How to Disappear (8 page)

“How would
I
know?” She’s fiddling with ketchup bottles. “I don’t even know what your name is.”

“Shit!” This is involuntary. “It’s James.” I picked a name that starts with
J
. If someone says, “Jack,” and I turn around, it won’t be that suspicious.

Olivia, back to me, shovels ice into a glass. “I’ve never heard of you.”

“That’s disappointing.”

She laughs, just a little.

I say, “Maybe her memory was shot. I heard she got hauled to rehab.”

Olivia doesn’t take this well.
“Where? In rehab where?
And there’s
nothing
wrong with her memory!”

She has no idea. I’m in Cotter’s Mill giving out information, learning nothing. Even Don would do a better job. He’d show up, put a knife to her throat, and make her spill everything she knows and then some.

I look down because looking someone in the face and hurling bullshit is getting harder, not easier. “Sorry, it’s just what I heard. And I feel bad. I might have encouraged her to drink more than she intended. Shots. I didn’t realize she was still in high school.”

Olivia is holding up a bottle of mustard and glowering at me. “Where did you say you know her from?”

I’m prepared for this. The Internet is a wonderful thing.

“Cheerleader camp. Last summer.”

She gives me an even more disapproving look.

I say, “
I
wasn’t at camp,
she
was. In Ann Arbor? I was in summer school. The cheerleaders kept showing up at parties at the Fiji house.”

Olivia
tsk-tsks
. “You’re a frat boy? You sure you’re not that douche Alex?”

“Independent. Things get looser in the summer. And I don’t know anybody named Alex.” I shrug. “Let me think.”

“Don’t bother. He came, he went.”

Then she stands there, staring at me as if I’m supposed to carry on a conversation about Alex the unknown douche from Ann Arbor. I need to get this back on track. “I just wanted to talk to her. . . . I was in rehab myself once, so . . .”

Olivia squints at me. “You don’t seem like the type.”

I try to imagine myself reaching around her and snapping her neck. I can’t. I’m aware of her chest rising and falling as she breathes, and of her tongue licking her chapped lower lip. She and Nicolette had better not have that much in common, because if I ever find her, I don’t want to stare at her like this.

I go back to being James, the bitter U of M drunk. “Some people in rehab are the type. Others were rich kids whose parents needed a place to ditch them.”

“Which category were you?”

“Not the former.”

Unless Olivia likes guys who pity themselves, the lip-licking isn’t a come-on. “At least you
have
parents,” she says. Definitely not a come-on. “Not that I’m complaining. I’ve been with the same foster family forever. Like Nick got Steve. We were the girls who ended up with different parents than we started out with.”

How did this go from me trying to pump her about Nicolette to her pouring her heart out?

“Don’t look so upset,” Olivia says. “Mine are pretty great. I’m staying with them after I age out.”

How did this solid girl end up with a bloodthirsty BFF like Nicolette?

I say, “Listen, when does your shift end?” Because this interrogation is not going well, and I need another shot.

“Like, ten minutes ago. We close three to five.”

“You want to get coffee somewhere that doesn’t smell like a grease fire?”

“Watch it, mister. Someday I’m going to grow up and own Cotter’s Mill Shake Shack. It’s my
dream
.”

I look at her.

“Don’t even!” she says. “You’re so gullible. Nick must have had you twisted around her pinkie like a rubber band. My dream is to
be a microbiologist. Someplace warm. Like Florida. Nick can be my accountant.”

Nicolette Holland is planning to be an
accountant
?

Olivia finally gives me a full smile. “Wait for me while I lock up in back.”

Her book and bag are on the counter right next to me as if I were the kind of trustworthy guy you could leave alone with your things for five long minutes.

I do what has to be done.

There are two phones in Olivia’s bag. The good one’s in the pocket where I think phones are supposed to go. The burner’s in the change compartment of her massive five-pound wallet. There’s only one number in this burner. I memorize it, put the phone back in the wallet, the wallet back in the bag, and the bag back on the counter before the door swings back open.

I look at my phone, and I lie. “I’m sorry! I’ve gotta head out. Family calls. I obey. Next time?”

