Never Missing, Never Found (13 page)

I wince and try to lift my cheek from where it lies pressed against the stone. I can tell before it rips away that there are now grooves in my skin that might never smooth out. “Hello?” I say, or try to say. My throat is dry and raspy. A chilly wind tries to cut off my hair.

Cobblestones. Popcorn. I’m in the park, on the main street, on the ground.

My cheek falls back against the stone. Lifting my head is too much work. “Hello?” I try to say again, but this time the stone snatches my voice and doesn’t give it back.

I fall.

Somewhere behind me, so faintly I might be imagining it, someone is laughing.

“Hello?”

I blink and cough. That didn’t sound like my voice.

“Hello?”

Ah. I’m not the one speaking. I’m sitting up now, somehow, though I don’t remember doing it, and someone is speaking to me. Someone who ate an entire head of garlic for breakfast, it smells like. “Hello,” I say back, wrinkling my nose.

My wrist drops.

Apparently, someone was holding my wrist.

“She lives,” Garlic Breath says. “You okay, kid? Do you need an ambulance?”

Light cracks around my eyelids. I open them and let it in.

I’m in the park still, but not on the main drag. Above me rise the electric-red loops of the Dragon King, the tallest, fastest roller coaster in the world. Cars rush around the tracks, but there aren’t any shrieks or screams or idiots who didn’t lock their safety belts tumbling from the sky and smashing on the ground. Warm-up loops, then.

I’m not cold, but I shiver. “How did I get here?”

“You tell me.” Garlic Breath stands, bathing me in a neon-green glow. He’s just a regular peon, like me, I realize, nobody important. Surrounding me are a few other green shirts. “Guys, we should call a supervisor.”

A pit yawns in my stomach. “Don’t call a supervisor,” I say. I don’t remember how I got here, or what’s going on exactly, but I know I don’t want a supervisor involved. I’ll get in trouble once they check the security tapes to see precisely how I ended up here and discover I’ve been here overnight. I’d lose my job for sure. Maybe even get arrested for trespassing.

As Melody would say, that’s not good for my college applications.

Melody. The pit yawns wider, aching, like it’s the pit where a missing tooth should be. “Where’s Melody?” She was here last night. She caught me when I fell under the bleachers. She wouldn’t leave me now.

“What’s going on here?”

The pit turns into a stone and falls. The questioner wears the casual suit and tie of a supervisor. (Not having to wear the green polo is kind of a big deal around here.) “Do you work here?” the supervisor demands. I can’t stop staring at the light gleaming off his bald head, at the shadows that sweep it every time the Dragon King rushes overhead. “Do I smell alcohol?”

“Scott, hey.” I breathe in the smell of sweet hay and Axe and sweat and smoke. Connor. “You found Scarlett. Scarlett, you okay? You must have fallen. Here, let me help you up.” His hand finds mine and pulls, so hard I feel my shoulder strain in its socket. He probably expected me to help him a bit, but now that I’m standing, it’s all I can do not to fall back down. I sway like a scarecrow, nodding at the calm understanding that any strong breeze or loud noise might send me tumbling into a pile of rags and hay.

“What happened to your uniform? Did you leave it at the office before you could change?” He exhales loudly and claps me on the shoulder, enveloping me neatly with one arm before I can fall. “Crazy girl. So dedicated to her job, this one. Well, come on, Scarlett, let’s find your uniform before the park opens so we can get you on register.” He steers me away. From the corner of my eye, I can see Scott’s brow creased in suspicion, but it relaxes as he, like everybody else, falls under the spell of Connor.

“Nice to meet you, Scarlett,” he says. There’s a heavy sort of skepticism to his tone that says he believes nothing Connor just said, but there’s something about the way Connor says things and the way his face glows when he smiles that makes people trust in him. Like I said: the spell of Connor.

