I Stop Somewhere

by TE Carter

  However, there’s not caring, there’s being human and forgetting, and then there was …

  I can’t decide what to call it. I can’t call it apathy. Apathy doesn’t bite into your soul.

  My father had always been strong. But strength is a tourniquet. It isn’t a well. We can’t tap into it endlessly as the hurt spreads and takes out all that’s good. Strength dies because it can only hold off so much pain. When my dad saw what they’d written, he couldn’t fight anymore.

  I’d been missing for less than a week.

  After he left the kitchen and went to bed, I sat at the table and looked at the screen. He’d left it open, because he couldn’t bear to close it, but he couldn’t keep seeing those words, either. There was my picture, and then there were his pleas for information. The police were requesting anything anyone might have known about me. Pleading on my father’s behalf.

  Below my picture, below my father’s attempt at connecting with the people left in Hollow Oaks and our surrounding area, were the comments …

  Sure, I’ll help, but only if she’s my reward. I’d like to find her and give her a good spanking.

  That was the first one. The first thing anyone on Earth—after my father—had to say about what happened to me.

  My dad was taken down by twenty words. Twenty callous combinations of letters that were put out into the universe without thought.

  It got worse from there.

  She looks retarded.

  Typical. Welfare family and welfare kid. Glad she’s gone.

  Who cares? Probably trying to get attention. Teenagers today.

  Idiot parent. Nobody cares about your dumb kid.

  I was a slut, a loser, a freak, mentally ill, pathetic, privileged, disposable, spoiled, worthless, and a lot of other things. But after 136 comments, still nobody cared. It took until number 137, and even then, he didn’t care. He just wanted to call the others out.

  So my dad gave up, I went back to the room with the brown walls, and the world continued to fall apart.

  Now that Caleb and Noah are done with me, with all the girls, with what happened in that place, I go home. It’s time. I don’t know if anything’s changed, but as soon as I see my dad and Fred, I realize how much I’ve missed them. How much I’ve missed home.

  This place is full of me, even though for my dad, it probably feels empty. Hopelessly so.

  I miss it all so much. Even my room with its remnants of the people I wanted to be, with all those pieces scattered, trying to make the right kind of girl.

  Dad’s on the couch when I get there, watching the news. The living room is dustier than it was when I was alive. A coating of dust covers everything. There’s a glass and a dish on a tray table beside the couch, but he’s not eating. They’re both empty and I get the feeling they’ve been there awhile.

  One of the bulbs in the overhead light is burned out. I remember how I had to constantly replace them. Funny how many lightbulbs have burned out in my short life. How we accept the creeping darkness into our lives. We run to the store and replace them. As if light is that easy to hold on to.

  Fred is curled up next to my dad. I squeeze in beside him the way I used to and his ear twitches. I imagine petting him and even reach out my hand. There’s no connection, though; it’s only the memory of what his fur felt like on my fingers. Still, he wags his tail like he knows.

  My dad coughs.

  It’s nearly twilight. The room is dim and the half-burned-out light does nothing. The news drones on about stocks and politics and sports. My dad isn’t listening. Not really, but the sound is comfortable.

  I settle into the recollection of it all. The normalcy. The mundane. If I was still here, I’d probably be making dinner or doing homework.

  “Oh, Ellie, why didn’t you listen?” my dad asks.

  I wonder if he knows, if he can feel me here beside him. I try to reach out to him, across whatever there is between us. He doesn’t see me. Doesn’t know. He’s watching TV and talking to the news. Fred falls asleep and starts snoring.

  I’m gone.

  The permanence of it still doesn’t make sense. I’m not really gone. Not exactly. My body isn’t here, but I feel the same things. I want my dad to hug me. I want to curl up against Fred, to feel his whole body across the length of mine, to listen to the rumbles he makes when I pet him. I want to fall asleep on the throw rug and hope there’s a snow day tomorrow, because I’m too tired even to walk to my room.

  I still need to be someone, to be remembered. Isn’t that the same as being alive?

  “The case of Ellie Frias, the girl who disappeared in early November.” The newswoman says my name the same way she delivered the information about the recent public works cuts to the snow-removal budget. She’s going home after this, having a drink, wondering what landed her in a market like this. A dirty place, a relic.

  My face appears on screen. The perpetual yearbook picture. Of course.

  The bored anchor continues.

  “When Frias went missing, a full investigation was launched, but the police were unable to find anything. They determined at the time that she likely ran away. Law enforcement officers and child psychologists across the state agreed that it’s not uncommon to find a teenager desperate for an escape from her life. While the case remains open, at this time we are told no new information has been presented to the police. We aren’t sure what brought on this renewed interest. All we’ve been told is that they are reviewing a possible link between Ellie Frias and two girls who’ve come forward with some shocking allegations. Cassie Haddom is live in Hollow Oaks with more.”

  A woman, barely older than me, appears. She’s not accustomed to spring here. She’s wearing a jacket and scarf. Locals are in shorts.

  “Thanks, Maria. That’s correct. Two young women have come forward with accusations against boys in town who they believe may have a connection to Frias. We are told one, in fact, was previously questioned about a relationship he had with the girl.”

