I'm Not Missing

by Carrie Fountain

  “No, you don’t.” A smile took over her face, making apples of her rosy cheeks.

  “Goody Two-Shoes,” I said.

  “Not anymore.” She saw me eye her phone. I grabbed for it, but she was too fast.

  “Whatever. I don’t even care,” I said, leaning back against Manny.

  “Yeah, you definitely don’t care.”

  She typed.

  “Wait, if Joe’s Medium Hottie, what is Isaac?” I asked.

  “Big Boy.” She looked at me and lifted her eyebrows. “I think.”

  “Oh god,” I said. “Never mind.”

  One area of Syd’s life that remained a mystery to me could be classified as Sex Stuff with Boys. It wasn’t that she kept it off-limits or anything like that. In fact, she talked all the time about her conquests, especially those involving college boys. It was more that she’d done what could be classified as Sex Stuff with Boys, and I’d done only what could be classified as Pathetic Maintenance of Hyper-Virginity. And it wasn’t even that I didn’t like the idea of sex. Not at all. I did it alone in my room all the time. It was just that I’d never catch up to Syd, especially because the Nick Allison Event had essentially forced me into hiding. The heartache and humiliation of being stood up on prom night by the boy I’d secretly been in love with for three years was bigger than me. It was kicking my ass. And the worst part was I was still totally in love with Nick. I couldn’t help it. I got butterflies every single time he walked into French class. It was pathetic.

  “So we’re going, yes?” Syd held up her phone and gave me a sideways grin. “I kinda wanna make out with him.”

  “Dude, you don’t know who he is.”

  “So what?”

  “So you’re lifting the ban on high school boys?” Syd had made it clear to anyone who wanted to know that she preferred college guys to high school boys. She hadn’t gone out with a high school boy in over a year. Even her prom date with Matt Martinez had been platonic.

  “No party times for me,” I said.

  “We’ll go for half an hour.” It was as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “I told my dad I’d be home. He’s mad I’m never home. And he cooked all those enchiladas.”

  My father was probably the LCHS Feminism Club’s most enthusiastic advocate. Every year he made the enchiladas we sold at the supper, and showed up to serve them, standing tall among the girls in his Feminism Club T-shirt, clearly enjoying that his presence mortified me. Times like these, the fact that my dad and I didn’t look like we belonged to each other—him with his light hair and blue eyes and me with my dark skin and unquestionable Latina-ness—didn’t bother me. When Lindsay Reynolds was tipped off by my dad calling me Miry today, she looked confused. “That’s your dad, Miranda?” I honestly considered answering no.

  “Bet I can steal a bottle of wine.” Syd was already scheming.

  “I can’t go,” I said plainly.

  “I have life problems, Miranda.” She gave me big, sad eyes. “I need to take my mind off my life problems.”

  “But—” I opened my mouth to offer my real protest but then swallowed it. Still, she knew exactly what I was going to say.

  “He won’t be there,” she said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “’Cause he’s a straight-up dork. Who only goes to house parties. That’s a known fact. Nick Allison maxes out at lame-ass house parties with parents in attendance. He’s not going to be there. Just text your dad. Tell him you’re going to help me organize my closet.”

  “I don’t wanna lie.”

  “Life problems! Miranda!” She took down her hair and shook out the curls and flung them over her shoulder. “Just organize my closet. It’s a freakin’ mess. Please?” She sat up and flashed me a big, geeky smile. Then her face fell. “Seriously.” She glanced at the trailer. “I so don’t want to be here tonight.”

  I was defeated. “I can’t drink. Not a sip. And I have to be home by nine.”

  She nodded in agreement of my terms. “Text the dad, please and thank you.”

  I texted the dad. She texted Medium Hottie, whoever he was. I felt bad lying to my dad, especially when the lie was about something as stupid as a Sunday night party at Ten Thousand Poles.

  “You’re the best,” she said, her thumbs flying.

  “You’re the worst.” I put my phone in my pocket and leaned back against Manny and tried to return my attention to the highway and its calming rumble and hiss and the big orange sun beginning to sink into the distant mesa behind it.

  “I know.” She looked up from her phone.

  It seemed like she might say something else, but she didn’t.