She looks disappointed. I did good. “Well, nice to meet you.” Then she reaches for my phone and writes herself into my contacts. She says, “Call me if you get back here. I’ll tell Nick to call you if I get the chance. If she’s up for a drunk rich boy.”

“Very sober, very rich,” I say—both true. “You do that. Give me your e-mail, too.”

I cup my hand over the burner. “Liv, I’m on a bus.” I lower my voice. “Somebody saw me.”

“I
know
. Piper Carmichael
tagged
you. And this boy from Ann Arbor wants to know why you stopped talking to him. You should let me call you!”

Oh God, oh God, oh God.

I don’t know if I say,
This is worse than I thought,
or if I think it. “What did he look like?”

“Super prep. Brown hair. Nice eyes. Knows you from Fiji parties.”

It’s as if everyone I’ve ever met is fanning out across the lower forty-eight waving sticks in front of themselves like volunteers forming a grid to find lost hikers.

“I told Summer it was probably your doppelganger,” Olivia says. “But she didn’t know what that was. So then I said your body double, and she said why would you have a body double, and I said—”

She rattles on. I know she’s trying to be helpful, but I can’t take it in.

“What was Piper Carmichael doing at South Texas Tech? Why would it even occur to her it was me?”

Olivia snorts. “Well, apparently, with red hair, you look
exactly
like yourself with red hair. And were you wearing
aqua
eye shadow?”

I’m pressed up against the window, curled into my best approximation of not existing, eight rows behind anyone else so they can’t hear me coming apart.

“I said it wasn’t you,” Olivia says. “I said, really, would Nick be caught six feet under and
rotting
with aqua eyelids?”

“Lovely image.”

“I said even if it was you—which it
wasn’t
—she should tell Piper to take it down because you’re supposed to be in rehab and Steve will pitch a fit.” She sighs. “But you know Summer. If it’s not about her, she won’t remember.”

I’m undone by my signature backless dress, and the fact that I had a terrible disguise, and what Piper told Summer. I feel like throwing up. And not because I’m tearing into a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts, Texas toast grilled cheese, and frosted crullers.

“Don’t cry!” Olivia says. “Even worst case, it’s not that bad. You get hauled back to rehab, it sucks, you cooperate with their BS, and you’re out.”

“Olivia, this wasn’t about rehab! I wasn’t in rehab. I lied.”

“What?”

“Just listen. Someone’s after me.”

“Says Miss Bears-False-Witness who
lies
to her best friend. Forget the Nick Holland show for a minute. Rehab is stupid, but what if you go back and gut it out?”

“Listen to me! Men with
guns
are after me, all right? I disappear or I’m dead.”

“What?”

“I saw them. I heard them. Please believe me.”

Liv says, “Sweet Jesus Christ!” And it’s not like she’s taking it in vain. It’s more like she’s trying to invoke divine intervention. “How did this happen? Stop wailing or someone’s going to notice you. Focus. If your hair’s still red, you need to get off that bus.”

But my hair isn’t still red, and I’ve been completely focused ever since Piper Carmichael said, “Come on, Nicky. I’m not that drunk.”

Absolute terror will do that for you.

I could hear blood flow past my ears inside my head, could hear myself breathing, could hear the words
left foot, right foot, left, right
, forming in my head. Directing me out through the front door and into the night.

Picked up my daypack and kept going.

Walked straight into the ladies’ room at the first bar I came to.

Cut five inches off my hair. Buried it in the trash.

Standing there in my bra, I pulled a box of dye out of my pack. Squirted foam through my hair. Spread Vaseline around my hairline. Kept spraying room deodorizer to cut the smell, which could have made birds fall out of the sky.

All I needed was twenty minutes for the dye to set.

I got fifteen, then some girl started rattling the door. It was my night for hogging bathrooms.

I yelled, “Just a sec, y’all!” As if I thought if I said
y’all
enough, people would believe I was from Georgia. Or wherever I said I was from.

Dunked my head into the sink. Ran a weak stream of water over it.

“You taking a bath in there?”

I wrung out my hair. Wiped out the sink. Put on jeans and gym shoes.

Walked out the back door into the pitch-black alley.

Tossed my wadded-up dress and fake-leather sandals in a trash can.

Walked away.

