The Disappearance of Emily H. Page 7

  The first memory plops into my mind as if it was just sitting there, waiting for me to show up.

  It’s recent—Jennifer is in a cool spaghetti-strap dress that I’ve seen her wear to school. She’s at a store, swiping different glosses across the back of her hand.

  I imagine a back key and press it.

  Now she’s in a kitchen, yelling at a woman about how the shirt she wants to wear is still in dirty laundry. It’s the woman in the black car who checked that I was going to clean up after Levi. Jennifer’s mother.

  I keep hanging on to the necklace, pressing the imaginary back key, rewinding time by baby steps.

  Press. Press. Press.

  Until finally, I hit pay dirt.

  Jennifer, Alyssa, and Danielle are clearing off a coffee table, moving gossip magazines, loose papers, a couple of remotes, and a container of Legos to the floor. Then they cover the table with nail stuff and snacks.

  “We gotta do something to Emily.” Jennifer sits on a cushion on the floor and vigorously shakes a bottle of polish. “She can’t go after Michael and get away with it.”

  “Like he’d ever be interested in her. She’s beyond gross.” Alyssa kneels and dips her fingers in a bowl of sudsy water. “The way she stinks like old cabbage, the way she clicks her tongue when she’s thinking and spit gets on her lips. The way she dresses. Ugh.”

  “Emily makes me want to throw up. And it’s not like I have a sensitive gag reflex.” Danielle lays her hand flat on the table in front of Jennifer. “It’s worth it to me to fail math. Just so I don’t have to deal with her anymore.”

  “We need a plan.” Jennifer unscrews the cap of the bottle. “To punish her.”

  The girls are quiet, thinking.

  “Let’s ditch her somewhere,” Jennifer says slowly. “I mean really ditch her.”

  “She deserves it,” Danielle says.

  “Isn’t she afraid of the dark?” Alyssa pulls her fingers out of the water, pushes back the cuticles with a plastic utensil, then submerges them again.

  “We’ll leave her somewhere dark.” Jennifer brushes bright turquoise on Danielle’s nails. “And really freak her out.”

  “I know the perfect place.” Danielle’s eyes light up. “Off Highway Twenty. My dad took me hiking there last year. Super backwoods. No lights. No buildings. No cell service.”

  “Where exactly is it?” Jennifer asks, the brush suspended in midair.

  “You know the hotel sign?”

  “I know where you’re talking about.” Alyssa nods. “Isn’t there a bridge? At least, there used to be.”

  “Still is,” Danielle says. “At the top of the ravine.”

  “We’ll do it next Saturday when my parents are out of town for the weekend,” Jennifer says. “We can have a sleepover. I’ll invite Emily.”

  “Are my cuticles done?” Alyssa holds her hands out for the others to check.

  Danielle nods.

  “First she can do my project, and then we’ll make her so sorry she ever came to Yielding,” Jennifer says, staring across the room, her eyes cold and mean.

  My mom goes to work on Saturday—weekends are prime renting time. So I’m kicking around the house, jotting down ideas for my project with Hugh, and watching TV.

  Around noon, my phone flashes with a text from Torie:

  Mall with me, Sydney, and Willow? My mom’s driving.

  Am I actually making friends?

  Sure, I reply.

  A minivan pulls into the driveway thirty minutes later, and the door slides open. I climb into the empty spot in the middle seat with Willow and Sydney. My fingers immediately start tingling. The van’s probably loaded with sparkles, although I’m not seeing any. I squint. One on Willow’s earring and one on Sydney’s phone. I sit on my hands. I will not look weird today.

  Everyone says hi.

  “Nice to meet you, Raine,” Torie’s mom says. “Thanks for helping support Torie’s sister.”

  What?

  Torie turns around from the front seat. “My sister starts a new job today at the henna tattoo kiosk. My mom wants her to look all popular, so we have to hang around the booth for a while and get tattoos.”

  A henna tattoo? How much does that cost? I barely have any money.

  “I’m paying for your tattoos, girls.” It’s as if Torie’s mom read my mind. “After all, you’re doing our family a huge favor.”