Once we’re a safe distance away, far enough that the roar of the Dragon King has faded into the roar of the wind, Connor drops his arm. I sway, but I stay standing. “Okay, so you better tell me what you were doing there,” he says. His voice is warm, as usual, but measured. “Because I know you’re not scheduled to work today.”

“What, do you have my schedule memorized?” I feel like I might throw up on his shoes. I know I can turn, but whatever direction I go, it’s going to be his shoes.

“Don’t change the subject.” He lowers his voice. “Were you in the park overnight? Katharina said something about that, but I didn’t think—”

“Katharina?” The world around me crystallizes, sharpens, and the feeling like I’m going to throw up disappears. I see everything through a sheen of blue. “What did she say?”

“That she and a few others were going to party after hours in the park. We didn’t think she was serious. It’s a crazy idea. But were you…?”

Anger shoots through me. Party? That was no party. She poisoned me, sure as Skywoman poisoned the Blade.

But I can see the worry on Connor’s face, even through all the blue and the bright. He’s worried. About
me.

Worry means that he cares, but I can’t have him worrying too much, especially after the heart-to-heart we shared. Worrying means that he’ll want to get close. Worrying means that he’ll want to know what’s going on. He’ll want to know my secrets, and nobody can get that close. “I have to go,” I say, and turn to shuffle away. My mind is racing. I feel terrible and furious and like I want to push someone off the top of the Dragon King, but at the same time, I want to cry. Because Connor cares. About
me.

“Wait, Scarlett!” Connor calls after me. I pause, but I don’t turn around. I don’t know what my face looks like at the moment. It’s possible I’ve transformed into a black swirling vortex of emotion. “Are you okay?”

A hysterical laugh bubbles up in my throat.
Okay.
Who even knows what that is anymore? “Yeah,” I say. I hear him approaching and lurch forward before he can place a comforting hand on my shoulder. A comforting hand from him might break me. “I just need to be alone right now. Please.”

I hear him hesitate, then back away. “Okay,” he says. “But are you still coming tonight?”

“Tonight?” I can’t think. Black swirling vortexes of emotion don’t have brains.

“The bonfire,” he says. “You know? At my place.”

The bonfire. Of course, the bonfire. “Of course, the bonfire,” I echo. “Of course I’ll be there. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

I can hear the smile in his voice. “Awesome,” he says. “See you there.”

I slept soundly in Candy’s bed that night, and then, when I woke up, I got to have a real shower and eat breakfast in the kitchen with two of the other girls. We had sugary cereal, that kind that crunches with sweetness. I hadn’t had anything like it in months. It made my teeth hurt.

Of course, I still had to clean. Stepmother brought Pixie up and left her there with me in the room, closing the door behind her with a mild “Behave,” almost as if she hoped we’d fight it out.

We didn’t. Pixie wouldn’t even look at me; she focused on her cleaning, her eyes following the movement of her rag as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. I watched her clean as if she were the most fascinating thing in the world, which she was. “Are you mad at me?” I asked after years of silence.

Scrub, scrub. Scrub, scrub. She didn’t reply.

“Because she didn’t really give me a choice. I had to tell her. I was in a really bad position.”

Scrub, scrub. Scrub, scrub.

“You were doing something that might have gotten us hurt. And you didn’t even tell me about it. It was like the time I caught Melody trying to light a fire in her room to toast a marshmallow. Even though she got in trouble, I had to tell, because she could’ve burned our house down.”

Pixie peeked up, then back down. Was it the story of my family? Maybe with all her foster-family issues, she liked hearing stories about my family. Well, I could do that. “My family was really happy, at least until they left me and didn’t want me anymore,” I said. It was getting easier to accept, but it still stabbed me in the stomach and left me breathless. Pixie must have seen the pain; her eyebrows made wrinkles on her forehead. “I had a mom and a dad and a little sister. We lived in Merry Park, outside Chicago. My sister is eight now. Her name is Melody.”

Pixie peeked up again. “I always wanted a mom.”

