Vanishing Girls

I swear, God. Please. So long as she’s okay.

How stupid I was to think Dara would come, that she’d be pulled to me, magnet-like, the way she was when we were younger. She’s probably out somewhere in East Norwalk, drunk and happy or drunk and unhappy or high, celebrating her birthday, letting some guy slip his hand between her legs. Maybe Parker is the guy.

By now, the fireworks are over, and the park is beginning to empty. Already I detect the action of the grave diggers—seven of them on shift to clean up after tonight, including Mr. Wilcox himself—in the evidence they’re leaving, of trash bags piled neatly by the gates and chairs stacked in high towers.

Two security guards are posted by the gates, making sure that the park clears out. The parking lot has emptied. The boys are gone from in front of Boom-a-Rang, though the air still has that lingering gun-smoke smell of firecrackers. When I finally climb back in Dara’s car, I’m so tired I feel it through my whole body, a dull ache in all my joints and behind my eyes.

“Happy birthday, Dara,” I say out loud. I fish my phone from my pocket. No surprise, she never texted me back.

I don’t know what makes me call her. A simple desire to hear her voice? Not exactly. Because I’m mad? Not exactly that, either—I’m too tired to be angry. Because I want to know whether I’m right, whether she simply forgot about dinner, whether even now she’s sitting on Parker’s lap, warm and tipsy and loud, and he has one arm around her waist, pressing his lips in between her shoulder blades?

Maybe.

As soon as the ringtone starts up in my ear, a secondary ring, slightly muffled, sounds in the car, so for a moment I can’t tell which is which. I dig my hand in the space between the driver’s seat and the door, close my fingers around cool metal, and unearth Dara’s phone, which must have somehow gotten wedged there.

It’s no surprise that she’s been using the car when she isn’t supposed to: Dara might not be the best student, but she gets an A+ in any subject that involves breaking rules. But it’s weird, and worrying, that she doesn’t have her phone. Mom used to joke that Dara should just have the thing surgically attached to her hand, and Dara always said that if scientists could figure out a way to do it, she’d be the first to sign up.

My finger hovers over the text message icon. I’m suddenly uneasy. One time, when I was in fifth grade, I was in the middle of a social studies test—I was filling in the countries of Europe, I remember, on a blank printout of a map—and had just reached Poland when I had the sudden, sharpest pain in my chest, like someone had put a hand around my heart and squeezed. And I knew, I felt, that something had happened to Dara. I didn’t realize I’d stood up, knocking my chair backward, until everyone was staring and my teacher, Mr. Edwards, told me to sit down.

I did sit down, because I had no way of explaining that something had happened. I switched the location of Germany and Poland and didn’t even remember to label Belgium, but it didn’t matter anyway; halfway through the test, the vice principal came to the door, her face pinched tight like the toe of a nylon stocking, and gestured for me to come with her.

During recess, Dara had attempted to climb the fence that separated the blacktop from the industrial complex on the other side: a factory that manufactured AC components. She’d made it all the way to the top before a teacher, spotting her, had called for her to stop; Dara, losing her footing, had fallen a dozen feet and landed with the blunt, rusted edge of a galvanized pipe, discarded for no apparent reason in the underbrush, lodged partway into her sternum. She was silent on the way to the hospital. She didn’t even cry, just kept fingering the pipe and the spot of blood on her T-shirt as if it fascinated her, and the doctor managed to extract the metal successfully and sew her up so smoothly the scar was barely visible, and for weeks afterward she bragged about all the tetanus shots she had received.

Now, sitting in the car, the feeling returns to me like it did that day: the same horrible, squeezing pressure in my chest. And I know, I just know, that Dara’s in trouble.

All along, I’ve been assuming she just blew us off tonight. But what if she didn’t? What if something bad happened? What if she got drunk and passed out somewhere and woke up and has no way of getting home? What if one of her loser friends tried to scam on her and she ran off without her phone?

What if, what if, what if. The drumbeat of the past four years of my life.

I pull up Facebook. The photo on Dara’s profile is an old one, from Halloween when I was fifteen, and Dara, Ariana, Parker, and I crashed a senior party, banking on the fact that everyone would be too drunk to notice. In it, Dara and I are hugging, cheek to cheek, red and sweaty and happy. I wish that photographs were physical spaces, like tunnels; that you could crawl inside them and go back.

There are dozens and dozens of birthday messages posted to her wall: We love you always! Happy birthday! Save a shot for me wherever you’re partying tonight! She hasn’t responded to any of them—unsurprising, since she’s without her phone.

What now? I can’t call her. I switch back to my phone and pull up Parker’s number, thinking that, after all, he might be with her or at least know where she went. But his phone rings only twice before going to voice mail. The pressure is building, flattening out my lungs, as if the air is slowly leaching out of the car.

Even though I know she would kill me for looking through her messages, I pull up her texts, swiping quickly past the one I sent earlier and several in a row from Parker, not sure what I’m looking for, but sensing that I’m getting close to something. I find dozens of texts from numbers and names I don’t recognize: pictures of Dara, eyes huge and pupils big and black as holes, at various parties I never knew about or was invited to. An unfocused shot—maybe a mistake?—of a guy’s bare shoulder. I study it for a minute, wondering whether it’s Parker, and then, deciding it isn’t, move on.