Author: Laurie Faria Stolarz
Category: Suspense
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My insides jump.
I swivel around to look, clutching the cell phone in my pocket, convinced the noise was from a car trunk slamming. I check the street, searching for anything that looks off.
“Jane?” A male voice.
Is that country music playing?
“Jane?”
It’s Mr. Miller. He’s still staring. His lips are moving. The water from his hose pours onto his shoe, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
I turn away and bolt down the street, feeling stupid for going out. Seriously, what was I thinking?
Breathe.
Breathe.
By the time I get to Coffee Et Cetera, Shelley is already parked and waiting for me out front. The shop is on the edge of town, in the opposite direction of the high school, so not many people we know frequent the place—at least that’s what I thought. When I open the door, I see Mike Jacoby from the debate team; Sarah Snell, class playwright; the Williams triplets with their matching headbands; and the infamous Vowel Team clan (Anya, Eric, Isaiah, Owen, Uma, and EnYa).
I haven’t seen any of them since BIWM.
“Do you want to leave?” Shelley asks.
Before I can answer, Jack comes out of the men’s room, and my insides coil up like bedsprings.
“Why don’t you get us a table,” Shelley says.
I move to the back of the shop, slide into a corner booth, and snag the saltshaker, trying to focus on the tiny crystals inside and not the grenade about to go off. Ten breaths later, I peek up.
Jack is looking this way.
Sarah hooks her arm in his, staking her claim.
“Here we are,” Shelley says, setting a mug of something frothy in front of me. There’s a card by her wallet. It’s been punched with two stars. After ten, she gets her prize, not unlike I do. She looks over her shoulder at the others. “I know. It’s awkward. But try not to let any of them bother you. They’re just curious.”
“About me?”
“Well, um, duh.” She smiles. “And you can’t really blame them. They were your friends, after all.”
“Since when was I friends with the Vowel Team or the Williams triplets?”
“Okay, well, maybe not them, but Jack.”
Jack.
He and I had plans together on the night I went missing: the Gigi Garvey concert. He knew she was my favorite and surprised me with third-row tickets. Things hadn’t exactly been official between us, but they’d definitely been brewing.
“He asked me for your new number, by the way,” Shelley says.
“Is he seeing someone?”
“Someone like Sarah? Doesn’t she wish. That girl collects boys like shoes. She’d just love him to be her next Jimmy Choo, not that I can blame her. I mean, who couldn’t use an extra pair, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“Number status?”
“What do you mean?” She’s speaking a whole other language.
“What’s the security status on your phone number these days? Classified? Open to the general public? Only available to private lists? In other words, do you want me to give it out?”
Do I?
Plastic plates clatter in the kitchen. I picture myself huddled and waiting by the cat door.
Clamor.
Scrape.
Clank.
“Because people want to see you,” Shelley insists. “They’re curious.”
That word again. It makes me crawl right out of my skin. I take a sip, wishing I were sitting inside a cab, headed over a bridge to someplace far away.
“I guess I’m pretty curious too,” she says. “I mean, can we talk about what happened? Because I really think it would help.”
“Help who?”
“Well, you, of course. I mean, how else are you supposed to get over stuff, right? Unless you’re seeing a therapist, but even still…”
“Even still?” My head spins.
“Are you seeing someone?”
“I’m mostly just writing about my experience—as a means of therapy, that is.”
“So cool,” she says as if we’re talking about summer plans. “I mean, I know how much you love to write. But do you want to talk about stuff too? Like … what that guy was like…”
I grab the saltshaker again, hating myself for agreeing to come.
“Was he as awful as everyone says? Did he make you do stuff?” She says that part under her breath, shielded by her hand, but that doesn’t lessen the blow.
My eyes press shut. The breeze from an overhead fan sends shivers all over my skin.
I need.
To get.
Out.
Shelley touches my forearm. The gesture makes me flinch. My eyes snap open. My hands are covered in salt crystals.
“It’s okay,” Shelley continues. “I mean, I get it—why you’ve been so tight-lipped. It’s just kind of hard for me, you know? Because we used to talk about everything.”
It’s true. We did. And the fact that she wants everything to zap back to the way it was BIWM is just one of the things that keeps us apart.
“I’m trying to be understanding.” She sips. “But at the same time, it’s, like, I don’t know what to say anymore. I mean, do I talk about myself? Do you even want to know? Because you haven’t really asked, so instead I end up babbling like an absolute idiot, which is probably as annoying as shit.”
Her inky-black bangs form a line across her forehead, cutting it in two.
I didn’t notice the bangs before; her hair has always been one length. And when did she get her ears double-pierced? Or start wearing lip gloss?
“Hello?” She waves her hand in front of my face. “Say something, will you? Tell me what you think.”
“About what?”
“About what I just said, about these feelies of mine.”
Feelies? Of hers?
Jack is looking this way again, flashing me back to the junior prom, when he took me out on the seaside deck and kissed me by surprise—until my lips went deliciously numb. He smelled and tasted like black licorice and confessed to having had a crush on me since the fifth grade.
