All the Rage

*


on friday, i open my eyes to the late-afternoon sun and the sky is empty. No clouds, no blue, just white nothingness stretched across town.

I hear Mom’s and Todd’s voices drifting through the window, along with the crackly sound of music playing from Todd’s old radio, some golden oldies station. I get out of bed and follow the song to the front porch. They stop talking when I come out.

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You could use the extra rest,” Mom says. “And now you should eat. Let me make you something up.”

She slips past me, inside, and Todd says, “Come on, kid.” I follow after her, to the kitchen, and he follows after me. I open the fridge and stare at the food inside. My stomach doesn’t connect with any of it.

“I said let me make you something.” Mom nudges me gently. The song on the radio changes. She points to the table. I sit beside Todd. “I’ll make you toast, okay?”

“Okay,” I say.

I think of Alek. I wonder what he’s doing. If he’s still in his bed, so leveled by grief he can’t move, or if he has the kind of grief that doesn’t settle, that pushes him from one moment to the next so fast, he never has to think about how much it hurts.

I wonder if he can make his own toast.

Mom sets a plate in front of me.

“Oh.” She touches the top of one of my fingernails, a ruined canvas. All ragged edges and chips, red disappearing a coat at a time. The girl I was, or only tricked myself into thinking I was, quietly making her exit. “Do you want me to fix them?”

I want to ask her what the point of that would be, when the song on the radio cuts off abruptly for the DJ’s voice.

“Breaking news this afternoon. A suspect is currently being held in custody in connection with the disappearance and death of seventeen-year-old Penny Young. The Grebe and Ibis Sheriff’s Departments are releasing no further details at this time. Young was last seen in Grebe, at a party at Wake—”

“What?” Todd asks.

“Oh my God.” Mom brings her hand to her chest.

Todd turns the radio up and the DJ says things we already know, like when Penny was last seen, and about how desperately hard we tried to find her, but something is gathering in the spaces between what’s been said and what hasn’t, gathering in me. The Vespa, the road.

You best pray this don’t come back around to you, Romy.

But if it didn’t come around to me, who did it come around to?

I go upstairs and grab my phone off my desk and dial the sheriff’s department. Joe picks up. I ask for Leanne. She comes on the line and she sounds unhappy. When I tell her it’s me, it only makes it worse.

“Why are you calling?” she asks.

“Who do you have in custody?”

“I’m not about to tell you.”

“What about the Vespa?” I ask and the line goes silent. “Does where they found it have anything to do with this? The road I was on? What about Tina Ortiz?”

“I can’t comment on this, Romy.”

“Please—”

“I can’t,” she snaps. She lowers her voice. “You promised you wouldn’t repeat what I told you about Tina leaving you on the road and you did.”

“But—”

“And I got reprimanded. I’ve been on desk duty ever since. I can’t tell you who we have in custody, Romy. I wouldn’t. I need to keep this line clear.”

She hangs up on me.

Later, when Mom and Todd are in bed, I open my laptop and light my room with the cold glare of its screen. I search Penny’s name, over and over, and keep the Grebe and Ibis Sheriff’s Departments’ Web sites up for any further details. The only trickle of something new is that the suspect in custody is a minor. A stranger—or someone we knew? Maybe it was someone from a class below us or a senior just weeks or months away from their next birthday.

I can’t picture a familiar face, not for this.

Everyone who knows her loves her.

Except people hurt the people they love all the time.

I try to tie so many of our classmates back to her death, but it’s impossible. I can’t even tie it to Alek, who loved her the most. If it was me, it would be different, I could draw those lines so clearly from myself to them, and all the pain they’d want to cause me.

My phone buzzes. I pick it up.

Texts from Leon.

I WANTED TO CALL, SEE HOW YOU WERE DOING.

I DIDN’T THINK YOU’D WANT THAT, THOUGH.

I delete them and stare out the window, at the stars scattered across the sky. I don’t know why he still cares. What a stupid thing it is, to care about a girl.





but nothing can stay secret long in Grebe.

Word travels. It gets slurred in bars, murmured over fences between neighbors, muttered in the produce section of the grocery store and again at the checkout, because the cashier always has something to add. When Mom tells me Todd went out to run errands, I wait for him to return with a name. It takes forever for the sound of the car rolling back up the driveway, and I think I’m prepared for anything, but really, I’m not.

I’m afraid.

I don’t move until I hear heavy and unfamiliar footsteps on the porch, until Mom wanders into the hall and says, “Oh.” It’s not Todd.

A wolf’s at the door.

“Hello, Alice Jane.”

He’s wearing his uniform.

I hang back, my arms wrapped around myself while Mom lets Sheriff Turner in. My stomach turns as he paws through, his eyes skimming over the space, nose picking up scents. I don’t like this and when he says, “I need a few words with your daughter,” I like it even less.

He lays eyes on me like he’s seeing me for the first time, like I somehow escaped his cursory glance. I shrink under the look. I don’t want to think about why he’d want to talk to me because there’s only one reason he’d want to.

“Why?” Mom asks.