  The screen is cut in two to allow Maria and Cassie to discuss my life, my relationships, and the investigation.

  I don’t know why Cassie is in Hollow Oaks. She’s standing on a street with no houses, and she has no information. She could have reported from her office, and she could have avoided looking out of place with her cold and her shivering.

  “Have you been given any names, Cassie?” Maria asks.

  “Not at this time. Names and details are not being released yet. We believe some of the parties may be minors and we’re told there are other pressing privacy concerns.”

  I don’t own privacy anymore. It’s another function of the living, I suppose. My name is spread across the television, with a terrible picture of me on the bottom right, below Cassie’s face. A study in contrasts. The successful and beautiful woman, and the unwanted mess of a girl.

  Dad turns the television off. It’s weird to be on the other end of a news story. I’m sure he’s relieved they’re looking again, but it’s hard to hope. It’s been at least five months. Even if they find me, he must know there’s not much chance I’m found alive. All that’s left now is closure, but that’s not a guarantee. Some people get closure; others just go on living because it’s the only option.

  If there was one thing I would wish for … one more thing on my massive pile of wishes, it would be the ability to tell him. To tell him that I didn’t run away, that I didn’t leave him willingly, that I wanted to live. I’d tell him that I love him. Tell him all the things I should have said and didn’t. Because we don’t.

  “Ready for a walk, Fred?” Fred looks up and whines, stretching himself out across the sofa. “I miss her, too. All the time.”

  He goes to get Fred’s leash, leaving the dirty plates and ignoring the burned-out lightbulb. When he comes back for Fred, I see the tears before he wipes them away. He edges past me as he takes Fred and they head out.

  I don’t follow them. I don’t want to be aware of how I can’t feel the breeze as we run
. How I can’t differentiate between temperatures or watch my breath remind me that spring takes a bit longer here. I can’t hug either of them or tell them I’m sorry. I can’t and so I stay, not crying the tears that don’t come.

  Instead, I go up to my room when they leave.

  I haven’t seen it in months, but everything’s been moved around. Dad, the police, who knows who else …

  My diary sits on the dresser, opened and inspected. I imagine what it must have been like, a team of people reading my secrets, trying to decipher me, trying to find connections between the little pieces I left them.

  I want to get away from this place.

  Those were the last words I wrote in my diary. A week before. They taunt me from the dresser. They told the police what they wanted to hear.

  The thing about my diary is that I lied in it. I obscured the truth. I never told even the empty space around me the whole story. I was afraid someone would find it, read it, know me. I wanted them to know a different girl. A better one. I didn’t want someone to tell my dad about the parts of me he would have been ashamed of.

  I try to picture it, having a stranger in here, looking through the objects and creating an image of a girl. I try to imagine the Ellie they found. Who did they ask about me, and what did they say?

  Next to my diary is the box of mementos I’d saved. The things we all hold on to while we grow up. Our soul in a shoe box. That’s what a girl becomes. She becomes a shoe box of fishing line, concert ticket stubs, hastily written notes from study hall, a dog collar, a pair of parrot earrings, the diamond heart from a boy she thought she loved. She becomes the things she can’t bear to throw away. Things she holds on to but that aren’t part of the girl she’s become. Or the girl she wants to be.

  Am I these things? What would someone know of me from this room? It’s all pieces of other people. Of the lives I thought were more than mine.

  Nothing makes sense. Nothing in this room makes me a girl. I have no secret music collection, no life passions, no real interests. Just cutouts of the lives I wanted instead. Looking around my bedroom, it’s so clear now. I never was.

  Seeing it makes me angry. I missed it, but being here hurts.

  I never wanted much. I only wanted to be a girl.

  I know I wasn’t very good at it. At being a girl. At being human. I hurt my dad. I didn’t say the things I should have said. I wasn’t Kate’s friend. I was selfish and naïve. I wanted so badly to be a girl that I fell for a boy I thought loved me. I fell for the first boy who called me beautiful. I fell in love with those words and I believed them and I let him make me think I was special. I chased those words until I fell for the wrong boy. Until I fell in love with the boy who killed me.

  I don’t want to think of these things. Not here. Not in my room. A place I wanted to come home to and have it feel warm again when I arrived. But I can’t feel warm here, because my room is like the houses Caleb and I visited. It’s like the house and the room where I died. A place that belongs to a ghost.

  It suits me better dead. My room is like a tomb. Which is fine, because it’s the only one I’ll get. Since nobody knows where to find me.

  chapter twenty-one

  By the lake, there’s this hidden spot. You’d never notice it. There’s the road and the trees. It’s something people pass all the time, seeing just the road and the trees. But if you look closely, if you stop and pause, there’s a break in it. And in that break is a path that’s dusted over with years of leaves and branches—dusted over with all the parts of life we don’t notice because we’re too wrapped up in the human parts. Who said what about whom. What someone did. What they meant by something. But in the quiet between all the worry and all the things we fill our minds with, the world goes on.

