, thanks,” I say. “I kind of need to be alone, if that’s okay.”
Maggie nods absently. Everything would be so much easier if I could just ask to use the damn computer. I know I need to work on that.
It’s not even that I’m afraid Maggie would say no. Of course she wouldn’t. It’s just that I’ve always found it especially difficult to accept things from the people who would give me anything.
The person, I correct myself.
The library is a twenty-minute walk from the Greenwoods’ house, and I don’t have a card to get on the computers there anyway. Much closer is a printing shop on Main Street that advertised web access, so I head there.
I use my shoulder to push open the door. A bell tinkles at the back
of the store. There’s a computer at the front, and a laminated sign overhead that says FOR PRINTER USE ONLY!!! Underline, underline, bold. Well, that’s obnoxious. It only makes me want to ignore the sign more.
I hop onto Google and get two hits for Brandy Butler. One is a Facebook page for a middle-aged woman in Delaware who is most definitely not my sister. Jos would be twenty-six now.
The other hit is a public record for a car loan. Someone named Brandy Butler applied for it four years ago, in a town called Catasauqua. I search for Catasauqua to Fayette, my stomach sinking when I see that Catasauqua is just outside Allentown—about five hours from here by car. An even longer trip on the Greyhound bus. I pull up the schedule as a hairy arm drapes over the top of the computer. Its owner, a stocky man in a sweat-stained polo shirt, peers at me.
“Computer’s for printing,” he grunts.
I swallow and eyeball the search results. The last Greyhound to Allentown leaves in fifteen minutes, from a truck stop half an hour from here.
“Sorry.” I click out of the windows and scramble off the stool.
“Hey!” The man doesn’t pursue me, but I keep running anyway.
He looked familiar. It’s not until there are several blocks between the print shop and me that I decide I don’t know him. Everyone here just looks the same.
•••
Now that I have less than a day left in Pennsylvania, I know that my sister is most likely in the state. After years of thinking she was nestled in the mountains of Colorado or in a straw hut in Maui, she’s here.
It feels as if the universe were screwing with me—until I remind myself that even if I’d made it onto the Greyhound, I’d still have to be back in Fayette by five o’clock tomorrow morning. That’s almost as impossible as tracking down one woman in a town of more than five thousand. Almost.
I head down the alley between the pizzeria and a smoke shop that wasn’t there ten years ago, my thoughts returning to my sister. No one in town was surprised when Jos left. She was a Sports Illustrated model in a sea of girls with crooked teeth and flat chests. No women wanted Jos around their sons. Or their husbands. She dropped out of school her senior year, a few months before she ran away. There were rumors that she was pregnant, that our mother threw her out, or both.
And now she’s back. It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t want to see me. She has the answers I need, and this is the closest I’ll ever be to her again. I can’t let her get away this time.
I can’t get on that plane.
Maggie said I could stay as long as I needed. But with Callie around, it doesn’t seem like a viable option. The bonfire last night showed me that I definitely don’t belong here. I’m surrounded by strangers, looking for Joslin, the one person who could already be long gone.
I cut across Main Street, skidding to a halt on the sidewalk when I see them.
Cop cars. Three of them, in front of a blue town house with a crumbling brown porch. There’s a Razor scooter and a soccer ball lying on the lawn.
I know that house. Sometimes when I see a stray dog, I can hear the gunshot and Ariel’s wails.
A group of teenage boys has gathered on the corner across from the Kouchinskys’ house. I can’t get a good look at their faces, so I don’t know if I know them. Knew them.
“Shut up, man,” one of the guys is saying.
Another one—a redhead—leans against his bike. “I’m telling you, it’s her.”
“What’s her?”
The guys turn around, stare at me as if I were an alien. The guy with the black hair, who told the redhead to shut up, is Decker Lucas. I always got stuck next to him in elementary school because he was right behind me in the alphabet. Decker was always getting yelled at for something—forgetting his gym sneakers at home, leaving a bologna sandwich in his desk over the weekend.
Not much has changed about him, except for his face. Something is missing. Glasses. He blinks at me with wide blue eyes, his mouth parting. He looks like a comic book character come to life. “Whoa. Tessa Lowell.”
“What happened at the Kouchinskys’?” I claw at the hole on my thigh for something to do. If I keep at it, I’m going to shred it big enough to flash everyone. But I can’t stop myself. The sight of all those cops is making me anxious.
“Ariel’s been missing.” The redhead spits on the sidewalk, his beady eyes looking me up and down. “Cops in Mason found a body this morning.”
“They don’t know whose body,” Decker cuts in. “Could be anyone. Like an old person or something.”
My breath catches in my chest. I see her clinging to her father’s leg again.
I see the princess stickers on the purple envelopes. Write back!!!
