How to Disappear (12 page)

No way. I have Nutella at home. I have cinnamon bread I
baked Mrs. Podolski to spread it on. I can
buy
cherries.

What am I doing?

Walking down the street with him is what.

Yes, but if he’s stalking me, why didn’t he follow me all the way home? I live alone in a tiny garage behind Mrs. Podolski’s house. It has a window you can open by pushing it with your pinkie.

If he were here to finish me, I’d be finished.

J says, “Or do you want to cut to the chase and get some beers?”

“No chase! No drinks!”

“Kidding,” he says. “I figured if I couldn’t buy you a burger, most likely I couldn’t get you drunk.”

“Do girls follow you home when you say stuff like this?”

“All the time.”

I sock him on the arm. This seems to make him happy. Everything I say or do seems to make him happy. Just glancing at me makes him grin like an idiot.

He says, “Use your words. You’re unusually violent for a short person.”

I sock him again.

He lives on the ground floor of an old green wooden house, subdivided into apartments. I figure, worst case, I can kick out a window.

I’ve got her.

The surreality of Nicolette Holland walking around my place simulates the sensation of reading in a moving car. The room looks to be expanding and contracting to the rhythm of her pulse, despite my disdain for people who lay claim to weird sensory experiences—unless they’re in the desert with a bag of shrooms.

I know her pulse because she said my ice cream was giving her brain freeze. My index finger is pressed to the indentation under her right temple.

“No, I’m happy to report that you’re still a sentient being.”

“Because there’s blood flow to my brain? Guess again. Blood flow is overrated. The sweet old lady I work for could run a
marathon in her walker, but she doesn’t know my name or what I’m doing there half the time.”

God, this girl is good, whether she’s making this up or if it’s true; she’s even better if it’s true.

“What
are
you doing there?”

“Stealing her jewelry.” She smiles up at me and nibbles on the cherry I stuck on top of the spray-can whipped cream. Of course she’s the girl who’d be stealing jewelry off defenseless old ladies. At least it’s a step up from playing with a blade.

She yelps, “Don’t look at me like that! That was a
joke
. If she ever had any jewelry, it’s buried in her garden anyway. She buries teaspoons. I have to dig them up and put them back when she’s asleep. I don’t want to embarrass her.”

The girl who steals jewelry from old ladies or the girl who has a nighttime protocol for sparing her senile employer’s feelings?

I watch her eat the grotesquely oversize sundae I made because I wanted to keep her in my apartment for as long as possible, ladling on caramel and chocolate sauce and scoops of mint chip. I scrolled through years of her photos online to figure out what kind of food would tempt her. As it turns out, anything with sugar does it for her. She had a Twix appetizer.

Let’s just say, she’s not the kind of girl who eats only reduced-fat lettuce leaves.

She licks green ice cream off her lower lip. In the bedroom, I have a duffel bag full of weapons any one of which could finish her off before the remnants of the sundae turn to slush. I try to
visualize using each one on her. I don’t get further than picturing myself shooting her from a distance, and then only when I imagine her flattened into two-dimensionality, a laminated paper target with a frozen face and immobile limbs.

She says, “For sure this is my dinner. Thanks. I might not have to cook myself anything to eat for days.”

“I don’t cook. If not for In-N-Out, I’d have to eat grass and leaves.”

“
I
spent yesterday making peach cobbler and five quarts of borsht. Do you know what that is? Beet soup. It’s what the lady I work for wanted for breakfast.”

“What’s the matter? Did you learn to cook in a giant family and forget to divide?”

When I ask her a question I know she’ll have to answer by making things up, it feels as if I’m torturing her, playing with her the way a cat bats a gopher back and forth across a patio before devouring it.

“Six kids,” she says. She doesn’t miss a beat.

“I’d lose track of their names.”

“My parents were highly practical. Angie, Bonnie, me Cat, Davey, Edie, and Frank. Which is a lot of alphabet to stuff in a trailer.”

“Don’t you call them mobile homes?”

