Vanishing Girls

AFTER

JULY 23

Nick

“It still works, you know.”

I haven’t realized I’ve been staring up at the Gateway until Alice comes up behind me. I take a step backward, nearly planting a foot in the paint tray.

She pushes a strand of hair back from her forehead with the inside of her wrist. Her face is flushed, and it makes her eyes look light brown, nearly yellow. “The Gateway,” she says, jerking her chin toward the huge metal spire. “It still works. Wilcox gets it inspected every summer. He’s determined to run it again. I think he feels bad, you know, like as long as the Gateway stays off-limits it means it really was his fault. The girl’s death, I mean. He has to prove the ride is safe.” She shrugs, scratching the tattoo below her left ear with one blue-paint-splattered finger.

When we’re not working the rides today, everyone on shift has been tasked with concealing evidence of last night’s vandalism. Sometime just before closing, a few idiots with graffiti cans went around decorating various signs around the park with crude illustrations of a certain part of the male anatomy. Wilcox seemed unfazed this morning. I later heard this happens at least once a summer.

“He petitions the park advisory department every year.” Alice sits down on a small plastic bench shaped like a tree stump. It’s rare that Alice sits down. She’s always moving, always directing things and calling out orders and laughing. Earlier today I saw her climbing up the scaffolding of the Cobra to get to a kid’s backpack that had somehow, inexplicably, become stuck in the gears—swinging, spiderlike, between structural supports, while a small crowd of FanLand employees had gathered, some to cheer her on, some begging her to get down, others scouting for Mr. Wilcox and Donna.

I watched Parker watching her, head tilted up to the sky, hands on his hips, eyes sparkling, and felt—what? Not jealousy, exactly. Jealousy is a strong feeling, a feeling that twists your stomach and gnaws your insides to shreds. This was more of a hollowness, like being really hungry for such a long time that you kind of get used to it.

Did he ever look at Dara like that? Does he still?

I don’t know. All I know is that he used to be my best friend, and now he doesn’t look at me at all. And my other best friend isn’t speaking to me. Or I’m not speaking to her.

Last night, seized by an old impulse, I went up to the attic just to check on her and saw she’d added a new sign to her door. Made of pale-green construction paper and decorated with hearts and badly drawn butterflies, it read simply: DON’T EVEN FUCKING THINK ABOUT IT.

“Mature,” I shouted through the closed door, and heard a muffled laugh in response.

“The girl’s dad—his name is Kowlaski, I think, or something like that, something with a ‘ski’—shows up every year and argues that the ride should stay closed,” Alice goes on. “I guess I understand both sides. The ride is really fun, though. At least, it was. When it’s powered up, all these tiny lights come on, so it looks like the Eiffel Tower or something.” She pauses. “They say she still cries out at night.”

Even though the day is dull and flat and windless, hot as metal, a tiny shiver lifts the hairs on the back of my neck. “What do you mean?”

Alice smiles. “It’s stupid. It’s just something the old-timers say when they’re working the graveyard shift. Have you worked the graveyard yet?”

I shake my head. The graveyard shifters—known at FanLand as the grave diggers—are responsible for closing up the park every night, securing the gates against break-ins, hauling trash, emptying the grease traps, and securing the rides and lulling them back into their nightly slumber. I’ve already heard horror stories from the other employees about shifts stretching until well past midnight.

“Next week,” I say. “The night before”—Dara’s birthday—“the anniversary party.”

“Lucky you,” she says.

“The girl,” I prompt her, because now I’m curious. And it’s a relief, weirdly, to talk about the girl, long dead, long broken up into echoes and memories. All morning, the talk has been of Madeline Snow. Her disappearance has sparked a three-county-wide manhunt. Every newspaper is plastered with her image, and the flyers have just multiplied, sprouting like fungus over every available surface.

Mom can’t get enough of it. This morning I found her sitting in front of the TV, her hair half-straightened, clutching her coffee without drinking.

“The first seventy-two hours are the most important,” she kept repeating, information I’m sure she’d regurgitated from a previous news report. “If they haven’t found her yet . . .”

A digitized clock in the upper right quadrant of the TV tracked how long it had been since Madeline had vanished from her car: eighty-four hours and counting.

Alice stands up, shaking out her legs, though she can only have been resting for five minutes. “It’s just a ghost story,” she says. “Something they say to the newbies to freak them out. Every park has to have a resident ghost. It’s, like, a law. I’ve closed shop here plenty of times, and I’ve never heard her.”

“Didn’t Mr. Kowlaski . . .” The question sticks in my throat, huge and gummy. “Didn’t he once tell you that you reminded him of her?”

“Oh, that.” She waves a hand. “Everyone thinks he’s lost his marbles. But he hasn’t. He’s just lonely. And people do crazy things when they’re lonely. You know?” For a moment, her eyes laser-beam onto mine, and I feel a tiny hitch of discomfort in my chest. It’s like she knows something—about Dara, about my parents, about how we all fell apart.