The Night She Disappeared (9 page)

I settle for “She didn’t say why she wanted to trade. Just that it was a favor.”

“Do you think it was a customer? Someone at school? Did she say anything about him?”

Everyone keeps thinking I know something, but I don’t. And even if I did, would it matter? Whoever wanted to take her out on Friday night probably didn’t kidnap her two days before.

“She didn’t say anything at all. She just said there was something she wanted to do on Friday.”

“I hear the guy asked about you. Do
you
know who it was that took her?”

I stiffen. “What? Why are you asking me that? Don’t you think I would have told the police if I did?”

He waves his hand. “I know, I know, sorry. It’s just that—maybe there are things you would tell me that you wouldn’t tell them.”

“To be honest, Brock, if I was going to tell anyone anything, it would be the police. Because I want Kayla found.”

He makes a small wordless sound, and again I wonder if I hear the beginnings of tears. “What will there be to find? Whoever did it is not going to just let her come walking home again.” And even though it’s his table, not mine, he stands up, picks up his tray of uneaten food, and says, “Thanks for talking to me,” before he walks off.

On my way back to class, I pass what must be Kayla’s locker. Now it’s decorated with yellow ribbons. On the floor in front of it are a half dozen bouquets of flowers, still wrapped in plastic. But the flowers are already fading, their heads hanging limp from the stems.

If I disappeared, who, besides my parents, would really miss me?

The Sixth Day

Kayla

AT SOME POINT
I noticed the water bottles lined up along the bottom of the bookshelf underneath the TV, and I drank some. There was a box of granola bars, too, but they are long gone. Mostly, I’ve just been sleeping. Maybe it’s a bad thing to sleep when you have a concussion, but I do it anyway. Sometimes I scream for help, but less and less often. I try to ignore how my stomach hurts, how it spasms.

This time when I wake up, a man is standing over me. His arms are crossed.

“Help me.” I reach my hand toward him, but he steps back with a frown.

I push myself up so my back is against the wall next to the bed.

He stares at me, expressionless, and doesn’t make a sound. He’s wearing tan pants and a navy blue short-sleeve shirt with a row of pens in the pocket. He’s got thinning dark hair and little round wire-framed glasses. He looks kind of familiar, but I can’t place him.

“Scream as loud as you want,” he says, and smiles. The smile changes his face, makes his eyes go flat.

I don’t scream. I don’t even cry. Or beg. Instead I say, “Who are you? Why am I here?”

“You belong to me now.” He says it as if it’s a simple fact.

The collar on his shirt is buttoned up tight, but right above it are three parallel marks, like the tops of angry red furrows. I think they’re scratch marks.

And I think I made them. Looking at them, I feel a surge of pride.

Pride and fear.

And a red-hot desire to hurt him again.

My eyes cut to the door, smudged with my bloody fingerprints. It’s closed. But maybe it’s not locked. Quickly, before I can telegraph what I’m about to do, I shoot past him with my arm outstretched. My hand closes on the knob at the same time his closes on my shoulder. He yanks me back just as I register that the door is still locked.

“You’re a bad, dirty girl,” he says, and throws me onto the bed.

I stand up really fast so that he doesn’t get on top of me. He just narrows his eyes. He’s so close I can smell his sour breath, but my back is against the wall and I can’t go any farther.

Finally he says, “You shall call me master.”

“What?” I heard what he said. I just can’t believe it.

He lifts his chin. “From now on, you shall call me master.” He watches me. Waits for my reaction. He looks like my cat after she sees a bird in the garden. Still, but all quivery.

“Say it,” he urges.

But I don’t say anything. When he moves, I don’t even see his hand coming.

Slap!

He hits me so hard that I fall against the white wall. Stars bloom behind my eyes. My ear is ringing. On boneless legs, I slide down to the cheap-looking linoleum. It’s cool against my cheek. The gold flecks twinkle. Or maybe that’s happening someplace in my eyes. In my broken head.

When I push myself up, there’s a new smear of rusty blood on the wall. I touch the cut gingerly. My fingers come away wet and red.

His nose wrinkles when he sees the blood. “You shall call me master,” he repeats.

“You’re my master,” I say.

Not meeting his eyes.

