Vanished (4 page)

“Oops,” I said. “I lost track of where we were.”
And
who
we were
, I thought to myself. I hated my body for betraying Beth. For reacting.

“Damn my irresistibility.” Zach smiled and threw his arm around me. “C'mon, let's get out of here.”

As we walked out of the gym, I felt Chester staring after us. I was too ashamed to meet her eyes.

I was packing my lunch the next morning when my
dad burst out of the basement, his eyes wide with excitement. Or it might have just looked that way due to the fact that his eyebrows were practically gone.

“Is your mom around?” He bounced from foot to foot.

“Dad, did you burn your eyebrows off?” I didn't mention
again
. It was implied. I couldn't wait to tell Nadir about it. Dad and his eyebrows were an ongoing family joke.

His hand went to his face. “This? A bit. Nothing much.”

Other people have dads who play golf or spend their weekends puttering around the yard. Mine makes robots in our basement. I was genetically doomed to be odd. “Aren't you supposed to be at work?” I asked.

Dad's eyes darted over to the clock on the microwave. “Soon. I woke up this morning with an idea of how to fix my latest project and I decided to tackle it before heading into the lab. I want to show your mom.”

“She left for the pharmacy already.”

His shoulders drooped a bit, then he straightened. “Do you want to see? I'm calling it Rover.” He whipped a robot the size of a Kleenex box from his side and put it on the floor.

“Named after the Mars rover?” I asked. It appeared to be a perfect scale model. In addition to being crazy about robots, my dad was a NASA nut. He'd build his own space shuttle if our neighborhood association wouldn't put up a fuss about the launch pad in the backyard.

“Nope. Watch this.” He walked around the granite island and the robot followed him. “Sit,” he commanded, and the back end of the robot lowered. “Beg.” The robot balanced on its back wheels, its front wheels spinning in the air with a mechanical clicking sound.

“You made a robot dog,” I said. Dad walked in a zigzag and the robot followed. “Any particular reason?” I tossed an orange in with my lunch. I wondered what it would be like to have normal parents. The one upside to my dad's robot obsession was that he hadn't noticed the huge dark circles under my eyes that broadcast I'd hardly slept. Around midnight Beth had finally returned one of my thousand texts.

K! Don't worry about me. I'm taking some time off. It's what I need to do
.

She didn't say a thing about the two of us. Nothing about missing me. Nothing about when she might come back. Nothing about why she didn't even bother to tell me before she left. I'd immediately hit
CALL
to try to catch her and hear her voice, but she didn't pick up. I didn't even know what to think.

“No reason. Just wondered if I could.” Dad looked down at the robot with pride. “The voice recognition was the hardest bit. We humans take for granted what a complicated process communication turns out to be. It's not just about what's said, but what's heard, and from that, understood.”

My heart recognized the truth of what he was saying. Once again it felt like my emotions were in free fall, looking for something solid to grab on to. Beth had been my gravity. Without her around I'd lost my grounding. “I don't take it for granted. I can't figure out what people mean half the time, and in theory I've got better sensors than that thing,” I said.

He winked. “I don't know. I did order top-of-the-line sensors. Those are no off-the-shelf RadioShack specials.” Dad draped an arm around my shoulders. “Go easy on yourself, kid. Once you get beyond the basic sit, stay, and heel, communication gets complicated. With a robot I can lay out exactly what I mean to say in code and the robot makes sense of it. We're rarely that clear with each other.”

I turned his words over in my head. There were times
when I felt so in sync with Beth, as if we were speaking to each other in our own private language. I didn't need to interpret her—it was as if part of me was
connected
to her. But now that connection was severed and communication had stopped and I didn't know why it had happened. It made me doubt I'd ever really understood.

I still wanted to believe there was a chance that we could fix things. But her text hadn't given me much hope. I trusted her with everything, and she didn't even trust me enough to tell me where she was. And she didn't love me enough to say good-bye. I swallowed hard so I wouldn't start crying.

“Well, I suppose we should take off,” Dad said.

I looked up. He was holding my lunch bag out in front of him. He shook it slightly. I took it from his hands.

“Thanks.”

He smiled. “As much as I'd like to talk robots all morning, if we do we'll both be late.” He gave Rover a pat on the head and went to give me a pat too, but I ducked out from under his hand. He blew me a kiss and headed out the door. I glanced at the clock. I needed to get going.

I ran up the stairs and grabbed my bag. Beth's copy of
Alice in Wonderland
fell out. I'd forgotten I still had it.

I flipped through the pages, wondering like a crazy person if it somehow held the key. Maybe there was some kind of message or hidden meaning in the parts she'd underlined. A code of sorts. If I could figure it out, I might be able to
make sense of what she'd been thinking when she made the decision to take off. I couldn't escape the idea that if I could just understand
why
she'd left it would make it better.

Last night when I'd been tossing and turning it had occurred to me that it really came down to two options. Either Beth's leaving had nothing to do with me, or she'd left
because
of me. Neither was good.

I tossed the book aside. If I wanted to know what was really going on with Beth, there was only one person who could tell me, and it wasn't Alice. I needed to talk to Britney.

Going to Brit's
house is like stepping into an issue of
Elle Decor
magazine. Everything, from the cream-colored Italian leather sofa that's as soft as a baby's butt, to the ice-blue Turkish silk rugs, was absolutely perfect and in place. I suspected dust spontaneously combusted before it was allowed to fall in that house. Even in the fridge things were lined up and color-coordinated. Green Perrier water bottles sat next to a bowl of bright red apples that looked ready for their close-up. You'd think with my compulsion for order I'd love it, but it made me tense. The house even smelled sterile.

