“I guess so,” I said.
* * *
I made posters that night. I worried that hanging posters would do nothing but advertise the fact that Syd was gone and start rumors flying. I dreaded people knowing she was gone, in part because it would make the whole thing more real. If no one knew, there was still a chance it wasn’t true. Syd would show up tomorrow with the stupid lab notes printed out for Erin Harris. But if hanging posters was the only thing I could do, I had to do it.
I used a photo I’d taken of Syd the week before, after she’d finished tennis and I’d finished my homework in the library, waiting for her. In the photo, she was smiling, her skin radiant and her round cheeks pink after practicing in the cold, her wild hair held back in a ponytail. “Say cheese,” I’d said when I’d sprung my phone on her as we’d walked to my car. “Butt cheeeeeeese!” she’d yelled as I’d snapped the picture.
I called Ray before school started and told him about the posters. I don’t know why, but it felt like I should get his permission. He was distracted, talking to a beer distributor. He’d heard nothing. He knew nothing. He asked me to keep in touch. Then he hung up before I had a chance to say anything else. I thought of what Letty had said, about Syd’s bad home life. It happens all the time. I pushed the words out of my head.
I had twelve texts before the first bell rang. I knew they’d come. I knew as soon as people saw the posters, Syd would be the talk of the school. I slipped into the bathroom and sat in a stall and watched the messages roll in. WTF!? seemed to be the basic question people had for me. Being on the receiving end of the shock was worse than being the only one who knew Syd was gone. It was as if Syd had been our school’s prizewinning animal—our Gracie the pig in human form—and I’d let her escape through a hole in the fence the day before the state fair.
That afternoon, my dad greeted me at the door as he had the day before. He told me everything was going to be okay. He cooked eggplant Parmesan for dinner. The rest of the week, I walked the halls with my head down, trying to be invisible, but found I couldn’t make it five steps without someone stopping me to ask if I’d heard anything about Syd, or to ask if the Life Club would still meet this Friday morning. I became Syd’s default spokesperson, but I had no answers for anyone. I was one big I don’t know.
Nick’s presence became more confusing than ever. Ever since our time together behind the ditch, he made a point of smiling at me when he walked into French. I could swear in his smile there was actual empathy, and without Syd around to hurl insults at him, I’d too often find myself slipping, obsessing about what his smile could mean, alternately hoping it meant something, anything, and wishing I could will myself not to care.
* * *
By Wednesday I’d made one crucial decision about my life in the new normal of Syd’s goneness. I was not going to become the kind of person who ate lunch alone every day in her car. Becoming that person would’ve been easy for me, and I knew I had to fight it from the beginning. So I made my way to the cafeteria and forced my chin up and braced myself for the barrage of questions. But by then, only a few people stopped me to ask about Syd, and most were really sweet about it. Everyone was as stunned as I was that Syd had run away.
For a couple days I ate lunch with Marcy Ellis, a Mormon girl I’d been friends with in elementary school, before Syd came in the third grade and the two of us left poor Marcy behind in the dust. Tall and skinny and friendly to the bone, high school was her natural habitat. It was her Goldilocks planet. She wasn’t super-smart, but she was talented in the art of being a person, and so, naturally, Syd despised her. “That poor thing,” she said once after Marcy had stopped to talk to me in the hall. “She doesn’t even know she’s straight-up peaking in high school.”
Marcy and her friends carved out the same spot at the same table each day for lunch. Their jokes were shockingly lame, and when they prayed before eating, their prayer was like a giant humble-brag, so low-key and sincere, it drew attention to itself. The whole time I ate with them, all I could think was how I’d describe the experience to Syd. How she’d gobble it up, throwing her head back and cackling. Somehow, eating lunch with Marcy and the Mormons, I felt like an awful person and a total loser at the same time. It stunk. And it made me miss Syd like hell. I’d never wanted her back so much as I did when I was watching those strangers pray over their bags of Doritos.
