How to Disappear (14 page)

The kid who’s signed up to use the computer after me taps me on the shoulder. I gasp so loud, he jumps back.

I’ve let an eight-year-old creep up on me.

He could have been someone else. He could have slid a switchblade from between the pages of
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
, cut my heart out, and fed it to a flock of magic pigeons. While I’m thinking this gruesome thought, he’s staring at me.

And so’s his mother.

I bolt.

What am I doing?

Seriously, if J had said,
Hey, babe, let’s run away to Bora Bora for forever
, I would have started packing.

Nothing like total deprivation of pretty much everything to make a person crazy.

He makes me feel safe. I lay my head against his chest, and it’s like I’ve got a bulletproof wall between me and everything. Or maybe it’s that he distracts me so much, I don’t think about being
un
safe.

I think about how much I like him.

And contraception.

How stupid it is to be with someone I like so much, I’d even be thinking about that?

The library’s out of the question, I’m out of my mind, and the burner is out of its container and in use.

Olivia says, “I don’t care if he’s God’s other son, you can’t have a boyfriend. Aren’t you supposed to be living in a cave until you look unrecognizable? You
said
.”

All true.

“But I like him so much! Liv, he’s so nice! And no matter what I do, there’s no way I’m going to start looking like a frumpy twenty-five-year-old until I’m twenty-five.”

“That’s a long way from looking like yourself with bad red hair.”

I swear, if there were no burner phones in the world, I would curl up and die.

If I had to spend years without anyone looking at me or touching me or caring about me.

If I had to be completely alone until I grew out of being at all like my current self.

If there were no J.

Olivia says, “Well?”

“I was wearing
mom jeans
, all right? But I still didn’t have to encourage him.”

“Do. Not. Encourage. Him!”

“I’m
joking
. We’re only slightly past first base.”

“What’s wrong with you?” she shout-whispers. “Do you want to end up with a baby? Do you?”

“I’m not getting pregnant.”

“Said fifty thousand other girls just before they had to hit Planned Parenthood. And that’s not the only reason he’s not safe!”

“I’m getting off the phone. I really like him. And if he was going to do something to me, why didn’t he just put a pillow on my face the first time he came over?”

“He knows where you live? Are you crazy?”

“Yeah, well, next time it’s at his house.”

One minute it feels like I’m a normal guy moving in on a normal girl. I want to hang out with her, make her like me, protect her. The next minute, the fact that I’m the person she needs to be protected from is making me choke on the dessert she’s feeding me right now.

I knew all the roads were dead ends when I started this.

If I don’t do it, Yeager comes after my family.

If I do it, I’m a murderer, and Nicolette is dead.

If I don’t do it, everybody still ends up dead.

Even the variation that has me hiding out in a dark corner of the world with Nicolette and the Manx money leaves my mother dangling in the wind.

Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.

When I was a kid, I was always searching for remote places my family could set up camp. Becoming the Swiss Family Robinson seemed like a better alternative than what we had going.

But here I am in El Molino with no idea how to extricate myself or anybody else, no exotic island backup plan, nothing. And Don keeps calling to remind me I’m fucked.

I say, “Just a minute,” leave Nicolette in my living room eating lemon meringue pie, and hit the front porch. It’s as if Don has a sixth sense for throwing people off, and I’ve reached the time limit for how long I can ignore him today.

“I thought I told you to pick up!” He’s pissed, resentful, frustrated—a brew of classic Don emotions that spew all over anyone in range.

“I’m in the library. Better databases.” Because what does he know about libraries? Nothing.

“I’m calling time, Jack.” He sounds harder than usual. “It happens right now. Find her and end it.”

Ignoring the Weedwacker to the gut, I say, “Get off my back. It takes how long it takes.”

“Don’t get high and mighty! You know what you have to do. Now do it.”

I think about our relative heights and might. Maybe I’ve descended into the gutter, but he’s in prison, which has to be lower. “You think you can do better? If you weren’t somebody’s slave boy, you could buy me more time.”