So what is he doing now, hooking arms with Sarah Playwright? What are the odds that he took her to that Gigi Garvey concert?
“Ignore them,” Shelley says.
But their stares are louder than words, impossible to ignore, tugging at the pin in my grenade.
“Whoa, what happened?” She points to the scars on my hand. “That looks pretty major.”
“It’s fine,” I say, covering the scars with my sleeve.
“You’re doing it again.”
She’s right. I am. It doesn’t matter that we’re sitting face-to-face. I’m icing her out, making her feel alone. The crazy thing: Somewhere deep inside me there are things I want to tell her, like that after I went missing, I still talked to her in my mind, trying to trick myself into believing that she was there with me somehow.
I want to tell her that, but I remain an ice queen instead.
“Just so you know, it’s not going to work,” she says.
“What isn’t?”
“Your plot to sabotage our friendship.” She punctuates the sentence with a clank of her spoon. “Feel free to continue ignoring my calls and texts. Don’t ask me a single question—not about my day, or about my year. It sucked, by the way. Maybe you heard: My best friend went missing, because she’d gone to pick up a birthday gift for me. Because I’d gotten home from a camping trip a day earlier than planned, because I’d been such a spoiled nagging bitch to my parents, begging them to come home early.”
A good friend would tell her that it wasn’t her fault. But friendship is a two-way street, and I’ve been nothing but dead ends.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she continues. “You can slam all the doors you want in my face. I’ll still love you. You’ll still be like a sister to me.”
I couldn’t hate myself more.
Every. Last. Bit.
Each.
Remaining.
Shard
.
Because I don’t deserve her friendship. And because it’s only a matter of time before she figures that out.
NOW
18
Instead of heading straight home after Coffee Et Cetera, I go inside the library, three blocks down, because I know they have a one-person bathroom, and I know where to find the key. I grab it from the basket on the circulation desk, keeping my head low. Then I lock myself in the bathroom, so it’s just me, among four white walls, under a stark-white ceiling, standing on a gray-and white-flecked floor, with no windows to look out. And, better still, no windows to look in.
I breathe here—or at least I try to catch my breath, to will the binds in my chest to release, to slow the palpitating of my heart. But I feel so out of control—like a car skidding across ice. Relief would be a crash.
But I don’t crash.
I never crash.
There’s just a perpetual sense of dread, a constant bracing for the worst.
I lift the lid off the toilet tank and pluck out the rod inside—for no good reason other than I know how to do it, and I know where it is.
The rod gripped in my palm, I scrunch down in the corner with my cheek pressed against the tile and imagine Mason’s knock, knock-knock, tap, thud, wishing he were here, wanting to feel his hands, dying to hear his voice. I grind the end of the toilet rod into my thigh, but I don’t break skin. Maybe there’s nothing left to tear.
I’m not sure how long I stay, but after too many knocks that aren’t Mason’s, I return the toilet rod inside the tank and head back home.
Shelley’s car is parked out front when I get there. Sitting on the walkway steps, she stands when she spots me.
“Is everything okay?” I ask once I get up close.
“I forgot to show you something.” She hikes up her sleeve, revealing the sterling silver bracelet I bought for her birthday. The amethyst crystals glimmer on her wrist. The star charm dangles toward her thumb.
“You got it,” I say, feeling my skin flash hot.
Norma must’ve found it on the counter at the store. Is that where I left it? Did I even have a chance to grab it from behind the register?
“I’ve never taken it off,” she says, pinching the star between her fingers. “From the moment I unwrapped it, this bracelet was the one thing that kept me going.”
She obviously expects the idea of that to bring us closer, but instead it tears me apart, because as selfish as it may sound, I never want to see that bracelet again.
I take a step back, trying to get a grip, and that’s when I notice. She’s holding the gift bag too—the one I’d carefully chosen, with the words Happy Birthday printed in big loopy letters. The sparkly purple tissue paper sticks out at the top. The ribbon still has its curl.
I clasp my hand over my mouth, remembering using the blade of a pair of scissors to make the individual tendrils.
“Here,” Shelley says, handing me the gift bag; the card I picked is nestled inside it.
“You want me to have the packaging?”
She’s shaking her head. Her eyes focus downward. A mascara-stained tear drizzles down her cheek. “I don’t know what else to do,” she mutters before turning away and heading back to her car.
I close the door behind her and try to breathe at a normal rate. My head feels woozy. I can’t stop shaking.
It isn’t until hours later, in the safety of my closet, with a box of tissues in my lap, that I’m able to slide the card from the envelope. The pink metallic star sparkles against the glittery black background. I open the card up. My handwriting startles me—the slanted letters, the way I like to capitalize at random. It almost looks as though I wrote the note just yesterday.
I read the words, able to feel each one in the hollow of my heart, and at last the answer becomes clear: why Shelley wants me to have this. She wants me to be reminded of how I felt about her on the day that I was taken.
The day I can never get back.
