I'm Not Missing

by Carrie Fountain

  I unstuck the second hot dog.

  I can’t trust myself with my phone right now, so I’m leaving it with you. Guess I’m kind of a coward myself. I know I’ll see you again someday. Please don’t worry about me. I’ll be FINE. BUT I NEED YOU NOT TO LOOK FOR ME. I don’t want to be found right now. I hope you understand that. Someday you’ll understand. I hope.

  I unstuck the third.

  I can’t believe what I did in the restaurant tonight. I totally deserved the new asshole you ripped me. BUT LISTEN: I know you, Miranda Black, and I know you’ll think I’m leaving because of what you said in the car. What I’m doing has nothing to do with that. Please believe me. I’m not leaving because you yelled at me. You’re the best thing in my life. I love you. S

  The fourth sticky read:

  POSTSCRIPT. OKAY. BIG FINISH. DRUMROLL, BITCHES.… Look under the map of New Mexico. (Why the hell do you have a paper map of NM in your glove box, Mir? It’s so you. I love you so much.)

  I lifted the map. Beneath it was a large, creamy white envelope. I grabbed it and turned it over and heard my gasp resonate inside my brain. It was addressed to Sydney Miller and the return address was Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.

  For two seconds I entertained the idea that I could simply destroy it. I’d never have to know. But I already knew. They don’t send rejections on stationary that fancy. It took it out and read it.

  Dear Sydney,

  The admissions committee joins me in the most rewarding part of my job: presenting you with an offer of early admission to Stanford University. We’ve reviewed your financial aid application and are pleased to inform you that, should you accept our invitation, you’ll be eligible for full tuition remission as well as other scholarship funds. In short, we understand your financial needs and offer our fullest support should you join the Stanford family.

  Keep in mind your admission offer is contingent upon continued academic success as you complete high school. We ask that you don’t change your course of study without first contacting the admissions office.

  Oops, Syd had written. She drew an arrow to the second paragraph.

  I read the letter from beginning to end, then read it through one more time. Then again. It was quite simply the most remarkable thing I’d ever seen, even if it meant nothing now.

  Syd’s Plan had worked.

  I sat there, dazed. I took up the phone again and pressed the button, but it was dead. If I wanted to turn it on, I’d have to take it inside and charge it. I was immobilized by indecision. I read through each hot dog again. For all her drama and drumrolls, Syd hadn’t once said she was sorry for what she’d done last year. She hadn’t apologized. Maybe it was that I’d had four months away from her. Her selfishness stood out to me. It was a scent I’d become so accustomed to, I was nose blind. Getting a whiff of it now, I smelled it loud and clear. The thing about Nick being a coward if he hadn’t told me about her betrayal! It made me irate. Nick didn’t deserve anything she’d done to him, and neither had I. And she’d left me her phone because she couldn’t trust herself with it. Which is another way of saying: Here. Take this. It’s your shit storm now.

  I looked at the driver’s seat of my car. Ten minutes and I could be handing this phone to Ray, if he still lived in Las Cruces. It was his property after all. Or better yet, I could simply walk around the side of the house to the shed in the backyard, close the door, and destroy it quietly with a hammer. It could be over in three minutes. Probably. Depending on how long it took me to find a hammer.

  I could be done with it before I even turned it on.

  Three minutes, I thought.

  I wished so badly I were the kind of person who’d do it. Syd was that kind of person. Obviously. She could slice people out of her life with no regrets. She’d done it to Patience. Now she’d done it to me.

  But I wasn’t that kind of person. I needed about zero minutes to figure that out. I checked the glove box to see if there was anything else. When I was sure there wasn’t, I put the insurance card inside and closed it. I folded the letter and returned it to the envelope and stuck the four hot dogs in there too. I slipped her phone, and then the envelope, into my pocket. I stared up into the green brilliance of the pecan tree and said one long, slow Gettysburg Address.

  It brought me no comfort.

  12

  “What were you doing out there?” my dad asked when I walked into the kitchen. He brought down a large knife, cleaving into a raw chicken breast. He turned around and detected my weirdness immediately. “What’s wrong?”

