Sarah and a bunch of my teammates cheered. And Lauren looked unhappy, the ultimate sign of success.
As I headed back to the stands, Mr. Matthews grinned at me and put his hand up for a high five. I hesitated. It wasn’t clear how to avoid it without being obvious, though, so I quickly slapped his hand and then beat a hasty retreat to go sit with Sarah.
“Good job,” she said. “Your parents are pretty cute, getting all excited.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Did your parents come?”
“My dad did,” she said.
“But not your mom?”
“Nope, she had lunch plans with one of her girlfriends or something.” She gave a weird laugh. “It’s probably just as well. The last time she came to a meet she pulled me aside afterward and told me I should be careful—she’d noticed that my thighs were getting ‘bulky.’ ”
I looked at her thighs. They looked strong and hard. Bulky was not a word I would have applied to them.
“They look fine to me.”
“Yeah, well, you’re obviously not the thigh connoisseur she is.”
I shook my head and thought back to the last time I’d seen her mom, all willowy limbs, her hair up in a perfect chignon. Beautiful and ethereal, as if she’d be blown to pieces by a strong wind. Then I thought about my mom and how she’d always told me and Anna how beautiful we were, how proud of us she was. We’d laughed and made stupid faces and said what about now? Are we beautiful now? Are you proud of us now? And she’d said yes, always.
Sarah sighed. “The pathetic thing is that sometimes I look at her and she’s so damn pretty that I catch myself wondering if all the stupid stuff she does—fasting, strange green protein shakes, obsessive moisturizing—is worth it. And then I get scared she’ll suck me into caring about it the way she does. That one day I’ll trade my eyeliner—which she hates—for her stupid coral lipstick and twenty years later, boom, I’ll be preaching the gospel of hot yoga and spending over an hour in front of the mirror each morning to achieve the ‘natural’ look.”
“I like your eyeliner,” I said. “It makes you look like a warrior.”
She smiled and rolled her eyes, even though I’d meant it—the eyeliner made her look fierce and tough, like an Amazon. We sat in silence for a few moments, and then I broached a subject I’d been wondering about for the last few days.
“If you wanted to go somewhere with someone, where would you go?” I asked.
“That’s super vague,” she said.
“Like to drink,” I said. “Or other stuff.”
“Other stuff?” Sarah grinned at me, her eyebrows arched.
“This is hypothetical,” I assured her. “You can bring those eyebrows back down already.”
“Hypothetical my ass.”
“No, really,” I said. “Where do most people go? For stuff they can’t or don’t want to do at home.”
“So, what—you’re just doing a sociological study of teenage habits in Birdton, right? Just an impartial survey to map the behavior of the natives?”
“Something like that.”
“Yeah, with you it’s almost possible. Well, the big place is the quarry. Especially to drink, but also to, you know, make out in dark corners or have the sexy-sex.”
“The quarry? That was where there was a big party, right?”
“Yeah, probably. Anyway, most people have three options: the backseat of their car, if they have one; some random place that just happens to be available when they need it; or the quarry.”
“I guess privacy is kind of hard to come by around here.”
She smiled. “Yeah, yet people find a way.” She stood up. “All right, my heat is coming up, so I’m going to head on down—wish me luck.”
“I doubt you’ll need it,” I told her.
“Thank you,” she said, placing her hand over her heart, beauty queen style. “That just means so much.” Then she pointed at my bag. “You got a message.”
I followed her finger and saw a dim light shining through the thin canvas of my bag. “Thanks,” I said, but she’d already headed off to the track.
It was only after I unzipped my bag that I remembered my phone wasn’t there. It was lying right beside me on the bleacher. The phone in my bag wasn’t my phone at all. It was Anna’s.
I pulled it out, and there was a text on the screen:
Stop calling me, little girl.
I stared at it, bewildered.
You don’t know, I thought. You don’t know that Anna is dead.
We kept going to the bar. We needed it to escape.
I didn’t ask Lily what she was trying to escape. I should have.
I was trying to escape myself—even as I began to worry about what I might say if I got too drunk, talked too much.
Somehow I thought of the bar as a safe place.
That was a mistake.
BIRDTON WAS NOT EXACTLY AN exciting metropolis filled with lots of newsworthy mayhem. People would get cited for drunk driving, someone might get arrested for shoplifting, and every couple of years, some guy went out hunting alone and either got lost in the woods or accidentally shot himself, usually in a painful but not lethal way, earning a new nickname in the process. That was the kind of news Birdton typically served up. Anna’s death had been major news, and it would’ve been very hard for a resident of Birdton to have missed it.
For someone to not know that she’d died, they’d need to have been practically in a coma for the last few months, or to live outside town.
Another thing that was odd about the message was the tone. Curt, annoyed. Dismissive, even. Whoever it was had seemed utterly unworried about not having heard from her in all this time, and totally uninterested in reestablishing contact.
I had no idea how to track down someone whose only known characteristics were not living in Birdton and being an asshole.
So I decided to move on to the quarry.
—
THE QUARRY WAS ONLY THREE miles from school if you walked through
