by Rix, Dan
No Vincent.
“Huh,” I said, still confused.
So I must have been remembering the photo on Malcolm’s phone.
But I could have sworn there was only one photo.
“Hang on,” I said, “is there anything new on his Facebook profile?”
Jace tapped his screen, scrolled down, tapped some more, then frowned. “Does he even have a Facebook profile?”
“Yes, Jace, he does.” My voice had an edge now.
He was acting like he barely knew Vincent, like he was merely an acquaintance, when the five of us had been inseparable for the last nine months.
“Well, nothing’s coming up.”
“He probably unfriended you,” I snapped. “Wow, I’m not surprised.”
“No, I can’t even find his profile.”
“Did he delete it?” Zoe asked.
“Everybody shut up.” Malcolm raised his phone to his cheek to make a call, holding up his finger to silence us.
A garbled voice picked up on the other end.
“Yo, Stevie-boy,” Malcolm turned away from us, “do you remember a guy named Vincent Ferguson? He was in AP Calc with you . . . little black kid with glasses . . . uh-huh . . . really? You’ve never heard of him?”
He hung up and faced us with a raised eyebrow.
I was short of breath suddenly, my brain racing to catch up.
No, Malcolm didn’t think . . .
“He . . . he wasn’t very popular,” I mumbled.
“Call everybody on your phone that might have known him,” he said, his voice deadly serious. “Ask if they remember him.”
We stood there, frozen.
“Call them,” he barked. “Now!”
Malcolm’s voice startled us into action. Zoe, Jace, and I raced through our contact lists, calling everybody we knew.
“Vincent . . . Vincent Ferguson . . . do you remember him?”
“. . . A little black kid with glasses . . .”
“He would have been a junior . . . he was best friends with Trevor Weaver, the guy who killed himself . . .”
But the answers were all the same.
“You don’t remember him?”
“Really? You don’t remember a Vincent Ferguson?”
“You’ve never even heard of him?”
As I made phone call after phone call, getting the same answer each time, my pulse made a nauseating drumbeat in my temples.
We hung up and stared around wide-eyed at each other.
Not only was he missing, but no one at school even remembered Vincent.
What the hell was going on here?
Just then, Mrs. Johnson bustled into the basement with a tray of ham and cheese sandwiches and a pitcher of juice. “Hi, guys! I made you lunch.”
“Mrs. Johnson, wait,” I called before she could leave, “do you remember our friend, Vincent Ferguson? He’s usually always with us.”
The others went stock-still, waiting as she tapped her chin.
“Hmm . . . Vincent . . . Vincent . . .” She smiled at me. “No, the name doesn’t ring a bell.”
My stomach seemed to drop.
“Mom, he’s been over here a hundred times,” said Jace. “You met him.”
“He’s the fifth one in our group,” Zoe said softly. “We always hang out with him.”
“Really? Seems like it’s always just you four.” Her eyebrows knitted together, and she tapped her chin again. “Was he that boy I met with the long hair? Your musician friend?”
“That’s Mark, Mom. I hate that guy. Vincent’s short, he’s black, he’s got these big old dorky glasses straight out of the eighties, he always wears polo shirts and khakis with white New Balance tennis shoes . . .” Seeing her blank look, he added, “Come on, Mom, he’s been here like every day for the last two months.”
“Yeah, I don’t know him. Sorry, hon.” She shrugged and headed for the stairs.
No one spoke for a moment.
I felt hollow.
As if part of me had disappeared along with Vincent.
No one remembered him. No one but us.
Bewildered, I looked from the corkboard to my phone, still open to my contact list.
His phone number was gone from my phone. In his house, every photo of him had been removed. In the woods, his footsteps just ended.
What on earth could have done that?
How could a boy, and all memory of him, be erased?
What really happened to him—to all of us—the night of that crash?
“One person we still haven’t talked to,” Malcolm said.
I looked up. “Who?”