  I tried to act like a person. “Nothing. I was just trying to close your glove box. I had to rearrange crap in there just so it’d shut.”

  He stared at my face for three seconds. “Nothing in there is crap.” My rudeness had covered my tracks. I was relieved. He brought the knife down again. “You didn’t take anything out, did you?”

  “No.” I tried to sound bored. “But you have a menu in there from Coop’s.”

  “I like Coop’s.” He held up his hands like a surgeon and rubbed his nose with his wrist. The raw chicken, laid out on the cutting board like a sacrifice, was sickening. I averted my eyes.

  “Coop’s closed when I was in middle school.” I walked to my bedroom as casually as I could. “You need an intervention,” I called from my doorway.

  “Dinner in about thirty,” he called after me. “And remember I’m going out.”

  “’Kay.” I closed my door. I yanked the phone and letter out of my pocket. I found my charger and plugged Syd’s phone into it. I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at it. I pressed the power button. Nothing. The phone was broken. Or it had been disabled. Was that possible? Was that a thing? I reached into my bag on the floor, grabbed my own phone, and ran to the windowsill, tossing Syd’s phone onto my bed but watching it as if it were a bomb. I was in the middle of Googling Can an iPhone be disabled? on my phone when I looked over and saw the little swirling circle appear on the screen of Syd’s. I left my phone in the windowsill and grabbed hers. I sat down on my bed. Four score and seven years ago. I continued through four complete under-my-breath recitations of the Gettysburg Address, the circle swirling and swirling like a single planet forming itself in the dark little universe of the screen.

  And then: Hello.

  Syd’s entire world. I was holding it in the palm of my hand. I swiped the phone on and entered her passcode—my birthday, 0723—and there was her menu screen.

  The phone was no longer receiving service, of course. Still, Syd had 447 new text messages and 33 voice mails. The last had been received at the end of December. Ray really had turned off the service, and not even a month after she’d disappeared. It was infuriating. His own daughter. I remembered my father saying he’d do everything if I disappeared. Anything. Letty was right, after all. Syd’s life was just the kind of life a person would run away from. That she hadn’t done it earlier was a miracle.

  I wanted to read every text and listen to every voice mail, but it felt wrong. I remembered trying to snatch Syd’s phone from her in the graveyard to see what she’d changed my name to in her contacts. She’d held on with a death grip. Phones were private. And I knew there was no middle ground. If I started, I’d have to read every single text, look at every photo, listen to every voice mail. I’d devour it. Syd knew that. Right? Why else would she have left it? Why wouldn’t she have changed the passcode?

  The phone was the only clue I had. It was the only thing I’d discovered in four months. It was my job to devour it.

  I started with text messages, but because of Syd’s method of renaming her contacts, I couldn’t identify a majority of the dozens of people who’d texted her. At first I couldn’t even find myself. I had to look through the threads until I found the last text I’d sent her. I wasn’t Goody Two-Shoes anymore. She’d changed my name after all. Now, I was The Good One. I didn’t know what it meant, but seeing it brought tears to my eyes. I scrolled up and up through the texts I’d sent her. I beg
ged her to call me. I begged her to come home. Please, my last text read, just text and tell me you’re alive and I’ll never text again. I swear. I couldn’t stand it. I went back to the list of threads. Her guidance counselor, Ms. Yslas, had sent a few stern texts. Both Isaac (Medium Hottie) and Joe (Big Boy) had written. Erin Harris (Academic Terrorist) had sent a flurry of texts the morning after Syd had disappeared, scolding her about the lab notes. Only one thread, far down, among the stupid names—T. rex, Math Ass, Clown Town—stood out. The name was too simple, too serious: HIM. In all caps. HIM? I tapped it. There was only one message in the thread. It’d come at 10:40 the night she disappeared, less than an hour after I’d left her house.

  No. This has gone too far, Sydney. You need help. I’m blocking your number.

  Syd must’ve deleted all the texts that had come before it in the thread. HIM had answered no to something. This one was the last text in a conversation.

