Fade Out (5 page)

I watch the car pull away. I watch, and the camera follows. The car pulls onto another dark street, and the camera turns its eye to a new girl and her boyfriend, and when it does, the car cuts the corner and is gone.

Jackson said don’t blink, so I don’t take my eyes off the screen. I can’t help but do what he says, even when I’m steaming mad at him.

I watch the new couple walk down the street, past crowded doorways, past parked cars, past—what’s that, a goat? They come to a stop at the border of Mexico and then the car from the beginning pulls up behind them. There’s the sound of something ticking, and the car speeds off, and just when the guy on the street leans in to kiss his girl, a loud blast shatters everything. A bomb just went off.

They pull apart, turn to look, and for the first time since the movie started the camera cuts away to—

To… ?

To a fuzzy something. A big blur.

“Hey!” I yell over my shoulder. “I can’t see what happened!”

Jackson’s not answering. I turn around in my seat and look for him in the projection booth. I can see him in there, his head at first, only his head.

Until there’s a second head. A second head very close to his head.
Intimately
close, in a way that makes me think I must be seeing things.

He’s not kissing someone, no. He’s only in there talking, whispering to someone, that’s all—but who?

Then I get it. It’s Austin, it has to be. That little worm is getting me in trouble.

You know what? I’ll be gone before he does. I pop up out of my seat and book it to the exit. I’m out the door and past the red velvet rope in the black-box lobby, where I take a moment to stop and catch my breath. I am
so
going to get Austin.

Only, Austin’s standing right here.

“You can’t have your money back,” he says. “Even if you hate the movie—it’s company policy. Besides, you didn’t pay so I don’t even know why I’m telling you.”

“You were just in there spying on me, weren’t you?”

“I was not. For your information, I didn’t leave my post.”

“Okay, okay, but you were in the projection booth, right? Talking to Jackson?”

“Negative.”

Not kissing,
I tell myself.
Not kissing.
“Austin, just tell the truth.”

“Dani,” he says, looking utterly lost, “I’ve been out here the whole time.”

I hate to say it, but I believe him. “I guess it was someone else,” I say, glancing at the closed theater door.

“Yeah, a girl,” Austin says.

I stand stock-still. “What girl?”

He shrugs. “Didn’t see who it was. She snuck in when I was, um… okay, I left for just a few seconds and I saw her when I was coming out of the bathroom. She didn’t pay for her ticket either.” He says this last bit with a sharp glare at me, but I ignore it.

“Elissa? Why didn’t you say so!”

“Not Elissa. A girl. If it was Elissa, I would have just said Elissa.”

“Of course it’s Elissa,” I say. It’s the only possibility that makes sense. Jackson wouldn’t have been in there whispering—or doing something more than whispering—with anyone else.

“I’m going to go say hi,” I say. But before I can, a high-pitched shriek escapes out Austin’s pocket. I jump. He jumps.
Then he looks down at his shorts pocket and says, “It’s just the walkie.”

It’s his mom, Ms. Greenway: “Austin, go find Danielle and tell her that her mother’s here.”

“Ten-four,” Austin says with this huge, obnoxious smile. Then he shoves the walkie-talkie back in his pocket. He looks me straight in the eye and says with what I can tell is great satisfaction: “Hey, Dani, your mom’s here.”

I could kick him.

My mom storms in, her face hot pink and filled to bursting with helium, but this time it’s because she’s mad at me. “Danielle! Your father will be at the house any minute! We’re leaving.
Now
.”

I’m afraid she’ll go all Niagara in front of Austin, so I don’t protest.

In a flash I’m at the car while she searches for her keys. She’s parked in the no-parking emergency space out in front of Taco Juan’s—that’s how not-herself she is. Also, she somehow seems to have lost her keys between parking and walking across the street.

“Do you see them?” she mutters. “Did I drop them?” She searches the asphalt all the way out to the yellow line in the
middle of the road. The shiny thing she thinks could be her keys turns out to be a crushed soda can—Mountain Dew, I think.

That’s when I see someone waving at me from inside Taco Juan’s. A head pokes out the take-out window, and that head belongs to Elissa.

