How to Disappear (10 page)

I used to get in trouble for TPing trees and making over girls whose mothers make them dress like Pilgrims.

I’ve moved so far beyond taking candy bars and licenses and money. I’ve traded what Steve would have called “playing with fire” (if he’d known what I was up to, which he didn’t) for real fire. I’m barely recognizable inside. And I’m working on my outside.

If your life was at risk, would you commit arson in an apartment building?

That would be yes.

Would you risk your soul to save your body?

Yes.

This tops the list of things I wish I didn’t know about myself.

I walk along the beach until sunrise. The waves hit the shore so much louder than at Green Lake. Then I run as if I could outrun what I know.

As if.

It feels like the end of a marathon. That’s how tired of this I am.

What would Xena, Warrior Princess do?

What she had to do, that’s what.

I cut back up to the edge of the road as shades start opening in the houses. I hang behind a gas station on the end of a beach strip mall.

Change into a pink tee I’ll never wear again.

Part my hair with my fingernail. Plan what color curly mop it will be a couple of hours from now.

Wait.

Two girls with a San Diego State decal and an empty backseat pull in.

“My ride was supposed to meet me here an
hour
ago. Could I possibly hitch a ride south? I could chip in for gas.”

I sleep all the way down the coast. When they let me off, it feels like the morning after I got monumentally trashed at cheer camp and woke up hungover. I pass an electronics store.
This time I find out which phone has GPS and buy the one that doesn’t, never did, and couldn’t. I don’t even steal it. Still, it seems like lots of money for a thirty-second phone call.

“Are you alone?”

“It’s Sunday morning—where do you think I am?” Olivia says.

“Drive the phone somewhere and crush it. Get yourself a new e-mail and write to Cinderella, okay?”

Cinderella3472 is from when we made up a college girl named Desiree to play with online. Not that we got past setting up her e-mail account and an unfinished profile on TrueLuvMatch.com. Who’s going to be able to find a nonexistent single who never goes to one website where I ever visited, posted, or scrolled past?

Olivia’s voice drops. “What happened?”

“Later.”

Then I trash the phone.

I have totally freaked out my best friend while she was sitting in
church
, and I don’t even feel bad about it.

I finally get how to do this. Lying and stealing didn’t feel that great, but this was a fire, and I don’t even feel guilty. On the bus back north, winding through farmland, I’m remembering Steve going, “Don’t you think that might have been a wee bit reckless, Nicolette?” I’m thinking,
Freaking-A, I’m reckless
.

Also, still alive.

I’m on the bus in different sunglasses and a marching band
shirt, chomping on a bag of mini Kit Kat bars and a half-quart carton of whole milk to get my fat on.

You can circumnavigate the globe on your tabletop, Steve, but no one, not anyone, not whoever texted me, not a platoon of Texas Rangers or the FBI or a band of scary thugs (or you) will ever find me.

By the time you walk past me on the street, I’ll be some whole other girl you don’t even recognize or know.

Even I will hardly know it’s me.

I feel so maniacally in power, I can’t even sleep anymore. So I sit back in this half-dazed state, scanning the bus for bogeymen and obsessing about where Catherine Grace Davis can get a gun.

When it happens, I’m alone in the motel room that by now is strewn with bottles, KFC boxes, and dirty clothes. Nicolette is using Gmail—great for security, bad for me—but Calvin’s instructions are gold, and the privacy of the computer Nicolette is using is protected by the functional equivalent of a chain lock made of paper clips.

The computer is in the John Muir Branch of the public library in El Molino, California, a hick town in the Central Valley above Fresno.

Yelling “Gotcha!” to myself would be too much like going over the edge. Instead, I start cleaning up and packing with a vengeance. From this point on, it’s all about self-discipline: the kind Nicolette doesn’t have.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

I accidently dropped my phone down a well. (Not really. You know what I mean.) Tell me you’re ok NOW!!!!! Luv u 4ever, Snow

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Somebody got my number, my fault, I gave it out, don’t even. Total terror-fest. Plus I think it had GPS. So. Spooked. Might get another for emergencies. Now that I get you have to throw them out all the time or PEOPLE FIND YOU. Do not trust Law & Order reruns for survival tips. ♥ ♥ ♥

She’s e-mailed Olivia, aka 1SnowWhite5150, twice, and if I don’t get to El Molino, California, fast, she gets her new emergency burner and she’s gone.