“You’re such a know-it-all! Has anybody ever mentioned this to you?”

All my friends and a couple of disgruntled teachers might have mentioned it.

“Ours was definitely a trailer,” she says. She has it down. “Not as bad as it sounds. But you know what?
Homes
chooled. We never got out of there!”

It’s a brilliant idea: no Reunion dot com or googling of the graduating class list or having to tie herself to a specific location where any curious person could find out she never was. She is, I realize, driving where this goes, dishonest and hypnotic.

I say, “Is this trailer nearby?”

“No! They disapprove of me. Religious zealots. I had to take off before they shunned me. I can’t go home.” She frowns, and if I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was real. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

She abandons her sundae to walk around the room, pausing at the wall of bookshelves, touching the spines of the books. “You read a lot of poems.”

“This is a sublet. They’re not mine.”

“You’re subletting from a girl, right?”

“And you know this because . . . ?”

“This shelf. Emily Dickinson. Sylvia
Plath
. In school, when we did this poem she wrote, it was like contraception day in homeroom. You know, boys to the right, girls to the left. Yay abstinence, but if you succumb to sin and personal degradation, say hello to this condom.”

I touch the pocket of my jeans containing my wallet and silently greet the condom.

“Interesting school.”

I watch her remember that she just said she was homeschooled. Her face registers something and then smooths itself out.

“Waaaay down south,” she says, returning to her sundae, blocking her mouth from view behind a heaping tablespoon of mint chip. “I got sent there for part of a year so I’d have a school experience beyond the inside of a trailer before college.”

“Good move.” And I don’t mean her imaginary parents sending her to an imaginary Southern high school.

“This poem,” she says, “it was about how much she hated her father. Which was a lot. The girls were all having fits about how good it was. The guys were all puking.”

“What were
you
doing while all this puking was going on?”

“Remember me? Educated in a tin can. I’m borderline illiterate.” She looks as thoughtful as a person can when lighting into a quart of ice cream. “If she’d have just gotten herself out of Dodge and hung with people who were nice to her and shoved her dad out of her mind . . . That’s what you have to do sometimes . . . Instead of writing
poems
about it . . .”

“You do know she killed herself?”

“That’s the stuff I pay attention to, are you kidding me? Did you know she married a guy who, after she killed herself, married another poet who killed
her
self? So the question is, did he constantly marry suicidal women, or did he marry regular women and drive them over the edge?”

“Is this a quiz?”

“Seriously? Who goes to a party looking for suicidal poets?” She grins. “Unless that’s
your
type. Ladies who cry a lot?”

Apart from the sick, intrusive flashes of me with my hands
circling her neck just above the collarbone, it’s possible that
she’s
my type.

Scarlett, for all her put-downs, for all the times she came on to Dan Barrons whenever she was pissed at me, at least didn’t kill people. But after spending three hours with this girl, I like her better than Scarlett. I like that she doesn’t take her imaginary self that seriously. I want to off-road with her and Calvin and Monica—despite my reservations about introducing my friends to a girl who could be hazardous to their health. I want to steer into hairpin turns with her thrown against me, riding shotgun. I’m betting she likes to go fast over rocky terrain.

While I’m wondering if I’m genetically impaired in a different way than I’ve thought all along—if the genes I should worry about aren’t my father’s, but my mother’s (the woman who spent two decades with my father, knowing what he was, but loved him anyway)—Nicolette AKA Cat is polishing off the whole mixing bowl of sundae, and smiling at me between bites. It’s that lopsided, endearing, unbearably sexy smile.

I want to rip her clothes off.

Cat is so trampy! She goes to his apartment and starts talking about condoms? Makes fun of abstinence. Plus, factoids about dead poets. Really? Like she didn’t notice they were dead and it was tragic?

At least I got out of there without unbuttoning anything.

But it was as if one of those tiny red Disney cartoon devils—the ones that hover over your shoulder encouraging you to do the wrong thing—was going,
Kiss him, kiss him, kiss him
. Until it was so loud I had to do it.

