Vanishing Girls

Just for a second, I feel a moment of grief so intense it hollows me out: I want my family back. I want my Dara back.

I quickly swap out my T-shirt for the official uniform, which is about three sizes too big, and return to the office, where Mr. Wilcox is waiting for me.

“Nick!” he booms, as if he’s seeing me for the first time. “Looking good, looking good.”

He wraps an arm around my shoulder and pilots me down one of the paths that wind through the park, past fake shipwrecks and more plastic palm trees, plus rides with names like Splish ’n’ Splash or the Plank. I see a few other employees, quickly visible in their vivid red, sweeping leaves from the boardwalk or changing filter traps or calling out instructions to one another, and I have the weird sense of walking backstage just before a play and seeing all the actors in half makeup.

Then Mr. Wilcox is pumping an arm high in the sky and calling out to another girl, roughly my height, wearing all red. “Tenneson! Over here! Tenneson! New meat for ya!” He lets out a booming laugh. The girl begins jogging toward us, and Wilcox fires out another explanation: “Tenneson’s my right-hand man. But a girl, of course! This is her fourth summer with us at FanLand. Anything you need, you ask her. Anything she can’t answer, you don’t need to know!” With another laugh he releases me and retreats, waving again.

The girl looks maybe half-Asian and has long black hair, worn in multiple braids, and a tattoo of a snail just below her left ear. She looks like someone Dara would know, except that she’s smiling and she has the bright eyes of someone who really likes mornings. Her front teeth overlap a little, which makes me like her.

“Hey,” she says. “Welcome to FanLand.”

“I’ve heard that a few hundred times already,” I say.

She laughs. “Yeah, Greg’s a little . . . enthusiastic about the new recruits. About everything, actually. I’m Alice.”

“Nicole,” I say. We shake hands, even though she can’t be much older than I am. Twenty, tops. She gestures for me to follow her, and we turn right toward the Cove, the “dry” half of the park, where all the big rides, plus the game booths and food vendors, are. “Most people call me Nick.”

Her face changes, an almost imperceptible switch, as if a curtain has come down behind her eyes. “You’re—you’re Dara’s sister.”

I nod. She turns away, making a face as if she’s sucking on something sour. “I’m sorry about the accident,” she blurts out at last.

My whole body goes hot, like it always does when someone brings up the accident, as if I’ve just walked into a room where people have been whispering about me. “You heard, huh?”

To Alice’s credit, she looks sorry to have mentioned it. “My cousin goes to Somerville. Plus, since John Parker . . .”

Hearing Parker’s name—his full name—makes something glitch in my chest. I haven’t thought of Parker in months. Or maybe I’ve been trying not to think about him for months. And nobody calls him by his full name. He and his older brother have been Big Parker and Little Parker for as long as I can remember. Even his mom calls her sons the Parkers.

John Parker makes him sound like a stranger.

“Since John Parker what?” I prompt.

She doesn’t answer, and doesn’t have to, because at that moment I see him: shirtless, straddling an open toolbox and fiddling with something beneath the undercarriage of the Banana Boat, a ride that, true to its name, looks like a giant airborne banana with multicolored sides.

Maybe he hears his name or senses it or maybe it’s just coincidence, but at that moment he looks up and sees me. I lift a hand to wave but freeze when I see his expression—horrified, practically, as if I’m a ghost or a monster.

Then I realize: he probably blames me too.

Alice is still talking. “. . . put you on crew with Parker this morning. I have a shit ton of work to do for the anniversary party. He can show you the ropes, no problem, and I’m around if you need anything.”

Now Parker and I are separated by no more than ten feet. Finally he ducks under the steel support beams, sweeping up his T-shirt at the same time and using it to quickly wipe his face. He seems to have grown another two inches since I last saw him in March, so he towers over me.

“What are you doing here?” he says. With his shirt off I can see the half-moon shape on his shoulder blade, a smooth white scar, where he and Dara burned themselves with lighters freshman year while they were drunk on Southern Comfort. I was supposed to do it, too, but chickened out at the last second.

Stupidly I tug at my T-shirt. “Working,” I say. “My mom forced me into it.”

“Wilcox got to your mom, too, huh?” he says. He’s still not smiling. “And I’m supposed to play tour guide?”

“I guess so.” My whole body feels itchy. Sweat moves between my breasts, down to my waistband. For years, Parker was my best friend. We spent hours watching bad B horror movies on his couch, experimenting with ways to mix chocolate and popcorn together, or rented foreign films and disabled the subtitles so we could make up the plots ourselves. We texted in pre-calc when we were bored, until Parker got busted and had his phone taken away for a week. We hopped his older brother’s scooter and piled on: me, Parker, and Dara, and had to abandon it and run for the woods when a cop spotted us.

Then, last December, something changed. Dara had just broken up with her latest boyfriend, Josh or Jake or Mark or Mike—I could never keep them straight, they cycled in and out of her life so fast. And suddenly she would crash movie night with Parker, wearing short-shorts and a tissue-thin shirt that showed the black lacy cups of her bra. Or I would see them riding the scooter together in the freezing cold, her arms wrapped around his chest, her head tilted back, laughing. Or I would walk into the room and he would jerk quickly backward, flashing me a guilty look, while she kept a long, tan leg draped across his lap.