THEN
19
There was still no light, but I kept working at the mattress anyway. It gave me something to focus on: a goal, a project, a distraction from going crazy. The nubs of my fingers stung, where the skin had opened up. But at least I was able to count twenty-seven loose mattress threads now. I fluffed them out, imagining they were white, puffy, and soiled with the blood from my cuts, like Santa’s mustache after a nosebleed.
I also started a mental list, trying to figure out who the monster was. Who could’ve been watching so closely, studying my habits, including what I wore? Someone from school? But it wasn’t that big, and I knew mostly everyone. The cute runner boy from the trails at the park? But his hair was short and black, rather than sandy brown and wavy.
Maybe a customer from the animal shelter? There had been this one guy, a year or two before, who’d requested to work solely with me—even waited a full hour while I helped other people. I’d assumed he’d gotten a recommendation from one of my former customers, but unfortunately I never asked. Instead I walked him around, pointing out cats and dogs and answering his every question about breed, care, and training.
He’d been around my age, hadn’t he?
With curly brown hair …
Did he have blue or brown eyes?
There had also been that awkward guy at Shelley’s house, at the end-of-the-school-year barbecue, one of her brother’s friends who’d given me a weird vibe. He kept staring the whole night like he knew me from someplace. When I asked him where he went to school, he said he was an exchange student from Wales (which Shelley later told me was a lie). Apparently, the guy was a new friend of her brother’s from some prep school in the city. I remembered his baseball cap had a lion logo. Shelley hadn’t known him well, and I never probed further.
But why would he have taken me?
Why would anyone have?
What did I do? Why was I here?
A blister burst on my thumb; a sudden gush dripped. I ran my fingers over the floor to feel where the droplets landed, then used the droplets to paint a smiley face on the cement, wondering if the blister was filled with blood—if the face was red. I popped my thumb into my mouth to check if I could tell. Definitely blood—a salty, metallic taste.
I needed more paint. I squeezed the wound, just as Mason’s knock, knock-knock, tap, thud sounded at the wall.
“Are you there?” he called.
I crawled across the floor and knocked to let him know that I was.
“You didn’t tell him about me, did you?”
I pressed my ear against the wall.
“I have a plan,” he said. “I’m going to get us out.”
“Now?” My heart clenched.
“Don’t I wish. I’m still working on the route, trying to find an exit. I figure there’s got to be at least five of them in a place this big. I’m bound to bump into one of them sooner or later—bump being the operative word. It’s dark in the ducts, not to mention in this room, and all I have is a reading light, smaller than the size of my thumb. I asked for it with my points, so I could read in the dark, but it doesn’t exactly project beyond the distance of a page.”
“How did you even get out? Were you in a room?” Had it run out of light?
“I found a heating vent behind the bathroom cabinet in my room. You should search your room too—behind the furniture, underneath the bed … I sneak out at various times of the day, when he isn’t doing rounds.”
“How long have you been here?”
“A few months maybe. The air ducts go all through this place. I took a different path yesterday. That’s how I found you.”
“How many of us are there?”
“Besides us? Three or four maybe. It’s too hard to tell. This place is huge. There’s at least one other guy. But I’ve only spoken to you and one of the girls—Samantha.”
“How old is she? Where is she from?”
“I’m not really sure. My age maybe … around eighteen? She was a couple of rooms away, so we couldn’t really tal
k much.”
I pictured the whole lot of us, scattered about the building in rooms just like this one, waiting for something to happen.
But what?
And when?
“Has he ever…?” I began just as a weird sucking sound sputtered from my throat. My chest tightened, cinching my lungs. I folded at the waist and pressed my forehead to the ground.
“Jane?”
“Has he ever…?” I tried again.
“Wait, he who? Ever what?”
“The guy who took us … Has he ever come into your room?”
“Negative. Wait, why do you ask? Has he ever come into yours? Did something happen?”
“No—at least not that I know of.”
“Shit. You scared me for a second.”
“Do you know what he wants with us?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, but I’m not sticking around for an answer. Are you in?”
“In?”
“To escape?”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“You don’t, I guess. But what have you got to lose? Your penthouse suite? The five-star room service?”
“No room service. He stopped bringing me food, and he shut off the lights.”
“Shit, seriously?”
“Seriously,” I mumbled, holding in a sob.
I suspected that he sensed it, because he began to chatter on, so maybe I wouldn’t have to talk.
“The guy likes it when you play by the rules: Set trays and plates in the hallway, empty trash once a week … He checks what you throw out, by the way. Like, he’ll notice if you’re not asking for shit, not using up all of your supplies, I mean. So use the stuff, fill out his stupid checklists, and indulge his grand plan, whatever that may be, just to buy yourself some time. And since I double as a mind reader, I bet you’re wondering if I know who he is. The answer is no. I met him at a party. He seemed normal enough. We were just shootin’ the shit, talking about muscle versus classic cars. He asked if I wanted to check out his ride—supposedly a ’68 Camaro. I followed him outside, but there was no Camaro in sight. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the trunk of his car.”
“So he drugged you.”