“His mom.” He grabbed a sandwich. “Let’s go. Saturday morning . . . she should be home.”
I felt a flare of hope.
Surely his mom would remember him. She had to.
Outside, we piled into Malcolm’s convertible, Zoe swatting away bugs, and drove straight to Vincent’s house. We lapsed into silence. None of us dared voice the question on all of our minds.
If his mom didn’t remember him either, if literally no one remembered him, then what?
“Her car’s in the driveway,” said Jace, as we pulled up.
“Let me do the talking. You guys’ll freak her out.” Malcolm yanked his parking brake and vaulted out of the car, leaving us jogging to catch up.
He rang the doorbell.
After two seconds, Jace raised his fist to knock, but Malcolm caught his wrist.
Inside, footsteps approached the door, and the peephole flickered.
Then, with a heavy clack, the door opened only a few inches before a security chain snapped taut, and a suspicious face peered through the gap.
“Whatever you’re selling, whatever Jehovah’s Witness crap you’re pushing, I am not interested.”
We’d met Vincent’s mom before.
Once.
She’d been distracted, absent-minded, but not rude like this.
Before she could pull the door shut, I blurted out, “Wait, Mrs. Ferguson, we need to ask you about—”
Malcolm shot me a warning look, shutting me up, then continued in a diplomatic voice. “Ma’am, do you remember us? We’re friends of your son, Vincent.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits, but she didn’t close the door.
“Do you remember us?” he asked again.
“Nope,” she said.
“Ma’am—” I started.
Malcolm shushed me again.
“Are you Mrs. Ferguson, Vincent Ferguson’s mother?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes narrowing even more.
Malcolm and I exchanged a hopeful look.
“Can we ask you about your son?” said.
“Nope. Goodbye.” She started to pull the door shut.
“Wait, wait!” he cried, sticking up his palms. “Mrs. Ferguson, listen, he may have been kidnapped . . . did he come home last night?”
She made a disgusted noise in her throat. “This someone’s idea of a sick joke?”
“It’s not a joke. Do you know where Vincent is right now?”
She glared at us, and I wanted to shrink away from her—never before had I seen so much hate in one person’s eyes.
“My boy, Vincent,” she said, spitting out every word, “is right where he’s been for the last ten years . . . in Shady Oaks Cemetery.”
She slammed the door in our faces.
Chapter 11
There were fresh flowers on Vincent’s grave, though the gravestone looked ancient.
We gathered around it in stunned silence—we’d driven straight to shady Oaks Cemetery from his mom’s house.
Vincent’s grave.
His grave . . . when we’d seen him alive only two days ago.
Vincent Marcus Ferguson
November 10, 1999 – January 19, 2007
We’d seen him alive.
He was next to me in the car, laughing and joking and trying to scare me.
He was there.
We had so many memories of him
—that time he and Trevor built a potato cannon for their ninth grade science project and broke the school gym window, that time he and Malcolm hacked the school’s intercom system and played an hour of Taylor Swift before they got caught, that weekend he and I did a scavenger hunt of Trevor’s favorite spots around town, so we could say goodbye to him.
Where had so many memories gone?
According to the tombstone, he’d died when he was seven.
It didn’t say how.
As I read the inscription—He was one who followed dreams, stars and ships—a tear blossomed in my eye.
Where was he now? Where was the sixteen-year-old we’d known? Where was our Vincent?
“What the FUCK!” Malcolm roared, spinning away to kick a nearby oak tree.
“He’s not dead,” I whispered. “He can’t be dead . . .”
“Man, this is like a bad dream,” Jace said.
“He’s been erased,” Zoe murmured. “His whole life has been erased.”
My gaze wandered to the other side of the cemetery, toward a shady bunch of oak trees, the location of my brother’s tombstone—which I visited every week, without fail. From here, I could even see the dots of yellow and violet from the flowers I’d brought a few days ago, their petals still vibrant despite the summer heat.
Nine months of visiting this cemetery to see my brother, and not once had I visited this gravestone.
