Now You See Her (4 page)

been wearing all week—like
all
week, including the same underwear, day and night. It’s so meaningless. You know what it’s like when adults pretend to listen and you can see them thinking about other crap? You can
see
them thinking, Oh, I should get my highlights touched up. Or, Oh, I forgot to make an appointment for Devon’s cavity. And all the while they’re nodding and saying, “I can see why you feel that way,” and acting like you can’t tell that their laptop means more to them than you do.

A healthy mind in a healthy body for the well- rounded young woman. That’s the Taylor motto. That’s what all that running up and down in the freezing cold chasing a ball with a stick on wet grass is for!

Half the teachers are
really
well-rounded. They didn’t used to be actors, or aren’t still actor wannabes, just barely over the hill, the way the Starwood teachers are. Like, one has a waist the size of one of my mother’s exer- cise balls.

Em’s waist is too, though.

Em looks like the Queen of Hearts after she ate the tarts.

I mean this in a totally nice way.

Once I passed her door and it was open. I saw her lit- erally unloading her secret stash of Snickers, which she had stuffed in everything from her purse to her gym shorts. (Yeah, we have to wear gym uniforms, like rejects

from parochial schools.) Not that Em isn’t totally sweet. But how could you eat something you had kept hidden all day inside your clothes? It skeves me out just to think about it. I took a good look at her. Em is tall, like five eleven, like my mother, but she is massive. I thought that day (I didn’t know her very well yet) that if I didn’t lock my door, she’d eat
me
in my sleep. She held out one of the candy bars to me. I was like, uh, no thanks, but thanks. I thought, Where does she get them? They don’t have a bookstore with T-shirts and candy and star stick- ers and lattes and stuff like they did at Starwood. I just waved and crept away from her door. I pretended I didn’t notice the food on the bed. She looked so ashamed.

Taylor should probably be helping her with her obsession with food, but all I’ve seen our “helpers” do is reduce Em to tears instead of a size six. She should prob- ably be at a school that concentrates on, you know, fat. She should talk about why she can’t get through a day without six candy bars at seven hundred calories apiece. I mean, fat ballerinas have limited appeal? She ate her- self right out of the Concord Academy. She never used to be fat, she tells me in her notes. Her “freshman fifteen” turned into a freshman forty.

I just have to hold on. I have to make sure they don’t get to me.

So, even though I don’t have obsessions, I make them up for our “jam sessions,” which I don’t even know why we have because no one is really mental.

Even Suzette. Suzette just has to talk about her obsession with her brother dying in a car accident while she was driving or something and why it makes her want to fail in school and have sex constantly. Personally, I think Suzette is just a little over the top. Anyone would feel the way she does. She liked her brother, like, a lot. They were close, even though he was only eight or some- thing. Suzette probably doesn’t need to be at a school as military as Taylor’s.

There are other girls who have academic problems and junk—like having flunked out of three other schools, including public, for smoking, drinking Scotch and milk, or cutting class for four weeks straight. One even slapped her cheerleading supervisor.

See the difference? Watch carefully now! They actu- ally
did
something, even Suzette and poor Em. Although I will say none of the stories are as interesting as what happened to me. None of them were on the news. Well, maybe Suzette’s brother was, but only in the local paper, because they probably felt sorry for the family.

I have to come up with something to be obsessed with, because I’m supposed to, so I say my mother came from a family where her father beat her mother, and her

sisters were totally screwed up, and one killed herself with a dagger. I say that I’m afraid of being buried alive. Whoever the teacher or teacher’s aide is that night gets all excited. They probably think they’re psychologists.

Mostly, when I’m not having a sharing moment (vomit!), I just listen to them. Or if I can’t stand it, I pre- tend to. I sit and stare out the leaded-glass windows and try to remember old monologues, so I don’t totally lose my brain. If I say something, no one cares. Everyone here is either spaced-out or thinks they’re all that because their parents are so rich or whatever.

I end up turning out my cheap light every night when I’m done with my “journaling” and scream in the night, biting my comforter, without making one sound: Logan, pick up your phone just once! Just so I can hang up on you, even! But then I wake up in the morning alive, looking out another leaded-glass window across the room (what did this place used to be, a cathedral? And how the hell old is it?) to eat scrambled eggs that are like the rubber ones that came with my toy frying pan I had when I was five. It made sizzling noises so you could pretend you were really cooking.

How can this all have happened so fast?

Two months ago. Nine weeks ago. I was having final fittings for my gowns. I had to have a whole other set of costumes from Alyssa because she was about twenty

pounds heavier than I was. Like, do you know what it means for a sophomore, a fifteen-year-old, to be cast with
seniors
? And not just any seniors—one of them had been in a movie, and one had been off-Broadway. And I was totally holding my own, totally living in those beau- tiful words, those gauzy paintings of castles behind us. I had everything down to the tiniest movement of one of my hands. At, like, one of the best arts prep schools on Earth. I could feel the understanding begin deep down inside me, coming from the source of all the grief you have from your genes or whatever: “O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb, lest that thy love prove likewise variable.” I knew it. I loved it. I was living it, onstage and off. Brooks Emerson, the guy who starred in that play based on the Cervantes story on Broadway, was totally in tears almost, because I was so great.

He was.

I would have gotten into Juilliard.

That’s what Logan said. Logan Rose, my Romeo.

Who screwed it all up. Screwed my life. Screwed me.

Now I’m in the Wildflowers dorm with Suzette the tattooed lady and Em the hippo ballet dancer—the crash-and-stash rejects from arts high school. At least we’re not in Buttercups, with the gaga freshmen and the technology weenies eating their Ritalin.

