I get dressed. I stare at myself in the mirror, at my dry and flaking lips. My nails are fine but this isn’t. I pick off pieces of dead skin and then rub a toothbrush across my mouth until it’s smooth. I wash my face and apply my lipstick one layer at a time and then I’m ready. I tie my hair back and wonder how Penny’s mornings start now. They still start, don’t they?
When I come downstairs, there’s breakfast waiting for me. A piece of peanut butter and jam toast, cut into thin strips. It was all I ate, every morning, the entire summer I was nine and back then, I called the strips “fingers.” Peanut butter and jam fingers. Comfort food.
“I wanted you to eat with us,” Mom says.
I don’t know who it’s comforting.
I nibble at the toast while Todd flips through the paper in the seat across from mine and Mom fries them up bacon and eggs. He slaps the paper down and taps it.
“It’s going to rain this week.”
“I don’t believe it,” Mom says.
“It’s right here in the Grebe News, though, so you gotta.”
She sets his breakfast in front of him and then rests her hand on top of his head. Todd gets hold of it before she can move to fix her own plate. He brings her hand to his mouth.
“Love you, Alice,” he murmurs, easy as that.
Mom catches my eye and there’s something guilty on her face, like this is something I should have had in front of me all my life. Todd is different from my father. Dad was thirsty, not given to great displays of affection, like his father and his father’s father before him. A long line of self-indulgent men who couldn’t give love but lived to take it, which isn’t the same as receiving it. They were all in so much pain and that’s always the perfect excuse.
“Next week, they’ll probably put in something about the search party,” I say.
“Probably,” Todd agrees.
Mom settles in with us. “Maybe you could take the night off and we could have some mother-daughter time. Go shopping, end the day at the Ibis McDonald’s or something.”
“What’s Todd going to do?”
“Wither and die,” he says dryly. He reaches across the table and scruffs up my hair. “Seriously? What the hell kind of question was that?”
“I just want to spend some time with you,” Mom says.
“Maybe the weekend? I’m trying to prove to Tracey I’m reliable right now, after…” I trail off. “And I just took yesterday off for the search.”
“Before the weekend would be better.”
I study her. “What’s going on?”
“Just do your mother a favor and humor her.”
“Okay. Before the weekend,” I say but I really have to go to Swan’s tonight, to see Leon and try to untangle that mess. “It can’t be today, though.”
I take my time on the walk to school because I’m in no hurry for an aftermath. The air is as sweltering as it ever is. Hard to picture it raining. Hard to picture it any other season but this one, which isn’t even the season it’s supposed to be, really.
The street is quiet for the first half of the walk, but soon the hard, rhythmic sound of feet hitting pavement is at my back. I glance over my shoulder and Leanne Howard is jogging my way. She’s wearing a black shirt and shorts, accented with bolts of neon to tell the world she’s doing this for the exercise and not because she’s being chased. I move off the sidewalk so she can pass, but she breaks when she reaches me, hunching over to catch her breath.
“Whew.” She gasps, straightening, wiping the lower part of her sweaty face on the collar of her shirt. “It’s too hot for this, isn’t it?”
“You’re crazy,” I say.
“Well, it’s maintenance.” She squints at me. “How are you, Romy?”
“I’m headed to school.”
“Mind if I walk with you?”
“Free country.”
But I don’t like it. Leanne falls into step with me. I take her in. She’s young, but she has the same kind of lines Coach Prewitt does, I think. I wouldn’t fuck with her.
“Search party was something else,” she says.
“I left after Emma Smith. What happened?”
“Alek had to be walked out. He was a wreck—”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and nobody had the heart to keep going after that. I think they’d probably do better searching the highways, honestly,” Leanne says. “But I don’t think they really wanted to find anything yesterday.”
I remember the deputy muttering to himself after the false alarm.
Waste of time.
“Then why would they even bother with it?”
“Combat helplessness,” she says simply. And then, just as simply, “Romy, you have to know they’re looking for a body at this point.”
It stops me. Stops my heart.
No, I want to tell her. You’re wrong. Penny isn’t dead. Penny made it through almost four years of high school beloved by all, except for me and even I was won for part of it—you don’t make it through high school like that and not survive whatever it is she’s gotten into.
“I’ve been thinking about what you asked, when you came down to get your phone,” Leanne says. “That maybe looking for you was the reason we didn’t find Penny. And then I heard some of the kids talking about you at the lake.” She looks at me, pities me. “They were saying it.”
“That surprise you?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
I shrug in a conversation’s over kind of way, hoping she’ll let me continue on without her, but she doesn’t. She’s at my back and then she’s at my side again. It’s too early to start the day with this kind of headache.
“Look, whatever anyone feels about you, it’s no small thing you got found.” She puts her hand on my shoulder and then we’re stopped again. “When I saw you on the road, I was so damned relieved. And it eats me up that we haven’t found Penny yet, but when it comes to missing girls, you barely get that lucky once, let alone twice. Anyone trying to guilt you—that’s bullshit.”
I stare at the ground. I don’t know what to say to the idea that finding me was worth anything to anyone beside my mother, and Todd. And Leon, who’s probably sorry about it now.
“So it wouldn’t have made that kind of difference?”
I want to hear her say it—that, exactly—if it didn’t.
She bites her lip. “Even it did … it wouldn’t have been your fault.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”