My mom? I could talk about my mom. “She’s pretty,” I said dutifully. “She has short black hair and is part Cuban and part Italian and has very white teeth. She buys too many clothes and too many shoes, my dad says, but she says she doesn’t like to wear the same thing more than once so he just has to suck it up, even though he’s the one working and making the money, he says. Sometimes she cries a lot.”

“But she has a family,” Pixie said. “Why does she cry?”

I shrugged, my insides singing. Pixie was speaking to me. She was forgiving me. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve asked her before, but she said I wouldn’t understand.” I paused. “She sleeps a lot too.”

“I would sleep a lot too, if I could,” Pixie said. I wondered what she meant. Maybe she’d had to keep watch over her rabbits. “Tell me more about your family.”

I told her more: I cherry-picked our happiest family memories, our vacations, our various deceased pets, the time we visited my dad’s cousins in Mexico and got sick from the water, the time I decided Melody needed a haircut and chopped off one of her braids. That anecdote even made Pixie laugh. Lifted by her laughter, I told her about the time my dad tried to make us his mother’s tostadas and set the kitchen on fire, about the time my mom passed out in the middle of the grocery store and I got to ride in an ambulance with its sirens wailing, about the time I tried to pierce Melody’s ears with paper clips. “Poor Melly,” I said fondly, and then realized that, compared with us, Melody was unquestionably the lucky one.

I told Pixie about the time Melody and I jumped off our roof after eating chicken wings, convinced we could fly (unaware that chickens were terrible fliers). I told Pixie about how, whenever I got sick, my mother would wipe my forehead with a cool, damp cloth and bring me toast and flat ginger ale. I told Pixie about the canopy bed I loved with the fire of a thousand suns, and the plastic glowing stick-on stars I’d plastered all over my ceiling, and the new pink sneakers I’d just gotten for gym class.

She was perking up a bit. I had to bring it home. “Wanna see my scar?” I asked.

Her eyes brightened. Good. “Scars are so cool.”

I leaned over and lifted my shirt above my belly button. “I had to get my appendix taken out,” I said. I watched her eyes trace my scar, a thick, wormy ridge that stretched across my right hip. It bowed up and out, like a pair of smiling lips. “I didn’t clean it good enough. My mom was supposed to help me, but she didn’t, so the cut got infected. It was so gross.”

Pixie’s eyes were bright, still, and round. “Can I touch it?”

I nodded, and she leaned over and traced it, up and down, up and down. “It’s like a smile,” she said. “On your belly.” And she smiled herself.

“I’m really sorry that I had to tell on you,” I said.

“Tell me more about your sister,” she said.

It was only later that I realized she didn’t accept my apology.

I’m out in the employee parking lot before I realize I have no way to get home. Melody drove me here, and, clearly, Melody isn’t here anymore. I survey the lot just to be sure, but her car is gone. She left me.

She
left
me. Again.

I feel bad, but I feel worse that I’m actually surprised.

My phone chooses this moment to buzz against my hip. I pull it out to see the indicator light blinking, and swipe across the screen to see that I have eight new voice mails and fourteen new texts. I scroll through.
Melody. Melody. Melody.
I read a few:
Where are you? S this isnt funny come back. S we are getting worried come back.
I listen to a voice mail, the most recent one, in which Melody babbles that I need to come back or they’re going to have to call the cops and we’re all going to get in major trouble so please just come back.

I wonder where I went.

It’s still buzzing,
Melody
flashing on the screen, so I pick up. “Morning,” I say, and Melody unleashes a gust of wind in my ear.

“Oh my God, Scarlett, you’re alive,” she says. “Where
were
you? Where are you now?”

“What are you talking about?” I say. The bad feelings are still simmering inside my stomach, bubbles of bad traveling up my throat and popping in my mouth. “You left me here.”

Another gust of wind. “You were so drunk,” she says. “You probably don’t remember.”