  I remembered her saying the thing that night about college boys acting like it was charity to touch her boobs. Was HIM a college guy? She’d been checking her phone so obsessively that night. I thought she was toggling between checking College Confidential message boards and texting Isaac. But now I knew she’d been doing neither of those things.

  The strangest thing, though, was that he’d called her Sydney. No one called Syd by her full name. She hated it and made a point of telling teachers before they took roll on the first day of class that she went by Syd. Had Syd gone by Sydney in her classes at NMSU? Why? To seem older?

  My own phone dinged from its perch in my windowsill. It felt like a signal from a distant galaxy. I dashed to receive it.

  It was Nick.

  When should I come over?

  He yanked me back into my life. I’d been hunched over Syd’s phone, reading her messages. I felt dirty. I’d soiled the entire evening. Nick coming over suddenly felt wrong. Gross. Weird.

  Why did I have to find Syd’s phone today of all days?

  Before I answered Nick, I powered the thing down right then and there and shoved it in my nightstand with the charging cord still attached. I wasn’t going to let Syd ruin tonight. Eight o’clock on the dot, I wrote. I tried to rally back my belief that tonight was going to be the best night of my life. I tried to will it with all my might to feel good again.

  He wrote back right away. On the dot! I smiled and then—wait. Wait. Syd flattened the tires at Nick’s house that night. Why had she done that? Could HIM be Nick? My whole body felt hot, like some cumbersome garment I needed to get off me. The room felt small. I grabbed Syd’s phone from the nightstand, powered it back on, and waited. In the time it took the phone to power on, I’d convinced myself HIM was Nick. My life was a sham and no one I’d ever loved could ever be trusted. I was glad I’d chickened out all those million of times and hadn’t said I love you to Nick. At least I still had those words safe inside me. I hadn’t given him everything. I plowed through Syd’s passcode, went to the messages, and tapped HIM’s number. Then I tapped Nick’s number on my phone.

  They didn’t match.

  They didn’t match!

  Of course they didn’t match. What the hell was I thinking? I felt even more miserable. I hated that I’d even checked the numbers. Maybe it was me who couldn’t be trusted.

  “Mir,” my dad called from the kitchen. I shot to my feet.

  “Yeah?” I called back, trying to sound like I was doing something normal.

  “Set the table?”

  “Yep.” I shoved Syd’s phone back in the drawer. I took a deep breath. I reread Nick’s text. On the dot! I wanted the words to feel perfect, but they didn’t. An hour ago everything felt okay. Now everything was wrong. I emerged from my room, looking as bored as I could, and set the table. But when I sat down across from my dad, my mind took off again. I thought about what I’d hoped would happen later with Nick. I thought about Syd’s phone, how it took me a second to recognize what it was. I thought about HIM and Syd’s hot dog notes and the letter from Stanford. Was she still going to be able to go? Was it still possible? Was her oops a reversible oops? And where the hell had she gone? And why? All this new crap and I still had no idea.

  “You all right?” my dad asked.

  “Oh. Yeah. Just thinking about the college thing.” I told myself it wasn’t a lie, since I was thinking about Stanford, and so was, technically, thinking of a college.

  “Getting to be decision time.”

  “Yeah. What about that scholarship at UNM? I mean, Brown is amazing, but getting a scholarship is, like, they really want me there, you know? And it’d be less expensive.”

  My dad was silent for a moment. “And Nick’s going to UNM?”

  “Jesus!” I sounded way more ferocious than I meant. It was the nerves.

  My dad looked shocked. “Jesus yourself,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But I’m not just going to follow Nick. Give me a little credit.”

  “I know,” he said. “Of course. I know that. I just want what’s best for you.”

  “And what’s best for you,” I said to my soup.

  “No.”

  “Then why’d you say that? What’s so bad about staying in New Mexico? You graduated from NMSU.” To punctuate this already shitty dig at my dad, I considered getting up and carrying my bowl of soup to the sink. That would be one of the greatest slights I could make. My father taught himself to cook. He cooked for me. His cooking was his love. We both understood this. Before chicken orzo soup, it was all peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, granola bars, and applesauce.

  “Hey,” he said sharply. “I studied for three years at MIT. And yes, I did graduate from NMSU.” He looked at me squarely. “But those three years were some of the most important years of my life.”

