CHAPTER 7

I’m fine.

I repeated this to myself as I sat in my car, putting on makeup, wearing black. Black shirt, black pants, black apron: the required uniform at the bistro that had been my after-school job, where I now waitressed Wednesdays through Saturdays. The driver’s-side visor was flipped down, its mirror open, reflecting the bags under my eyes and a healing zit on my forehead. I smeared my lips with gloss.

It was my first shift since summer began, a week since the night that left me watching James disappear down the road. A week since I’d found myself alone again, standing in the yard with a headache and his words, We can still have this summer, echoing insistently behind him.

I had walked toward the warm glow of my house, yellow light behind wavy glass windows, safe and bright and with family inside. The screen door had slammed behind me. My mother had called my name.

“Do you want dinner?”

My tongue was coated with wool, cottony in my mouth. It had grown hair. The inside of my mouth had never been drier. My stomach was empty.

I walked into the kitchen where she sat, eating from a white container of Chinese food. Gluey fried rice rode the fork to her mouth. The sight of the food, the grease spots on the tablecloth, and the chunks of artificially colored pork made my throat twitch with nausea.

“I don’t think I want any of that,” I said.

“Well good, because I’m not giving you any,” my mom replied, taking another forkful and winking at me. “Your father is late, and I wasn’t sure if you’d be here for dinner or not. Did James go home?”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking, Please don’t ask anything else, and thinking, too, Please, ask me what happened.

“Okay. So, dinner?” she asked again.

I went to the table and sat down with a sigh. A half-full bottle of red wine sat in the spot across from her, as though it had found the seat available and decided to take my dad’s place. Looking at the dreamy look on my mother’s face, I thought that might not be far from the truth. I reached for it.

Other times, my hand would have been swatted away. Instead, Mom just watched with a half smile as I grabbed the bottle by its neck and brandished it, threatening to drink from it.

“That’s what you want?”

“Maybe I feel like drinking.” It was the truth. Not only that, but the thick scent of the wine had wakened my stomach. Its protesting clench, its strike against food, had subsided.

Mom giggled. I was pretty sure that I knew where the top half of the bottle’s liquid had disappeared to.

“Well?” I said, sloshing it at her.

She looked out the window for a second, toward the garden and the hidden incline where James and I disappeared a few hours earlier, and smiled again.

“You’re an adult, right? High school graduate? I think you deserve a drink.”

“What? Really?”

“Just get yourself a glass, would you? I don’t want you stumbling around the kitchen with your lips wrapped around that thing like some kind of hobo.” She giggled again.

“All right.” I tried to hide my surprise as I grabbed a long-stemmed goblet from the cabinet above the sink. No doubt my mother knew that this wasn’t my first drink, but to this point, she and my father had done a good job of pretending my innocence; all I’d had to do was nod, play along, and avoid vomiting in the rosebushes on the nights that I came home wasted.

I sat down again, filled the glass, and took a long sip while my mother grinned at me.

“Nice,” I said. “Do most hobos drink Pinot Noir?”

“Ha!” she said.

“What?”

“I thought you were going to say, ‘Do most hobos drink pee!’” She cackled through a mouthful of fried rice.

By the time I teetered off to bed, we’d been sipping for hours, laughing at nothing, until the past twenty-four hours felt like nothing but a hazy, bad dream. Two bottles of wine were empty—drained but for the deep red silt that ringed the depression in their heavy bottoms—my father had come home, and although I didn’t feel particularly adult, at least I could sleep. My head thudded heavily on the pillow and I swallowed hard, trying to combat my body’s insistence that the room had begun to spin. I was dead asleep within moments, oblivious to the heat or the noise of the katydids. I didn’t hear the voices that carried from the kitchen, my mother’s tone raised and shrill.

* * *

And now, I was fine.

Almost.

I had zombie moments; I sat for hours, staring at my college packing list, too paralyzed to even touch my sock drawer. At night, I would stare unfocused at the cordless phone—waiting for his inevitable call, but yelping when the chirruping ring shattered the silence. I had begun to move at half pace, trying to keep steady, trying to keep moving at all.

If things had been normal, someone might have seen my raw eyes and slack expression and asked me whether everything was okay.

But nobody did—not my friends, not my family, not the head chef at the restaurant outside of which I sat and stared at my own pallid reflection. I was temporary. I had a sell-by date, good only until the end of the summer. My dark moods, my nervousness, my paralysis in the face of the future—they were all understandable. If I seemed to be fading, they thought, it was only natural. I was on my way out, moving on, already gone.

The dead girl on the side of the road had yet to be identified; with the question of who she was and how she came to be there still hanging in the air, the almost-ghost that I was attracted no attention.

The visor snapped shut under my hand. The car door slammed behind me.

* * *

I had always liked waitressing: the constant movement, folding napkins and filling drink orders, the hours flying by while I paced the dining room. But tonight, I couldn’t concentrate. Knives slipped through my fingers and left gouges on the floor. Tables full of summer people, giddy and boozy at the three-day reprieve of the Fourth of July, laughed and smiled beatifically when I forgot to bring bread or beer. One woman even patted my arm, saying, “Don’t you worry, dear—I’m sure you’ll be off to school soon anyway.”

Halfway through my shift, I stood up too suddenly in the busy kitchen and dropped a full bottle of ketchup on the dirty tile. It shattered, splattered, shards of cheap glass with a viscous red coating skittering across the floor and under the sinks.

Tom, the chef, clapped me jovially on the shoulder and left a five-fingered grease stain on my shirt.

“Ten points!” he called.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I licked ketchup off my finger.

“Hey, I understand,” he said, waving a hand at me. He smelled like garlic and sweat. “You were thinking about some boy, yeah?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I bet!” He winked. “Well, there you go. Everybody’s gotta break one thing before they leave.”

My occasional forays into the world of the living dead had sapped my conversation skills. I couldn’t banter or chitchat—not with Tom, not with the dishwasher, not with the cashier at the XtraMart who would charge me $1.25 for a Coke on my way home. I muttered something about having gotten it out of the way.

“Ah, yeah,” he said again. “I understand! And don’t you worry about that ketchup, one of the boys will clean that up. Don’t wanna send you off with a nasty cut. Travel healthy!”

“I’ve got a few more weeks,” I said, but it was lost in the clatter of pans and the hiss of steam as the kitchen moved to life again. Tom, a good guy, a handsome man who flirted with the older waitresses because he knew that it made them feel good, was already handing a mop to the guy who washed the dishes.

“You get that, Manny, will ya?” he said, and turned back to the stove. He clapped the lid onto a pan with a resounding clang.

“You guys hear about that girl?” he announced, to no one in particular.

There was a chorus of “What?” from every corner of the kitchen. Nobody said, which girl. Everyone knew who he was talking about.

I grabbed a new bottle of ketchup, skirting the broken glass as I turned to leave.

“Still no idea who she is,” Tom said. “But I heard something, from a guy who knows one of those cops. You know what he said? Said they think somebody came in and messed around, screwed things up in the crime scene.”

“Somebody like who?” said Manny.

As I slipped through the swinging door to the dining room, Tom’s voice floated after me.

“Dumb kids, probably,” he said. “They do stupid shit like that. Walk all over things. They don’t think.”

The door closed behind me.