“You want anything?” Brit asked. She grabbed a bottle of water for herself. “No, thanks.” I was certain I would spill it or leave it somewhere, making a water ring on an inlay table that would turn out to have belonged to Napoleon or the queen of England. “Should we head down to the
basement?” I suggested. It was the only part of her house that didn't make me anxious.

The basement was like our personal clubhouse. We rarely hung out at Beth's because of the tension at her place, and while my house was okay, it couldn't compete with Brit's. When her parents built the house the basement was the nanny suite. When Britney grew up, the nanny moved out and Brit took over.

Unlike the rest of the house, the basement looked like an actual home instead of a movie set. Fashion magazines were piled on the floor and bottles of nail polish were scattered on the coffee table. There was an oversized sectional sofa that seemed to hug you when you sat on it, and a pile of unmatched pillows. There was a huge flat-screen TV, a pool table, built-in bookcases filled with every board and video game you could imagine, and even a wet bar with a microwave and fridge. The basement had its own entrance, which meant Jason could sneak over without Brit's parents knowing. The only sign that it wasn't solely Brit's domain was a huge walk-in wine fridge that her dad had installed when he'd been on a wine-as-an-investment kick a few years back. It was like a temperature-controlled vault. Then he'd decided he wasn't interested in wine anymore and started collecting some kind of Old West prints that hung in his office upstairs. Now the only things in the vault were a few cases of wine and Britney's perfectly chilled Diet Coke. Brit's parents didn't care that we hung out down there. It
was soundproofed from the main house, so they didn't have to listen to us blasting music or giggling.

“Nah, I don't want to go downstairs.” Britney motioned to the stacks of paper she'd lined up on the dining room table. “I already got everything set up here. We need to make a packet for everyone on the student council.” She sighed as if she couldn't believe that her role as secretary required actual work.

It was clear to me that when Britney said “we need to do X,” what she really meant was that someone other than her needed to do it while she watched. I didn't mind. I sat down at the table and started pulling together the information on next year's elections. Brit leaned against the black granite island and flipped through a
Vogue
.

It felt somewhat weird to be with Britney, just the two of us. Normally Beth was the one that connected everything. Maybe Brit didn't want to go down to the basement because it was a screaming reminder that everything was different since Beth had left.

Even though she was acting like everything was fine, I knew it had to be bothering her that Beth was gone. When I'd told her earlier about Beth's text last night, she'd given me a small hug and said, “See? I told you she's fine,” but she clearly hadn't wanted to talk about it. Just like she hadn't wanted to talk about why she hadn't been in school today. “Mental health day,” she'd said with a shrug. It was fine if
she didn't want to confide in me about her emotions, but I needed to get her to talk.

“How come you aren't running for student council? They're taking applications until the end of the week for next year's slate.” Britney popped a cashew into her mouth.

I stapled a stack and set it aside. “I'm not really interested in that kind of stuff.”

“Who cares if you're interested? It looks good on college applications. You should volunteer for everything you can now. Next year will be too late.” She pointed at me with a perfectly manicured nail. “You can't afford to sit back, unless you have your eye on beauty school . . . or Ohio State.” She winked like we were in on the joke together. Britney never missed a chance to make fun of where Beth was going. Britney believed anything below the Ivy League was a waste.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. Brit had told everyone that she'd been accepted everywhere she applied, but Beth had told me the truth. Britney hadn't gotten into any of her top schools except Cornell, and she wouldn't have gotten in there except for the fact that her grandfather had donated something like an entire engineering building with a telescope to make it happen.

Before I could respond, Britney's mom bustled in. “Excellent advice. If you'd taken it yourself, then your own applications would have been stronger.” She blew a kiss at Britney as if she was joking, but my heart still hurt for my
friend. Brit's parents never missed a chance to imply she wasn't quite up to their standards. What else they wanted in a daughter was a mystery to me.

Brit's mom untied the gray-and-green Hermès scarf from her neck and let it drift down onto the counter. She smiled at me, her lips pressed together. I could tell she was trying to remember my name.

“Hi, Dr. Ryerson,” I said.

“Kalah came over to help me with a student council project,” Britney explained. “I was just telling her she should join.”

“Being on student council shows a commitment to service and leadership. Both Britney's dad and I were president when we were in high school.” There was a pause where it went unsaid that Britney had only made it to secretary. Never mind that secretary was the position Brit had
chosen
to run for.

Dr. Ryerson was still staring at me. She always did this thing where she kept eye contact for a long time. Maybe it was because she was a psychiatrist and wanted you to feel heard. What it made me feel was that I was under inspection.

“I'm counting on my grades getting me in,” I explained. “And maybe field hockey.”

“Performance in school isn't enough to make someone a complete candidate. You want to show them a full, well-rounded person. Just because of your heritage, you can't count on getting preferential treatment.” Dr. Ryerson
noticed an atom-sized piece of lint on her sleeve and flicked it away.

I flushed, unsure of how to respond. I wanted to spit back that the last time I'd checked, I was in fact a full person already, including and regardless of my “heritage.” But I was pretty sure there was nothing I could say to change the fact that Britney's mom probably thought of me as “that brown girl.”

“Where are you planning to apply?” Dr. Ryerson asked. Britney looked at me behind her mom's back and rolled her eyes.

“I haven't decided,” I admitted. “Maybe Ohio State.” I felt a band of tension in my chest loosen. It was the first time I'd said out loud what I'd been thinking about ever since Beth got in. I could picture Beth and me on campus, walking through the leaves on our way to a class, holding hands. Of course my whole college fantasy was clearly just a fantasy, since I couldn't even get her to return my calls. I'd tried her again at lunchtime and on my drive to Brit's. Both calls had gone straight to voice mail.