  “Well, this is my life,” I returned, too harshly.

  “I know.” He gave me a little grimacing smile.

  “I know too. That’s what I’m saying.”

  He took a deep, grudging breath. “What I mean is: you’re right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked about Nick. The decision is yours—entirely yours, as in my opinion counts for very little. But I can still have an interest in this matter. Okay?”

  Of course he had to go and apologize. I wanted to keep fighting. Now he’d taken the option off the table and I was forced to succumb to his reasonableness. “I’m sorry too,” I said. All the hot air escaped my head. I ate some soup. It was delicious, annoyingly so.

  After dinner, I did the dishes and my dad headed back to his room to get ready for his night out. I heard his electric razor, then his electric toothbrush. I guessed these Tuesday nights with his NASA buddies were as much of an effort as he was ever going to make at meeting someone. That he shaved and brushed his teeth gave me hope and made me feel sad at the same time.

  In ten years my dad had dated three women and I’d only met one, a tall, nervous dentist named Ruth. She had red hair and a long, thin face. Aw, that’s sweet, Syd had written when I texted a photo. Pete’s dating horses now. They broke up after six months. But for a long time after, I stalked Ruth online. I don’t know why. Within a year she met and married a man who had a penchant for pastel-colored polos and whose name also happened to be Peter. A year later Ruth and her Peter had a set of twins, a boy and a girl. Emma and Charlie. I checked on those babies for months. I guess I cared about them because I knew, in an alternate universe, my dad could’ve been Ruth’s Peter and Emma and Charlie could’ve been my redheaded siblings and the five of us could’ve made the most wonderfully weird, ethnically confusing family of five.

  * * *

  My dad walked into the kitchen at 7:45 while I was wiping down the counters. “Tucked or untucked?” he asked.

  “Untucked.”

  “You didn’t even look.”

  “Is it a T-shirt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then the answer is always untucked,” I said. “Go get ’em.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said, grabbing his keys.


  “Don’t drool.”

  “Don’t drool. Got it. Don’t you stay up too late.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  As soon as he was gone, the house became intolerably quiet. I felt like I could hear the thick, adobe bricks of our house eroding. I couldn’t stop looking at the clock. I finished cleaning the kitchen. When everything was neat, I rubbed smudges out of the toaster with my sleeve. I swept the floor. I even went down the hall and peered into the dryer to see if there was laundry to fold. There wasn’t. I nearly dropped my phone when Nick texted at 7:55. On my way.

  I sprinted to my room and took Syd’s phone out of my bedside table and put it in my backpack along with the Stanford letter. I made my bed. I put my dirty laundry in my hamper. When everything looked okay, I walked back into the living room and sat down on the couch and put my hands in my lap. After a few seconds, I jumped up and sprinted back to my room and grabbed my backpack and tossed it to the very back of my closet and closed the door. I went back to the living room and sat down again. My stomach was in knots. I knew I was supposed to be feeling anticipation, but this felt different. This felt like dread, pure and simple. When I heard Nick’s car pull into the driveway, I popped up. He had his hand on the doorknob when I yanked it open. I startled him.

  “Whoa.” He stumbled into the doorway. “Hey.” He stepped inside and closed the door.

  “You’re here,” I said.

  He put his car keys on the table and opened his arms and I walked over and buried my face in his chest. “I’m on the dot,” he said. His face was beaming. I pulled away and looked into his eyes for a long time, but I couldn’t find anything to say. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yeppers,” I said. It was the first time the word yeppers had ever come out of my mouth. I wanted to push it back in. My body didn’t belong to me. I took his hand and led him the few steps down the hall into my bedroom. I closed the door and locked it. Then I checked to make sure it was locked. I put on music. First it was too loud, so I turned it down. I closed the blinds and pulled the curtains shut, and then, when it became comically dark, I clicked on the lamp beside my bed. I just tried to soldier on. I’d written a check, as my father would say. Now my ass would have to cash it. I went here and there, mechanical and silent. Nick stood in the doorway. I couldn’t bear to look at him.