  Kate and I found this place once. Right before she left. She’d finished packing and we walked along the road toward the lake. She was leaving in the morning. I wondered which shirts she’d ended up packing. I hadn’t really been paying attention. Of course, I didn’t realize there was something else in what she was doing. That she didn’t care that much about shirts. That she was trying to decide what parts of herself to keep when she moved on from Hollow Oaks.

  “Hey, come here,” she said. Cars didn’t come out this way much. One had passed twenty minutes earlier, but it was just us on the road now.

  I followed her as she dragged me into the trees. “Check it out. There’s something back here.”

  Two of the trees rested, broken in half, one hugging the other. They made an archway over the path. I ducked under the trees, one of the branches scraping the back of my neck as I shimmied underneath, and we crossed into what was left of a picnic spot. There was a table, splintered wood with one bench. The sign that used to say something about the place was rusted over and coated with what happens when we forget places. I don’t know what you call that kind of rot.

  “This is awesome,” Kate said. “It’s this entire secret world.”

  It wasn’t a world. It was a small circle on the edge of a cliff overlooking the lake, where people had sat once, eating sandwiches. It was another memory in a town full of nothing else.

  I sat on the bench seat, looking out over the water. People were boating. It was still summer and there was still that quiet comfort of knowing the day would take forever to die.

  “You don’t seem very excited,” Kate said, sitting next to and above me, on the picnic table itself. She peeled loose pieces of wood from the top, splinters becoming dandelion seeds. Her nail polish was already chipped.

  “I can’t believe you’re leaving.”

  She lay down across the table, her long legs kicking off the back, and she squeezed my face. “Ellie, baby.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “Forget it. Forget I said anything.”

  I didn’t know how to have friends. I knew we weren’t actually friends. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I was probably nothing more to her than someone to fill the space in her boredom. I certainly wasn’t a good friend to her. I didn’t know her. I didn’t ask questions. But having a sort of friend was still better than being alone. Mostly, I wanted to believe we were friends. Or that we could be. I liked Kate. I just didn’t know how to find Kate through all my thoughts about me that waited between us.

  “Don’t be sad. Come visit me,” she said. “Come discover the exciting world of Ohio.”

  “You picked it,” I reminded her.

  She started to play with my hair. The chopped mess from where the blue had faded was growing out. “You should let me redo this before I go.”

  “Why are you going to Ohio?”

  She smiled. “It’s the only place that would have me.”

  “Seriously,” I said.

  Kate wouldn’t look at me. “I don’t know. There’s just … I needed space. This town suffocates you.”

  My father had said it before, too. I never felt it, though. Not then. I liked the town. Except for how sad it was. The way things got left behind. I didn’t like that, but I blamed people, not a town. I didn’t have big goals, so I never felt like the town was stopping me from reaching them. All I really wanted was to be someone.

  “I think I’m going to sleep with Caleb.” Kate kept playing with my hair, kept looking past me, at the trees. “I mean, I want to. Not because he’s asked or anything. Really.”

  “He hasn’t asked?”

  Asking implies communication. We hadn’t talked about it. Not exactly. He’d pushed further each time, finding new parts of me to explore, but we hadn’t said anything about it. His hands went further, and things moved forward. He’d hinted at it. He talked about how good we’d be together, but we never actually said the words. He never asked me if I wanted to and I never brought it up. He simply tested the line and pushed just past it. Far enough to move us closer, but not far enough that I stopped him.

  “No. I mean, he wants to. I can tell. He hasn’t really asked or anything. But he definitely wants it to happen,” I said. “I do, too.” />
  “Are you sure? You really think you’re ready to have sex?” Kate asked.

  “I am.” I paused. “Yeah. I think so. I think I want to.”

  She sat up and returned to pulling the wood of the table apart. “It’s a big deal, Ellie.”

  “Is it?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Well, I mean, it’s a big deal for my church. And my dad might be mad. But it’s not like people don’t do it all the time. You have, haven’t you?”

  She sighed. Parts of the bench had been white once, and now the paint was peeling, crackling off in strips and flakes. She slid to the edge, where the white was trying to hold on, and slipped a painted fingernail underneath a piece of it, watching it flutter on her hand before the wind took it over the cliff.

  “Ohio was the farthest my parents would let me go that wasn’t here.”

  “Kate? Have you? Why won’t you answer me?” I asked.

  She was pretty. Older. All the things I wished I was. She knew things that she never said, but they rested on her. She walked like she understood the subtle places of the world, and her eyes always felt full of stories. Yet she didn’t explain. She never said anything and I didn’t ask. She held herself apart from it, and now I realize that sometimes, we do whatever it takes to survive. I wish so much that I’d asked her what had hurt her.

  “No. I haven’t. It’s not really … We don’t have the same kind of friends.”

  “I have you. You’re my friend.”

  “We don’t have similar experiences, Ellie. My high school years were … well, I wasn’t where you are. I didn’t really get involved with guys.”

  “So you don’t think I should?” I asked.

  “I think you should do what you want, but I also think you need to consider what someone like Caleb will expect. You’re not going to be his first, you know.”

  I hadn’t asked him. I thought there was a chance he’d been with other girls, but I didn’t want to know. I hated the thought of it, because it made what we did feel less special. It made it feel like something people do. Not something we did.