My mind buzzes with nothingness as she calls out to me. Something dead-center in my chest tightens into a ball of hurt. For her, I tell myself. Mostly for her. “Hey, Dani! So do you want that sundae or not? Told you, it’s on the house.”

Slowly, I shake my head. “No, thanks,” I hear myself say. I’m still trying to find a way to explain how she made it out of the theater and into the lobby—where I’d been standing—and across the street—where I am now—onto the sidewalk and back inside Taco Juan’s without me seeing a thing.

“Dani, you never turn down a free sundae,” Elissa says. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” At least I think I am.

Her eyes widen at the sight of something in the street. “Um, you might want to get your mom out of the road before she’s hit by that bus.”

I speed over and pull my mom out of the intersection. The
Pine Hill Trailways bus trundles past without running her over. I have to get her out of here. I need to get out of here myself. So I wave thanks to Elissa and lead my mom to our hatchback. It’s when we reach the curb that my mom notices the keys in the ignition, windows down. Her face pales, finally. She shrinks back to normal size. “They were here the whole time,” she says. “I can’t believe they were here the whole time.”

As we get in the car, she’s having trouble looking at me. “I’m sorry,” she says, staring out through a windshield that desperately needs washing. “This is a hard day.”

Sarcastic snaps fill my head. They stomp around like elephants, wanting out. But I keep them down and all I say is, “I know.”

“And you’re not making it any easier,” she adds.

Again I say, “I know.” I say it, but I guess I don’t
know
-know. I have no idea what it feels like to be her right now. She’s sitting here next to me, not talking and not driving, and I wish she’d just start the engine and
go
.

She glances across the street, up toward the offices of
The Shanosha Scoop
, the newspaper where she works. It’s one block down from the Little Art, just across from Taco Juan’s. “Dani, I just remembered that I need to run in and get some work to
take home for the weekend,” she says. “Can I trust you to stay in this car?”

“Yes,” I assure her.

She touches my arm, holds my eyes in hers. “I’m trusting you. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“You can trust me,” I say as she leaves the car. She can trust me, I think to myself as I watch her cross the street. I will stay in this car. I will go to my dad’s for the weekend. I will not cause my mom any more trouble.

And I am trustworthy, I am as good as my word… until I catch a glimpse of something strange. Something I don’t want to see.

The fire door at the side of the Little Art just opened—the emergency exit leading out of the theater and into the parking lot, the one door no one ever uses. Well, someone just came out of that door. A girl.

The fence and parked cars block my view, so at first I think my eyes are playing tricks on me, that I’m seeing spots. But then I realize the girl’s just wearing polka dots.

Someone else would go, Huh. There’s some girl slipping out the fire door. Maybe she was in the projection booth making out with Jackson…. Oh, well, I’ll just sit here fiddling with the
radio until my mom comes back since it’s none of my business, because it’s not like he’s my boyfriend, and it’s not like I care who he kisses in the dark with the door closed.

I am not that someone.

I’m the kind of someone who unsnaps her seat belt and opens the door, even though she promised to stay put. I’m a nosy someone. A determined someone.

I’m the someone who would never forgive herself if she didn’t get out of that car and follow the girl.

4
The Femme Fatale, Take One

I
sneak down the sidewalk
and across to the parking lot behind the Little Art. I follow the girl.

All I can see is her back: She has hair to her shoulders—bright burgundy when it catches the sun. She wears a skirt, black. A tank top, black. And oddest of all, footless tights with spots all over them, dark pink and stark white, like she broke out in some sort of heinous rash just on her legs. I figure she’s in high school. But I’m guessing—because I can’t see her face. Even so, I am positive I have never seen this girl in my life.

She walks across the parking lot and I follow the path of her polka dots. I duck down behind a car as she checks for a rock in her shoe. Then she steps out of the parking lot onto Upper Canyon Road. I wait a few seconds before I go after her. She sticks to the side of the road even though there’s no sidewalk. I stay put behind a tree.

I’m thinking about movies again. About one very specific movie, the one playing in my head.

