He breaks our embrace. “That’s you,” he says.
A moment later, I’m peering down at the crowd. When I catch Dylan’s eye, he winks.
“I’m going to do a Donna Summer song,” I say. “Hope you like it.”
I shut my eyes, and in the darkness I’m alone. This is the moment I try to hold on to. After the first note, it all becomes a blur. Right before, when the entire room is silent for just a moment, it’s pure bliss. That’s the high I’m chasing every time I become Cassidy.
Twenty minutes later, after I’ve done “Bad Girls,” followed by two up-tempo Blondie numbers—“Call Me” and “One Way or Another,” which I probably wouldn’t have even attempted but for Dylan’s show of courage covering Queen—I close with “Love to Love You, Baby,” which I sex up with utter abandon, even for Cassidy.
The crowd is roaring as loud as they were for Dylan, which is as loud as I’ve ever heard it at Lava. But the reviewer I most care about is sitting at the bar with a half-full glass of whiskey in front of him.
His critique comes in the form of a whisper in my ear.
“I need to be with you, right now,” he says.
I’m not so drunk that I don’t realize it’s a line, but it hits the mark. I throw back the rest of his whiskey and say, “Let’s go.”
On the street, the air has a chill to it that I hadn’t recalled from earlier. It feels exhilarating. We immediately resume our make-out session outside, interrupted only long enough for Dylan to flag down a cab. When we get in the back, I blurt out my address before Dylan can direct the driver to his place.
The cab ride is less than five minutes, during which our lips barely separate. We break the embrace long enough to make it into my building and up the stairs, but we go at it hot and heavy as soon as we get inside. I never even turn on the lights.
I fall asleep with Cassidy’s reckless abandon, but awake a couple of hours later with Ella’s thumping head and her dry throat. Dylan is already wearing his pants, tying his shoes, but is still bare-chested.
“Sorry I woke you,” he says.
“Are you leaving?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, I have early rounds.”
“Okay,” I say, trying to sound cool. Cassidy should be experienced with casual hookups, even if I’m not.
After he’s dressed, Dylan leans over me as I lie in bed and kisses me good-bye. It brings back the rush I felt the night before, and as I watch him leave, I feel a dull ache inside. There’s nothing I want more right then than for him to return to my bed.
After I hear my apartment door slam shut, I realize that my fantasy is not going to come true, at least not right now. I reach for my phone to check the time. I assume from the early light that it’s barely six o’clock.
Even before verifying the hour, I feel dread.
My phone shows three missed calls from Zach.
I blink.
Charlotte’s Zach.
There’s no reason Charlotte’s boyfriend would call me even once unless something was wrong. Three times can only mean catastrophe.
And then I remember that I haven’t spoken to, or even heard from, Charlotte since we met at Tom’s. That was more than thirty-six hours ago—too long a silence. Much too long.
I can’t tell when Zach first began calling because my phone only registers the last of his calls. It came in at 4:15 a.m., at which time he left a voice mail message.
I hit the “Play” button.
“Sorry to bother you, Ella, but I’m not sure where Charlotte is and it’s not like her to be out so late without telling me. If she’s with you, or if you know where she is, can you ask her to call me? I don’t care what time.”
His last contact was at 4:52 a.m. A text:
Call me anytime. Important. Zach.
I call Charlotte. She might be screening Zach, but she’ll pick up for me.
Only she doesn’t. I hang up and call again. When the call goes to voice mail for the second time, I leave a message.
“Char, it’s me. Zach called and said you didn’t come home last night. Is anything wrong? I’m worried because I haven’t heard from you since Tuesday. As soon as you get this message, call me. I don’t care what time.” I take a beat. “I love you, Char-bar.”
I debate waiting for Charlotte to call back before returning Zach’s call, but I already fear the worst. Besides, Zach sounded like he needed to hear from me. So after hanging up with Charlotte’s voice mail, I call Zach.
He answers on the first ring.
“Ella,” he says breathlessly. “Is Charlotte with you?”
“No. Did you guys have a fight or something?”
“No.” Then he repeats it. “No.”
“And you have no idea where she is?”
“No. And she’s not answering her phone or texts.”
“Are you sure she didn’t say anything to you about where she was going tonight?”
“No,” he says for the fourth time. “I expected her home for dinner. It’s not like her to be out all night, and certainly not without telling me.”
“Did you call the school?”
I already know the answer. Zach must have tried every possible place he could imagine Charlotte being before involving me.
“They didn’t have any information and suggested I call the police.”
“Did you? Call the police, I mean.”
“Yeah. They told me I had to wait forty-eight hours.”
“When did you last see her?”
He doesn’t answer, at least not fast enough for my liking. It’s incomprehensible to me that he doesn’t know the exact moment he last saw his girlfriend, especially if he’s supposedly been sitting up worrying about her.
Finally he says, “It was this morning. I mean, yesterday morning. Wednesday morning. I’m sorry, but I’ve been up all night. I left early for an audition yesterday morning, and she was still in bed.”
“What about her friends? Did they see her yesterday?”
“I called Julia and Brooke. That was . . . I don’t know, around midnight. They said that they hadn’t seen her all day, but would ask around and call me back if anyone else had. That’s the last I heard from them.”
For a brief moment I consider involving my father, but he’s the last person Charlotte would go to with a personal issue. He’s also the last person I want to tell that she’s missing.
“I’m sure she went out with someone, lost track of the time, and just decided to crash at their place,” I say.
“Yeah, I guess that’s right,” says Zach.
Once, when Charlotte was little, maybe three or four, I convinced her that I could read her mind. I told her it was a power that all older sisters possessed. I had her going for a day before she figured out that I had no such ability.
How I wish I had it now.
In need of something to calm me, I put on a kettle of water. I know peppermint tea isn’t the answer, but I pour myself a cup nonetheless.
And then I wait. For Charlotte to call and tell me she’d just come home and was fine. False alarm. She was out with a friend and decided to stay over. She’d told Zach, but like the idiot he was, he’d forgotten.
But deep down I know that’s not going to happen.
DAY THREE
THURSDAY
7.