  “She gets paid by the number of tattoos she does,” Torie explains.

  “I’ve seen some of Turner’s designs,” Willow offers. “They’re adorable.”

  “My mom said I should get mine on the back of my hand.” Sydney looks up from the game she’s playing on her phone.

  “We’ll all get them on our hands. Same hand. Same design,” Torie announces. “Like we’re a club.”

  And what started off sounding like a sketchy plan, before Torie gave me the whole story, ends up sounding kind of wacky and fun and like I’m included in something.

  When we arrive at the mall, Torie’s mom gives her money for our tattoos, then leaves us to go chat with some lady she knows.

  “My mom contacted everyone to show up here today.” Torie shakes her head. “Let’s get in line. There are other things I want to do today besides get a tattoo from my sister. Like she hasn’t been practicing on me at home, anyway.”

  “I desperately need new mascara,” Sydney says. “Mine’s all dried up.”

  Torie points to her hair. “And I need some new color. This blue is already fading.”

  There’s a long list of things I need, too. The problem is that money’s the number one item.

  I haven’t been to a mall in ages, and I’d forgotten how my hands go crazy with tingling. If I could see all the sparkles around, I bet it’d look like a diamond mine.

  “Hey, Hannah.” Torie taps the shoulder of the girl in front of us.

  The girl squeals and hugs Torie. “How’s your team doing this year?” she asks, not even bothering to say hi.

  “Great. We’re doing great,” Torie says with a tinge of annoyance. “This is my cousin Hannah. She goes to Carlton Oaks Middle.” She nods at each of us in turn. “This is Sydney, Willow, and Raine.”

  “You guys do cross-country?” Hannah asks.

  “Yeah, they’re on my team,” Torie says, sounding more annoyed.

  “We are so going to pound your butts this season. Our coach has been working us extra hard.” As the line moves, Hannah walks backward so she still faces us.

  Sydney crosses her arms.

  “They barely beat us last year,” Willow whispers in my ear. “Hannah always has to be better than Torie at everything.”

  If cousins are this irritating maybe I’m better off not having any.

  “We’ve been training hard, too,” Torie says. “Plus, Raine’s new. And she’s crazy fast.”

  Hannah looks me up and down. “Where’re you from?”

  “Detroit,” I say.

  “Hannah,” Torie says, “you won’t believe where Raine lives. In Emily Huvar’s old house.”

  Hannah knows Emily?

  “Emily went to Hannah’s school before she transferred to Yielding Middle last fall,” Torie explains.

  “You knew her?” I ask Hannah.

  “Yeah. Not as a friend or anything. But yeah, I knew her,” Hannah says. “That’s such a sad story.”

  We all nod.

  “Not like she had a happy time at my school, but at least she didn’t die,” she continues.

  My ears prick up. “What do you mean?”

  “She was big-time bullied. Like once, these girls locked her in a closet in the art room. She was in there for hours. Until the custodian let her out.” Hannah pulls her hair up in a ponytail, then lets it drop. “Her parents transferred her after that.”

  “That’s horrible,” Willow says, her face scrunched up like she’s imagining it.

  Was Emily bullied everywhere she went?

  “She didn’t change schools because her family mo
ved?” I ask. I guess I assumed her scenario was the same as mine.

  “Other way around,” Hannah says. “She changed schools to get a new start. Her family moved to Yielding so they’d be close to Emily’s new school.”

  “She was picked on at our school, too,” Willow says sadly.

  “By Jennifer and those guys,” Sydney says to me.

  A couple of girls wander past us, holding out their arms. I glance at their tattoos. The lines are kind of wobbly and smudged. How good is Torie’s sister?

  “Is Turner any good at henna tattoos?” Sydney asks, her eyes on the same girls I’m watching.

  “No,” Torie says cheerfully. “She sucks.”

  “That’s what I heard, too,” Hannah says. “Remember when she tried working at the ceramics place? My mug cracked in half the first time I used it.”

  “That job was such a disaster,” Torie says. The two girls laugh.

  “Did Emily go to a lot of sleepovers at Jennifer’s?” I ask.