I’m about to tell her everything I do remember, the drinking in the storage room and the passing out and the swirls of colors like in Skywoman and waking up in the park, but I stop myself. I want to hear what she has to say first, in case she’s going to lie. “What?”

“I shouldn’t have let you drink so much,” Melody says. “Kat just kept egging you on. I feel bad.”

“What happened?”

She is a sack of sighs. “The stuff Kat had was super, super strong,” Melody says. “Like, ridiculous strong. I have a pretty good tolerance, and even I was feeling it after half a cup. You have no tolerance. You had no chance.”

No. I was drugged. I had to have been drugged. It felt just like it looked in the cartoon. “I drank too much and passed out?”

“You downed, like, that whole cup,” Melody says. “And you were already out of it, but you had some more. Finally we went out into the park, and you fell over on the cobblestones and blacked out for a little. I thought I was going to have to call the cops and we were all going to get in so much trouble and I was going to get arrested, and that wouldn’t have—”

“I know, your college applications,” I say impatiently. The pit in my stomach is back. “What happened then?”

“We were trying to lift you to carry you out, but you popped up on your own,” Melody says. “And took off. We tried to chase you, but we lost you. Seriously, Scarlett, we looked for you all freaking night. I’m so tired right now and I have to go to practice.”

It sounds plausible. So plausible it might be true. “But I don’t remember drinking that much,” I say. “Why didn’t you call someone? I could’ve been dead somewhere.”

Melody hesitates, and in that hesitation I can hear
college applications.
“Never mind,” I go on. I don’t want to hear whatever lie she’s formulating. “What about Katharina?”

“We ran around looking for you together,” she says. “Eventually we had to get out because the park was going to open. Where were you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Can you come get me?”

“I have to go to practice. Can’t you walk?”

“Are you kidding me?”

She’s silent for a moment, then blows a long breath into my ear. This one isn’t a sigh. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll be there in a few minutes. Be ready to go.” She hangs up without saying goodbye.

My mind swirls the whole ride home, which is fortunate, as Melody doesn’t speak to me and I need something to do besides look out the window at the nauseatingly fast-moving trees and mailboxes flashing by. Why was I so convinced I’d been drugged? Was I really that eager to think the worst about my sister, about Katharina?

I don’t know what I think about Katharina.

Melody drops me off and I crawl straight into sheets that smell too much like me and sleep.

I don’t dream.

I wake up a few hours later feeling at least somewhat refreshed, and set about planning for the bonfire. Yes, I’m still going. I need something, anything, to distract myself from everything else going on right now.

I pick out my clothes (long white maxidress, about as far as I can get from the Five Banners uniform, and it covers my right hip and the scars on my back, which is the most important thing) and take a shower, then settle in to wait for dusk. I cocoon myself on the couch and grab a book from my childhood and turn on Food Network in the background and plug my ears with my iPod. Basically, I do all I can to keep myself from thinking, and Matthew and my dad are kind enough to let me. My dad takes Matthew to a friend’s house and then shuts himself in his office to work or whatever.

Finally evening rolls around, and I unplug my ears and toss the book onto the table and flip off the TV to find I’m still in the same world as I was this morning. I shoulder the disappointment well and go off to change. I select cute sandals and even put on makeup, a shimmery layer of lip gloss and a swoop of eyeliner, though I know chances are good I’ll sweat it off later.

The drive to Connor’s takes me down a series of increasingly dark and winding roads that reach deep into the woods, then open up into a wash of pastoral farms. I pass fields of what I think is corn, of hay swaying in the breeze and waiting to be baled (whatever that means), fields ambling with horses. Fences are nothing more than markers of wood. Houses are squat and cheerful and all have chimneys, and bright red barns dot the landscape. I would quite like to live here, I think. Maybe I can convince my dad to move and take up farming. Maybe baling hay would make Melody’s college applications glow.

Connor’s house fits right in. I pull into a winding dirt driveway and park my car at the end of a long row; I’m evidently not the first one here. There’s still a ways to walk to get to the top of the driveway. When I get out of my car, I’m greeted by the sound of faraway laughter and the crisp, summery smell of burning leaves and what might be the whinny of a horse.