Because if this were a scene in a movie, it would be full of suspense and dodges and near-escapes and your heart would thump in your chest as you watched it, your heart up in your throat as the detective—you know that’s me—sneaks down the alley. But the femme fatale keeps turning the corner before you can see who she is.

It would be deep night, the only light from a few sparse streetlamps.

There’d be a whole sea of shadows.

It would start to rain and she’d pull out a black umbrella, pop it open. As she does you’d catch a flash of her hair. A quick shot of her cheek. Then the umbrella would cover her up, making it impossible now to find her face.

You’d hear the sound of her shoes even through the rain.
Clack, clack. Clack, clack. Clack, clack.

And my shoes too, fainter but still there—if this were a movie I would not be wearing sneakers.

We’d be in a big city nowhere near Shanosha. We’d be where all the movies take place, where things actually happen.

The streets would be cobblestone, not cracked asphalt with weeds bursting through. The buildings would be way taller than two stories. Up in the sky would be the lights of a city, not the lumpy old mountains that don’t light up in the night at all.

But, soon enough, the femme fatale would realize she’s being followed. She’d lift the umbrella to peek over her shoulder and you’d catch a glimpse of her eyes—dark-painted, narrowed with suspicion, but still calling you closer, drawing you in.

She’d duck down a side passage, and you’d follow. Only, it’s a trick, a dead end. You’d find a wall, bricked up, no exits. Somewhere deep in those shadows she’d have to be hiding, but as you stand there in the dark, straining to hear through the rain, you’d swear she got away.

This may not be a movie, but the girl in the polka-dot tights does take a turn somewhere because, peeking out from my spot behind the tree, it looks like I lost her.

Or maybe she got into that car parked all the way up the street—I can’t see from here. I have to get closer. I step out
from behind the tree and stay low, letting the Fosters’ unruly hedge be my cover (I happen to be standing on their lawn). I’m getting ready to make a run for it when my mom finds me.

She’s pulled up in the hatchback. “Danielle,” she says, “what in the world are you doing? I told you to stay in the car.”

“I thought I saw—” I start, then think better of it. Austin might know about the girl, but I shouldn’t tell anyone else, not till I’m sure.

“You thought you saw what?” My mom’s not going to let me get away with this.

“A kitten,” I say. “A little baby kitten.”

“Where?” my mom says, looking around wildly. Good choice, Dani. Mom
loves
kittens.

It seems like she may actually get out of the car to search. Then she remembers we have somewhere to be—that my dad will be at the house any minute, if he’s not there already—and she makes me get in and put on my seat belt.

“The kitten must belong to someone,” she says as we pull off Upper Canyon and back to the main road. “Don’t worry,” she says as we take the turn to our house, “the kitten will be just fine.”

But you and I know there’s no kitten. This is all one huge
diversion, see, this part of the movie. Because what’s really happening is someone’s been lying and breaking hearts, and that’s not fiction, that’s not a picture on screen. That’s real life.

Someone
is being a big fatheaded liar like my dad.

And it all has something to do with a girl in polka-dot tights.

5
A Little White Lie

H
ey, you.

Yeah, you. You in the car with your face smushed against the glass. The one sulking. The one who forgot to pack socks. How’s it feel to lose?

I won’t dignify my own self with an answer.

My whole rebellion thing went nowhere and fast, there’s no denying it. I mean, if I look out the car window I see the tollbooth, which is how I know we’re coming up to the Rhinecliff Bridge. Once we cross that, we’ll be on the other
side of the Hudson River. In Dad’s territory. Where I said I wouldn’t go.

Dad reaches out an arm to pay the toll. With the window rolled down, the air-conditioning leaks out and the scent of the river seeps in. If you’ve never crossed the hideous Rhinecliff Bridge heading east on a summer’s night when you’d rather be anywhere else, I’ll tell you what it smells like:

Mud.

Dad’s paid the toll and we’re moving again. Soon we’ll be on the bridge, and we can’t turn around once we’re on a bridge, I think that’s illegal. I haven’t spoken a word to him since we left Shanosha.