The Missing Girl (18 page)

267

“Oh,
wooo
,” one of the girls says, “the fifth grader is fresh!”

“Shut up, Stacey,” Krystal says. She has beautiful black hair and perfect teeth, and she gives you a big smile, showing all of them. Every girl at the table is a year older than you. They all dress better than you, with earrings and cute jeans and their hair really nice.

You open your lunch bag and wonder what Stevie would say about these girls.
Bunch of snobby hypocrites.

You’re too good for them!

Since you came back, all your sisters have been super nice to you, but Stevie has been the biggest surprise. It started at the health clinic Mommy and Poppy took you to the afternoon you came home. You were still in your cruddy clothes, but Stevie made you put on one of her sweaters, and the next day she told you it was yours to keep. “It looks cute on you,” she said, “better than on me.”

And then last night, just when you were falling asleep, she leaned over from the top bunk and said, “Autumn? I really missed you. And I love you.” Then she flopped back into her bed, and it was almost like a dream. Except it wasn’t.

“How
are
you, Autumn?” Krystal says as you take out your sandwich. You nod and say what you say when peo-268

ple ask you that question, which they do all the time. “I’m good.”

“Good,” Krystal says. “
Glad
to hear that! Glad for
you
.”

You take a bite out of your sandwich and hope they don’t notice your rashy hands.

Blaze Flanagan, who’s almost as beautiful as Krystal, leans across the table and says, “Okay, Autumn, tell.” Her eyes get really big. “Tell us everything.”

“What?” you say through a mouthful of bread and cheese.

“Whaaat?” someone mimics.

“Tell,”
Blaze repeats. “We want to hear all about it. Did he really—” She looks at the other girls, who are leaning in, and she almost smiles, and then she tries to look sad and serious. “You know,” she says. “Did he, uh—what was it like? I mean,
really
?”

You get that choked-in-the-throat feeling, like you can’t breathe and almost can’t move. But you do move. You stand, pick up your lunch bag, and walk away. You hear them laughing, but you don’t care about people like that anymore, the stupid things they’re saying or thinking about you.

You go outside and sit down under a big old pine tree.

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It’s chilly, and you’re not wearing a jacket, but you don’t care about that, either. It’s
nothing
to you, after the things you’ve done. You don’t go back in, even after the second bell rings. You don’t go in until you can breathe again, breathe without thinking that the next breath won’t ever come.

270

YOU CAN’T STOP

SOME DAYS IN school are good, like the two days a week you have lunch with Mrs. Kalman and you talk about things. Some days are not so good, like the afternoon when Mr. Spiegleman is explaining some work to you, and he says something and touches your arm, and you jerk away and yell, “Don’t touch me!”

Right away he’s saying, “I’m sorry, Autumn, I shouldn’t have done that,” and he looks really sorry, and not the least bit as if he’s mad at you for screaming at him, but even so you can’t stop saying it.

Don’t touch me.

Don’t touch me.

Don’t touch me.

271

YOU REMEMBER

“WHAT DID MR. Spiegleman do?” Mrs. Kalman says on Thursday when you eat lunch with her.

“Nothing,” you say. “Nothing. It was my fault.”

“Well, maybe,” Mrs. Kalman says. “Want some more chips?” she asks.

You shake your head. The first week you were home, you ate and ate and ate, like you could never get full, but then one night you just stopped eating halfway through the meal. And since then you haven’t wanted to eat a lot.

You lost your big appetite, and you don’t know why. You’ve always been, well, sturdy, but now there are almost no more places to pinch, like he pinched you, on your waist
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and your arms, and other places, too, like where you’re growing breasts. He pinched you there, and it hurt.

Mrs. Kalman takes a sip of her soda and says, “Can you show me what Mr. Spiegleman did?” You nod, and you touch her arm. “He touched you,” she says. “I see.” She picks up her sandwich and takes another bite, so you do the same with yours. “Anything else?” she asks.

“It’s stupid,” you say.

“What is?”

“I’m stupid.” You hunch your shoulders. “He said something, that’s all.”

