I went to the Roosevelt Field Mall with Tabs.
I’d wanted to get out of the house and go somewhere with lots of people around. Because, okay—the house was beginning to feel a little like juvie hall. Minus the ammonia smell and the shitty food and the snitch of a roommate.
They’d leave the hall light on there 24/7. There was no escaping that sickly yellow light, because even with the door shut, it would seep through the cracks like something living.
It said: I’m watching you.
I’d woken up in the middle of the night because I’d heard a door close.
My door.
Just as I went and opened it, a light shut off. I couldn’t tell whose light. But I caught its visual echo, I’d guess you’d call it, like the imprint of a camera flash that lingers in your eye.
Someone had been in my room while I was sleeping.
Watching me.
I’d never made it back to sleep.
I need to ask you a few questions about your son. About Ben.
Why wasn’t Pennebaker asking questions about Jenny? Who liked to push her best friends off monkey bars and her big brother down the stairs? Only I was starting to remember other stuff from Ben’s Facebook page.
Like that scar he still had on his leg from when his sister pushed him into a metal tomato stake in the backyard. That time he was in the ocean and remembered being pulled under by a wave. Or was it by Jenny? That’s who he remembered being there when he made it to the surface after nearly drowning, wasn’t it? His little sister. And then there was that time he got lost in the same cave Jenny had easily walked out of. Maybe she’d had a little something to do with the getting-lost part. And there were those crayon pictures he’d seen in her room after a fight—the ones with bloody targets drawn on Ben’s forehead. At some point, other kids were being kept away from Jenny for their own protection. But not Ben. He was there. In the ocean. In the cave.
In the house.
“Wanna do a little vogueing?” Tabs said.
We were passing one of those photo booths you put a dollar into and walk out with stupid snapshots of yourself—probably a big deal before you could do exactly the same thing with your iPhone. The booth had probably been there forever and they just hadn’t gotten around to junking it.
The whole mall looked about ready for the junk heap today. Old and faded. I hadn’t noticed all those stores with RENT ME signs the day Laurie took me here. I must’ve been too busy loading up on skinny jeans and scoop-neck tops. It was like a pretty girl smiling at you and suddenly you see all these missing teeth.
No missing teeth for Tabs and me. We mugged for the camera with our faces glommed together, changing our expressions between flashes. It reminded me of that day in the police station with Detective Mary.
Mind if I take your photo, Jenny?
We divided them up when we left the booth—one for you, one for me. Tabs was partial to the shots where we looked like complete idiots, sticking our tongues out, pursing our lips into exaggerated Os, squinting our eyes.
Your eyes . . . they used to crinkle when you laughed . . .
Personally, I liked the ones where we’d forgotten to mug, where maybe the flash had caught us by surprise and it was just the two of us being normal. Tabs and Jobeth at the mall.
That’s how I felt with her.
Like Jobeth.
The one I might’ve been if my mother hadn’t loved Crystal more.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked me, after we’d devoured two Ben & Jerry’s cones and wandered back out to the parking lot searching for Tabs’s car.
“I don’t know. Nap.”
“I mean the rest of your life now?” Tabs said. Cherry Garcia versus Cookie Dough had somehow morphed into a serious life discussion.
“Stay put,” I said.
I meant it.
That psych from juvie hall told me I’d been continuously trying to recapture my stolen childhood by stealing other childhoods. Maybe so. But what happens when you stop being a child? What then?
This.
Jenny had asked me to save her in a dream. She’d whispered I was the only one who could.
Okay. I’m trying.
I owed it to her, I thought. To that dream Jenny in a striped T-shirt and pink shorts. The one who’d never gotten to grow up. And maybe I owed it to myself.
When I’d found her, fixated on the photo of this smiling blond kid who looked a lot like me, practiced her name in front of a cracked bathroom mirror—it hadn’t sounded much different than mine.
Jenny . . . Jobeth . . . Jenny . . . Jobeth. See?
When I’d tried Jenny on for size, she’d fit.
We were members of the same stolen-childhood club. Maybe I was trying to steal hers back. For both of us.
I was getting close to something. To an answer. To what really happened to her on that morning twelve years ago.
I’d been staying for me.
Now I was staying for her.
Even with a knot that was slowly tightening in my stomach. As if I was back in that locked house dreading the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.