All the Rage

“She’s getting quiet,” he says. He tapes the last corner of the third poster down, smiling a little. “Never known my sister to be quiet.” He nods toward the kitchen. “I have to get ready. You coming back?”


I tell him I’ll be there in a minute and take the tape from him. I stare at the posters for a long moment. Three lined up, side by side, almost kind of like modern art. But that’s good, that’s eye catching, I think. I wonder how it looks just coming in, so I step outside, walking backward until I can’t see the posters through the door and then I move forward like I’m anyone stopping in for a bite. I want to know the exact moment my eyes register MISSING and Penny’s face—but then Holly comes out and blocks my view.

“You walking out on us again?” she asks. It’s the first she’s spoken to me since Friday night. I point to the posters behind her.

“I just wanted to see how they looked.”

“You said you didn’t know her,” Holly says.

“What?”

She crosses her arms. “Penny Young. She was in here, that Friday. As soon as I saw her in the paper, I recognized her. You sat right across from her in that booth and then you both got upset about something and you both left, one after the other. Now she’s gone. I keep waiting for you to say something about it, but you were never going to, were you?”

My heart stops. I thought Penny got past Holly, but nothing gets past Holly. I was stupid to believe it could.

“No,” I finally say. “I wasn’t going to.”

She’s not expecting an honest answer. It catches her off guard enough that I can slip by her. She reaches for me. “Romy, just a minute—”

“Leave it, Holly.”

But another thing about Holly is she doesn’t know how to leave anything. She follows me to the kitchen, right at my heels. When we’re behind the door, she starts in on me.

“Did you at least tell the police she was here?”

This gets everyone looking. Leon’s head turns my way. Girls on their way out—order pads and pencils in hand—stop to hear what Holly’s got to say.

“Did you tell the police Penny Young was here?” she demands again.

I go from zero to a hundred, in a second flat. “Holly, would you shut up?”

“Hey,” Leon says sharply and Holly’s mouth hangs open because I’ve never mouthed off at her before. He sets his spatula down, wipes his hands on his apron. “What’s going on?”

“Penny Young was in this diner the night she disappeared,” Holly tells him, pointing at me. “She’s the customer Romy looked after, before she walked out and she told me she didn’t know her. Now I’m wondering if she’s been as honest with the police.” She looks at me. “You don’t mess around with this kind of stuff, Romy. It’s serious.”

“It’s also none of your business,” I say. “Yes, I told the police about it, but this wasn’t the last place she was seen so it didn’t matter and I’m not your fucking daughter and I don’t work for you, so back. Off.”

I storm out of the kitchen, through the back door. It swings shut behind me. I kick the Dumpster. My foot meets the metal hard, the impact recoiling up my legs. That felt too close, like my mom almost getting in the car with Todd the day of his accident. I shouldn’t have hung those posters up. Try to do good for a girl who never did me any favors and it turns out worse than it ever needed to be. Fuck you, Penny. Just—fuck you.

I rub my palm over my mouth and then the panic hits, so ingrained after a year of hypervigilance—you wrecked your lips, fix it—that my other hand finds my pocket, then my lipstick, and I trace my mouth with it because after a year of hypervigilance, I know its shape enough to know how to make do without mirrors.

Leon comes out just as I’m ready. I pocket my lipstick and move away from the Dumpster. I try to look sorry, but I know it won’t be enough.

“What the hell was that?”

“She was in my face—”

“No, she was asking you a question. A good one,” he interrupts. “You don’t talk to Holly like that. You know the kind of shit she’s going through at home, Romy. Come on. She doesn’t need this.”

“I don’t need it, either. She was getting in my face,” I repeat, because I don’t know what else to say, but I have to put something out there so the last thing isn’t his chastising me, because if it is, I’ll get mad enough to do something dumb. I don’t need any boy telling me how to talk to other people, but I don’t want to be dumb around Leon, either.

“That’s not what I saw,” he says.

“That’s what it felt like.”

He exhales and looks up, like he’s plucking all the words he wants to say next from the sky. I hope they’re the right ones. “I don’t think you get what you put us through here. You walked out on your shift to get drunk. Just think about that for a second—”

“Leon—”

“No, just think about it,” he says and I shut my mouth, but I can’t make myself think about it. Maybe I got drunk, but I didn’t leave my shift to get that way, Leon. And everything that happened after—I didn’t leave for that, either. “You’ve got people in there who want to give you the benefit of the doubt because they can’t believe you’d do something like that in the first place. You’re not making it easy tonight, Romy.”

“Neither is she,” I say.

“She doesn’t owe you that. And she’s not the only one you’re making it hard for.”

He’s angry with me. No. Is this where I lose Leon? I don’t want to lose Leon. He’s the boy who stopped and I’m the girl he stopped for and what happens to her, if he goes away?

“Oh,” I say.

I press my hands against my face and split myself in two. Push away the side that’s the truth because that’s the side that wants to be angry at him for how wrong he is because of all the things he doesn’t know. I focus on the side I’ve shown to him. There’s so much missing, but it’s better that it’s missing. And as long as it’s missing, that makes everything he’s saying to me now—right. I take a breath.