“Nic . . .”
I tipped the ceramic bowl over into my palm and tossed him the ring as if it weren’t worth more than him and me combined. His eyes went wide for a minute as he turned it over in his hand. “No shit, Nic. Good for you. Who’s the lucky guy?”
“His name’s Everett.”
He started to laugh again, and I bit my lip to keep from smiling. I’d thought the same thing when we met—my neighbor’s Ivy Leaguing college roommate, partner in Daddy’s law firm. I’d thought, Of course that’s his name. Of course. But Everett had surprised me. He kept on surprising me.
“His name is Everett and he got you this ring,” Tyler continued. “Of course he did. When’s the date?”
“No date yet,” I said. “Just . . . eventually.”
He nodded and tossed it back the same way I’d thrown it to him. Like flipping a coin or tossing one into a fountain. Heads or tails. Make a wish. Penny for your thoughts.
“How long are you staying?” he asked as I dropped the ring back in the bowl.
“Not sure. As long as it takes. I’m off for the summer.”
“I guess I’ll be seeing you around, then.”
He was halfway out the door already. “Anyone I know?” I asked, gesturing toward the window.
He shrugged. “Annaleise Carter.”
That’s why he was in the area. The Carter property backed up to ours, and Annaleise was the oldest Carter, but not as old as we were. “What is she, thirteen?” I asked.
He laughed like he could see right through me. “Bye, Nic,” he said.
Annaleise Carter used to have these big doe eyes, so she always looked both innocent and surprised. I saw those eyes now—saw her leaning out the car window, eyes fixed on me, blinking slowly, like she was seeing a ghost. I raised my hand—hi—and then the other—not guilty.
Tyler got into the driver’s seat with one last wave to my window before pulling away.
What was she now, twenty-three? She would always be thirteen to me. And Tyler would be nineteen and Corinne eighteen. Frozen at the moment when everything changed. When Corinne disappeared. And I left.
* * *
TEN YEARS AGO, RIGHT around this time—the last two weeks of June—the fair had been in town. I hadn’t been home for it since then. And yet for all the time and distance, this still remained my sharpest memory—the thing that came to me first, before I could push it away, any time Everett asked about home:
Hanging over the edge of the Ferris wheel cart, the metal digging into my stomach, calling his name. Tyler down below, too far to focus on his face, frozen with his hands in his pockets as people weave around him. Watching us. Watching me. Corinne whispering in my ear: “Do it.” Bailey’s laughter, tight and nervous, and the cart rocking slowly back and forth, suspended over all of Cooley Ridge. “Tick-tock, Nic.”
Me, climbing over the edge though we were all wearing skirts, the shift in my weight swinging the cart even more, my elbows gripping the bar at the top of the cage behind me, my feet balancing on the waist-high ledge below. Corinne’s hands at my elbows, her breath in my ear. Tyler watching as the Ferris wheel started to circle downward again. The wind rushing up with the ground, my stomach dropping, my heart racing. The ride screeching to a stop at the base and me stepping off a moment too soon.
The impact from the metal loading dock jarring my knees as I ran down the ramp, dizzy and full of adrenaline, calling back to the worker who was yelling after me, “I know, I know, I’m leaving!” Racing toward Tyler, faintly smiling, his eyes telling me everything he wanted in that moment as he stood near the exit. An enabler. That was what Daniel called him, trying to find someone to blame other than me.
Run, Tyler had mouthed to me. I was out of breath, not quite laughing but something close, as I raced toward him. His lips curled into one of his half-smiles, and I knew we wouldn’t make it out of the parking lot. We’d be lucky if we made it to his truck.
But then a hand gripped me—“I said I’m leaving,” and I yanked my arm away.
But it wasn’t security. It was Daniel. He grabbed me, solid and forceful, and hit me. He hit me across the face with a closed fist, and the impact knocked me off my feet onto my side, my arm twisted on the ground between my stomach and the dirt.
Shock and pain, fear and shame, they all felt like the same thing in my memory, all tangled up with the taste of blood and dirt. He’d never hit me before. Not even when we were little kids, really. Ten years later and that moment hangs between us in every interaction, in every passive-aggressive text message and ignored phone call.
And later that night, sometime between the fair closing and six A.M., Corinne disappeared, and everything that had happened that day took on new weight, new meaning. In the weeks that followed, the potential for death became palpable. It was all around us, intangible yet suffocating, existing in every different permutation of events. She could always be dead, in a thousand different ways.
Maybe she left because her father abused her. Maybe that’s why her mother divorced him and left town a year later.
Or maybe it was the boyfriend, Jackson, because it’s usually the boyfriend, and they’d been fighting. Or the guy she was flirting with at the fair whom none of us knew—the one at the hot dog stand. The one who Bailey swore had been watching us.
Or maybe she stuck her thumb out for a ride home, in her too-short skirt and her long-sleeved, gauzy top, and maybe a stranger passing through town took her, used her, left her.
Maybe she just left. That’s what the cops finally decided. She was eighteen—legally, an adult—and she’d had enough of this place.
What happened, the cops asked, in those hours, with all of you? Lay bare your secrets, the Who and the What and the Why, between the hours of ten P.M. and six A.M. The same cops who broke up our parties but then drove us home instead of calling our parents. The same cops who dated our friends and drank beer with our brothers or fathers. And those secrets—the Where were we between ten P.M. and six A.M., the What were we doing, the Why—they wouldn’t keep with those cops. Not at the bar, not in the bed, not in this town.
By the time the people from the state arrived to help out, it was too late. We’d already turned inward, already had our theories set, already believed what we needed to believe.
The official line: Corinne last existed to everyone who knew her just inside the entrance to the fair, and from there, she disappeared.
But she didn’t, really. There was more. A piece for each of us that we kept hidden away.
For Daniel, she disappeared from outside the fair, behind the ticket booth.
For Jackson, from the parking lot of the caverns.
And for me, she faded to nothing from a curve of the winding road on the way back to Cooley Ridge.
We were a town full of fear, searching for answers. But we were also a town full of liars.
* * *