I know his anxious, angry breathing from the years of being
smaller than he was, when I had to know when to get out of his way or risk drowning in six inches of water in the bathroom sink, groping to break the headlock. I have three inches on Don now, I’m armed, and I have martial arts training he dropped out of at age twelve. But when I hear that breathing, I feel it in the pit of my stomach, and all even a black belt would be good for is wrapping around his neck and pulling.

Everyone has the power of life and death over everyone else. Anybody walking down the street can jab anybody else between the ribs with something sharp. Man’s march out of the ooze toward civilization—a march that passed the Manx family by—is all that saves mankind from a continuous bloodbath.

Through the window, I see how nice Nicolette looks perched on the arm of the couch. She breathes at my discretion.

What happens next?

I can live with moral ambiguity. Grow up with a dad who executes people and a mom who sits there while he pounds on you—grow up loving your mom and your dad and your shit brother who’d sell you out for a carton of cigarettes—and you
get
moral ambiguity.

I’m eighteen. I’m legally qualified to judge guilt and innocence. If there were a DA stupid enough to put someone named Manx on a jury, I could determine someone else’s fate.

Would I be the lone juror voting to acquit the guy who killed somebody crazy-bad to save his mother, his shithead brother, and maybe himself? Maybe.

Would I acquit the guy if he slept with the crazy-bad girl first, fully consensual, everyone smiling, nobody drunk, victim and victimizer with protection and clean sheets? That guy should burn in hell.

Don says, “Pay attention. If you need reinforcements to do it for you . . .” He trails off. I keep him waiting. “Two more days, and I’m sending in helpers.”

Helpers? This is all I need. The only upside is he doesn’t know where to send these helpers. I don’t have much leverage, but if he knew where to find me, I’d have none.

“Here it comes: threatening Mom.”

“I’m not threatening. For now, we’re in this together. The day you quit, that’s the day you start triple locking your door.”

“I’m not together in
anything
with you! I’m doing this because you’re ten-feet deep in shit, and you’re dragging Mom down with you! If your guys do
anything
to Mom, this is over. I drive straight to a police station.”

“Big blowhard Jacky! These wouldn’t be my guys. These would be Yeager’s guys. I don’t control what they do or where they do it. And the police—that’s what you’ve got?” He belly laughs like Santa’s evil twin. “Death certificate. Didn’t Dad teach you
anything
?”

I visualize Don facing the wall of his cell, his hands cupped over his phone. I take some pleasure in the fact that I can tell he wants to scream but can’t. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.

“If you don’t have what it takes to do this,” he says, “tell me where the girl is, and I’ll get it taken care of.”

“I don’t know where she is!”

“Come on, Jacky. We both know how good you are at fingering people.”

“Shut up!”

Don says, “Open your e-mail.”

My in-box pings with an attachment from an unknown sender with a long string of seemingly random letters and numbers for a name.

Hey bro,

Hope you’re still looking for love on the road. Cuties all over and you only need to find one. There’s some bad news. They found Connie Marino’s body. It’s a sad day. What kind of person would hurt Connie?

I can’t read any farther. I start clicking on links, one after the other:

Citizens of sleepy Cotter’s Mill, Ohio, were shocked earlier this week when a body was found in a shallow grave on a public access trail to Green Lake. Today, police announced that the body has been identified as twenty-two-year-old Constance Marino, missing from the Detroit suburb of Birmingham.

And another:

The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is looking into the murder of Constance (Connie) Marino, a Detroit-area nursing student, found buried four hundred feet from Northern Ohio’s Green Lake on Tuesday.

Shit, Nicolette.

Right when I’ve made every excuse I can think of for you—ignoring the obvious, staring down reality and calling it bogus, ignoring the facts—my screen opens on the words “Cotter’s Mill, Ohio,” in the same sentence as Connie Marino’s body.

How can I still be this turned on when your house is 324 yards from where a hiker’s curious Newfie found the corpse?

We’re sitting in J’s living room, eating lemon meringue pie.

All right, I’m sitting on J’s lap on his green scratchy sofa, and I’m feeding him pie. He’s extremely appreciative.

This is what zero to sixty without taking off your clothes looks like. After nobody touches you or gets anywhere near you for what feels like forever.