Fast, no tongue, antiseptic. Then I’m out the door so fast, it’s like the bad-kiss cops are chasing me.

J’s the one who’s chasing me, going, “Hey!”

I go faster. So does he.

“Hey!” This guy needs to learn one or two things about picking up girls. But not from me.

“Hey! There are rules against kissing and running.”

He’s caught up, and he’s touching my arm for good measure.

“Says who? The sleazy guys’ handbook?”

He breaks out laughing. “Right under the section about aftershave.”

“I hate aftershave!” Something Cat and I agree on. “Please stop following me.”

“You’re not supposed to flirt with guys you’re trying to ditch,” he says. “Didn’t one of your many older sisters tell you that?”

I want to slap myself. Then him.

Acting like I act in real life when buzzed, only worse! Real life being my old life. The one where guys following me wasn’t cause for alarm. Possibly should have been, but wasn’t. (Definitely should have been. But wasn’t.)

What am I doing?

It’s not that hard to break it down. I could make a diagram of how my heart is divided into empty sections labeled with things I can’t have anymore.

The address of the home I can never go back to.

An aerial view of the trail where I run through the woods and along the lakeshore with (what used to be) home right at the end of it.

A schedule of cheer practice.

A road map from Cotter’s Mill, Ohio, to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Then there’s the place right in the middle, full of loneliness and longing, where I’m not allowed to put anyone. There are rules of survival for runners like me. Human entanglements aren’t exactly encouraged. Desire for a normal friend, for a normal conversation with a normal boy, for a kiss, has to be squashed.

But how normal is it that the scared-out-of-her-mind girl who spends all her time with an elderly demented person would entertain one or two thoughts about the hot, not-demented boy who was thrown into her path by Fate?

And then removed his shirt.

We’re standing on the sidewalk, both of us trying to look inconspicuous.

She says, “I’m going
home
. Do
not
follow me. If you follow me, I’ll yell for the police.”

No, you won’t.

I say, “Understood. But you don’t have a phone. How will I find you?”

I’ll follow you, and this time I won’t lose you.

“You’re extremely persistent. I’m not the first person to notice this, right?”

The guy I used to be would be persistently figuring out how to get the hell out of shoving this girl in front of a moving car without ending up with a dead family. He wouldn’t be wondering how best to position
himself to kiss her back, and how soon he could get to the base of her neck, to that little hollow she keeps touching with her fingertips.

He wouldn’t be chasing her down the street, uncertain about whether this is moving toward sex or death.

Fuck all.

Meeting her face-to-face in a place I didn’t control was an unlucky accident, but was I supposed to leave that little girl bleeding on the ground? Who would have thought Nicolette Holland would be a steps-up-in-emergencies kind of girl? I wasn’t prepared for her holding that kid’s hand, spilling milk of human kindness all over the ground six inches from me, where I could smell her hair and get turned on while waiting for paramedics.

I was supposed to be repulsed.

Instead, I’m thinking,
Don has to be wrong
. She couldn’t have done this. She’s too normal to have done this. She’s too cute; I like her too much; I could tell.

I look at her standing in front of me. There’s no one else on the street.

I run my hand across her forehead, pushing the fake-brown bangs out of her eyes. Then I kiss her back. It starts out tame. It doesn’t end that way. I cradle the back of her head in my hands, with only a brief thought of snapping her neck. Her hands are in the small of my back, and her mouth tastes like chocolate. When I come up for air, she reaches up and takes hold of the back of my head and pulls me back in. I kiss her eyelids and her ear, and I swear she shudders, like in a porno, only more believable. Scarlett didn’t shudder.

If there were some way to pick her up and haul her back to the apartment without courting arrest, I could add that to my list of depraved aspirations.

“Fine!”
She makes the word
fine
sound like swearing. “Tomorrow. Are you happy?”

I’m happy, but Don isn’t.

The respite between his phone calls has diminished to the point that I anticipate by sundown, there’ll be one long continuous ring. I’d turn off the sound, but I can’t stop listening for it, a regular reminder of how messed up this is.