Connor’s house, a small brown ranch, sits dark and alone in the middle of an expanse of fields that ends in woods several hundred feet away. Near the edge is what I’m guessing is a barn, though it’s rough and unpainted and doesn’t fit in with its cheery red compatriots. The ground is scoured down to the dirt and scattered with bits of hay, though one part of the fields is lush and green—that must be the pasture for the horses. Everybody is gathered near the woods, where they’re silhouetted black against the glow of the bonfire; words and laughter float above the crackling of the blaze, and movements are hazy, spooky, through the billowing smoke.

“Hey, Scarlett,” a familiar voice calls. Cynthia.

Hay bales are scattered about for seating; on one bale sit Cynthia and a few other girls I vaguely recognize from the park, all clutching red Solo cups that glisten with condensation. Cynthia grins at me. “Glad you could make it,” she says, and lets out a laugh that sounds very much like a cackle. “Connor will be glad to see you.”

I blame the heat that climbs my throat and cheeks on the nearby fire. “Hey, Cynthia. How are you?”

“Go get a drink.” Cynthia points behind her, nearly toppling off the bale of hay with the effort; she cackles again as her friends lift her back up. “Don’t drink too much, though,” she shouts, and her friends laugh. “It’s bad for you!”

You don’t need to tell me twice. Yet somehow I find myself wanting a drink anyway. Tonight can be a test—I can see if the colors come back to visit.

There are a lot of people here, but somehow, maybe because we’re outside, it doesn’t feel claustrophobic. I weave my way through the crowd, saying hello to people who may or may not be fellow Five Banners peons. It’s hard to tell without the shirts, and near impossible to remember any names without the name tags.

Several kids are clustered around a fold-up table loaded down with drinks and stacks of red cups. They part as I approach, revealing a kid I don’t recognize, shaking and stirring and pouring. The “bartender” looks up and grins, and I realize it’s Rob.

Though I’ve seen his gauges and tattoos before, somehow it’s hard to reconcile uniformed Rob with the Rob in front of me now. This Rob, while still short and thick and hobbitlike, is decked out in black from head to toe, with silver spikes jutting out from unexpected places, like his left shoulder. Piercings glitter in his eyebrow and his lip, and the gauges stretch out his ears, so large I can see two nickel-size slices of the woods through them. Gel slicks his hair to his head, and the tattoos crawling over his shoulders, leering faces and skulls and flowers and initials in Gothic font, are in full, glaring display. I haven’t had anything to drink yet, but I already feel a little dizzy. “Evening, Scarlett,” he says. “What’s your poison of choice?”

“Um.” I survey the options. The table is loaded with a staggering array of drinks; if this is Connor’s parents’ raided liquor cabinet, he must come from a family of alcoholics. “Just make me something sweet. Please.”

He tips an imaginary hat. “Sweet it is.” He shakes and stirs and pours from a glittering glass bottle, topping it off with something purple and syrupy. He presents it to me with a flourish, like he’s handing over a crystal goblet rather than a plastic cup. “It’s pomegranate.”

I smell it, and it smells enough like juice that it doesn’t make my stomach lurch. “Thanks.”

“Enjoy.” He turns to the next person, a girl I’ve worked with a few times at headquarters. “Denise. You look like you’re in the mood for tequila.”

I don’t hear Denise’s reply; I’ve already melted back into the crowd. The taste of pomegranate and sugar makes my back teeth tingle, and warmth floods my belly. I need to get close to the fire, I decide. I take another sip of my drink, and it’s like the fire is inside me. No colors though, I note.

Somebody claps me on the shoulder. “Scarlett!” It’s Cady. Her cheeks and forehead are shiny with sweat; streaks of mascara decorate her cheeks like war paint. “Scarlett, I’m so, so happy to see you.”