A wasted girl on the ground, folded in on herself, her head against her knees and she’s surrounded by a small crowd with their backs to the camera and I don’t know who I feel more betrayed by—them or her.
I make myself numb as I switch to the next photo and the camera is closer to the girl, too close, at a nauseatingly perverse angle. The girl’s shirt is loose and wrinkly and dirty, her hair is half out of the ponytail it was tied in, and the parts of her face that are visible look wrong, like she’s so far from where her body happens to be.
I switch to the next photo and she’s staring right at me now—the camera. Her eyes are half-open and I feel it, she’s dead. She’s dead. I feel her deadness, feel her stuck between two places, the party and the rabbit hole beneath her.
Fall, I think. Be anywhere else.
In the next photograph, her hands are at her shirt, fumbling with its buttons. No, no. I ache at the picture after—a first button is undone, her hand snaked past her collar, resting against her skin. In the next shot, the camera is even closer. Another button is undone.
I bring my hand to my own shirt and it’s hot in this room, the air weighs on me, more than normal heat, pushing on me from the outside, from the inside, something I want to separate myself from. The next photo, the girl is looking up, up, up, eyes searching for something she’s not finding. Her hands rest uselessly at her sides. She looks so small and exhausted.
In the next photo, her shirt is open.
The pink-and-black lace push-up bra.
There are hands on her shoulders, keeping her upright, keeping her from slouching forward just so everyone can see.
But that skin has been shed now. That skin, all of that touched skin has been shed now, cells have regenerated. Those hands aren’t on her anymore.
Whatever was on her then is gone, now—
My head throbs. The kind of headache that makes you want to vomit, but I swallow against that feeling and click forward and I imagine it how it must have been that night, all these people around this girl, trying not to laugh, but it’s too hard. It’s so hard not to enjoy this because how can you put something so golden, a girl who can barely open her eyes or her mouth—how can you put something like that in front of them and expect them to be better people?
Because in the next photo—the last photo—the girl’s hands are at her bra, her red nails teasing the clasp and I think wildly that I could reach through and grab her wrist, like I could stop her and take her away, because no one else is doing it. Because no one else did it.
I put my hand to the screen, covering hers.
We’re wearing the same color nail polish.
i sit at my desk with everything I need for my nails and every application of polish ends up feeling the same, ends up feeling like it’s leading me back to the water. Over and over, I paint the color on and each time I finish, it’s still too close. I have to take it off, try again until it’s right, because I can’t give up the red. It’s mine. It makes me.
“Romy, you’re going to be late.”
I press the brush heavily against my nails, letting my hand shake the color on. Something I never do. It doesn’t make for the best manicure, but the weight of the polish feels differently than it normally does and then I’m ready.
At school, I stand in the entranceway, and I think the heat outside would be better than choking on the same breathed air of the people who crowded around me, saw me with my shirt open. My eyes skim their faces, their hands—hands on my shoulders. Whose hands? Who was holding my phone, taking photos with it to send to the school? I close my eyes and hear a muddle of voices and try to imagine which one said they should, because that’s how it started, didn’t it? No. First it’s a thought, a thought in someone’s head and then said aloud, and then me, on the ground, with my shirt open.
“Jesus, Grey. When aren’t you in the way?”
Brock is behind me and Alek lags behind him. They’re both carrying two hefty baskets full of bright yellow T-shirts with bold black lettering across the front. FIND PENNY YOUNG. And underneath that in tinier, but still visible letters, GREBE AUTO SUPPLIES. I move and they shuffle past before they’re waylaid by some underclassmen who ask about the shirts as an excuse to get a closer look at Alek’s haggard face.
“They’re for anyone who wants ’em,” Brock says. He nods at Alek. “Mrs. Turner had them made. They’re free. If you take one, make sure you wear it for the search on Monday. The news is probably going to be there. This’ll be a chance to—”
“Get Grebe Auto Supplies some free publicity?” I ask.
Alek turns awkwardly, weighed down by his basket.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” he says and the underclassmen look at me like I’m scum, like I disappeared her myself. But they already think that.
“Yeah, because the last goddamn thing a national brand needs is free publicity,” Brock snaps. It probably doesn’t hurt, though. He grabs a T-shirt off the top and whips it at my chest. It drops from there to the ground. The letters get mangled into the folds and the only word still visible is PENNY.
“Pick it up,” Alek says but he’s not talking to me.
Brock turns to him. “What?”
“Don’t leave it on the fucking ground.”
There’s a hint of panic in Alek’s voice, enough for one of the freshmen to snatch it from the dirty floor and put it back in Brock’s pile.
“Man, I didn’t—”
But Alek is already walking away.
By midday, the halls are a sea of yellow, making Penny a part of every single moment, a relentless reminder for everyone of what they think I took from her search.
I get so tired of the constant glares that at lunch, I hide in the bathroom, in the stall farthest from the door and become a tableau of a girl crouched stupidly on a toilet seat, so she won’t be seen. Over the hour, girls come in and out, in and out. I can’t stand every boring, worthless piece of conversation I overhear because they make me wish I could be a part of them, be some nobody girl with nothing to say.