Now You See Her (13 page)

the other kids, but my mother said I should celebrate with family and make an early night of it. “With a debut like that, you have to stay focused, Hope. You don’t know who’s going to read that interview and come to the next show. My God, people in New York could read it! Being an understudy in a production like this is no small thing, Hope.” I just stared her down. Calling me an understudy after that debut? And getting all excited about a little town’s newspaper story. The Black Sparrow Lake newspa- per wasn’t exactly
USA Today
, although
USA Today
would try to interview me later. I didn’t talk to them.

My mother said I could go to the
closing
night party, when it wouldn’t matter how I looked for the next show, in case I needed to be Juliet. I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

And so, after I finally got rid of my parents, I carefully put just the smallest sliver of cardboard in the glass doors of the dorm, just like I had so many times before, so the alarm wouldn’t go off when I opened the door.

And then I waited for Logan. I thought that he’d come and get me by one a.m. at the latest. But then I remembered he would be at the cast party, and it prob- ably lasted until all hours. I could see the lights on in the lodge. Then the lights went out.

Everybody probably went to the shack afterward, I thought. So, about one thirty or so, I put on my hiking

boots and my parka. I went up the jogging path and then turned off into the woods toward the shack. And there they were, all the seniors, with a big keg. All I had to do was to take one picture with my cell phone and they’d all be expelled. Logan and Alyssa Lyn were in the mid- dle of the floor, grinding away to some stupid ChanTwos song they had on a boom box. Then, all of a sudden, one of them whispered, “Can it! I hear something!”

“Hit the lanterns! No, all of them!”

They did, and I accidentally dropped my flashlight and ran. That was when I first found
my
little ravine, because I dived right into it when I heard the door bang open.

“Flashlight. See over there!” somebody said. “Better split.”

“Sure it’s not Logan’s little shadow? Tinkerbell?”

A voice I sort of recognized said, “Rose, you should stop encouraging her. You bring it on yourself. She prob- ably thinks you want her.”

And Logan said, “I don’t come on to her or anything.

She’s a good kid.”

“You don’t have to! She’s totally like a little puppy dog, following you around with her tongue out!” the guy said. “Ready for action!”

Everybody laughed.

A girl’s panicky voice broke in then, “It’s almost two in the morning! If we get caught out here . . .”

Alyssa Lyn, almost crying, said, “I don’t want to get kicked out of the show! I don’t want to get kicked out of school!”

So they all left.

They took the flashlight, and it was so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. But I managed to fol- low close enough behind them that I could see the light bobbing along.

I went back to my room and lay there on the bed. I wished I could just sleep until I was old, like, twenty-one. I just lay there. I felt like I could hear my life crack- ing and creaking and breaking like the limbs of an old tree in a high wind. I wanted to call Logan and scream, “I saw you practically screwing her with your clothes on! What about me? What about The Plan? What about The

Idea?”

I thought, The hell with Logan Rose.

But the more I thought about him with her, the more I knew I had to go through with it because he was weak, and she would get him away from me. And so I got up and started to get dressed. First my black long under- wear, then my black jogging pants and matching hoodie, and then finally my gloves and silk ski mask turned up like a hat. I packed my little pack with a few granola bars, some water bottles, condensed moisture packets, a few of those things you crack open to warm your hands

at football games, and other stuff I would need. I took my cell, too. At least I could use it to surf the Net when I was bored. There was going to be a lot of dead time for me. I wished I had my flashlight. I carefully opened the dorm door and the alarm did not go off. I started to jog in the dark, hoping I wouldn’t twist my ankle.

As I warmed up, I thought about the fact that The Idea wasn’t totally original. In fact, it was sort of just like the plot of
Miss Fortune
, the movie with Ben Stiller where Logan had two lines. Right down to the dispos- able cell phone, and using one of those kids’ Darth Vader voice-changing masks, except the guy was going to ask for a million dollars instead of twenty thousand. If my parents didn’t tell the police and left the money in regu- lar cash where he said to leave it, “the kidnapper” would tell them where to find me. But if they told the police, they would never find me. I would be dead from natural causes in a few days unless they did what he said, because he would just leave me where I was.