Not once had I crossed the lawn to visit his best friend.
To visit Vincent.
No, this had to be a fake gravestone.
With a knot in my throat, I pulled out my phone. “Guys, I’m calling the police now . . . something really weird is going on.”
This time, no one argued.
“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?” answered the operator.
The officer emerged from Vincent’s house after questioning his mom and blew out a loud sigh. “We got a doozy here, alright.”
The four of us leapt to our feet on the front porch and spoke all at once.
“What’d she say?” I said.
“Does she know where he is?” said Zoe.
“You check the bedrooms like I told you?” said Malcolm.
“Move along, move along.” He ushered us down the driveway. “Come on, you four, back in the street. She doesn’t want you in her yard.”
Reluctantly, we obeyed, gathering around his Chevy Tahoe while he scribbled some final notes in a tiny notebook.
They’d been in there almost half an hour, talking in low voices.
Surely, he’d learned something of interest.
Of course, the first thing the cops wanted to do after we called them was talk to Vincent’s mom.
We should have lied.
We should have told them we didn’t know who she was. At least, that way, they would have started at the crash site and it wouldn’t seem like we were lying assholes.
“You guys are aware,” he muttered, still scribbling, “that Vincent Ferguson has been dead for a while, according to his mother.”
“Yes, we told you that,” I said. “We told you she’d say that. But he was with us two nights ago, I swear.”
He frowned at his notes, then straightened up, wiping sweat off his forehead.
Earlier, while we were waiting, Zoe and I had called our parents, too.
They didn’t remember Vincent, either.
Jace’s mom, I could almost understand—except for an endless supply of snacks and juice, she respected our privacy and let us do whatever we wanted down in Jace’s basement pad, whether it was staying up till three a.m. watching horror movies, trying pot for the first time (disaster), or playing strip poker (another disaster—Zoe and I were down to our bras and underwear when we realized Malcolm was rigging the deck). So I could understand if she’d overlooked Vincent.
But my parents?
Vincent and Trevor had been best friends since grammar school. Growing up, Vincent had been like a fifth member of the family.
It was like having your parents forget about a cousin, or an aunt.
No. Just no.
“Alright, let’s go over this again.” Officer Craig Schapiro—a young cop with soft brown eyes, but a piercing stare—pointed at me. “Remi. You’re Remi, right?”
“Yeah. Remi Weaver.”
“Okay, start with the flash. What happened after the flash?”
I swallowed, my throat dry. “Well, all the lights went out for a few seconds, and I think Jace was trying to brake, which didn’t work, and when they came back on, we were like five feet from the edge, and then we just went over. I remember screaming, and I felt Vincent’s body bumping into mine the whole time, so I know he was still right next to me.”
“Then what?” he said.
“Then I . . .” I hesitated, knowing it wouldn’t sound good.
“Then you woke up?”
Heat rushed to my face. “It wasn’t a dream,” I stammered. “When I woke up, I was bleeding—”
“I thought he was the one bleeding.” The cop gestured to Malcolm.
“Right, he was, but . . .”
“She was bleeding, too,” Malcolm added, saving me. “Three scratches right down her back, like claws.”
I bit my lip, trying not to shudder.
The cop looked up. “Do you still have them?”
I nodded and turned around so he could nudge down the top of my tank top.
“I see ’em.” He scribbled something in the corner of his little book, scrunching his hand to make it fit. “Remi, what’s the very last thing you remember?”
I took a deep breath, grateful he was asking questions and taking this seriously. I wanted him to ask, I wanted him to question, I wanted him to cross-examine us, because maybe we’d missed something obvious, maybe this would all turn out to be a misunderstanding—God, I hoped it would.
“Well, we were crashing down the ravine. I remember thinking it was like the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland, you know, how you’re in the Jeep and it’s bouncing all over the place? Well, that’s what it was like, but a thousand times worse, and then this huge branch—I think it was a branch, at least—swooped out of the darkness, and then it was like I blinked, and I was suddenly in my bed.”