  2

  No one knew why the spot was called Ten Thousand Poles. There were no poles. Not even one single pole. In fact, there was nothing out there on the west mesa but barren desert spreading out in all directions, thorny mesquite bushes, and a silty red dirt that had ruined more than one pair of my shoes. I was sure my parents had come here when they were in high school. I guess I could’ve asked my dad if he knew why it was called Ten Thousand Poles. That was the kind of inane factoid he’d be certain to know and would be so pleased to call up. But then I’d have to admit I knew about Ten Thousand Poles and that I went to parties in the desert, which he’d strictly forbidden. If I ruined my shoes at Ten Thousand Poles, I hid them from my dad. He knew that red dirt.

  We drove out of town on the old highway and then turned off onto a dirt road that led to the base of the mesa. We drove down it slowly, searching for the elusive road that would take us to the top. Mesas were weird landforms, like steep hills with their tops sliced off. There was no graceful way to drive up one. Syd and I argued about which path up was the one we needed to take, and which was an arroyo that would lead us out into the darkest heart of the desert and thus to certain death.

  I hemmed and hawed until Syd finally lost it. “That’s it, dingus!” She pointed to something that looked to me more like a horse path than a drivable road.

  “Don’t yell at me!” I yelled at her.

  “Don’t be a dingus! Just go!” When I didn’t go, she reached over and laid her hand on the horn. “Goooooo!”

  I turned and started up the path and almost immediately, my car started to struggle against the sand. My wheels spun. “This isn’t it,” I said. “We’re going to die now.” I braked.

  “Yes, it is,” she barked. “Go! Don’t stop or you’ll get stuck. Just go—go forward. Go!” She was having a hard time yelling at me through her laughter.

  I kept going, up and up, until it felt like we were completely vertical. At the very top, my tires started spinning again, kicking up a giant cloud of dust. “Okay,” I said. “We’re going to die now.” I pressed my foot all the way down on the accelerator. We jerked forward suddenly and my car bottomed out. We were at the top. We’d made it.

  But there was nothing there. I’d been right all along. “This isn’t it,” I said. I turned to face her. “This isn’t it.”

  “Oh my god, yes, it is.” She was losing her mind. “Just. Fucking. Go.”

  I followed the path as best as I could, inching along, certain it was becoming more faint. Just as I was about to repeat again my certainty that we were going to die, my headlights glinted off the license plate of a car. Then they hit another, and another.

  “See, dingus.” Syd pointed to a guy standing behind one of the cars, peeing with his back to us. He squinted over his shoulder, unfazed.

  “This isn’t it,” I said again. We both laughed. I drove a little farther and my lights found a group of kids. I recognized some of them from school. They were standing in a semicircle, staring up at a giant sign that had been planted just beside a circle of charred tires and beer bottles.

  “No way.” Syd peered out the windshield.

  COMING SOON, the sign read in cursive script. ENCHANTED ACRES, ADOBE-STYLE HOMES STARTING IN THE 200s. At the bottom, in big black letters, it read: PRIVATE PROPERTY! NO TRESPASSING!

  “Gr
oss,” I said. “Did you know they make the houses look adobe-style using Styrofoam?” I edged my car off the road, narrowly avoiding a mesquite bush and making my own parking spot. “Like, at the edges, for the rounded look. My dad told me that.” My dad was exceedingly proud we lived in an authentic adobe, tiny though it was and over one hundred years old, with walls so thick I had no cell reception in my bedroom and had to place my phone in the windowsill, like a beacon to the modern world. It’d been the house my mother and her brothers, Benny and Jacob, had grown up in, and my parents had bought it from my grandparents when they retired and moved to Deming. It seemed weird to me, to live in the house where your ex-wife had grown up, the very house from which she’d driven away one morning, never to be seen or heard from again.

  “Why does everything always have to be ruined?” Syd opened the door and stepped out. “Enchanted Acres? It’s so stupid. It sounds haunted.”

