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If Lisa Bellow was the queen of eighth grade and the middle school was her castle, then the Parkway Mall was the country village where she deigned to mingle with the town folk. This was in large part why Meredith wanted to go there to buy new shoes. (What shoes? She would just have to figure that out when she got there.) Meredith had spent many Saturday afternoons at the mall with her friends, but there were the girls who went to the mall and the girls who ruled the mall, and it was easy to tell them apart. There was apparently no occasion too mundane, and no place too commonplace, for Lisa and her besties to take a selfie. They were forever squeezing into the frame—Lisa and Becca and Amanda and Abby—with their skinny vanilla lattes at Starbucks or beside the nearly pornographic mannequins at Victoria’s Secret or cuddled together in the leather chairs in front of Hollister. For what purpose? Meredith and Jules and Kristy often wondered. Just to show that they had been there . . . again? Another corner of the mall conquered . . . again? Meredith sometimes wondered if they ever even looked back on those selfies. Or was it just about the taking, and not the remembering? Meredith recalled seeing the iPhone in Lisa’s hand the moment before the door opened at Deli Barn. If only there had been occasion for a selfie moment then, perhaps the man, or even his car, would have been captured in the background.
She could not explain why she wanted to see the country village without Lisa in it, only that she wanted to experience a world without Lisa before she went back to school on Monday, a trial run, a test. Normally she wouldn’t be caught dead in the mall with her parents, especially not on a Saturday. After the age of eleven, the weekend duties of parents primarily involved transportation. But she knew they would not let her out of their sight. Too many things could happen to girls without their parents.
But those girls, the selfie girls, Lisa’s friends, were not at the mall. There was no eighth-grade pack. In fact there seemed to be no middle school pack at all, and very few teenagers but for the stray one with a parent attached, and Meredith wondered if it was they or their parents who were keeping them at home on a Saturday afternoon, whether it was grief or fear at work.
Was there a danger to the public? The police had not said so specifically. They had not said be careful, watch yourself, pay attention. In the three days that had passed it had not occurred to Meredith that what happened at the Deli Barn might be anything other than an isolated incident, but the thin crowds at the Parkway Mall suggested that this thought had occurred to others. Many others.
She went with Evan and her parents into a shoe store. It was ridiculous, the four of them shopping together. She could not remember the last time this had happened—surely it had been four or five years. Evan stood beside her and her parents hung back, scoping out the place for kidnappers.
“Those,” she said to the saleslady, pointing at the shoes she had last seen seventy-two hours before, the golden gladiator sandals on the feet in front of her face, right before the feet had disappeared. She liked those shoes after all. Jules had been trying to convince her to buy a pair but she had never wanted them before, because she thought they were stupid and phony—“Are we gladiators? I don’t think so!”—but now that she had seen them close up she realized they actually were kind of cute.
“Cute,” her father agreed, not that he wouldn’t have said that about anything she’d decided to put on her feet, including six-inch slut heels. She walked around to get the feel of them. They felt different from her old shoes. They were not so tight. Her feet felt more like feet. She looked in the mirror. It was just the same old her but the shoes looked good.
“They’re you,” the saleslady said. “And they’re very trendy. This is our last pair. End of the season.”
“I’ll take them,” Meredith said.
?
Lisa was missing the mall. Meredith closed her eyes on the car ride home and could see Lisa sitting on the couch in the apartment, watching TV, the dog on her lap, pretty much okay except for missing the mall. Missing being a bitch at the mall, Meredith thought. God, what would it feel like to walk through a space like that knowing that you owned it, to have that confidence that anything you wore was the right thing to wear and anything you said was the right thing to say and anything you did . . .
But Lisa was probably missing her friends a bit, too. Mostly she was thinking about bossing them around, but also maybe she was thinking about how Becca always got the cinnamon pretzel with extra sugar and Abby always got the pretzel bites because they weren’t as greasy as the classic pretzel and her mom was totally going to kill her if she ruined another skirt with pretzel grease.
And speaking of Abby’s mom, and moms in general, Lisa might also be remembering the way her own mom always waited until the last possible minute to use the hair dryer in the morning, and how she was always busting into the bathroom shouting at her mom, “It’s time to go!” and her mom was always like, “What? What?” over the high-pitched whine of the hair dryer, and how Lisa would mouth, Time to go, and her mother would be like, “What?” and Lisa would stab her finger on the time on her iPhone and her mother would be like “What? What?” And how it took her, Lisa, forever to realize that her mother knew perfectly well what she was saying but said “What?” anyway because she thought it was funny to prolong the moment, because it was their thing, the thing they’d always done and no one else knew anything about it, and so she, Lisa, kept doing it, too. Parents, right? You never knew what dumb thing they’d think was hilarious.
She missed that, the wail of the hair dryer, her mother’s long hair flying in wispy curtains, the steamy bathroom . . . though the little white dog was warm on her lap, and the day had been mostly quiet and peaceful, and maybe she wouldn’t be there forever, in the apartment, with the man.
There wasn’t any decent reason she could think of why he couldn’t let her go.
?
“What’s all this?” Evan asked.
Meredith opened her eyes. They were driving through the main square in town, the intersection with the town hall and the courthouse and the two old churches. In the courtyard outside the town hall, where there was a farmers’ market on Wednesdays and where on other days the homeless man sat on the nicest bench and everyone made a wide berth around him, a few hundred people were milling around.
“Pull over,” Meredith said, realizing what “all this” was, recognizing half the kids in the eighth grade. This was the reason they weren’t at the mall.
Her father pulled the van into the bike lane and turned around in his seat. “You want—”
She slid open her door.