The Missing Read online

  She was cutting school right now to meet Enrique in the woods. Last class of the day, home ec. Right now everybody else was learning how to pour Cheez Whiz over a two-minute nuked potato, and she was free. She wasn’t going to be like all the other robots who put one foot in front of the other their whole lives and burned their time like it was made of wood. She was going to make every second count.

  The sky overhead was blue as a deep lake, and the air had to be at least seventy degrees. She frowned: global warming, no doubt. When people got old they stopped caring about stuff like greenhouse gases and melting ice caps. They bought houses on credit so they couldn’t quit their jobs, and they got so tired from living lives they hated that their hearts dried up like clotted blood. That would never happen to her. Her heart would always bleed, even if it hurt. Someone’s had to.

  She couldn’t help caring about this stuff! Even if she wanted, she’d never be one of those girls with blow-dried hair and pink lip gloss who got perfect grades in lame classes and wrote fashion editorials for the school paper. The world was colliding toward disaster, for crap’s sake, so who cared about pencil skirts? Sure, people acted like rising estrogen rates in drinking water that would one day make men sterile were a big deal. Her parents always pseudo sympathized when she freaked out about the hormone-infested Omaha Steaks they served every time David visited, like his arrival was the frickin’ second coming. They nodded their heads like they cared about eating lower on the food chain, and then they slathered their cow offal with A.1. sauce.

  Her mom had really been pissing her off lately. Last night she’d limped around the kitchen like Captain Ahab after Moby Dick bit off his leg. For a while Maddie’d wanted to bitch-slap Albert Sanguine for what he’d done. Seriously. What kind of guy hits somebody’s mom? But then at dinner, Meg made her eat five bites of a cheese lasagna even though she wasn’t hungry. All night it sat in her stomach like a tub of lard. She was force fed like one of those caged sows PETA was always trying to free, and she’d started thinking that short of a permanent injury, Meg Wintrob deserved what she got.

  Still, this morning had been pretty neat. She’d come down the stairs to find her parents kissing, which she hadn’t seen for at least a year. They left for work before she left for school, and when they did they both kissed her good-bye. Each parent got a cheek. It was totally gay. She told them they were complete dipshits even while they did it. Meanwhile, she’d liked it so much she hadn’t ever wanted to leave her chair, just so she could wallow in that good feeling.

  As soon as they were gone she’d thought: Love is in the air, so why not today?

  “Of course,” Enrique had said when she’d called this morning to see if he was up for an afternoon in the woods. Then she’d added, And bring the thing. “What thing?” he’d asked. She’d wanted him to guess, but it busted out of her like an explosion: The rubbers!

  “Oh. Right…Okay,” he’d told her.

  Hooray!

  Now, she pedaled. She was wearing high-top Converse sneakers and lace thigh-highs, a knee-length felt skirt with a slit up the side, and a red wool cardigan. The outfit was ridiculous, she knew, but it suited her. Plus, if you’re gonna have purple hair, you might as well look the part. People had stared at her at school today, and she’d even noticed a couple of full-on pointers, but that was fine. Today was all about whims and loud colors and getting exactly what she wanted. She smiled and pedaled faster. The lines to a song were playing in her mind: “Girl, you’ll be a woman, soon.” She couldn’t frickin’ wait!

  He was standing at the edge of the woods where they’d agreed to meet. Clenched in his hands were cornflower blue daisies from the Puffin Stop. She giggled even though she didn’t think the flowers were funny; she thought they were romantic.

  He was dark-skinned and small, and no matter how much she dieted, she’d probably always outweigh him. His family was from Mexico, so he rolled his Rs and chose his words carefully like he was translating from the Spanish in his mind. When she hopped off her bike, he grabbed the handlebar and steered it into the woods for her. She loved that he did that kind of manly stuff. It was one of the many things that made him perfect.

  When they got a few feet inside the woods he leaned the bike next to his moped and turned to her. Some sticks were tangled in her hair, and he pulled them out. She giggled because it reminded her of the way monkeys groomed each other: They combed their fingers through their mate’s pelts, then picked out the lice and ate them. That was the two of them: a pair of monkeys. This made her think of sea monkeys, and those lounge chairs they were supposed to sit on at the bottom of fish tanks, which made her giggle even more.