On Friday I hid from the Mormons and avoided the cafeteria in general. But I didn’t return to my car. I decided I’d take baby steps. I escaped to the abandoned patch of concrete in front of the band room with Will Carey, who took secret drags from his vape pen while I ate my sandwich. He was happy to have me join him, and it felt good to get away from everyone for a half hour, to escape into the details of Will’s excruciatingly complicated fan fiction. But it became clear before I’d even opened my Sprite that Will had abandoned his obsession with fictional characters and had replaced them with a real live human being.
And who was this human being?
That tall guy with a ponytail in our French class.
Syd would’ve found it hilarious, the way I nearly choked on my ham and cheese when Will said Nick’s name. How had I found the one person on Earth who didn’t know about the Nick Allison Event? Or maybe Will did know and just didn’t care. Either way, it was agony hearing another person obsess so openly over him. He went on about Nick’s hair and the cute way he turned red when called on to speak and how he’d cheerfully receive Madame Spencer’s teasing about his sometimes tortured pronunciation. Will even asked if I’d noticed that Nick had dashed into class Monday morning, right before Madame Spencer had arrived, grabbed his stuff, and never come back. He was so enamored of Nick, he didn’t notice I hadn’t come back either.
Will had things wrong about Nick too, and his sloppiness annoyed me. I had to bite my perfectionist’s tongue when he pouted about how Nick was going out with Camila Giménez. Nick wasn’t going out with anyone. Will was an amateur. I knew Nick’s association with Camila was a professional one: Camila’s parents paid Nick to tutor her in math. The two of them met in the library after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays—I waited for Syd every Thursday afternoon in the library just so I could watch them from a distance. Camila had no interest in Nick, or math, and checked her phone every five seconds, often staring off into space while Nick was trying to walk her through something. I’d investigated the relationship thoroughly and had long ago rendered it harmless. I’d even seen Camila hand Nick cash.
Still, I felt awful for Will. He’d found something in the real world to love. But what he’d found was mine—Nick was my secret obsession—and I wouldn’t yield even half an inch of my love to accommodate Will’s. After fifteen minutes, I had to fake an excuse and escape, leaving Will in his cloud of vapor and yearning.
By the end of the week, I’d skirted the edges of nearly every social group on campus. Even the ag kids, still grateful about my showcasing their pig, were welcoming. People had started to take pity on me, I guess. The newspaper crew was especially nice. I gave assignments for the week and took on the easiest one myself, a piece about the Feminism Club’s enchie supper. I knew I could put it off until an hour before deadline.
I sent Syd hundreds of texts, some of them desperate, some of them not. I tried everything. I asked if she’d heard from Stanford. I tried to be funny and told her she was forcing me into Mormonism. I’d already ordered my magic underwear. As the week went on, her absence grew heavier and heavier. Before I opened my eyes in the morning, the truth would slam down on me and I’d jump out of bed and run to the windowsill for my phone to see if the impossible had happened and Syd had texted.
I thought it might get easier, seeing that she hadn’t. But it didn’t.
In the absence of being able to actually do anything, I fixated on things Syd had said over the last few weeks, trying to find any reason for why she’d leave. I remembered that, walking to the Life Club meeting the previous Friday, she’d said she wished she’d never form
ed it. When I joked that she was helping a lot of people extract their heads from their asses, she sighed. “Seriously. All I’m doing is teaching otherwise happy people to be as stressed-out and neurotic as I am. Is that what the world needs?” The way she said it—totally flip, edged with her trademark cynicism—hadn’t made me think anything at the time. She was grumpy and tired. She was hangry.
But now?
I turned it over in my mind obsessively. Stressed-out and neurotic? I’d never have described Syd that way. She was a force of nature. A boss bitch. But was that the way she saw herself? Had the pressure she’d been placing on herself the last four years gotten to be too much? It seemed impossible. But everything seemed impossible. Maybe Syd had been sending me hints for years. Maybe she’d been asking for help. And maybe I was simply the world’s worst friend, unable or unwilling to allow her to be anything less than the bulletproof superstar I’d come to rely on.