The Sixth Day

Gabie

WHEN THE LAST
bell rings, I run down the hall to catch Drew. I find him pulling his skateboard out of his locker.

“Do you have your wallet with you?”

His eyebrows pull together, and his hand reaches toward his back pocket like he thinks someone might have stolen it. “Yeah. Why?”

I press my keys into his palm. “Good. Then you can drive me home. You need the practice.”

“What? Now?”

“I just want to make sure that you’re comfortable driving my car before you have to deliver your first order tomorrow.”

“Okay.” He looks down at the key ring, which has two house keys and the key fob for the Mini. “What is this thing?”

“It’s the key.”

He runs his index finger over it. “It doesn’t look like any key I’ve ever seen.” It’s round, about the size of one of those dollar coins, with concave sides. It kind of looks like the starship
Enterprise.
There’s nothing metal sticking out of it.

“Trust me, it’s the key,” I say as we walk out to the student parking lot. I see people noticing me. It reminds me of this girl, Jordan, who went to our school last year. Her older brother took their dad’s gun, went downtown, and shot into a crowd waiting for a movie to start. He hit seven people, killing two, and then shot himself in the head. Before her brother did that, no one noticed Jordan. After, everyone stared, but still no one talked to her. About two weeks later, Jordan stopped coming to school. I don’t know if she dropped out or transferred. Now I wish I had said something to her. Although I don’t know what it would have been.

Fifteen feet from my car, Drew carefully presses the button to unlock the doors. Once we put our stuff on the back seat and get inside, he runs his fingers over the blank column of the steering wheel without finding the ignition switch.

“You put the key in there.” I point to a slot on the dash labeled stop start.

He slides the key in and then presses the button. Nothing happens. And again. The third time, he tries holding the button down. Still nothing.

I’m used to this car, so it takes me a minute to figure out what Drew’s doing wrong. I lean over and look at his feet. “You have to have your foot on the brake before it will start.” He smells like Ivory soap mixed with a little bit of sweat.

Drew looks down at the pedals. “Jeez, even the pedals are round. Everything is round in this car—the rearview mirror, the gauges, the seat backs—”

“Someone had fun designing it.” Everything in the world is designed. Someone decided how deep and how wide to make your cereal bowl, how long to make your spoon handle, and what shape to make the puffs or squares you pour into your bowl. I’m always looking at things, deciding if I would make them the same way or not. But the Mini? The Mini I would keep as is.

When Drew does things in the right order, the car starts smoothly. The melody of the seat belt chime makes us both smile. When we buckle up, our hands brush. I feel funny that I blush and quickly give him directions to my house.

Drew’s careful. I like that. I watch as he checks his sideview mirror, the rearview mirror, and then my sideview mirror, his hands at three and nine o’clock. Then he lifts his right hand as he turns toward me. At first I think he’s going to touch my face, but instead he rests his fingers on the back of my seat. Keeping his head turned, he slowly backs up.

Once we’re out of the parking lot, we both relax a little. It’s funny, but when it was me driving I wasn’t that aware of him. Now all I can think about is how close he is. I hear the breath going in and out of his lungs. He has to keep his eyes on the road, but I can study him, his deep-set eyes and his sun-streaked hair. The backs of his fingers have fine blond hairs.

“So who taught you how to drive?” Drew asks, without taking his eyes off the road.

“My dad. In the cemetery, really early in the morning. He said there was no one there that I could hurt. When I first got into the driver’s seat, I thought there was something wrong with the car. The gas pedal kept shaking. I told my dad, only it wasn’t the car—it was me. My leg was shaking because I was so nervous.”

“Maybe it’s good to be a little nervous,” Drew says. “If you’re too confident, then you’ll screw up.”

“My parents never get nervous,” I say.

“Never?”

“Not that I’ve seen. Sometimes they’ll get a call that there’s been a huge car accident, or some kid who lost both his arms in a hay thresher is being Life Flighted in, and when they hear that, they both get amped, like they just drank a lot of coffee. They don’t seem scared at all.”

“It’s probably good that they love what they do.” His teeth press his lower lip. “I know I wouldn’t want to do that.”

“Me neither.” I don’t tell Drew that sometimes it seems like my parents are only fully alive at work. “So who taught you how to drive?”