You get spotted. You evaporate like dew on a leaf. The sun rises, the leaf dries off, and even if someone can tell you were there, you’re gone.

Ask me who I hitched a ride to San Antonio with. How I
found the bus station there. How I bought a ticket on the next bus out. How I managed to calculate the exact number of calories in the junk food I kept shoving down my throat.

I don’t know.

The new plan was to alter the shape of my body—put on weight, and quick—before I hit Tallahassee. Because obviously, cheap disguises didn’t do the trick. It crossed my mind that with all the greasy frosted doughnut residue, the cream filling and oozing cheeseburger fat clogging my arteries, I’d probably keel over dead before anyone got me in his crosshairs anyway.

So I’m sitting in this bus heading east, eating a chalupa. Wide-awake. Jolted into a perfect state of clarity.

Then it gets worse.

Then it’s not that
if
I keep messing up, they’ll find me.

I’m found.

Then comes my first and only text. Luna says:
Your biker’s back with some muscle. Two guys with shoulder holsters. Looking for you. They have pictures. I said I never heard of you. Get outta Dodge. I’ll box your stuff. Xo.

I’m tagged online for two damn days, and guys with holsters are swilling iced tea in the lobby of the Bluebonnet.

How many screw-ups between Galkey and here? I picture two guys in an Escalade following the bus, biding their time, listening to the radio.

Someone opens the latch on the bathroom door in the
back, and I stop breathing until the bus stops at a multiplex of gas stations and fast food and showers you pay for.

The driver is standing outside, smoking, shooting the breeze with a guy in a T-shirt. No holster. A lady with a half-asleep kid wants off the bus to buy some food.

I slide down the aisle. My pulse and breath and heartbeat are so loud. Out the door and fast over to the on-ramp to a highway going north.

Catch a ride on a truck carrying groceries to Topeka.

Get off. Get on. Change direction. Repeat.

Sleep for a couple of hours in the bushes behind a McDonald’s near Memphis.

Wake up.

Stick out my thumb.

Go west.

Two and a half more days on the road, and I slink back across the state border into Nevada, hoping no unhappy coincidence puts Enright or my mother next to me at a red light. I’ve driven thirty-eight hundred miles without coming six inches closer to finding this girl beyond a phone number I have no strategy for calling.

“What are you doing here?”

I’m in Calvin’s room via the ground-floor window next to his closet. I’ve gotten in this way since we were kids. But that’s not his usual response.

I say, “Hello. How’s it going? Fine. How about you? Also fine.”

“Not fine. Monica can’t go to prom with a senior unless she’s in a group.”

“Sorry. Go with Dan Barrons and Scarlett. Scarlett always liked
you
.”

Calvin pantomimes heaving. His geekier friends think prom is crap. I was his group, and I’m supposedly rock-climbing in Yosemite.

“I was hoping for technological assistance.”

“Tell me what’s going on first.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

He groans. This question comes from Boy Scouts, when I rowed us into rapids he wasn’t expecting. I wasn’t expecting them either, but I was slow to admit it. When you know someone long enough, all your history turns into jokes.

I say, “I just need to know. If you call up a burner, is there a way to trace the location of the person who picks up?”

“If you’re the NSA. Not if you’re you.” He rubs his palms together. “That was easy.”

This gives rise to Plan B.

Calvin runs his hand through his hair. “Six years of El Pueblo, and all you want is to get As, beat Barrons at everything, and leave for Mercer in a blaze of glory. Now you’re gone before graduation. You like cars, but you’re driving Don’s
thing
. Your mother’s a
prosecutor
, but you want me to show you how to put illegal spyware in a girl’s computer? And of course this has nothing to do with the mysterious errand for Don. One more time, why do you want this?”

“Maybe I’m stalking a girl.”

Calvin gapes. “Sorry, man. You have to give me more than that.”

“Maybe I’m obsessed with her. Maybe I want to read every e-mail she gets and every word she writes back.”

“Doable but illegal.”

“Like tapping into Courtney Gan’s computer?” Courtney is Monica’s older sister, who has bigger everything but no appreciation of smart guys. Calvin wanted her first, explaining the four days of cyber-intrusion. It took him two years to figure out that Monica was the self-proclaimed nerd of his dreams. “Show me how you did that.”