One week without her, and Syd had become a genuine mystery to me. Letty’s words—your Syd is the type to run away—assaulted my thoughts until they lived there permanently, written across my brain in all caps.
It bothered me to no end that I couldn’t recall what I’d said in response that afternoon on the way to Life Club.
I probably just laughed.
I probably just told her to eat a sandwich and chill the hell out.
But now?
* * *
Staring at the back of Nick’s head in French on Friday, I had an idea. It was the only idea I’d had all week, so it felt like a good one. I decided I’d stop texting Syd for twenty-four hours. I’d stop calling and leaving desperate voice mails. Maybe this would persuade Syd to contact me. Maybe she needed a little radio silence, a signal that I wasn’t going to do something insane—like call the police or tell Ray—if she texted to let me know she was still among the living. I’d done everything else I could do. I’d written Patience. I’d put up posters at school and at NMSU. I’d had the world’s most awkward conversation with Isaac Chavez in which I determined he was, in fact, Medium Hottie, but that he had no idea why Syd left or where she’d gone. Syd and he flirted. That was all. “Don’t even,” he said, putting up his hands when he realized what I was after. “No way she ran away ’cause of me.”
I’d done everything I could think of, and nothing brought relief. I remained a walking panic attack. When Madame Spencer put her palm on my shoulder after class on Friday morning, I swung around so fast that I nearly clobbered her. I felt terrible, especially because all she’d wanted to say was I should consider seeing the movie at the Fountain for extra credit. Missing a quiz had been a bad idea. She feared my A for the semester was on the line, and tonight was the end of the film’s run.
And so, it was kind of perfect. The worst week ever would now conclude with my going alone to the very movie I’d refused to see with Nick.
On the way home, I decided to stop by Ray’s to see if he’d heard anything. He’d been so uninterested on the phone Tuesday, it occurred to me he could know something and simply never have thought to share it with me. Also, part of me just wanted to go there, to see the graveyard and the trailer and remember that Syd Miller had existed in real life a week ago.
When I got there, though, Ray’s truck was gone and Tonya answered the door dressed in sweatpants and flip-flops. She looked like hell and was self-conscious about it, which brought me a modicum of happiness.
“What is it?” she said, as if I were a stranger, or possibly a home invader.
“Is Ray here?” I asked. “I just stopped by to see if you’d heard anything.” I thought of asking if Syd had received any mail, say from Stanford University, but Tonya’s face wasn’t open to questions.
“No, we haven’t. And if you hear from her, you tell her we’re cutting off her phone. And we reported the car stolen.”
“You reported her car stolen?”
Again, I had that disorienting feeling that Syd’s life was a total mystery to me, though it’d been happening alongside my own all day every day for forever. What did I think happened when Syd closed the door to the trailer? Did she just disappear? In the hours we spent apart, did she simply not exist?
“That car’s Ray’s. It’s in his name.” She was smug, satisfied.
“That’s her car,” I said. I could feel the tension in my jaw.
“Well”—Tonya smiled—“tell her she can say that to the cops.”
I shook my head. It was all I could do.
“Also, tell her we’re moving. And I threw most of her shit away already.”
I wanted to pop her in the face. I tried hard to imagine what my dad would do in this situation. He’d be civil and strong. He wouldn’t lose his cool.
“Please just tell Ray to let me know if he hears anything,” I said. I turned and walked down the stairs and heard the door close before I was halfway to my car.
* * *
When I got home, my dad was in the kitchen, starting dinner. I walked in and stood in the doorway and watched him for a second before he turned and looked over his shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Where were you? What’s wrong?”
“I stopped at Syd’s. Tonya was there.”
He wiped his hands on a dish towel. “What happened?”
“What would you do if I disappeared?” I asked. I was standing with my backpack still slung over my shoulder, my keys still in my hand.
