Vanishing Girls

Maybe she always made me feel that way, but it’s only since the accident that I’ve been able to admit it.

I pull on my best skinny jeans, surprised by their fit. Weirdly, even though I’ve barely left the house, I must have lost weight. But with a studded tank top and my favorite slouchy boots, I look all right, especially from a distance.

When I head downstairs to the bathroom, I see Nick’s door is still closed. I press my ear to the door but hear nothing. Maybe she’s already left for the party. I briefly imagine her standing next to Parker, laughing, maybe competing to see who can throw their beer cans farther.

Then my brain spits out a whole series of memories, flip-book-style, from our lives together: struggling on my tricycle to keep up with Parker and Nick, both on shiny new two-wheelers; watching from the pool deck while they took turns cannonballing into the deep end when I was too small to join them; hearing them burst into laughter because of an inside joke I didn’t understand.

Sometimes I think I didn’t even fall in love with Parker. Sometimes I think it was really all about Nick, and proving I could finally be her equal.

Downstairs, Mom is standing in the kitchen, talking on the phone, probably to Aunt Jackie, the only person she ever calls. The TV is on behind her, barely audible, and I get a jolt when the camera pans to a familiar stretch of highway not far from the place Nick drove us into a solid face of rock. The place is crawling with cops, as it must have been after the accident; the whole scene is lit up with floodlights and sirens, like a nighttime movie set. Words scroll across the bottom of the screen: Cops Launch Massive Search for Missing Nine-Year-Old . . .

“Yeah, of course. We expected a period of adjustment, but—” Mom breaks off when she sees me, points to the Stouffer’s lasagna box on the kitchen table and then to the microwave, mouthing Dinner? In the quiet, I can make out the newscaster’s voice: “Police are searching for witnesses or clues in the disappearance of Madeline Snow, who vanished Sunday night. . . .” I shake my head and my mom turns away, her voice muffled as she passes out of view. “But I’m hanging in there. It’s starting to feel a little more like a house again.”

I punch the TV off and grab Nick’s favorite field hockey hoodie from the peg near the front door. Though it’s likely still in the mid-eighties, with the hood up my scars will be mostly concealed. Besides, it gives me a thrill to wear Nick’s clothes unasked, as if I can shrug on a new identity. The sweatshirt still smells like Nick—not like perfume, since Nick never wears any, but like coconut shampoo and the general, indefinable odor of cleanliness, outdoors, and competency at sports.

I pull the hood up and cinch it under my chin, stepping onto the grass and enjoying the slick feel of the moisture around my ankles, seeping through my jeans. I feel like a burglar, or someone on a secret mission. My car is blocked in, and I don’t want to ask Mom to move the Subaru, which would then involve a lot of questions and concerned, quizzical looks. I’m not even sure she would say yes—she put a moratorium on driving after the accident.

I drag my ancient bike out from the garage—I haven’t ridden in forever, except once two summers ago, as a joke, after Ariana and I dropped mushrooms and Nick found us flopping on the grass like fish, gasping with laughter. I’m a little unsteady at first, but soon enough, I get the rhythm back. My knees are bugging me, but no worse than usual. Besides, the Drink is only a few miles away.

The Drink is actually a nickname for the Saskawatchee River. Sometime in the previous decade, back when a rush of Realtors and speculators descended on Shoreline County like an army of money-crazed locusts, chewing their way through our land, a development group decided to raze the woods and build a clutter of sleek waterfront stores on its banks: coffee houses, art galleries, and high-rent restaurants, smack-dab in the middle of Somerville.

Construction was approved and materials shipped before the residents freaked. Apparently, for a town built on history, the threat of new buildings and new parking lots and new cars bearing in tides of new people was too much. Somerville managed to have the entire area west of the river declared a piece of national park land. I’m surprised the town board hasn’t mandated we start wearing hoop skirts yet.

Someone was supposed to have cleaned up the mounds of gravel and the piles of concrete. But no one bothered. There’s even an abandoned hard hat, meticulously and mysteriously preserved by the people who hang out there.

I can hear the party almost as soon as I turn off Lower Forge and bump off the road and into the woods, keeping to the path that has been carved through the undergrowth because of a constant Friday-night procession of kids, coolers, bikes, and, occasionally, Chris Handler’s ATV. In the woods, the air is cooler, and leaves slap wetly against my thighs and calves as I jerk along the uneven ground, holding tight to the handlebars to avoid being bucked off. As soon as I see lights through the woods—people moving around, using their phones as flashlights—I dismount, wheeling my bike out into the open and leaning it next to several others on the grass.

The party’s pretty big: forty or fifty people, most of them in shadow, milling around on the slope leading down to the river or perched on broken pieces of concrete. No one notices me yet, and for a second I get this moment of panic, a feeling like being a little kid again on the first day of school and watching the stream of kids through the double doors. I haven’t felt like an outsider in a long time.

I don’t know why you always have to be the center of attention, Nick said to me once, not long before the accident. I’d been wriggling into a pair of leather pants I’d bought and then concealed from our parents by hiding them underneath the sweaters folded at the back of my closet.