Girls, like Annaleise on the telephone poles, silent and silenced.
Annaleise had gone to some well-known art school, which wasn’t surprising. Back in middle school she’d won a statewide photography competition, and that had made the local news. She looked the part—the girl on the other side of the camera. Timid and fine-boned, with too-wide eyes, every move tentative, careful, deliberate. The one creating, seeing, but never seen. The opposite of Corinne.
I knew the cops had been here, but the place looked completely undisturbed.
There obviously hadn’t been a struggle in the apartment. Besides, we know she went out walking. If she had been hurt, it hadn’t happened here. Her purse was gone, but that could’ve been because she had it with her when she left. Her car was here. That was the Big Sign. Who leaves without her car? They hadn’t found her cell phone, so the general consensus was that it was with her, wherever that was. And it was powered off, since they hadn’t been able to trace it.
The cops had been through here, and probably her parents, though I hadn’t heard a thing about any evidence or clues. But this key was something real and solid and gut-twisting. This key was dangerous.
I went through her desk. Her closet. Her bathroom cabinets. Even the garbage can, remembering the pregnancy test they’d found at Corinne’s, stuffed inside the box of Skittles.
There was nothing here. A tissue, an empty stick of deodorant, the wrapper from a bar of soap. Though it was possible that someone had swept through here before the cops, cleaning up after her, saving her the embarrassment, letting her keep the parts of her that should’ve remained hidden.
I checked her dresser drawers. Everything neatly folded and everything hers. No men’s clothes. No spare toothbrush beside the sink. No notes on her desk. Nothing at all there except the sleek laptop next to a bundle of wires. I chewed the side of my thumb. They’d probably already been through it. I could have it back before anyone noticed. I could.
I grabbed it before I could change my mind.
I checked under her bed on the way out. There was a suitcase—more potential evidence that she hadn’t gone on a trip. And beside that, a white box that could hold a large photo album. I placed the laptop on the hard floor and slid the box out from under the bed. Lifting the top, I saw that it held the sketches that hadn’t made it onto the wall.
I flipped through them rapidly, the flashlight cold and metallic between my teeth, wondering if she’d stuffed anything else amid the drawings. Something the cops missed, something she’d tried to keep hidden. But no, only art. More sad girls. Eyes open, eyes closed, all forlorn, somehow. I had to squint to see their faces, their outlines so faint. Drafts, maybe. Sketches to darken and shade and bring depth to later. All blurring together as I turned them over faster and faster.
But then I stopped, flipped back a few pictures. I took the flashlight from my mouth, ran the light over the familiar angles of the face, the curve of her smile, the freckle at the corner of her right eye. The bow shape of her mouth and the flowing peasant dress that hit just above her knees—
Corinne.
It was a sketch of Corinne. No, it was a goddamn replica of a picture that had hung in my room. We had been in a field of sunflowers. Johnson Farm. It was only a few towns away, practically a tourist attraction—people driving from hours away to take pictures there. It was Bailey’s favorite shoot location.
This picture had been taken with Bailey’s camera the summer before senior year. We’d taken at least a hundred shots that day, posing beside each other for so long that we forgot we were posing. Bailey liked to make us spin as fast as we could, and she’d set the camera for long exposure, and after she got the film developed, we’d look like haunting, blurred images. Like ghosts.
I never picked those pictures to keep—I hated how you couldn’t tell us apart when we were spinning. I took the ones with us smiling, frozen-faced and happy, and I hung them on my walls, like proof.
I had been in this picture, too. Corinne’s eyes were closed, and she had a small smile, caught between moments. She’d been telling us a story that I could no longer remember, her hand brushing the top of a waist-high sunflower. I’d stood beside her, watching her. Laughing.
This was my favorite picture of us. But Annaleise had sketched only Corinne. She’d left me behind when she transferred Corinne, and filled the white space I’d occupied with sunflowers. I was gone, removed from the memory. An unnecessary complication, easily excised. Without me in it, Corinne looked lonely and sad, like every other girl in this box.
I moved the page aside, and there was another behind it. Another sketch of one of my pictures, this time of Corinne and Bailey and me. Again, the sketch was just Corinne, staring forlornly to the side. We’d both been looking at Bailey in the picture, at her twirling with her head back and her white skirt flying up around her dark legs. Now it was Corinne alone in a field of sunflowers.
How the hell did Annaleise get my pictures? She must’ve been in my house. She must’ve been in my room. Who was this girl I’d lived beside for years?
Annaleise was five years younger, and we barely noticed her back then. Noticed her even less because she was a quiet kid, and the times I remembered her, she’d been in that awkward phase between kid and adolescent, skinny and unsure of herself.
This was all I knew of her: Her parents sent her over with food for a solid three months after my mother died, and she never seemed to know what to say when she brought it over, so she never said anything at all; she didn’t have a lot of friends, I didn’t think, because any time I remembered seeing her, she’d been alone; she won that photography contest, but I’d known about it only because Bailey had entered it, too; and she liked strawberry ice cream. Or she liked it enough to be eating it at the county fair ten years ago.
She’d been standing by herself near the entrance as I ran from the Ferris wheel; I hadn’t seen her at first. I’d seen only Tyler, waiting for me. It wasn’t until Daniel hit me so hard that I dropped to my side, until I untwisted my arm and turned my head away and saw her face frozen behind a melting scoop of strawberry ice cream, her tongue still out, halfway up the cone.
I heard a fist collide with flesh—something snap—and I didn’t have to look to know exactly what it was. Annaleise’s ice cream scoop fell off the cone, and she ran out the front entrance. I turned my head the other way in time to see the drops of blood collecting on the ground as Daniel bent over, his hands cupped over his nose, and Tyler cursing to himself, shaking out his hand.
I slid the box back under the bed. But I folded the sketches of Corinne and tucked them inside the laptop. They were almost mine, anyway.
* * *
“NICOLETTE?” EVERETT WAS SITTING on the side of my bed this morning as I stared at the empty space where the pictures once hung on my walls. “What are you doing?”