“Everything,” he said without a beat. “Anything.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Of course. Miranda. Yes. What happened?”
I shook my head. I moved my keys from one hand to the other. I wanted to tell him about how rude Tonya had been, how I felt like I’d been the worst friend ever, how I was becoming more and more sure every day that Syd might be gone for good. But before I could stop it, another question came out of my mouth. “Did you do everything to find Mom?”
He grimaced. I’d caught him off guard. We never talked about my mom. I don’t think it was a decision on his part. My father was all about talking. He’d sat me down many times over the years to have difficult conversations, including cringe-worthy ones about menstruation and safe sex. And he still talked freely and often about how he missed his own parents, who’d had children late in life and had both died before I could get to know them.
Maybe it was because my mother wasn’t a topic. She wasn’t something we could sit down and discuss over a bowl of ice cream, which is exactly how we’d covered both how I’d prefer to acquire my first bra and the dangers both practical and spiritual of sending nude photos. (He’d read an article in The New York Times. He was practically hyperventilating.) But my mother’s leaving was bigger than talk. For so long it’d been the defining characteristic of our entire existence. It was our thing. My dad tried to make it smaller. Maybe he feared we’d die beneath it, crushed especially by the weight of any lingering hope that she’d return. Someday. Benny and Letty believed it would happen. They had faith. But my father couldn’t allow that for either of us. We couldn’t afford someday. So he allowed and then encouraged the details of the everyday to slowly creep over the giant hole where my mother should’ve been. Our house had changed incrementally. Her stuff disappeared, seemingly piece by piece, a book here, a photo there. Then, when he took up cooking, he’d redone the kitchen. He bought new furniture. A few years ago I’d gone to see Benny and Letty, and he painted the guest room, the room my mother had grown up in. When I returned, I checked. He’d painted over the spot behind the closet door where, as a kid, she’d scrawled I love Morrissey.
“Your mom didn’t disappear,” he said. He slung the dish towel over his shoulder and put his hands on his hips. “Your mom’s not missing, Mir. She left.”
“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t even know why I’d brought it up.
“Do you think she got married again?”
He dropped his head and spoke to the floor. “I don’t know.” The question hurt him and I was sorry.
“Never mind,” I said. I relieved us both of
the question that logically followed: Do you think she has more kids?
“Did Tonya say something about your mom?”
“Oh,” I said. “No. She told me they reported Syd’s car stolen. They threw away her stuff.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No,” I said.
“God.” He shook his head. “I want you to stay away from them.”
I took off my backpack and sat at the table. I put my keys down. “The other day Letty said Syd was just the type of person who’d run away. Because of her home life. I thought she was wrong. But maybe she wasn’t.”
“It hasn’t even been a week,” my father shot back. “Those people. It’s been five days. She could come back.”
“And all her stuff will be gone.”
He pointed at me. “Don’t go back there. I don’t want you to go back there.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“I’m making pizza,” he said firmly, as if pizza was just punishment for our unjust world.
“From scratch?” I stood and picked up my backpack and tossed it onto the floor in the hallway.
“Of course,” he said, offended.
7
I thought of asking my dad if he wanted to come to the movie, but I didn’t. He took it as a good sign I was going out. “It’ll be good to get out of the house.” He’d said similar things in the months after my mom left. He’d wake me on Saturday mornings and announce we were going for a day trip to El Paso or Silver City. He’d tricked me into a disturbing number of hiking situations.
I did the dishes after dinner and went into my room to get dressed. I changed my clothes a dozen times, finally settling on a pair of jeans and an old shirt of my dad’s, a vintage T-shirt from R.E.M.’s legendary Green tour. My father had gone to the concert with my mom at the Pan Am Center at NMSU when he was seventeen. It’d changed his life. I knew this because he’d told me about it a zillion times. The shirt was my favorite. It’d faded from black to dark gray and was perfectly soft but not yet threadbare.
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