  Enrique kept walking. He’d forgotten to give her the daisies. The branches hit the flowers so that their bright blue petals glided in a trail behind them. At least if they got lost they’d find their way out. He was being really quiet. He hadn’t even kissed her hello. She knew it was silly to think, but still she wondered: Was he having second thoughts?

  They’d been dating for almost a year. In gym class the girls were always talking about sex and blow jobs. Orgasms. Jizz. Gross stuff that made her blush, not because it was gross, but because she found herself nodding, even though she’d never done it. She found herself pretending to be a woman, even though she wasn’t yet.

  But the last couple of months, even after she told him she wanted it, he’d stalled. Every time they got hot and heavy he invented some excuse, like the back of his dad’s hatchback wasn’t classy enough. He said he wanted to wait for the right time, but she was starting to think he wanted to wait for the right person, who happened not to be neurotic Maddie Wintrob. She started to think that he’d rather find a nice Mexican girl with big eyes like Natalie Wood from West Side Story, who would never pick fights and who knew how to cook a grilled cheese without burning it. Who could blame him? She knew she was a weirdo. But then again, she did blame him. The world made sense when they were together, and with each day he made her wait because he’d decided to treat her like a flower instead of a girl, she trusted him less, and he killed the thing between them a tiny bit more.

  “If you’re being all quiet because you’re going to dump me, you’re in a lot of trouble,” she said. “I mean it. I’ll beat you up.”

  Enrique shook his head in mock disappointment. “Madeline,” he muttered. “You’re so crazy.” His accent wrapped around her name like the Mexican flag: “MAD-e-LINE,” and she was immediately reassured.

  People in Corpus Christi raised their voices around Enrique because they thought he didn’t speak English. Meanwhile, he wrote poetry and read T. S. Eliot. But when his father’s heart seized up two years ago, he took over the store and delayed college. He had five younger siblings (four girls, one boy), so he’d pretty much been the head of the family ever since.

  Now that his dad had started taking shifts at the store again, Enrique had enlisted in the army. He planned to serve a tour of duty and get his tuition financed when he came home so he could study poetry at any state school in the country. His orders were supposed to arrive within the week. She worried about him a lot. He expected everybody to be like him: decent and honest. That kind of stupid gets a boy shipped home in a bag.

  So she’d been thinking about that, too, when she called him this morning. She wanted to have sex with him before he left. That way, even if he got hurt or came back changed or stopped loving her, at least they’d have been each other’s first. But really, she didn’t want him to go away at all. She sort of hoped the world would blow up instead. It would be easier than life without him.

  Enrique’s palms were sweating. He walked in front and held the branches back so they didn’t slap against Maddie’s legs or face. He’d seen a few clearings that might have worked, but he wanted to find a place where the ground was soft and without too many logs or sticks. He was glad he’d skipped lunch, because otherwise he might throw up.

  He hoped he wasn’t coming down with the cold everyone who stopped by the shop today seemed t
o have. They’d all coughed themselves red in the face, and some had even sported rashes on their arms, hands, necks, and faces—all over their exposed skin. He’d meant to ask Maddie about it because her father was a doctor, but now wasn’t the time. He knew it wasn’t allergy season, but he couldn’t figure out how a sickness could spread so fast.

  He’d known Maddie since before either of them was tall enough to reach the Puffin Stop counter, but it wasn’t until his dad got sick and he took over the shop that she became a regular customer. She stopped by on her way home from school a few times a month and sipped black coffee while flipping through the fashion magazines under the counter, or else she puffed her Marlboro Lights on the front curb. She didn’t have any friends. At first he thought it was because she was shy, but after a while he realized it was because she was a kook.

  She was also spoiled. Her clothes were new and clean, and the legs of her jeans were always creased in perfectly ironed pleats, which meant either a Mexican cleaning lady or a mother with too much time on her hands. She didn’t have a job, but she paid for her smokes and OK! magazines with crisp twenty-, fifty-, and even hundred-dollar bills. She was pushy, too, and expected things to go her way: “Not the red lighter, Enrique. I want the blue lighter.” “Hi, Mom. No, I’m at the store right now. I can start dinner, but I’m not heating up your fettuccine. It’s gross. I’m either ordering cheeseless pizza or making stir-fry. Dad likes that better anyway.”

