Today.
He breaks down how all this is going to happen and I forget Leon’s eyes, still on me. First, we need to program the contact number into our phones. If we get separated or lost, too far out to be heard, this is how to touch base. Call the number and Helen Turner will pick up. The whistle should only be used in the event we find something relevant to Penny, or I guess, Penny herself. If you hear the whistle, we’re to stay where we are and wait until we’re given clearance to move. We should be vigilant in searching and don’t forget to sign out when we leave, so everyone is accounted for. The more Cory talks, the more put-on this feels. It’s a show. It’s like … a funeral, something you only do for—the people left.
“Romy,” Leon says softly, too close again. That’s the price of paying attention to one thing; I lose track of something else. This is too much. Someone turns. Andy Martin. He stares at us, his forehead crinkling, trying to figure out how Leon and I fit. “Can you tell me what’s happening here?”
“A search party.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you—”
“Why am I what?” Dare him to put it to words.
He shifts as the deputies start forming groups. I don’t know how to keep Leon from being in my group but I know he can’t be in anyone else’s.
“Why didn’t you put my name down?” he asks.
“I did,” I lie.
“No. You didn’t. And—” He steps closer and I step back and he does it again and I’m not sure why he’s doing it until I realize he’s proving a point. I hate him a little, for catching on. “You obviously don’t want me here.”
“It’s not about you.”
But it is. It’s about keeping you.
“Then why are you being so—”
“Because this isn’t a date.”
“Jesus, I didn’t come here thinking it was—”
His words start to blur because bodies are shifting, and I’m losing everyone’s places.
“I don’t want you here,” I say and it must be the last thing he really expected me to say, even though he was the one who suggested it in the first place. And Brock, still watching. These worlds can’t meet. They can’t ever meet. “I don’t want you here.”
“Romy—” My name again. He reaches out and grabs my hand, holds it tight. It’s the kind of contact I couldn’t deny to anyone or pretend didn’t happen. It makes my heart go terrible and it makes me do something terrible. I wrench my hand from his and say, too loud, “Don’t touch me—”
The words taste and sound so bad out of my mouth. People stare and Leon backs away. One step back. Two. Three. A man I don’t recognize, with salt-and-pepper hair and a stomach so big it precedes him, comes over. He puts himself between me and Leon, like he’s my savior.
“You know this guy? He bothering you?” he asks. I open my mouth and nothing comes out because I don’t know how to say yes, I do, and no, he’s not, but I need him to leave and in that second’s worth of silence where I should have said something, even if it was just stuttering over nothing, I memorize the hurt on Leon’s face, what I caused, and I feel so sick.
“Maybe you ought to leave.” The man steps closer to Leon. “Look, this is a search for a missing girl. This isn’t the place to be making a scene…”
“Don’t worry,” Leon says, disgusted. “I’m gone.”
He leaves. He doesn’t look back at me once. He gets into his Pontiac and drives as slowly out as he did in, and when he’s gone, the knowledge I’ve fucked things up badly is only second to the relief I feel that none of these people will have him. The girl he knows is still here and she can fix this. I know she can.
“Ms. Grey, we’ll have you over here—”
Principal Diaz is at my side, ushering me into her group with Cat Kiley, a few freshmen, a woman who says she’s friends with Penny’s mom, and a deputy, Mitchell Lawrence.
The search begins.
We’re told to walk in a line, side by side, and every time it goes ragged, if we get too far ahead or behind, Diaz yells for us to straighten out. We round the water and step into the brush and there’s something unsettling about the way we weave ourselves into the trees. The lake is still, behind us. It’s hard to imagine this place meant for anything but this. Not parties, not nice summer afternoons or family picnics. Just searching for the missing girl.
“What even gave you the idea anyone wants you here?” Cat asks, beside me.
I don’t look at her. “Just trying to make up all the time everyone thinks I wasted.”
Then, one of the freshmen, a boy, asks, “Are we looking for a body?”
I want to shove the question down his throat until he chokes on it.
“No,” Mitchell snaps, and the boy flinches.
“We’re looking for a girl,” Diaz tells him.
It’s quiet after that. The farther into the woods we get, the darker it gets, and the air turns just so slightly cooler. Bugs hover curiously at our faces and we wave them away. Diaz holds herself like she’s done this before, but there’s no history of missing girls in Grebe that I know of.
“You can’t,” Cat says to me.
“What?”
We fall back a little. Enough to talk, but not enough to get yelled at for it.
“You can’t make up that time.” She steps over a large tree branch. “They probably would’ve found her if they’d started out with enough people looking for her.”
I think of Cat collapsing on the track, think of her listless in Brock’s arms. How jealous Tina was when Brock carried Cat off and what he said after Tina asked him if he got Cat to the nurse’s office. Eventually. I wonder what Cat would think if she knew Brock said it and how when he did, people were deciding things about her, things she had no control over.
“I was on a road.” My voice cracks. “I had no idea where I was—”