She nods and says, “You want to tell me what he said?”

It comes out of you in a whisper, as if it’s a big secret.

“He said, ‘What’s that rash on your hands?’” You cover your face and laugh through your fingers, because it’s
so
stupid
to be upset about that. You just couldn’t stand to hear it, and you don’t know why.

“Well,” Mrs. Kalman says, “let’s have our cookies, and you think about it, okay?”

You love Mrs. Kalman. She never tries to rush you or make you say anything, or do anything like “get over it,” or

“forget about it,” or “remember that you’re safe now.” You never have to tell Mrs. Kalman
anything
. Mommy and
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Poppy say stuff, and they want to hug you and kiss you and hold you all the time, and you kind of want that, but you also kind of really
don’t
, and when you tell them, they get all confused and it makes them feel bad, and then
you
feel bad, and it’s just a big mess.

You reach for a cookie and check out all the red, bumpy things on your hands. Some bad rash. Itches a lot, too.

Last night Mommy put that soothing, white calamine lotion all over your hands and your arms, and she gave you a soft old cotton sheet and—

The sheet
.

Now you remember. You remember that
he
noticed your rash. You remember what
he
said. The same thing Mr. Spiegleman said. You remember that
he
brought you a sheet. You remember too much.

274

SIX MONTHS LATER: ROSES

OUTSIDE PATRICK THE Florist Beauty sniffed the display of roses, then unlocked her bike. She still worked her ten hours every week with Patrick, but she’d added another twenty-five hours at the KwikStop. Now that she was eighteen, she was paying her parents rent and saving the rest. She pushed off and rode into traffic. Ten minutes later, after valiantly biking up the hill to the school, she leaned on the handlebars and scanned the shoving, chattering crowd of kids for Autumn. Today she didn’t bother looking for Ethan—he had track practice. He usually managed to show up once or twice a week to walk home with her and Autumn. Sweet of him—above and beyond.

275

Over the summer, when he’d been pumping gas at the KwikStop, they’d become friends—just that. Not the man of her dreams, but a really good friend. That was unexpected, as in
not planned for
. Speaking of which, her eighteenth birthday—that birthday at which
Le Plan
had been aimed for so many years—had come and gone, and here she was, still in Mallory. By choice, and not chafing about it, either.

Something had shifted in Beauty.
Le Plan
wasn’t dead so much as revised: it wasn’t so fanatically about escape now—that had come to seem sort of, well, juvenile—but more about getting her associate degree at Community College, getting herself really educated, and
then
finding out if she still wanted to leave Mallory. A little more open-ended. A little more about exploring. A little less about Beauty, and a little more about other people.

She spotted Autumn coming down the steps, but she didn’t wave. She watched her progress, noticed who she did or didn’t talk to, and if she appeared sad or upset. That was happening less and less, but even after six months Beauty found herself still anxious about the effects of the abuse on her little sister, still surprised about the changes in Autumn, but mostly still overwhelmingly grateful that she had come back to them.

276

BREMEN HERALD

Your Community Newspaper

“We print all the news that’s fit to print and none of the gossip.”

BODY DISCOVERED IN RIVER

BREMEN—The badly decomposed body of

a white male was discovered on Sunday by two experienced Bremen sportsmen. Charles

Skulko, 69, and his cousin Bradford Skulko, 58, were duck hunting Sunday afternoon in a marshy cove in the lower reaches of the Niskcogee River when they noticed what they at first thought was simply a pair of shoes someone had lost. Chuckling, the two men investigated and soon realized the shoes were on a body.

Charles Skulko then called the state police on his cell phone and directed them to the site of the discovery. “It was all bloated and swollen,”

Bradford Skulko told this reporter. “A pretty bad sight. I’m an EMS tech, and I don’t exactly faint at the sight of blood or anything like that,
277

but this made me pretty sick.” Dr. Ronald Mantelier, the county coroner, said it appeared that the body had been in the water for at least several months. It is not known if foul play was involved. Dr. Mantelier said he would not spec-ulate on the cause of death until his examination was complete. He did add that the body was in an advanced state of decomposition. “Pretty much more decomposed than any corpse I’ve had to deal with,” he said.