  Torie shrugs. “I doubt it. Emily was doing Jennifer’s homework. The sleepover was probably ‘payment’ for the big project we had.” She makes air quotes around payment.

  Exactly what I thought after the diorama vision.

  “Besides, Emily was pretty bizarre,” Sydney says. “I bet she didn’t get many invitations for anything.”

  “We shouldn’t say negative things about her,” Willow says.

  There’s a short silence.

  “Emily had a reputation for being a computer genius,” Hannah says. “She even knew more than the computer teacher. Emily said if she wanted to, she could hack into the school records and change everyone’s grades.”

  We’ve been steadily shuffling along, and now we’re at the front of the line.

  “I’ll be the first victim,” Hannah says dramatically. She presses one arm against her forehead and stretches out the other one.

  When it’s my turn, I sit on the stool across from Turner. Her whole face is damp with sweat. She keeps shaking her hands in the air, like they’re cramping. She looks nervous and exhausted.

  “Thanks,” I say when she’s finished.

  “You’re welcome.” She gazes at the line behind me and sighs.

  At the food court, Torie, Sydney, Willow, and I lay our hands flat on a table and compare our tattoos. They do look sort of the same, the way all humans look sort of the same. Everyone’s tattoo has dark brown and reddish henna lines, some curvy, some straight, with a similar sunflower-ish design. Willow’s tattoo is half the size of the others. Sydney’s has thicker lines. Mine is missing several petals. Torie’s looks like her sister was wearing a blindfold.

  I sip my soda, thinking about how the tattoos are like sparkles. The four of us are joined together because we have the tattoos in common. Seeing someone’s memory links me to that person because we have their memory in common.

  Was Emily connected to anyone at school? Did she have any friends? Or was she always alone?

  “What kind of big project?” I suddenly ask Torie.

  “What?” she says.

  “If the sleepover was payment for Emily doing Jennifer’s project, what subject was the project for?”

  “It was a really obnoxious chemistry project,” Torie replies. “I wish someone had done mine.”

  “You mean when we had to make a model of a compound?” Sydney says. “I hated that project.”

  “Jennifer’s turned out really cool,” Willow says. “It was made of Lego bricks.”

  At the word Lego, I go simultaneously cold and sweaty.

  Because in the memory from Jennifer’s necklace, the girls moved a bucket from the coffee table to the floor. A bucket of Lego bricks. That hadn’t been made into anything yet.

  I feed Levi, then text my mom to find out what time she’ll be home for dinner.

  When I don’t hear back, a nugget of worry lodges in my chest.

  I’ve been slacking when it comes to keeping an eye on her. Usually, I’m on hyperalert, watching for the first signs of a loser. Then I rush in and slam on the brakes. It works, sometimes. I’ve been to five different schools. It could’ve been double that.

  I text again. Radio silence.

  My mom falls into relationships the way other people finish a bag of chips zoned out in front of the TV. It happens when she’s not paying attention. A guy who stays late at work to help her can easily morph into a guy who parks his razor on our bathroom counter and his feet on our coffee table for Saturday-night hockey.

  I text again. By now, a weight the size of my social studies textbook presses on my chest, making it tough to breathe. I try to remember. How many times has she come home late? Has she been getting lots of texts? Are her eyes all bright when she talks about a certain guy? Is she mentioning one guy’s name too much?

  I’m practically hyperventilating, imagining us repacking and loading up the truck, when I hear the crunch of tires on our driveway. My mom breezes in, clutching a brown paper bag.

  “I texted you,” I blurt out.

  “You did?” She frowns. She sets the bag on the counter and pulls her phone from her purse. “Sorry. I put my phone on vibrate for a meeting and never switched it back to ring.”

  The weight lifts a little, and I suck in a decent breath.

  My mom opens the bag, and our little kitchen fills with yummy smells. “Greek,” she says. “From this restaurant called Athens near the apartments in Oneida.”

  She pulls out a salad, hummus, pita bread, a gyro, a chicken shish kebob and two flower-shaped baklavas. I get glasses of water, and we sit at the counter to eat.

