The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

I share the picture to Google on my phone and hit search.

The waiting circle spins for what seems like forever while the results load. While I wait, I start rewinding Tyler’s film with a punch of buttons and a whir of tape. The girl with the hipster curls blurs out of existence.

I’ve tucked the film reel back into its canister and am about ready to leave when I check my phone for the search results.

And the results are—nothing.

Well, not nothing, obviously. The results are hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of random girls, none of whom even remotely look like the girl with the hipster-curls hair. I frown, scrolling through all the glurge spat out from the farthest reaches of the internet. How can there not even be one? No Facebook? No Instagram? No drunk selfie with a bunch of other girls dressed like slutty witches on Halloween? Nothing from high school, even? My Facebook is like a permanent repository of all my worst high school moments—bad hair. Zits. My ex-girlfriend, who tags everything to make sure I see it. That’s one reason I never check it anymore.

“Huh,” I say aloud.

I sift through pages of anonymous girls grinning into cameras, arms around each other’s necks, fingers flashing peace signs. So many girls, and none of them are the girl with the hipster-curls hair.

Deep into page six of the search results, I almost recognize someone. I squint at the phone, trying to figure out where I know her from. This girl is blond, and grinning into the camera like all the others. She’s pink-cheeked and fleshy in an appealing, healthy way. She looks really young, like fifteen. It’s from a defunct-looking Facebook page that is all set to private except for the profile picture. The girl’s name is Malou, which seems like a name I’d remember if I’d ever heard it, which I haven’t. I know that I recognize her, though. Not from Madison. I just can’t put my finger on where I’ve seen her before.

I save Malou’s picture to my gallery and flip back to the film still. When I look at it, there’s a strange heaviness that comes into my chest, and for a minute I’m worried I’m going to cry, which is stupid because there’s nothing wrong. The girl hovers there, an image of an image, looking off to the side like she desperately wants to catch someone’s attention.

Someone who’s just out of shot, to the right of the frame, trying to stay out of the camera’s way.

Someone who, I realize in a dizzying rush of certainty, is probably me.





CHAPTER 6


The Bowery looks different during the day. Maybe it’s because I was up all night, and it’s still pretty early, but I have the hallucinatory feeling that I’m floating above the sidewalk as I walk. The thin light of summer morning brings things into sharp relief that I never noticed before. A restaurant with overturned chairs on the tables. A taxi, light on, idling by the curb. A lumpy sleeping bag rolled up against a doorway, with two dirt-crusted feet sticking out the end.

My dad told me that I shouldn’t go to the Bowery. He said that’s where all the flophouses are, the ones where homeless men pay five bucks to sleep in chain-link enclosures, caged like animals. He told me about his one night of glory playing CBGB, sitting in with some guys he met through the girl he was crashing with. He saw Television and Blondie play in person.

I guess Dad really hasn’t been back to the city in a while, because other than the line of homeless guys snaking out of the mission waiting for breakfast, the Bowery looks pretty plush to me. Fancy bars I can’t afford. High-end furniture shops. There’s even a Whole Foods.