278

WHAT YOU DID

FROM INSIDE THE big glass front door of the school, you see your sister Beauty standing up on the pedals as she bikes up the last bit of the hill. She’s lost five pounds in the last two months. Big smile when she told you this. Two months is almost exactly the amount of time she’s been biking up Barker Hill Road in order to walk you home every day after school. “So you’re doing me the big favor,” she tells you.

But you know who’s doing who the favor. Mim reminded you that Beauty takes time off from work at the florist shop and has to make it up. Mim herself waits for Fancy, who takes forever to get ready, and walks her
279

home. Sometimes Stevie comes along with you and Beauty, sometimes you all go together.

You run out the door and down the steps to meet her.

“No more riding today,” she says first thing, fanning her face. “I’m boiling.” It should be cool here in the mountains—it’s already the third of November—but the whole state has been smacked with a heat wave, and the leaves are falling like rain.

“That’s okay,” you say. Sometimes you hop on the handlebars and you have the thrilling ride down the hill, both of you laughing and shouting. Now you walk the bike, and Beauty asks if you had a good day. You shrug and say, “I don’t know. I yelled at some people.”

“Why’d you yell?” she says.

“They were being nosy about—you know.”

“So they probably deserved to be yelled at.”

“Maybe,” you say. After you have one of these yelling explosions, which always take you by surprise, you wonder if you’re just a terrible person. You’ve been trying so hard to be
mature
, like remembering the good things about yourself and keeping your temper and not being scared of things you don’t have to be scared about, like noises at night and seeing a strange man walking on your block.

280

Later, turning the corner onto Carbon Street, you jump on the bike and, as you pedal through a drift of fallen leaves toward your house, you make a deal with yourself, which is something Mrs. Kalman taught you to do. And the deal is that from now on, it’s okay for Beauty to walk you home one or maybe two days a week. The other days you walk alone. And if, on those days, you find your stomach in knots, the other part of the deal is to remind yourself of what you did and how you saved yourself and how good that is.

You used to think that, unlike your sisters, you were the only one with nothing special about you, nothing at all, but now it occurs to you that you’re really lucky—you’ve got the best part of each of your sisters. When the man had you locked up, you got wicked mad (like passionate Stevie), you thought about things (like smart Mim), you made a plan (like careful Beauty), and then—like yourself!—you car-ried it out. And it wasn’t easy, but you did it. You had to get back to your family, which you love so much (like love-bug Fancy), love more than anything in the world.

The maple tree in front of the house has turned red overnight. You lean Beauty’s bike against the porch, pick up a leaf to give to Mommy, and go in, calling, “Mommy?

It’s me. I’m home.”

281

FUNNY AND SAD AND SCARY, TOO

HELLO, EVERYBODY in my class and Mrs.

Sokolow my teacher that I love. Hello, how are you today?

I am good today, and today for share time I will tell you a story that Autumn my sister told me. It is such a good story, and nobody fall asleep while I’m telling, please!

This story is funny and sad and scary, too! But don’t worry, it has a happy ending. See, there was this girl, who was like a princess, and one day she walked into this cave and guess what? A creature lived in it. You know what a creature is? It could be a person or it could be an animal.

It could be a monster!

The princess didn’t know the creature lived there, she
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was just like, la, la, la, I guess I’ll take a walk and look in this cave. And then the creature came out and she was sooo surprised, and the creature said, Hello, princess, you came to visit me. The princess said, No, I didn’t. I think I’ll go home now.

But the creature said, No you have to stay with me because I love you and I’m going to put you in the tower and keep you there. So he did.

Oh, and I almost forgot. The creature wore a tie and eyeglasses, which is the funny part of the story. Isn’t that funny? A creature with a tie and eyeglasses! It made me laugh
sooo
much.

So the princess lived with the creature for a long time, and every night he came to visit her and tell her he loved her. And he touched her toes and her knees and her fingers and her belly button! Touching the belly button!

That’s another funny part of the story, right?