I drive there in the dark, guzzling Red Bull.

I’m in an innocuous grayish Prius I bought for cash off a used-car lot just before it closed as soon as I hit California. Don’s car is by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. I hiked back. I’m not sneaking up on this girl in a car you can hear coming a mile away.

It’s seven a.m., still chilly, and the library doesn’t open for hours. I dig a flannel shirt out of the trunk and cruise. There are
FOR RENT
signs planted in front of half the apartments abandoned by students taking off for summer.

I want a command post with an ergonomic chair and a mattress from this century, not another sleazy motel. I’m not a guy who throws money around, but I throw some rent at a place in a Victorian house I can get week-to-week. The girl who’s handling the rental seems so relieved to get the place off her hands, she doesn’t care if I’m in town to commit acts of terror.

I sit in the ergonomic chair and stare at my screen while more days of my life go down the tubes.

There’s nothing like a good obsession to keep a guy mesmerized. Four days in, I’m still sitting in the desk chair in boxer shorts, waiting for something to happen. I’m beating myself up for not walking El Molino systematically, street by street, looking for her, when my screen offers her up.

She’s e-mailing Olivia from the John Muir branch again. The rush is like a free fall, like bungee jumping where you’re not supposed to be.

I’m there in five, scouting.

I watch her hands hover over the keyboard, her arms emerging from the sleeves of a giant tee, her face bent toward the screen. The hair that was once straight and blond, now brown and curly, falls over the side of her face as she leans forward. She has glasses now. I see the thin blue vein in the corner of her forehead, watch
her push her hair behind her ear. The diamond studs from the photos are gone, her earlobes curved and white.

I watch her breathe.

I don’t let myself feel what I’ve felt since I saw pictures of her that first time, more difficult now that she’s more my physical type, curvier and a little older-looking. She’s still small and beautiful and a killer.

When she gets up to leave, I follow her carefully through a leafy neighborhood of big, old wooden houses to a park with a playground. There she sits, reading a book, shading her eyes from the afternoon sun. There I sit on a rock not more than twenty yards behind her, pretending to stare into space.

And it’s not that I’m too self-disciplined to move in precipitously, it’s that I have no idea what I’m going to do next.

An express to El Molino was the first bus out of San Diego. The ticket lady said, “Whole different state up there.”

I nodded like a girl that no one would remember.

But even if she did remember, since LA—with my (sallow) skin, my (stringy) hair, my (unnecessary) glasses, my (penciled-on) eyebrows, my (rapidly increasing) weight, my (lumpy) padding, my (non) style of clothes—
nothing
about me is the same.

This time, if Piper Carmichael sat down next to me, she wouldn’t even think I looked familiar.

I probably shouldn’t be outside reading anyway. But the point of looking this different is that I’m supposed to be able to walk around in public without being terrified.

I look up to see the little girl fall because she’s screaming.

Not in terror, in joy, as she leaps from the swing and soars over the playground’s sand floor. Until she lands on a bike and a red wagon. The sound of the child hitting the metal, the bicycle crashing against the wagon, isn’t that loud. But it’s deafening.

I’m up before I even think, running toward her.

When I was supposed to be as noticeable as a bush, or a slat in the bench, or one more nanny.

The little girl is silent, not making another sound.

A guy runs past me from out of nowhere, outruns me, crouches over her.

You can hear him swearing.

I yell, “Don’t move her!”

I’ve seen enough cheerleading pyramid falls to know this. But there’s blood. Her pants are torn above the knee. There’s a red stain seeping across the yellow cotton like spilled Hawaiian Punch.

The guy takes off his button-down and uses a sleeve for a tourniquet around her thigh, pressing down on the leg.

In tones of iced rage, he says, “Where’s the mom?”

“I’m not the mom!”

“Call 9-1-1.”

