Vanishing Girls

What does it mean?

You think this is a fucking joke?

I think of Dara the way I saw her earlier: boarding a bus, arms crossed, jumping at the sound of her name.

U better keep ur mouth shut or else!!!

What the hell has Dara gotten herself into now?

JULY 28

Dara’s Diary Entry

DEAR NICK,

I MADE UP A GAME.

IT’S CALLED: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.

—D

Nick

10:35 p.m.

I might as well have chugged a gallon of coffee. I feel ultra-wired, jumpy, and alert. On the drive home, I keep checking the rearview mirror, half expecting to see a stranger sitting in the backseat, leering at me.

As soon as I enter the house, I see that Aunt Jackie’s bag is gone—she must have decided to go home after all. Mom has fallen asleep in the den, her legs entangled in the blankets: a sure sign of sleeping pills. The light from the TV casts the room in blue, sends shifting patterns over the walls and ceilings, and makes the whole scene look submerged. An orange-hued news anchor gazes seriously into the camera above a blazing red graphic that reads SNOW CONSPIRACY? A TWIST IN THE MADELINE SNOW CASE.

Onscreen, the news anchor is saying, “We’ll have more on the new reports from the Snows’ neighbor, Susan Hardwell, after the break.” I turn off the TV, grateful for the sudden silence.

How many times have I heard it in the past week? When a person disappears, the first seventy-two hours are the most important.

I saw Dara just before dinner, only a few hours ago, boarding the bus. But she didn’t have a bag with her, and she didn’t have her phone. So where the hell could she have been going?

In Dara’s room I switch on all the lights, feeling a little bit better, less anxious, once the room is revealed in all its mess and plainness. This time, I know exactly what I’m looking for. Despite all of Dara’s whining about privacy, she’s too lazy to ever hide things successfully, and I find her journal where it always is, at the very back of the smallest drawer in her rickety side table, behind a tangled mess of pens, old phone chargers, condoms, and gum wrappers.

I sit down on her bed, which groans awfully underneath me, as if protesting my trespassing, and open her journal on my lap. My palms are itchy, like they always are when I’m nervous. But I’m compelled by that same indescribable instinct that flattened me all those years ago during that stupid geography test. Dara’s in trouble. Dara’s been in trouble for a long time. And I’m the only one who can help her.

Dara’s handwriting looks like it’s trying to leap off the paper: the pages of the journal are packed, covered with scrawled notes, doodles, and random observations.

It happened, starts one, dating from early January. Parker and I hooked up for real.

I flip forward a week.

Hookups, breakups, complaints about Mom, Dad, Dr. Lichme, and me: it’s all there, all the anger and triumph, all channeled into neatly intersecting lines of ink. Some of it I’ve seen before—I did once read her journal, after I found out from my friend Isha that she and Ariana had started in on coke—and I read her note to me afterward, taunting, about what had happened at the Founders’ Day Ball. I’m going to tell Mom and Dad their little angel isn’t such an angel after all.

If only she knew.

From February 15: Happy Day After Valentine’s Day. I’d like to take whoever invented this holiday out to the backyard for a good old-fashioned firing line. Better yet, just string up Cupid and fire arrows in his stupid fat ass.

From February 28: Parker’s in love with somebody else. That one makes my heart turn over a little.

And from March 2: I guess that’s the really nice thing about disappearing: the part where people look for you and beg you to come home. I slow down when I reach March 26: the day the photographs were sent to her from the East Norwalk number, from the guy who warned me—who warned Dara—to keep her mouth shut. This entry is relatively short, only a few lines.

There’s another party tonight!! Andre was right. It gets easier. Last time I worked for three hours and made over two hundred bucks in tips. The other girls are nice, but one of them warned me about getting too close to Andre. I think she’s just jealous because he obviously likes me the best. He told me he’s going to be producing a show for TV. Can you imagine what Nick would do if I had my own reality show? She would just die. Then Parker would feel like a real dipshit, wouldn’t he?

I know that name, Andre. Dara mentioned an Andre to me months ago. She had pictures of him on her phone.

I flip forward another page. Dara’s entry from the morning of the accident is even shorter.

Damn it. I really thought I was getting over him. But today I woke up feeling like shit.

Ariana says I should just go talk to Parker. I don’t know. Maybe I will. Maybe Lick Me was right. I just can’t fake my way out of this one.

Or maybe I’m finally growing up.

Images come back to me from that night: the rain slick and steel-colored on Parker’s hood, and headlights cutting the world into blocks of light and shadow. Dara’s look of triumph, as if she’d just crossed a finish line first.

Forward. The entries stop for a while, and I flip past several blank pages. Dara shattered the bones in her right wrist in the accident; she couldn’t hold a pen or even a fork. The next entry—the last one, from the looks of it—dates from yesterday, and is written in all capital letters, like a sign, or something shouted.

DEAR NICK,

I MADE UP A GAME.

IT’S CALLED: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.

—D

For a second I can do nothing but stare at it, stunned, reading the message over and over, torn between equal feelings of relief and anger. Anger wins. I slam the journal shut and stand up, hurling it across the room, where it thuds against the window and knocks an empty pencil cup from her desk on the way down.