Vanishing Girls

I force a laugh. It sounds like someone’s choking me with a garden hose. “Really?” I lower my chin, the way Dara always does when she wants something, and blink up at him. But I can feel my left leg twitching. “I’ll be five minutes. Less. I just have to give my friend her wallet.”

“ID,” he repeats, like my words haven’t even registered.

“Look,” I say. He’s keeping the door open with one foot, and I can just make out a portion of the bar behind him, dimly illuminated by badly unseasonal Christmas lights. Several girls are huddled together over some drinks. Is one of them Dara? It’s too dark to tell. “I’m not here to drink, okay? I’m just looking for my friend. You can watch me. I’ll be in and out.”

“No ID, no entry.” He jerks a thumb toward the sign posted on the door, which reads exactly that. Beneath it is another posted sign: NO SHOES, NO SHIRT, BIG PROBLEM.

“You don’t understand.” Now I’m getting pissed. And for just a second—white walled inside that hot flash of anger—something clicks, and I get it, and I slip into her skin without meaning to. I toss my hair and reach into my back pocket, extracting the business card I found in Dara’s room. “Andre invited me to come.”

It’s a huge gamble. I don’t know who Andre is or whether he even works here. He might just be some random sleazeball Dara met at the bar. In the photo on Dara’s phone, he was wearing a leather jacket and watching Dara with an expression I didn’t like. He might have simply grabbed a card to write down his number.

But I’m coasting on instinct now, listening to a low hum of certainty buzzing somewhere deep in my brain. Why write down a number? Why not text it, or program it into Dara’s phone directly? There’s a message in these numbers, I’m sure of it: a secret code, an invitation, a warning.

The bouncer examines the card for what feels like an eternity, flipping it back to front, front to back, while I hold my breath, trying not to fidget.

When he looks at me again, something has changed—his eyes tick slowly over my face and down to my tits, and I fight the urge to cross my arms. He’s no longer bored. He’s evaluating.

“Inside,” he grunts. I wonder if his vocabulary is limited to the words he needs for the job: ID, inside, no, entry. He elbows the door open a little farther, so I just have room to slip by him. A blast of air-conditioning greets me, and a heavy cloud of booze-smells. My stomach tightens.

What am I doing?

More importantly: What’s Dara doing?

It’s so loud, I miss what the bouncer says when he next speaks. But he puts a hand on my elbow and points, gesturing me to follow him toward the back.

The bar is crowded, mostly with guys who look at least a decade too old to be as loud and drunk as they are. There are padded red vinyl booths arranged on an elevated platform: one guy is groping his date while she sips a bright-pink drink from the largest cup I’ve ever seen. A DJ is blasting bad house music from one corner, but there are also four TVs mounted behind the bar and baseball playing on every one, as if Beamer’s hasn’t decided whether it wants to go for full-on Eurotrash club scene or sports bar. My danger alarm is going off the charts. There’s something . . . off about the whole place, like it’s not a real place but an imitation of a real place, a hastily constructed set piece meant to conceal something else.

I scan the crowd, looking for Dara or even someone who looks like a friend of Dara’s. But all the women are older, midtwenties at least. In her journal, Dara mentioned she was working for Andre. But all the waitresses, too, are older: strapped into micro miniskirts and tight tank tops with the Beamer’s logo—two headlights I’m pretty sure are meant to look like nipples—emblazoned across their boobs, looking bored or overwhelmed or just annoyed.

I think of that picture of Dara on the couch, reclining, eyes glazed over, and my stomach knots up.

We move down a narrow hall that leads to the bathrooms. The walls are papered with multicolored flyers—Wednesday Happy Hour! Fourth of July Bonanza! Ladies’ Night Every Sunday! and more of the strangely monochromatic signs advertising Blackout—and photographs. I’m half hoping I’ll see a photo of Dara and half praying I won’t. But there must be five hundred pictures on the wall, all of them practically identical—tan girls in tank tops aiming kissy-faces at the camera, guys grinning over tequila shots—and we’re moving too quickly for me to make out more than a dozen faces, none of them hers.

At the end of the hall is a door marked PRIVATE. The bouncer raps twice and, in response to a muffled command I again don’t hear, swings open the door. I’m surprised to see a woman sitting behind a desk, in an office cluttered with boxes full of plastic straws and bar napkins printed with the Beamer’s logo.

“Casey,” the bouncer says. “A girl for Andre.” After shepherding me inside, he immediately abandons us. The door seals out most of the noise from outside. Still, I can feel the pulsating bass rhythm, beating up through my feet.

“Sit down,” the woman—Casey—says, her eyes glued to a computer screen. “Give me a second. This fucking system . . .” She works her keyboard like she’s trying to punch it to death, then abruptly shoves her computer aside. She’s probably forty, with brown hair streaked blond and a smudge of something—chocolate?—on her upper lip. She looks like a guidance counselor, except for her eyes, which are a vivid, unnatural shade of blue. “Okay,” she says. “What can I do for you? Let me guess.” Her eyes sweep over me, landing on my chest, like the bouncer’s did. “You’re looking for a job.”