But there are two women behind him already telling 9-1-1 dispatchers the same identical thing in a duet.

The little girl is pale and still, hair almost white, skin
whitening by the second. The guy is cooing to her. “Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes? I’m right here. What’s your name?” And then, in a raspier voice, “Stay with me, okay?”

I say, “Don’t talk like that! She isn’t dying, all right? I swear, I’ve seen a bunch of kids fall from way higher than this.”

“Thanks, doctor.” Then he goes back to telling the girl to stay with him, like she’s a police detective breathing her last breath after being felled by a bullet on
Law & Order
.

I’m stroking her arm.

There’s blood on my hand.

The mother is running toward us from the ladies’ bathroom.

I’m shaking so hard, the paramedic puts a blanket over me after he braces the little girl’s head.

The guy who gave up his shirt, now in the wife beater he had on underneath, hands me a half-f water bottle. I take it without even thinking. That’s how freaked out I am. Not just about the blood.

He gives me a hand up.

I take in the design of the armband tattooed around his right arm.

For the first time, I really look at the guy. Cute and in extremely good shape.
Extremely
cute. Hazel eyes, shaggy hair, tan. Good smile. Nice taste in tats.

He says, “You ought to sit down.”

I ought to run.

“You just stood me on my feet.”

“On a bench.”

I’m actually gripping this guy’s tattoo. I feel him tensing. His biceps don’t need any work.

“You’ve seen a
bunch
of little kids fall out of the sky onto wagons?” he says. “Remind me not to have you watch my kid.”

“You have a
kid
?”

“No!” He looks truly taken aback. “You want an ice cream?”

There’s a food truck at the edge of the park with pictures of snow cones on the side of it.

“That’s okay.”

“I’m not trying to pick you up. I’m trying to give you some sugar so you don’t go into shock.”

“I’m
not
going into shock. Plus, sugar wouldn’t help. Complete old wives’ tale.”

That smile. “Girls often require massive shots of sugar when they first behold me.”

“
Behold?
Not grandiose or anything.”

“Grandiose? Thanks a lot!” He doesn’t look offended.

“Honors psychology.” God, now I sound like a high school student. “Who knew that
years
later I’d have insulting diagnoses at my fingertips? Sorry.”

“How come you won’t let me help you out? You’re still shaking.”

He’s so close to me, propelling me toward the bench, I can feel him shift his weight slightly toward me. Feel his bare forearm against mine. Hear him breathing hard.

He says, “Come on, ice cream. We could still call it celebratory ice cream. We just saved that kid from bleeding to death.”

“All I did was hold her hand.” His foot’s touching my foot. “You did the first aid.”

“Boy Scout,” he says. “Who knew that
years
later the first aid would come in handy?”

Great. I’ve found myself a hot Boy Scout. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not. That would violate the Boy Scout creed. In fact, I think there’s a bylaw that says you have to get Popsicles for girls covered in blood.”

I start to get up to rinse my hands, to get the blood off me, all of it, now, but I have to sit down again. Dizzy and dry mouthed. Field of vision narrowing. Passing out.

“Are you all right?” He has his arm around me, but I think it might be to keep me from falling over as opposed to uninvited PDA.

Who am I kidding? I like it.

“You don’t look like a Boy Scout.”

“This?” He holds out the tattooed arm.

“I like it.”

I get that Xena, Warrior Princess wouldn’t be cuddling up to this really cute guy in a wife beater in a public park. She’d be home making arrowheads. I get it.

But I can’t catch my breath or blink or move. His heart
is beating like crazy too, after his virtuoso moves with the injured kid.

Maybe all I’m feeling is like how, after you get spun upside down on the Colossus at State Fair for what feels like forever, you’re so hyped up, you want to kiss the random guy sitting behind you in your capsule.

Maybe.

Or maybe I actually want what I want, which would mean I’m insane.

He says, “What’s your name? Are you hearing me?”

“
Please
don’t start telling me to stay with you like that kid. What’s
your
name?”

“J-j-Jay . . .” The slight stammer gets me. As if maybe he’s got a slightly (less than 1 percent but still endearing) bashful side. “Just the initial.”