How to Disappear by Ann Redisch Stampler
For Rick, Laura, and Michael, as always
Prologue
There is a body in the woods.
The flash of an electric yellow blanket in the moonlight, unfurling as it’s dragged along. A glimpse of nylon binding at the edges, sweeping the ground at the corner where the arm has fallen out.
At the end of that limp arm, a hand is trailing through the leaves into the darkness. But I have seen the fingers, curled like talons, the nails all broken, the blue polish chipped away.
Shoes shuffling through the leaves.
And then the digging of the hole.
I’m crouched behind a fallen pine tree, soft leaves and pine needles underfoot, cocooned in darkness. I pause to catch my breath. My heart’s banging so hard that it could crack my ribs.
A walk in the woods, that’s all it was. That’s what I tell myself now, when it’s too late to do anything about it, when it’s done—when the kind of person I am and will ever be is thrown into unanswerable question.
When all I want is to pretend it never happened.
But how do I forget that there were pine needles stuck in the laces of my sneakers, and that they were wet with blood? How do I pretend I never felt the handle of the knife pressed hard against my palm?
Part 1
1
Cat
I’m not Catherine Davis.
My hair isn’t brown.
And I have never lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve never even seen the state of Oklahoma, despite what this convincing but completely fake ID says.
Or, technically, not fake.
Just not mine.
Cat Davis.
Born in Oklahoma City (where I wasn’t born).
Got so drunk, she didn’t even notice when her license was stolen right out of her bag nineteen years later. At a frat party (where I shouldn’t have been) in Galkey, Texas (where I didn’t want to be).
Stolen by me.
Morally speaking, this wasn’t my most glittering moment. But it definitely answered that Sunday School question of whether I’d steal bread if it would keep me from starving.
Yes.
I would.
The license just seemed like one more untrue thing to stuff between me and my past. A tiny piece of laminated plastic I actually thought of as my ticket out of the obituary column.
One more little thing I needed to make it to the age of seventeen alive.
That, and a different-looking face and a different-shaped body and bulletproof skin.
That, and a heart of stone.
2
Jack
I slide the gun into the trunk of Don’s shitmobile, between the rucksack and the cooler. My gut feels like someone took a Weedwacker to it.
I tell myself, Man up, the bitch cut Connie Marino—I have a thing against people who cut other people’s throats. They’ll convict her as an adult anyway. They’ll inject a fatal dose of potassium chloride into her veins if I don’t get to her first. I’m doing her a favor. She won’t know what hit her.
But I’ll know what hit her: me.
I try to think of ways out of it all the time, but I just keep getting pulled in deeper.
Two weeks ago, I was studying for the AP English Lit exam. I was taking notes on the poetry of T. S. Eliot.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
No, T. S. Eliot, this is how the world ends: with a bang.
? ? ?
I slide the box of bullets into the compartment where the spare tire goes. The knives are already in there, wrapped in a hand towel, tied with twine.
I can hear my dad’s voice when he found me on the floor of his room when I was little, unpacking a cardboard box of bullets. I was trying to get them to stand up on the carpet.
“Don? What did I tell you?”
But when I turned around and he saw that it was me and not my older brother, Don, he shook his head. And in an ice-cold voice, he said, “Jack, what are you doing? Think about it. Think, Jack.”
When I remember my dad now, that’s always what I hear: him saying, Think, Jack. Because I was the one with the brain, the one who could analyze, assess, figure out consequences.
I was the one who said no thank you to my dad’s business and his crazy-ass expectations. My career path was not going to be selling secondhand shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, describing tanks as “scrap metal” for the bookkeeper. And the rest of what my dad did for a living—the part of his career that required a silencer, his sideline in ending peoples’ lives—was a nonstarter.
I was the one who got out.
And he was fine with my defection. He stopped saying, “You and me, Jack—the same guy in two bodies.” He got it.
Don, on the other hand, doesn’t get it.
If he had any idea who I am, he wouldn’t have asked me to do this thing in the first place. It would have been like every other prison visit—me nodding through his complaints about the food, the exercise equipment, and the fact that his request for early release got turned down.