  Two guys in LCHS WRESTLING shirts started working together, one on each post, trying to maneuver the sign out of the ground. The posts wouldn’t give. We walked over to join the crowd. “So much for the middle of nowhere,” I said, zipping up my coat against the frigid evening. Syd linked her arm with mine and we stood and watched as the sign began to move incrementally against the dark sky. When two more guys joined in, the posts began to give way. The last heave dislodged them suddenly, and we all had to scramble as the giant sign fell, sending up a plume of dust and ash as it hit the ground.

  “That was easy,” I said. We looked on as people started stomping on the sign.

  “I hate that I love destruction so much,” Syd whispered gleefully. “Come on.”

  Syd brightened as we walked through the crowd, our arms still linked. She was like the Pope, anointing people with her smile. As usual, she looked amazing. She’d showered and changed out of her enchilada-stained jeans and T-shirt into a sweater and leggings and boots. She’d spent half an hour blowing her curls into beautiful, smooth submission. Her makeup was perfect. We’d swung by my house, but I’d only had time to go in and switch T-shirts. And then I just threw on another T-shirt because I didn’t want my father to become suspicious. Why would I need to look good to help Syd organize her closet? I felt grungy next to her, and I detected the lingering smell of enchiladas in my hair, which was held back in an ugly French braid. I suddenly regretted having given in to Syd. I could be home right now, watching TV with my dad, studying the future perfect for my French quiz tomorrow.

  Syd stopped at a pickup and let down the tailgate and hopped up onto it.

  “Whose truck is this?” I asked, joining her.

  “I dunno.” She pulled a bottle of wine from her bag, along with two small plastic cups. She unscrewed the top, then poured one cup and handed it to me.

  “I’m not drinking,” I said, taking the cup.

  “Fine,” she said. “Just to toast.” She poured the other cup to the brim and screwed the cap on the wine bottle and put it back into her bag.

  I held up my cup. “To what?”

  She glanced around the party as if looking for something to celebrate. “I don’t know. The future.”

  “To the future,” I repeated. “It’s gonna happen,” I added under my breath. She locked eyes with me. We tapped our cups. I took a sip of the wine. She downed hers. Then she grabbed mine and poured it into her cup.

  “Hello, wino,” I said.

  “Jealous,” she replied, taking a big swig from my cup and holding back a grimace. Syd wasn’t a drinker, usually. She was cautious. She wasn’t going to allow a clichéd predisposition to alcohol to be the thing that kept her here. She wasn’t going to become her mother. Tonight, though, she seemed ready to get drunk. “I wanna make out with Medium Hottie,” she whispered, singsong. “But I don’t know who he is.”

  “Fabulous,” I answered. I regretted even more having agreed to come. What was I going to do while Syd made out with Medium Hottie? Scan the party for Nick Allison and wait it out?

  The wrestlers came walking toward us, dragging the giant sign behind them. They couldn’t help but resemble cavemen. “Hey, Syd,” someone called from the back of the pack. As he got closer, I saw it was Joe Moya, aka possible Medium Hottie. He must’ve just arrived. Great.

  I was formulating a plan for what I’d do while the two of them made out when, behind Joe, presumably from thin air, Nick’s best friend, Tomás, appeared. My heart picked up speed. I noted he was wearing his letterman’s jacket and was flanked on both sides by his baseball teammates. The chances were slim that Nick would join Tomás with his baseball friends.

  I saw Tomás a second before he saw me and so had the great pleasure of watching his face go from neutral to stink eye.

  One of the most mind-boggling aspects of the Nick Allison Event was that it had rendered Tomás and me enemies. I’d known Tomás since kindergarten. He was probably one of the most familiar people in my life—he was there the morning after my mother left, when my father had forced me to go to school. I knew he was dyslexic; he knew I was math-phobic. But for the last eight months, we’d been forced into to this weird routine, arranging our faces into fuck you every time we saw each other.

  Nick himself didn’t even do this. When he saw me in the hall, he simply looked away and, because seeing him hurt my heart, I paid him the same strange courtesy. It was Syd and Tomás who ended up doing our dirty work for us, our glaring and, in Syd’s case, our torturing.

  In this way, the whole thing was an entirely fifth-grade affair.

  I scanned the faces of the pack of boys, but I knew before I was done that Nick wasn’t among them. Nick would’ve towered over them in the most frustratingly awkward and adorable way.

