The girl tried not to look up into the hazy summer night, the seagulls circling overhead like giant paper airplanes. They made her dizzy. She focused on the horizon, the dark ocean churning, its vastness broken up by milky froths.
Thomas, the guy from the party, was pressed up against her, his thighs tight against hers. She could feel the heat in her cheeks, but at least it was cooler here at the end of the pier, away from the lights and sounds, from the constant pop pop pop bling bling of the arcade games and the deafening roar of the Zipper, a ride she’d thrown up on last year and then sworn her friends to secrecy.
Thomas dipped her back over the railing—not too far, but enough that she felt the danger, felt that if he just shifted his large hand an inch or so off her back she’d fall, tumble like a tragic mistake. He laughed, pulling her back, his dewy breath catching in her hair.
“Stop it,” she said, batting at him, though she wasn’t sure she meant it.
She liked him. She liked the way he made her feel—important. Funny. Sexy. At the party, he’d said he was from the cornfields of Indiana, a state—she would never tell him—that she wouldn’t be able to point out on a map. He was tall like a cornstalk, she thought, and let that bubble up into a giggle on her lips as he swayed into her again and kissed it away.
Their friends were on the other side of the pier, drinking beer they’d poured into empty soda cans, chattering away and tossing a Frisbee. The guys flicked the disk so fast and low that she was afraid it was going to soar over the edge of the pier.
It was as if they were all in a delicious dream that might never end, a pause on life, a stop-freeze on a late-summer moment where everything still felt good. Right. Forever.
And this guy. This cornstalk Thomas, with white-blond hair curled by the salty air. His arms long and warm and his breath in her hair and his tongue filling her mouth and oh. She was drunk, that was for sure. That had been their mission, all of her friends. One week before college. Get wasted. Let your hair down. Wasn’t that what everyone came here for?
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, a fluttering on the nearby post caught her attention. It was a piece of paper, tattered, clinging by one small piece of remaining tape. The wind slammed it back flat across the post, and she saw a girl’s face, black-and-white, the word Missing scrawled across the top.
“Thomas,” she said low, trying to push him off her. “Thomas. Look.”
She couldn’t quite make out the girl’s name, printed in small type below her photo, but the girl’s face—well, her eyes stared right at her, it seemed. Smiling shyly. A yearbook photo, perhaps. Remember me always forever.
The paper fluttered again, a pathetic flag rippling, weak.
“Someone’s missing,” she said. She tore her gaze away as Thomas untangled himself from her neck. He was smiling at her, his teeth so white. She pointed to the poster and he reached out and steadied it for her. Now she could read it. The girl had gone missing the summer before. How long had this paper been hanging here? She straightened her thin bra strap. She could be any of us. She could be me.
“No reward, though,” he said, tapping the poster with a thick finger. Behind them, one of the guys hooted, and a peal of laughter echoed in the night. Thomas crinkled his nose. “How do they expect anyone to care without a reward?”
The girl’s eyes widened. Surely he was joking, this guy who just earlier, at a crowded party, had shamefacedly admitted he didn’t know how to swim. Who had seemed so crushed she was leaving in only a few days to go home.
“Oh, come on,” he whispered, burying his face in her neck. “No time for being sad. Not now.”
“Maybe she was already found,” she said, more to herself than him.
Thomas muttered what sounded like a yes in her ear. His fingers snaked into her shorts and she wondered how far they would go tonight. And where.
Another gust of wind, and the missing poster freed itself from the post, whipped around the pier for an instant and butterflied into the darkness. The girl watched as it flitted to the ocean, wavered on the choppy surface. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, the paper had disappeared.