Last Seen Leaving (2 page)

“Huh?”

“Was she upset? Angry?” Wilkerson made a revolving motion with one hand. “What did the two of you talk about?”

I flashed back to Friday night, January's breath fogging the air between us, her hands pawing at my jeans, her eyes a shimmering slick of tears, and I shifted on the couch. My mom was watching me like I was something under glass at the zoo, and I could feel my chest constricting. “I don't know. We talked about normal stuff.”

I was sure they could see the sweat leaking at my temples. This was my worst nightmare. Why were they asking me about Friday night
in front of my mom
?

“Could you elaborate?”

It was like being called to the chalkboard to give a presentation you had forgotten you were supposed to prepare. I started talking, saying things that popped into my head, desperately avoiding the truth. I didn't
want
to mislead the cops—not if something bad had happened—but they wouldn't tell me what was going on, and I wasn't going to back willingly into this particular corner if I could help it. “We did some stargazing. January's really into that kind of thing, and it was a pretty clear night, so we went out and … you know, looked at stars for a while. And we talked about what we're going to do when we finally graduate, and we talked about her big, fancy new house and her big, fancy new school, and … and that's about it.”

It sounded pitiful even to my own ears, and I could see the cops didn't believe me. Looking at me dubiously, Wilkerson asked, “Did she seem depressed at all, or preoccupied? Was she acting unusual in any way?”

Again, I flashed on January's torn expression, stark in the moonlight with bitter tears making silver lines down her cheeks, and I felt ashamed. “Not really.”

Wilkerson frowned, and Detective Moses narrowed her eyes a little like she was trying to picture me in handcuffs. Then she spoke for the first time. “She's your girlfriend, but you haven't seen her in almost a week?” It was Thursday now, so technically she was right. “Not over the weekend? Not on Tuesday night?”

“Why do you keep asking me about Tuesday?” My pitch was climbing into the upper register and, like watching a cat run up a tree, I couldn't seem to stop it. “Why do you keep asking me about January? What's happened?”

Maddeningly, the detectives shared another glance, and then Wilkerson finally said, “January McConville is missing, son. She never came home from school on Tuesday night, and no one's seen or heard from her since.” He watched me for a moment, as if he expected me to respond, but I merely stared back in quiet astonishment until he added, “So I think you can see why we'd like to know exactly what the two of you talked about the last time you saw her.”

I looked from my mom's worried expression to the businesslike ones of the cops, and I swallowed hard.
Oh, shit.

 

TWO

TWO WEEKS TO
go before Halloween and the moon was full, a bone-white disc that glowed so brightly it rendered streetlamps redundant, so bright I actually cast a shadow over the waves of blond hair that trailed down January's back as she trudged quietly through the tall grass in front of me. A few small, wispy clouds hovered at the edge of the night sky, and the fields that stretched out
around us
were cast in a sharp, bluish relief. It was a startlingly cold night, and our breath streamed visibly into the air, white phantoms that vanished as soon as you looked at them.

I hadn't heard from her in days—not a call, not a text, nothing—and then, out of nowhere, she wrote and asked me to come over. The second I arrived, she'd told her mom and stepdad we were going stargazing, and we'd be back later. “Don't wait up,” she'd said sarcastically, knowing they probably weren't even listening.

Ever since her mom married Jonathan Walker, a rich-as-hell state senator with national aspirations, January had become increasingly, incongruously pessimistic about her life. She went from a tiny, rented condo to the biggest house I'd ever seen in real life—a house so big it could double as a hotel—and she hated it. It was an “estate” in the sprawling and largely rural Superior Charter Township area northeast of Ann Arbor, sitting on more acreage than my entire neighborhood, and she bitched about how far away it was. Her bedroom was enormous—her
bed
was enormous—and she'd already been promised a convertible when she turned sixteen.

Still, she complained. “Mom and I used to be close, you know? We used to actually
talk
. Now it's the ‘Tammy and Jonathan Walker Show' all the time, and I'm the teenage daughter who gets reduced from ‘starring' to ‘recurring' because my character's no longer useful. Mom always takes his side, and she barely even sounds like herself at all!”

She was right, though. I could see it happening before my eyes. When I'd met January freshman year, her mom had only just started dating Walker, and January was convinced it wouldn't last. Tammy was a struggling office manager and single mother, and Walker was one of the richest men in the state; they had nothing in common. But then I watched as January's mom went from mousy brown to platinum blond, from Sears to Saks, and from “Tammy” to “Mrs. Walker.” Mr. Walker had stamped a new identity on her, like a kid playing with a doll, and his girlfriend/fiancée/wife had been an eager and cooperative subject. January, however, resisted the interference every step of the way, becoming harder and pricklier until neither her mom nor her stepdad particularly wanted to handle her
anymore.

She still hadn't spoken yet, and we were reaching the little stream that marked the back end of the Walker property. Beyond it, a garrison of black trees rose up toward the wispy shreds of cirrus clouds that drifted like torn gauze above our heads. Past the trees and to the left was a sloping meadow where January liked to watch the stars, far enough from any houses that you could easily pretend you were the only person left in the world, but instead of heading for it, she veered right.

We hopped the stream, shoved through a cluster of pines, and emerged in the moonlight only a few yards from what had once been a functioning barn. Now it was an abandoned, moldering shipwreck of a building, its boards hoary and warped with age, its roof sagging perilously in more than one spot, with an encampment of weeds spreading out around its foundation. Without a word, January headed for the wide doors, the lock on them long since rusted through.

“Uh … I thought we were going to look at the stars,” I said uncertainly.

“We will,” she answered, her breath vaporizing before my eyes. “I just want to go in here first.”

“Why?” I halted in my tracks, eyeing the structure nervously, scared not of the building's safety rating but of what this unannounced stop might represent.