Logan could just walk away and no one would ever know.

But he had to be planning to do what we had always said—act like he was the hero who saved my life, and my parents would still love him after we ran away.

In the movie, the guy played by Ben Stiller is this rich guy whose parents have cut him off because he’s, like,

thirty, and he’s flunked out of college, like, five times. The girl he talks into The Idea does just what he tells her to, and ties him up. But the next morning they dig up the whole forest where he’s tied to a tree for a condominium development, and he ends up in a bucket machine or something. The girl takes off with the money. The last thing you see is her driving this big red pickup truck and picking up . . . Logan (or the character he played).

He says to her, “Hey, good looking? Are you headed where I’m going?”

She says, “Has it got palm trees and tequila?” He says, “It does now!”

And they take off, burning rubber, in Ben Stiller’s jazzed-up truck.

I finally found the place where Logan had said I should wait. The little short evergreens and bushes would hide me and keep me warm. The jogging path went on for miles, but Logan and I usually only did a cir- cuit, a mile and a half out and a mile and a half back. We only went farther, out to the hunter’s cabin, for . . . you know what. But after I found the place, I went out to the cabin. It was still warm in there from the after-party party. I went in and lay on the floor, and the smell of beer and cigarettes made me nauseated. I looked in the little broom closet and got out our special sleeping bag.

I thought about Logan. About our love and how

suspicious I was. And how strange this thing was that he’d asked me to do. I want to be clear right now. I didn’t know
exactly
for sure why he wanted me to do it. He said it was for the money, for The Plan. But maybe he really wanted the attention to help launch our careers. It would be in newspapers all over the country, with pictures of him and me. All publicity is good, I thought. I thought that would be okay.

Romeo Rescues Juliet. Right.

I woke up in the cabin. I was still pretty warm in the sleeping bag, but I could tell it had gotten colder.

I didn’t want to put the tape around my hands until the last possible minute.

But Logan said I had to do it a little sooner so it would look authentic when he found me the next day. The tape would have to be on six or eight hours before the rescue at least. Overnight, if I could stand it. Otherwise, it would look phony. It had to look like I’d actually been kidnapped and missing for four days. He wouldn’t let me get too bad off. After all, I was his love, “the sweetest flower of all the field.” It would just be more dramatic when I
somehow managed to take the stage again the next weekend
for the Saturday night performance. People would be wowed. It would be a national story.

The whole thing had gone according to the way it was supposed to this far. Just before my mother kissed me good night after dinner, I said I’d seen that creepy guy again. I said I thought it was the guy who worked at the shopping center restaurant, Chatters, the Mexican guy. He was the only guy I knew by sight who was in his twenties. She freaked and said she was going to tell the administration the next day. And I said no, I didn’t want Mr. Emerson to get upset. He would flip out.

That shut her up.

She wouldn’t have cared if Jeffrey Dahmer was stalk- ing me if it was going to bother
Brook Emerson
.

Finally, after a whole day of doing nothing but jog- ging to keep warm and then sleeping, I got ready to tie myself up. I went to the place and I laid down outside and taped my hands in front of my body.

And Logan didn’t come.

When he didn’t come the first night, I did have the thought that maybe he’d dumped me. Then I pushed it away. He knew I had food and a warm place to go. He probably couldn’t get away from his parents. That’s all. But the bad thoughts kept creeping back.

He really had dumped me! The Idea wasn’t about me.

He was really going to run away with Alyssa Lyn Davore!

With my parents’ money.

He was planning to let me die out there. Not like I was stupid enough to let that happen. But I could have been that stupid. I could have killed myself.

My parents probably already knew about it too. The police already probably knew about it. No, they wouldn’t know until morning.