  Still, if this was the kind of party Tomás would attend, it was one Nick might attend too, theoretically.

  “Hey, Joe,” Syd said, elbowing me in the ribs. “You text me?”

  “Nah,” Joe called back. “What you want to text, bae?”

  I fake puked. Joe’s friends whooped.

  “Aw, big boy,” Syd said. She couldn’t possibly be drunk yet, though she was acting a little like she was.

  “Mystery solved,” I said. “Where’s Isaac?” I looked around, happy to have an excuse to scan the rest of the party for Nick. There weren’t many people, and many of the faces I didn’t know. They must’ve been kids from Mayfield or Oñate.

  There was no Nick, thank god. But also no Isaac.

  “He’ll show.” Syd sipped the wine. She was confident now that Isaac was Medium Hottie. I always had a feeling Syd knew exactly who everyone was in her contacts. She wasn’t the type to actually mistake anyone—or anything. Ever. Mistakes were not her jam. More likely, to her, Joe and Isaac were simply interchangeable beings, lowly high school boys she’d make out with only when college boys weren’t immediately available. I suspected it was this very quality in Syd—the don’t call me, I’ll call you vibe she put out—that made boys crazy about her.

  “What’re you going to do with that?” Syd called out to the guys with the sign.

  “Burn it, I guess,” Joe said. The crowd thought that was a great idea. In no time, the whole party was yelling, “Burn it, burn it.”

  “You can’t just burn it like that,” Syd called out. “Guys.” She hopped down from the tailgate. “Seriously. You’re gonna start a wildfire.”

  Joe shrugged as if to indicate things were out of his hands. No one, in fact, seemed to care for Syd’s opinions at that moment. People had produced lighters and started gathering kindling.

  “You need to cut the posts into smaller pieces. You can’t burn it like that.”

  “Well, what are we supposed to do, Smokey the Bear?” Joe asked playfully.

  “You guys are idiots,” she said, her sudden rudeness leaving a tense silence.

  “Day-um,” Joe said. A few people oohed. “Just ’cause you broke the SAT, doesn’t mean the rest of us are idiots.” Syd shook her head and took a sip of wine.

  “Syd,” I whisper-called to her. “Come here.�
�� She swung around and walked back to the tailgate, incensed.

  “I didn’t break the SAT,” she said loudly as she walked, raising her voice even more. “Just because I’m not a moron.”

  Joe shook his head and gave his attention back to the posts and the sign, perhaps realizing Syd was right: they couldn’t burn the ten-foot posts the way they were. If he agreed, though, he gave no indication. The charged silence was obliterated when someone put on country music in their car and blasted it out of the open windows.

  This officially became the lamest party I’d ever been to.

  “Whatever.” Syd leaned on the tailgate beside me, took out her phone, and disappeared into it once again, leaving me completely alone. Why had I even come?

  “Dude,” I said finally, a sharpness in my voice. She looked up. “Come on. What are you doing? Who are you texting? What’s the deal?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Sorry.” She made a big show of turning her phone dark. She looked around. “I don’t even know any of these people,” she said flatly.

  “Me neither,” I answered.

  Her phone dinged loudly in her hand. Of course. We locked eyes.

  “Just wait.” She swiped her phone and read the text.

  “Fine.” I hopped off the tailgate. I wanted to get away from Syd, but I had no one I could talk to at the party. The only person I really knew was Anna Oliver, one of the other staff writers for the newspaper. Anna had a dumb tattoo of a human heart on her forearm and a penchant for dangling modifiers and, at the moment, seemed to be on the verge of a make-out session with a guy from Mayfield. I turned. “I’m gonna sit in the car,” I said, huffy. “It’s freezing.”

  “Wait,” she said. She turned her phone dark again and pushed off from the tailgate. Then her face lit up with an idea. I dreaded hearing it. All I wanted was to go home, really. “Wanna go get tacos? At La Posta? My treat?”

  Tacos actually sounded good, I had to admit. I’d passed on the leftover enchiladas my dad was eating for dinner and I was hungry. “That place is gonna be packed right now.”

  “We’ll be fine, Granny. It’ll be fun. More fun than this.”