“Where in Mason was the body?” I squeak out. “Not off I-70, right?”
Decker’s friend—the redhead—shrugs and hops onto his skateboard. He stands on it, wobbling back and forth as we stare at the Kouchinsky house, silent.
A beat later, there’s movement on their porch. A uniformed officer escorts a gray wisp of a woman onto the porch swing—Ariel’s mother. She’s so much shorter, thinner than when I last saw her, as if time had eaten away at her.
She collapses into the officer’s arms and lets out a splintering cry. Behind her, two small faces look out the window.
The redheaded guy spits again, maneuvering his skateboard so he doesn’t roll over the wet spot. “Don’t sound like it’s anyone.”
By the time the Greenwoods’ house is within view, the back of my shirt is soaked with sweat and the bridge of my nose is sunburned. I ran most of the way here, because I can’t wait to find out if it’s true.
I hear a screen door slam; Callie barrels down the Greenwoods’ porch steps, not noticing me on the sidewalk. She makes it halfway down the driveway before she stops; she buries her face in her hands, and my stomach sinks.
It’s true, and Callie found out in the fifteen minutes it took me to get here.
Callie turns and heads for the backyard before I can call out to her. I lean against the mailbox and catch my breath; it feels like there are a million pinpricks in my lungs.
Everyone at the party last night thought Ariel had run away. She could have been dying while we sat around the bonfire.
When my breathing evens out, I follow the fence around the side of the house. Callie left the gate open.
She’s sitting on the grass, her palms pressed to her face. I have to cough to get her to look up. Her cheeks fill with color when she sees me. “What do you want?”
“Is Ariel dead?”
Callie tears out a fistful of grass in a single, violent motion and lets the blades fall through her fingers. “They have to ID the body, but yeah, it’s her.”
Body. I picture Ariel, discarded by a highway guardrail. Ariel, with her scraped-up elbows and legs from falling off her bike, and her pink mouth smelling of fake strawberries, from the Lip Smacker lip balm she carried in her pocket everywhere so her sister couldn’t steal it.
I realize I’m picturing Ariel as she was ten years ago. My stomach clenches. “How did she die?”
“Don’t know,” Callie says. Her face is still beet red. I think she’s going to lose it, cry, do something, but instead, she takes a deep breath. And looks straight at me. “There’s a vigil tonight at the high school. If you want to come or whatever.”
Terrible Tessa wants to say no. Whenever someone young dies, lots of people congregate, and as a general rule, I like to avoid places where lots of people congregate. In those situations everyone is either devastated or morbidly curious, and I don’t know which side I come down on. I haven’t even spoken to Ari in years.
But she was my friend, and Maggie will be disappointed in me if I don’t go. For some reason, that matters. Maybe because I don’t have many people left to disappoint.
•••
We get stuck in a line of cars waiting to enter the parking lot. Fayette High is small; my elementary school class had fewer than a hundred kids. Around the time I left, p
eople started panicking about the dropout rate and started campaigning to reinstall vocational programs.
In the front seat, Maggie stares ahead, a pan of zucchini bread in her lap. “Maybe we’ll drop you girls off. Daddy and I can go sit with Ruth for a bit and pick you up later.”
Callie takes off her seat belt and gets out of the car without a word. Maggie tosses me a helpless glance over her shoulder. If Rick weren’t here, I’d tell her what’s on my mind, that I think I may have found where my sister is staying, and I need a few more days in Pennsylvania to figure it out.
Instead, I thank her for the ride and follow Callie, who is already several strides ahead of me.
“Hey,” I say. “You’re pretty shitty to your mom.”
Callie’s shoulders tense, but she doesn’t stop walking. I catch up to her, smelling something acrid when she sighs.
“Does she know you have a drinking problem?” I ask.
“You sound like a pamphlet.”
She stops short of the gymnasium doors, something dark eclipsing her businesslike expression. “I can’t go in yet.”
“Okay.” We step to the side, letting the people behind us go in. I tug at the sleeves of my sweatshirt; it still smells like smoke from the bonfire.
Callie takes off around the corner of the gym, toward the auditorium, where the buses line up at the end of the day. She doesn’t object when I follow her.
There’s an oak tree at the back of the bus lot; beneath it are three guys. I can see the tendrils of smoke coming out of their noses from here. As Callie and I get closer, I spot Nick, Steelers-hat guy from last night. The moon gives his face a ghastly whiteness. His eyes are bloodshot.
“Fuck this, man,” he says, offering Callie his joint.
She shakes her head and wraps her arms around her chest. “What else you got?”
Nick reaches into his pocket and produces an unlabeled bottle of something amber. Callie grabs it before I can voice my feelings on accepting untrustworthy-looking liquids from people. They’re pretty similar to my feelings about meeting people in dark parking lots.