I got up and ripped off the tape, went back into the cabin, wrapped myself in the sleeping bag, and checked the weather on my cell. No snow in the forecast, just cold, and not below freezing. I fell asleep. I woke up when I heard someone coming, laughing, crunching along. It had to be people coming to the cabin to be alone, the way Logan and I had. I made a howling noise—I don’t know why, but I couldn’t think of what else to do—and I heard a scream and footsteps crashing away. It was so cold I curled up in a ball with the sleep- ing bag over my head.

Now, I would have gone back to my dorm right then except a part of me still wanted to believe that Logan,
my
Logan, would come to me.

But there was another part of me thinking something else, and that part was growing bigger.

It was like a red flower in my chest, growing bigger and brighter. I wanted to make him pay.

Pay for snuggling with Alyssa Lyn in the lounge. Pay

for grinding with her at the secret party. Pay for . . . using me and leaving me in the cold. Alone. I was so incredibly furious that I decided to let him think that I was gone, really gone, not for pretend.

So when the sun came up, I took my tape and my junk but I didn’t go to the place where I was supposed to be found. Instead, I went to my little gully, which was behind the hill—like, half a mile away, farther past the old hunting cabin on the circle trail. There was a little bridge over a dry creek, and I scrunched under it and put on the tape. Now, it wasn’t exactly at the bottom of the ocean! Anyone looking along that bend away from the circular jogging path could have seen me, but they’d have to be looking and not be total idiots.

I lay down there, under the bridge, sucking on a mois- ture packet. If anyone got anywhere near me, I figured I could pretend I was passed out. But though I heard shouts and sirens, nobody came remotely close by. I went back into the cabin that night. It was cold; I made a lit- tle fire in the oven with some paper and dry branches I broke off a tree. It was smoky, but it was warm. I got into my down bag and went to sleep.

The next morning I was bored out of my mind. I wanted to play games on my cell, but I needed to save the battery to check on the weather. When I tried to do that, I saw that there was a story in the Black Sparrow

Lake paper Friday night and that Saturday morning in the Detroit paper, about this huge manhunt for the miss- ing “young actress” from Starwood.

Me!

I decided I would go back out to my special place and put in the gag and bind myself up for real.

Logan must have been out looking in the place we originally decided on and not been able to find me! Now he was sorry. Now he would remember everything we meant to each other and stop being such an asshole. He must have practically had a seizure from fear. He must have started praying, saying to God he would do any- thing if I was just safe. I pulled down my silk ski mask over my face and went running to warm up before going to lie down. I passed a guy running in the opposite direc- tion, but he was a real hot dog going about ten miles an hour, and he didn’t even look at me.

I ran straight out toward the edge of the woods, where I’d never been, and straight back.

Then, back at the cabin, I put my hands on the stove where it was still warm from the little fire I’d made in the dark. It would be cool before anyone came looking. I didn’t think until later that anyone might have seen the smoke. I checked the Internet again. I was amazed that my cell phone worked, until I realized that I was actually only a few hundred yards from the administration building. It

just
felt
remote, because of the woods. Friday night, it had said in the Black Sparrow Lake newspaper that Alyssa Lyn Davore had dedicated her performance the night before to me. She came out after the curtain and said, “If anyone here knows anything about where Hope is, please help us. Hope is one of us. If I ever did anything to hurt her, I’m so sorry. We just want her to be safe.”

Stinking bitch.

It had warmed up so much I was actually sweating from my run. I could hear all kinds of cars, and people shouting, so I thought I should go outside and get in posi- tion. But there was another article, and I had to read it.

Volunteers were coming from as far away as Madison and Chicago!

After that, I knew I was ready to really take the risk and be out overnight. After all, it said they were already doing flyovers with helicopters and, even though the woods were dense, those things probably had heat-sensing units in them. With my luck, they would sense a dead deer or two people screwing. Oh, well. They had to find me somehow.

It was the biggest thing to happen in Black Sparrow Lake, ever!