“You don’t remember how you got those scratches?”
“No, sir.”
He took more notes, tilting his book sideways. “So this friend of yours—Vincent—he was on the right side of the car, next to you?”
“That’s right.”
“So that puts him directly behind . . . Malcolm, er, Malcolm Malone, was it?” He peered over his booklet at Malcolm, consulting his notes. “And you said you saw a ‘tall man with very long arms’ standing by the road? Is that correct?”
“That was no man, Officer.”
“Mm-hmm.” He twisted his arm, trying to write on the tiny page.
“You want a bigger notebook?” Malcolm moved toward his convertible. “I got a bigger notebook in my trunk—”
The cop halted him with his palm. “I’m fine, son, thank you.”
“Do you need my statement?” Zoe asked, trying to be helpful.
“Nah, we’re good.” The officer studied his notes, scratching the back of his neck with a pained expression. “I got to be honest, guys, I don’t think I can file a missing person report for Vincent Ferguson if he’s already dead. His mom had a valid death certificate.”
“Look, here’s a recent photo of Vincent—does that look like someone who died when they were seven?” Malcolm brought up the homecoming photo on his phone, which the cop studied with knitted eyebrows, squeezing his jaw.
“There any chance your friend here lied about who he was? Maybe this isn’t really Vincent.”
“At this point, we don’t give a shit. We need to find this guy”—Malcolm tapped the picture, making it wobble—“whoever he is, wherever he is, we need to find him.”
“And you’ve contacted family and friends?”
“We’ve talked to a dozen people who’ve defi
nitely met him,” I said, “yet no one remembers him . . . he’s like a ghost.”
Officer Schapiro drew back and regarded us with narrowed eyes. “You guys aren’t putting me on, are you?”
“No, we swear,” I said. “We can show you where we crashed. The car’s still there, and you can see where his footprints end.”
“Yeah, I guess we’d better do that.” He tucked his notebook in a little pouch on his Sam Browne belt and slid into his Chevy Tahoe, painted and outfitted as a police pursuit vehicle. “Hop on in.”
Malcolm took the front seat, because he was the bravest, while Zoe, Jace, and I slid into the second-row bench seat, me riding bitch again, and with a whoop of his siren, we were off.
My hands couldn’t find anything to do, so I clasped them tightly in my lap, and only barely registered when we turned onto Ridgeview Drive. Riding in a police car made me nervous.
Like, they might decide to drop us off at the station and throw us in jail instead.
The cop’s eyes kept flicking to me in the rearview mirror.
“So what y’all doing next year?” he said, making conversation. His eyes met mine again.
“UCLA,” I said, fidgeting under his stare.
His eyes crinkled into a smile. “How ’bout that? My niece is a Bruin.”
“Chico State,” said Zoe.
“Shasta Community College,” said Jace.
He nodded his approval, then asked Malcolm, “How about you?”
“United States Naval Academy.”
The cop peered sideways at him. “Good for you, son. You got Plebe Summer coming up pretty soon, huh?”
“Couple more weeks,” he said.
Hearing those words, I felt a pang of sadness.
Malcolm had told us he was leaving midway through summer, but I’d gotten so swept up in everything I’d almost forgotten about it. Only a couple more weeks?
Suddenly, what had seemed like an endless summer when we graduated now seemed a whole lot shorter, and somehow bittersweet.
As jerk-ish as he was, Malcolm was the core of our group. He made things interesting, he was what kept my mind off Trevor’s suicide, he was what made me forget—if only for a second. Once he left, would we even have a group? Would I slip back into depression?
Would I have to get back on my meds—which I’d only just managed to get off?
And to think I still had ages until UCLA’s move-in day. I pictured Zoe and me down in Jace’s basement, bored out of our minds while he strummed his guitar and sang us some dumb song he wrote. Ugh, talk about lonely and miserable.