I looked at her.
Embarrassment flickered through her face. “But you don’t remember any of it.” She gave a halfhearted laugh. “You’re probably like, What the hell am I even doing here.”
“No, no,” I said quickly. I set my hand on her arm. But then I didn’t know what else to say.
After a minute, she took pity on me. “I asked you for a ride home,” she said, “since I don’t have a car right now. But then when I wanted to leave it was pretty clear that you couldn’t, you know, there was no way you could drive anywhere. So I drove us. And I let you crash here. On the futon, alone.”
I drank the rest of the water. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
She shrugged. “I’m kind of the worst at this though. Picking up on the signals. It’s still new to me, in practice. With guys it’s just so obvious where you stand.”
I looked over at her. “You got the signals right,” I said. “Maybe we can try again sometime.”
She watched me for a second, then pulled her knees to her chest. “You’re leaving?”
“I have some things to take care of,” I said. I sat up too and took a deep breath. Everything hurt. But I’d already wasted more time than I cared to think about. I untangled my jacket from around myself and slipped the loose sleeve on and left her a card with my number.
Outside, the heavy grey clouds were throbbing like an open wound. I dropped into my car and shoved a pair of sunglasses onto my face. “Jesus Christ,” I said to no one. I thought again of my father: Did he ever accidentally drink too much cinnamon-flavored vodka while at a serial killer’s pool party? Although he certainly had his flaws, I doubted that was among them. I noticed that the whiskey bottle I bought at the liquor store last week was still wedged between the passenger seat and the gear shift. I slapped it to the floor. I never wanted to think about liquor again. Then I sat there with my hands over my eyes for a while, unable to do anything else.
I decided to go home and recover for a minute, hoping my head would eventually clear to reveal a solid next move. I drove out of Marisa’s apartment complex and onto Clover Road, where I went through a drive-through for a greasy sandwich and a cup of tea, neither of which sounded good but hopefully both of which would help. I was about to join the regular people of the city on the rush-hour-dense freeway toward downtown when my phone rang. I almost didn’t take it out of my pocket. The unknown number had made me distrustful of my own phone. But I got stuck at a red light and curiosity got the better of me. I checked the screen, saw that it was a known number, just one I didn’t recognize.
“This is Roxane,” I said, clearing my throat.
A beat of silence, and then a small, worried voice. “Hi, um. This is Shelby. Evans.”
What the hell?
Something about her tone stabbed straight through the fog in my head. I put my tea in the cup holder and tried to sound normal. “Shelby, hey. What’s up?”
“It’s Veronica,” she said, and then she began to cry. “I don’t know where she is and I don’t know what to do.”
*
“She always answers her phone when I call,” Shelby was saying. “Always. We have a pact. She would never not answer. Something’s wrong.” She was pacing back and forth in the small living room of her house, still wearing her green army coat and a heavy-looking messenger bag slung across her back. “Something’s wrong.”
“Okay. Shelby. Shelby? Is your dad here?” I said.
She shook her head. “He’s at work and he isn’t allowed to have his phone on so I called there, at the desk, and they haven’t turned off the overnight greeting yet and then I saw your business card on the fridge and I, I don’t know, I’m sorry if it seems like I’m being stupid but something is really, really wrong—”
“Shelby.”
She stopped pacing and looked at me, her youthful features quivering.
“You’re not being stupid, I don’t think that at all,” I said. I was trying to be calm and adultlike. But I felt sick and it wasn’t only because of how much vodka I’d consumed last night. Belmont didn’t have a good track record of returning teenage girls that didn’t come home. “But I need you to take a deep breath and tell me what happened, okay?”
Shelby nodded and sat down in the recliner where Joshua had sat the first night I came here. “She always rides with me to school,” she said. “Usually she comes over when she’s ready but sometimes she doesn’t, like if she’s running late, and then I go there. She lives right next door. And today she didn’t come and when I went over there, her stepdad answered the door and when I asked if she was ready for school he got really weird, and he was like I thought she was at your house. But she wasn’t. And then he told me I better go to school and he would deal with her.”
“Was she supposed to be at your house?”
She shook her head.
“Why would she say that?”
“She probably went to Insomnia,” Shelby said. I must have looked confused, because she added, “It’s a coffee shop down the street. She was telling me yesterday that this guy Aaron, his band was playing there last night, she likes him. Her parents said she couldn’t go.” Her eyes were on the carpet between her Doc Martens. “The show was at ten and my curfew is ten thirty, so I couldn’t go either. But they always let her come over here. “
“When did you talk to her last?” I said.
“When she left here. It was like seven thirty. And I was like, Tell Aaron hi for me, but it was a joke, because she couldn’t go. I thought she was just going to go home.” She jumped up and resumed pacing the floor.
I didn’t like the sound of this. Not at all. I couldn’t help but think that yesterday evening, Kenny Brayfield had missed most of his own party. “Okay. Shelby, is this like her? Lying to her parents?”
She wrestled the messenger bag off her shoulders and flung it on chair she’d been sitting in. “I don’t know. No. Her mom is, like, kind of oblivious, she just wants to get her hair done and work out all the time. Her stepdad pretty much sucks, he acts like Vee is the world’s worst kid just because she has to go to a therapist. I think she just really wanted to go see Aaron.”
“Insomnia,” I said. “It’s walking distance?”
She nodded. “If you cut through the neighborhood it’s like a ten-minute walk, you just go between the houses and then you’re in this big parking lot for the Kroger. It’s in the same plaza.”
I rubbed my forehead. The headache hadn’t gone anywhere yet, but it barely mattered now. “Let’s go talk to her parents, okay?” I said.
*
Veronica’s stepdad was a short guy in a dark blue suit and tie, a pair of frameless glasses perched halfway up his nose. He threw the door open like he couldn’t wait to scream at somebody—probably Veronica—and then looked confused when he saw who it was. “Shelby,” he said. “And…?”