  “Henna tattoo?” she asks, pointing a plastic fork at my hand.

  “This girl at school’s sister does them at the mall.”

  My mom tilts her head to look at the tattoo from different angles.

  “It’s supposed to be a sunflower,” I say.

  My mom chatters about work. She describes this gross-sounding complex they’re fixing up to rent. I hang on every word, analyzing, scrutinizing, looking for clues that she’s interested in someone. Nothing.

  “How’s the unpacking going?” I ask as I pop the last bite of baklava into my mouth. When my mother starts falling in love, she stops unpacking. Actually, she stops doing everything except hanging out with the guy.

  “Come see my room.” My mom stands.

  I walk into her bedroom and gasp. Literally gasp. Only three boxes are piled in the corner, still waiting to be emptied. Three. I can’t even remember the last time my mother unpacked this much. Brass knickknacks in the shape of animals are lined up on the shelf behind her bed. I haven’t seen them in years. A few pictures hang on the wall. A little doily sits under her alarm clock.

  “Wow, Mom,” I say. “It’s incredible.”

  She beams. “Although, you should see the basement. I empty a box and just toss it down the stairs. It must look like a cardboard graveyard.”

  I make a face.

  “Don’t worry. You don’t have to go down there.” She waves her arms, as if dismissing the thought. “I’ll take care of it. Besides my boxes, I noticed a mattress and a few other odds and ends.”

  A mattress? I wonder if Tasha ever slept down there. Most likely not. The basement’s pretty nasty. I tell my mom what our nosy old-lady neighbor said about teens sneaking into our house and getting up to stuff.

  “I believe it. I’ve seen it happen with other vacant houses,” she says, straightening a small brass horse. “The neighbor’s name is Mrs. Burns, by the way.”

  “You met her?” I ask.

  “I think she makes it a point to talk to everyone on the street.” My mom smiles. “She sees herself as the ears and eyes of the neighborhood.”

  “You know who snuck past Mrs. Burns?” I pause. “Tasha, the little sister of the girl who disappeared. She came in our back door with a key the day I was home sick,” I say. “She had her lunch with her.”

  My mom sighs, and her lips and eyes turn down in sadness. She has a soft spot the si
ze of New York for anyone going through tough times. “That poor girl. Her life will never be the same.”

  There’s silence while we’re both probably thinking about how life can take a turn for the worse.

  “I really am trying, Raine,” my mom says quietly. “This is the fresh start that will stick.”

  A flutter of hope flits through me. I hope she’s right.

  After my mom goes to bed, I sit outside in the dark on the porch. There’s no moon or stars tonight. I pull up the hood of my sweatshirt in the chilly breeze. A small animal rustles on the ground nearby. The night wraps around me until I feel completely alone.

  Was it this dark and quiet in the woods where Emily got left? How alone did she feel? How scared? I shiver like a thousand spiders are skittering all over me.

  I take Jennifer’s necklace from my pouch pocket. The sparkle on the stone flashes, cutting through the inky gloom. I cradle the necklace in my palm.

  Shutting my eyes, I go straight to the memory of the girls doing their nails and plotting to leave Emily in the forest. I guess my mind remembers the path.

  Zooming in on the papers the girls cleared off the coffee table, I find the instructions for the science project.

  FINAL 7TH GRADE CHEMISTRY PROJECT

  Due June 23

  Using common household materials, construct a compound of your choice.

  I stop reading and switch my focus to the bucket of Legos. Emily snapped these little bricks together into a compound for Jennifer. This is the science project Emily mentioned to Hugh when they met on the night she vanished.

  Emily didn’t disappear on the way to Jennifer’s sleepover.

  There was no bad guy.

  Just three very mean girls.

  Who made her do a chemistry project.

  Then took her to a secluded place in the woods and left her.

  What happened out there?

  Something so bad that Alyssa’s hand shook when she found out where I lived. Something so bad that Alyssa lost her balance when she heard the police might go hard-core with the investigation again. Something so bad that Emily didn’t make it back to Yielding.

  Jennifer, Alyssa, and Danielle took Emily out into the forest and left her.