“We just have to get through this,” Liss told her as she tapped her fingers against her thumb. Up to four and back. “Then we’ll try to find him. But we can’t do anything when the cops are around. You understand that, right, Dan?”
She did. If Liss wanted to wait, she would wait. Maybe if they waited, it would not be so raw, so painful. The gnawing, black feeling inside her didn’t seem to be weakening with the passing days. Actually, the opposite was happening. It would wash over her like a wave of ice, bringing with it horrible little memories she didn’t want to know were hers.
Like now, sitting next to Liss, who was watching a cop car across the parking lot and doing that nervous thing with her fingers, Dan remembered this:
The way Johnny’s hands seized up into rigid claws the moment that the strange woman they had summoned chose him and how Dan had watched those same hands slip into Liss’s only a few minutes earlier, their fingers laced and palms pressed together.
She remembered the absolute, void-like blackness of the woman’s eyes; her too-long, thin fingers and their thick yellow nails; how the night air swirling around her suddenly carried the scent of decay.
Tears stung Dan’s eyes. She’d cried so much in the last forty-eight hours she thought the swelling around her eyes might never go down.
“Jesus, I wish I could cry as easily as you,” Liss said as Dan yanked down her sleeve to wipe her eyes.
And so Dan sat beside Liss, trying to hold back her tears as Liss tried to muster her own. “My boyfriend disappeared,” Liss whispered to herself. “My boyfriend disappeared,” over and over until her eyes were watery and she was sniffling. Then they got out of the car, which Liss locked three times in a row, took a few steps, then locked it three more times, like she always did, and went to the cafeteria so Liss could cry in front of an audience.
* * *
—
They found his car the next day: a beat-up silver Volvo pulled off the road into the grass beyond the shoulder, at an intersection near Hare Creek State Park. There was talk of a candlelight vigil at the school, or at the North Coast Community Center, but it never came to pass. Liss told the police her story of Johnny’s plan to get high and go for a drive, and Dan told hers about doing homework at Liss’s. Johnny’s friends were cagey around the cops but agreed that that sounded like Johnny. They didn’t know if he was unhappy, if anything was troubling him, if he ever talked about hurting himself. He hadn’t been hanging around with them much since he started dating Liss. They didn’t know what he had been up to.
The police labeled Johnny a “voluntary missing adult,” given that he was already eighteen, and marked his case low priority. By that time, an understanding of Johnny Su’s fate had emerged in Fort Gratton, in Dogtown, down in the mansions of Marlena. People went missing in the North Coast. Drifters floated in and out off Highway 1. Weed farmers operated in thousands of unmonitored acres of redwood forest. Local kids hitchhiked down to San Francisco or up to Portland, then called home when their money ran out, and middle-age parents moved into Buddhist retreats for weeks-long vows of silence. North Coasters lived off the land, wired solar panels to their camper vans, and microdosed hallucinogenic mushrooms in one of the thousands of pockets along the coast where cell coverage didn’t reach but the gray mist of fog did. Usually, they turned up again, though sometimes it was just their bodies, or worse, bones picked clean by the animals that called North Coast their home.
Everyone knew Johnny was gone, at least for now. If he was coming back, it wasn’t because anyone could find him.
THREE
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 9, SENIOR YEAR
Dan
The day after the show, Alexa and Dan set up at their regular lunch spot at the back corner of the cafeteria, far from the soda machines (decommissioned by concerned parents) and the girls who giggled and shrieked at the boys throwing fries at one another. Dan examined her Tupperware without enthusiasm.
“Yesterday’s quinoa with yucca,” she told Alexa as she doused a whitish chunk with hot sauce. “I thought it was impossible for Mexican people to make food this bland, but my mom’s under the impression that yucca’s an undiscovered superfood. And also under the impression that superfoods are a thing.”
Alexa took a bite of her PB&J sandwich, which was a little smushed after spending the morning in her bag. “How are you doing, after last night? I thought you would text me.”
“I’m fine,” Dan said mechanically. “I was super tired.”
“Oh, good.” Alexa swallowed a mouthful. “Was worried for a second you might be upset by the whole nemesis-waiting-in-the-driveway-to-talk-about-her-boyfriend thing. But. Happy to hear you’re fine.”
Dan let herself smile a little. She always said she was fine. It was a habit she couldn’t break, even when it was the furthest thing from the truth. She said it even as her eyes stung from holding back tears, and when her face felt like a hard mask, because she had somehow managed to sink to a place below feelings, where nothing reached her but sadness and the urge to sleep. Sometimes she said it with a savage desperation that others mistook for anger—that she had to be fine, because if she admitted to being something else, she would crumble.
The funny thing was, Dan was never exactly sure if it really was a lie. Wasn’t she fine? Maybe sad was a bad way to be, but life was like that. It seemed foolish to expect more. After all, wasn’t that why everyone heard her say it—I’m fine—and whether they believed it or not, they accepted it? Even Liss, who had to have known when Dan felt so low it was like she had burned away to ash, never pushed her to say what was wrong.
I’m fine was an agreement. It meant: I’ll never mention this, and you’ll never ask.
Or that’s what it used to mean, until Alexa.
Alexa never let her be fine. The first time it happened had been mid-September, only a few weeks into their friendship, and Dan had been so miserable and bleak, she’d been stabbing a paperclip into her thigh through her pocket to get through her morning classes without crying. At lunch, Alexa made it clear with an arch of her eyebrow that she didn’t buy Dan’s deflection. “But seriously?” she’d asked, her hazel eyes searching and her forehead a little tight with concern. “You seem down. What’s bothering you?”
It was as if Alexa, with one glance, had seen through the person Dan pretended to be—the person everyone agreed she was. “Yeah, I guess,” Dan mumbled. “Kind of down. It’s just . . . stuff.”
Alexa sighed sympathetically. “Stuff. I’ve got that too.”
And even though it shouldn’t have made any difference at all, it was as if Alexa had found some back door to her heart by seeing her and not wanting to look away. It made Dan feel better, just a little. The feeling didn’t last, but a few hours of feeling close to okay was enough to get through the day.