“First my mom tried to. She’s one of those people who brace their hands on the dash and scream and pray and stomp their feet on imaginary brakes.” He shoots me a sideways glance. “You can imagine how well that worked out. Then she got one of her boyfriends to do it. He made me go out on I-5. I’d had about ten minutes of driving experience, and all of a sudden everyone is going seventy. I think the most I ever managed was forty. I was sweating so much the steering wheel was slippery.” He smiles with that cute crooked grin.

“That’s like teaching you to swim by throwing you into the deep end of the pool.”

“Kind of like that, yeah.” His silver eyes flick over to me. “It’s pretty much my mom’s whole approach to being a parent.”

“And your dad? Where’s he?”

He shrugs. “No idea. I’ve never met him.”

I try to imagine that. “Do you know if he’s alive?”

“My mom’s never told me his name.” His voice gets softer, like he’s talking to himself. “Sometimes I wonder if she even knows it.”

When we get to my house, the open garage doors show my parents’ matching blue BMWs. My mom’s out on the front step, getting the mail. She does a double take when she sees who is driving the car.

“Just park on the street,” I tell Drew.

He bites his lip and pulls in next to the curb. “Are they going to be mad that I’m driving your car?”

“No,” I say, although I have no idea. They’ve never met Drew. They’ve never really met any of my friends. Not that I have that many.

“Maybe I should just take off.” He looks out at the street.

“No. Come in with me. I need to talk to you about something.”

He presses the key into my hand. We get out, pick up our stuff, and start walking up the flagstone walkway. Drew stays a half step back.

My mom looks up and smiles. “Hey, Gabie—who’s your friend?”

The Sixth Day

Drew

I KNOW WHAT
Mrs. Klug sees when she looks at me. A loser. A skinny kid in torn jeans, hair that’s too long, and Vans that were black and white checked before they got worn a couple of hundred times. She probably thinks there’s a pack of cigarettes in my backpack. Which there is. But they’re not mine. I took them from my mom when we were arguing about how much she smokes. Plus there’s the longboard under my arm.

Or maybe because she’s a surgeon, Gabie’s mom sees the longboard and no helmet and thinks “donor.”

She’s slender and really pretty for a mom, dressed in green scrubs. Her hair is blond, but a brighter blond than Gabie’s, so maybe she dyes it. Gabie’s mom looks important, like five minutes ago she was making life-or-death decisions and yelling “stat!” and talking about femoral arteries and stuff like that.

“Hi, Mom. This is Drew. We work together at Pete’s.” I wait for her to say why I was driving the car, but she doesn’t. Do Gabie’s parents even know about her plan? “Drew, this is my mom.”

I shift my longboard and reach out to shake hands. “It’s nice to meet you—um—should I say Mrs. Klug or Dr. Klug?”

Although her skin is soft, her grip is firm. “Call me Gail. Dr. Klug is for the hospital, and Mrs. Klug is Steve’s mom.” I figure Steve must be the other Dr. Klug.

“Okay. Gail.” I nod.

“We’re going upstairs to study,” Gabie says, hefting her backpack like a prop. We don’t have a single class together. Her mom doesn’t say anything, just smiles again. I follow Gabie inside.

If the twin BMWs weren’t bad enough, my first sight of the inside of her house convinces me that I will never, ever let Gabie see the inside of our apartment. Her house is big and perfect. It’s not like a real house where people live. Everything is in the right place; there’s nothing left out—no candy wrappers, no newspapers, no mail, no empty glasses, no magazines, no shoes kicked off. It looks like how I imagine a really expensive hotel would look.

“I’d offer you a snack,” Gabie says, “but unless you like baby carrots, you’re out of luck. My parents have zero tolerance for junk food.”

Just then a man in dark blue scrubs walks out of a hallway that leads off the living room. His eyes are on a BlackBerry, and he’s talking while he types. “We just want you to be healthy, Gabie.” Then he looks up, sees me, and stops.

“Dad, this is my friend Drew from work.”

I step forward and shake his hand, too. The same soft / firm combo as his wife, although his is a little firmer, as if to remind me that it’s his daughter I’m with. “Hello, Dr. Klug.” He’s a little less than six feet tall and not as thin as you might think, given his feelings about junk food.