“Because it's cold,” January told me simply, dragging one of the doors open with an ominous croak from its ancient hinges, “and I want to.”

“Why?” I repeated, but she ignored me. Without waiting to see if I would follow, she walked through the
dark maw
of the doorway and was swallowed by the shadows within. Typical January. She
knew
I would follow; I didn't have a choice. Where else would I go?

Heaving an irritated sigh, I trotted obediently after her.

The inside of the barn was no cheerier than the outside, especially at night. Creepy stalls filled with petrified straw bordered a central passage, dust thickly coating every visible surface, and the sharp, rusted remains of farm equipment deemed too decrepit to salvage or sell hung from the walls like some kind of primitive armory. I'd been in there before, of course; immediately after discovering it, January had turned it into her own Fortress of Solitude, a place where she could get away from the Tammy and Jonathan Walker Show. As if she couldn't just go to the other end of that railway station they called a house and be equally as isolated.

Toward the far end of the barn was a ladder leading to the hayloft, and in the dim light I saw January already halfway to the top, the rungs giving little squeaks of protest under her feet. Frustrated, I called out, “Are you gonna tell me why we have to stop off in this haunted shithole first, or what?”

She didn't answer. She disappeared from sight, and then I heard her feet scraping through dirt and straw above my head, boards thumping and creaking until she came to a stop near the front of the barn. After a moment, I ascended the ladder and found her huddled in a little nest of hay near an open window that looked out toward the meadow and the woods, beside a stack of crates pushed up against the wall. The bright moonlight made a platinum halo of her pale hair.

“Sit with me for a little while, okay?” Her voice was scarcely above a whisper. “I'm cold.”

I was still annoyed, but she sounded … fragile somehow. It was so unlike her, so out of character for the girl who had never had a sentimental word to say about anyone or anything, that I forgot to be wary of her motivation. I crossed the hayloft, skirting the weak spot in the floor, and settled next to her. She was shivering, so I opened my coat and let her move into my lap, then closed the coat around us both. We were silent
for a moment, looking out the window at a sky rendered into a pointillist masterpiece by limitless stars, the moon shining like a beacon through the diaphanous lace of barely-there clouds.

“This is nice,” January said at last. She looked up at me, the light picking out an icy reflection in the blue of one eye. “I've missed you, Flynn. I feel like … like we don't even see each other anymore.”

“We kind of don't,” I answered bluntly. It sounded rude, so I added, “I mean, we go to different schools now, you've got drama club every afternoon, you work every weekend—”

“It's not just that. I feel like—” She stopped abruptly, then changed gears. “I miss you,” she repeated. “I want for us to be happy again, like before.”

“
We're
not happy?” I asked carefully. “Or
you're
not happy?”

“You know I'm not happy. Not anymore.” Familiar bitterness was in her voice, a rush of bile so strong I could almost taste it. “I fucking hate it here. I hate Jonathan, I hate Dumas, I hate fucking robo-mom.… I hate that you and Micah and Tiana and everybody else are all having your old lives and doing fun things, while I'm out here in Narnia with my brand-new wax museum family and nobody fucking cares.”

“I care,” I assured her automatically.

She was silent for just a moment. “Tell me about California, okay?”

This was a little game we played. We'd played it since before we started dating, but neither of us got tired of it. She rested her head on my shoulder and I looked out the window at the moon. “When we graduate, we're both going to California. I'll go to UCLA for English, but only until I figure out what I really want to do; your parents will make you apply to Stanford and you'll probably get in, but you'll choose Cal Tech instead just to prove a point. You'll major in astrology—”

“Astronomy,” she corrected, and I could hear the smile in her voice.

“Same thing,” I teased. “We'll go to parties every weekend, alternating whose friends we hang out with, but pretty soon you'll join a sorority—”

“Fuck you!” She laughed, and I realized it was the first time I'd heard her laugh in weeks.

“—and I'll make friends with all these film school hipsters, and they'll get me to start drinking organic, fair-trade coffee and bitching about the Establishment. Your sorostitute friends won't like me, and my hipster friends won't like you, and nobody will understand how we ever got together in the first place—”

“—but we'll go to the beach every Saturday afternoon, the Sunset Strip every Friday night, and a different, trendy café-slash-bar-slash-restaurant every Sunday, and all of our faux-cool friends will wish they were those two awesome kids from Michigan,” she finished with a giggle, but her voice was quiet. “I really want that to happen.”

“Me too.”

She turned again, tilting her face up to mine, and then she kissed me. Her lips tasted like vanilla gloss and spiced rum, and I was surprised that I hadn't smelled the alcohol earlier. The kiss went from tender to serious in nothing flat, her tongue sliding between my teeth, her mouth pressing against mine with unmistakable urgency. Her right hand slipped underneath my sweater, moving over my stomach and up to my chest, and I jerked backward.

“What?” she asked, that one illuminated eye darting back and forth as she read my face. “What's wrong?”

“It's just—I mean, your hand is freezing cold!” I laughed awkwardly.

“It'll warm up,” she promised, and she moved into me again, kissing harder, her left hand joining her right under my sweater. Her fingers clutched at my abs, the cold searing my skin, and then dropped down to the waist of my jeans. She'd managed to get the button undone before I realized what she was doing and pushed her back.

“Wait,” I said, a little panicked.

“The time is right,” she insisted breathlessly, her hands twisting out of my grip like eels, and she reached for my crotch again. “It's finally the right time, and I want … I want you to be the first. I want you.”

She was kneading me, tugging at my jeans, and I should have been enjoying it—I really wanted to be enjoying it—but the panic had escalated to a screaming tornado siren in my brain, and I pushed her back again. “Stop! Stop it!”