I so don’t need this kind of idiot place.

I need it like Ophelia needed swimming lessons.

Ophelia? She was Hamlet’s girlfriend? And he totally rejected her, even though she would never love anyone else, so she drowned herself. The average teenage kid probably thinks of Shakespeare as something you get SparkNotes for, so you can write a boring paper on it. They probably don’t even know what it really means. But then, most kids watch those stupid shows on music channels where the girls are so dumb they, like, cry when a guy asks them to
prom
. And kids think those girls are really super-cool.

All I need is someone to listen to me and believe I’m telling the truth. And then all of this can end and I can go back to the way I was. Get out of here. Get started again. Back to who I was.

Before Logan.

Before the kidnapping.

II
‌

I

BET THEY TALKED
a lot about hope those first few days. Not Hope, as in my name. Hope as in the hope of finding me. When we were driving to Miss Taylor’s,

my father sort of sketched in what the main police offi- cer and the security chief told them . Probably to lull me into thinking that nothing was wrong. He said that the first day, he felt pretty good because the police said they had never failed to find a missing person. Starwood is a hundred acres, and they said that sounded really big, but basically most of it was buildings and fields. There were only a couple of patches of woods, and the whole thing was fenced off. The national forest land didn’t start until the other side of that fence. Later my parents told me that the first day, the police chief and the security offi- cer said there was “every hope” I would be found alive and well.

Today’s entry.

See the two little Roman numerals on the first page? Like little stick figures side by side?

Those could be my parents, very tall and elegantly thin (I’m little, like my father’s sister). Stiff from fear and, um, yes, embarrassment, they stand side by side, probably for the first time since their wedding day. I can totally picture them. Standing in the dean’s office at Starwood Academy of the Performing Arts, with five or six detectives and the dumbest canine “officer” on Earth. (I saw the dog later. That dog wouldn’t have been able to find barbecue beef in a deli.) I wasn’t there in the room with my parents, obviously. But they would have looked nice. They would have been thinking about themselves, and about how it would look to the neighbors if I was found raped and strangled or something:
The Romano girl? The beautiful one who was an actress? Who changed her name? Right, Mark and Marian’s daughter! Well, that’s what you get.
. . . Like, being raped and strangled would have been
my
fault. What happened to me was almost as bad.

Twelve hours later, after there was a search that even all these store owners and resort owners and farmers and fishermen joined in, it wasn’t so hopeful, and my parents would have looked a little haggard, but still well groomed.

It was November.

In Michigan it’s already cold in November. Pure, white Christmas cold, sometimes even by Halloween.

My mother would have been wearing . . . okay, I can do this without even half thinking about it: She would have had on olive slacks with a crease, and a sweater with a rust-colored scarf and earrings to match, because color, she always used to say, must “travel up.” She taught me that when other girls were learning the alphabet. It was why I could make normal clothes look like date clothes. She would have dressed carefully. Just because I was missing in Michigan in the winter didn’t mean my mother had to look anything but complete Bellamy Country Club.

The first thing that happened when they got to Starwood from the bed and breakfast where they were staying, my father said, was that the dorm advisor told them her story.

She was always a bitch—an opera major who went to graduate school two days a week at Northern Michigan University. Always telling me what I was doing wrong. “We have to make sure our beds are made, Hope,” and “We don’t go outside at night without an escort, Hope.” She came in bawling. She’d already been screaming and crying and showing off for a newspaper reporter earlier that day. She told my parents and the police about how hard it was to find one of her girls missing, and how ter-

rified she was when she saw the videotape, which, though I didn’t see it, I know was completely faked. It had to be, or she would have seen me let Logan in, and she kept saying I was alone. Why? I think Logan’s parents paid Starwood to protect him. That was the only way it could have happened.

The dean was there too. Knowing her, and that she also was a total and extreme bitch, she was mostly there to comfort my dorm advisor and make sure the school didn’t look bad in any of this. My father said the dean told them that I’d probably hitchhiked to Black Sparrow Lake and got myself a hotel room to think things over after the breakup with Logan. She said in a newspaper story I read later that “girls like me” tended to be “very dramatic and high-strung” when it came to failed relation- ships. She would have seen the stupid faked videotape and thought I went out by myself! Okay, they caught me once for going out at night for a jog. Once! Big deal!

How does jogging at night when it’s hot during the day mean you’re dramatic and high-strung? I always did my run at night at home! God, I wish I would have been there!

Breakup? Right.

Like there was even any “breakup” that I knew about! I would have told them right then what really hap-

pened.

And like I so would have hitchhiked. Nobody hitch- hikes, even in a hick place like Black Sparrow Lake. Not unless you’re on drugs! You’re asking to be raped! I so wanted to be picked up and strangled next to a tree like the poor girl in Central Park. That happened right across from where we lived when I was a baby.

By the second day, it was the biggest manhunt they ever had in the north woods.

Ever.

It was all over the news as far away as California. It was on the radio. There were bulletins with that elec- tronic tone they make before they tell you there’s a tor- nado warning on the radio. I looked up some of the articles in the library and copied them on the machine. It was on TV, too. I know my parents were interviewed. There were helicopters and police all the way from Detroit. There were federal agents.

It was the biggest thing that had happened in history, well, in
Michigan
history, except the time when a college girl was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. That was all the way in Ann Arbor and, like, a year before. It was even bigger than when that little boy walked away from the family’s campsite with his dog the summer before. Now, the little boy was deep in the woods, not on a campus that was only a hundred acres. It was a complete miracle they found him. He was almost dead. It should have