“Could you at least
try
not to get it on my nose?” he says.

“Sit still and open your mouth.” I do the babysitter-feeding-the-kid thing, chugging as the fork circles his mouth.

“If the next step is I’m supposed to talk baby talk, it’s not happening,” he says.

“Says you. If I took off my blouse, you’d talk any way I wanted.” (Cat’s a lot more direct than the actual me.)

This is when he gets another phone call. I’m pretty sure from his ex. Every time that phone buzzes, he tenses up.

He takes the phone out onto the porch. Through the front window, I watch him making angry faces as he talks.

He scrolls, and then he shoves the phone back into his pocket. Wipes his hand on his jeans, hard, like he’s trying to scrape off poison ivy.

From the doorway, he says, “Where were we?” He reaches under the tank top that’s beneath my blouse and runs his fingers up and down my spine. I tense every time he gets close to the clasp of my bra, but he ignores it and keeps going.

He’s
nice
.

I like this so much.

I’m like a camel binge-eating affection and physical touch at the oasis. So it can do without when it treks through the desert for months.

Enjoy the heat, binge-feel the feels, and take off for parts unknown with enough stored-up satisfaction to last until I’m someone else. In theory, if I store this up, I won’t miss it.

In theory, I won’t miss
him
.

In theory.

J is massaging my shoulders, one after the other, one hand under my shirt and one over.

I say, “You want some of this? I’m not completely greedy. Take off your shirt.”

Because (holy crap, Cat!) when you don’t want to get
attached to someone, make him take off his shirt.

“No way. I’m not taking off my shirt until you take off your shirt.” He crosses his arms across his chest. Wads up the cotton of his T-shirt in his fists. “You’ll lose all your respect for me.”

I swat him. “Don’t tease me!”

I shove a forkful of meringue against his lips when his mouth is closed, and he pushes it in with his fingers.

“Who’s teasing whom? Besides, I have to keep you in line, or who knows what you’ll do? We know how violent you are when you don’t get your way.”

I’m pushing him down. “How violent? How violent? How violent am I? You want to find out?”

J pushes back, he’s bent over me, and I’m pinned. “I won’t be finding that out,” he says. “Don’t try.”

It feels, just for a second, like he isn’t playing. His voice is lower, and he’s not letting me up.

“This isn’t funny.”

He says, “It’s not meant to be funny. Don’t smear pie on my face. Don’t push me with a fork in your hand, got it?”

I’m not actually scared, but my body is acting scared. Highly adaptive sweating so I could slither away like a greased piglet. “I got pie on your mouth, so you’re holding me down? Asshat! Let me up, because do you see where my foot is?”

I don’t kick him. But his face looks like I did. Like I kicked him just after I caught him pulling the wings off a fly.

“Oh shit! I’m sorry! I apologize.”

At least he’s got his normal voice back.

He pulls away, lets go of my wrists in what looks like a spasm. “Sorry!”

Great, I’m getting my camel fix of romance with a scary lunatic.

“You can’t do that kind of stuff! Are you stupid?”

He says, “Don’t call me stupid!”

I swear to God, I’m going for the ice pick if he gets off the couch. Except he’d twist my hand and grab it. It would take a much better strategy than that to bring him down.

Strategy is my strong suit.

What the hell thing was that?

I hold down a girl I outweigh by 100 percent, whom I could lift by the collar of her blouse using my thumb and index finger, because she comes at me with a dessert fork? It’s not even the heavy, silver-plated kind of fork she could use to poke holes in me. It’s cheap stainless steel, the weight of a plastic picnic fork.

I knew what she was when I started this. Now I’m pissed Don rubbed it in my face?

I hold out my hands, and they look like someone else’s—someone I despise, I’m ashamed to be, and I wasn’t supposed to turn into. Someone who just took a call about how soon he has to smoke the girl he’s making out with.

She’s backing toward the door.

Is this Nicolette, America’s mouthy sweetheart, who’s afraid of a guy who just demonstrated what an all-powerful creep he is? Or is this Nicolette, the throat-slasher who has to be stopped?