  About a year and a half ago she came into the shop and he complimented the forest green of her sweater because it matched her eyes. After that, she wore the sweater every time she visited. That’s when he knew for sure that she liked him. But he didn’t ask her on a date for two reasons. First, he’d never been very comfortable around girls. Second, she looked like a lot of work.

  That summer, her parents extended her curfew to ten o’clock, and she started coming to the Puffin Stop at night. Sometimes her brother, David, would drop her off like the store was her destination, and then he’d give Enrique this look, like, Sorry dude, but she made me do it. Once, David even plopped a few banana PowerBars onto the counter and then leaned over and whispered, “You know what an eight-hundred-pound gorilla gets?” Then he’d nodded at skinny Maddie Wintrob: “Anything it wants.”

  But Enrique liked the company. Maddie was funny. She clomped when she walked, like she expected people to notice when she entered a room. If she wasn’t smoking, she was chewing grape Bubblicious so hard it snapped. When closing time came, she’d read celebrity gossip in OK! without paying for it while he mopped the floor (she never offered to help, he noticed). Since it was on his way, he’d walk her home, and they’d talk about all the things that were important to her, like whether the guests on Jerry Springer were real, and the melting arctic permafrost that had once been a methane sink. “We’ll all be dead soon,” she’d once said to him without even the hint of a smile. Then she’d skipped a few paces and added, “Thanks for the Fun Dip Sticks. They’re frickin’ awesome!”

  He hadn’t known for sure that he cared for her until she stopped visiting. The first week, he hardly noticed. The second week, he decided she’d found a boyfriend. Some other guy got to watch her act like a screwball. Some other guy got to hear all about environmental disaster, and the poor chimps kept in cages for animal testing. Some other guy had found the only girl in the world who had read, and liked, Octavio Paz.

  Turned out, she’d been on a family vacation in Gettysburg. When school started again, he resolved to ask her out. But every time he saw her, the words sealed his mouth shut like a lump of dry oatmeal. He had no money, not even for a movie. Where would they go? Besides, she was fair-skinned and tall and smart, and he was the guy behind the convenience store counter with five kid siblings like he came from the third world. And then he got angry at her for making him feel second-rate, and he promised himself that after the army funded his college, he’d win the Nobel Prize in Poetry. In fifteen years he’d come back to Corpus Christi with a wife even whiter and better-looking than Maddie Wintrob, and boy, would she be sorry.

  So he was thinking these things one crisp September night, when she leaned over the register and kissed him. Sloppy and untrained, like a pair of nicotine-flavored fish lips. And that was all it took. He was a goner. They’d been dating for almost a year now, and the only thing he regretted was that he hadn’t been the one to make the first move.

  And now they were in the woods. His armpits were wet even though he’d sprayed them with half a bottle of Right Guard. Behind him, Maddie muttered something. Probably a complaint. They’d been walking for a while. It was quiet out here. The closer they got to Bedford, the less the birds chirped and the gnats swarmed. People said the air was fine here, but he didn’t believe them. Since the fire, it smelled like sulfur, and even in Corpus Christi, birds had begun to twitter on the ground before dying, as if they’d forgotten how to fly. James Walker got lost here the other day, and he’d heard from his mother that overnight more kids James’s age had gone missing. He was worried it wasn’t a safe place to take Madeline, but with no car and no apartment, where else could they go?

  Up ahead was a grassy clearing. His heart started to pound, and he thought about turning back before Maddie spotted it, too. This thing they were about to do was irrevocable. But he kept walking until they both stood on its periphery. They were panting a little, but not from exertion. From nerves. She smelled like grapefruits and rose-scented lotion.

  The grass was mostly dead. He could see the remnants of a campfire and some beer cans that had been sitting around for so long that their painted labels had worn away. “What a dump,” she said.

  She was tall for a woman, and he didn’t like to let her see his naked body because he was scrawny by comparison. She nudged him, and he kicked his foot behind her knee and caught her off balance. She fell on her bottom with a thud. The girls he’d dated before her (all two of them), would have sneered right now and feigned some kind of injury, but not Maddie. She started laughing with her hand over her mouth while shouting, “Shhh, shhh,” as if it was he, not she, who was making all the noise.

  He lowered his hand to help her up. She tugged hard, and pulled him down with her. She was laughing so hard that she was crying, and it occurred to him that she was nervous, too. They sat like that for a little while, and then she took a blanket out of her bag. She opened it in the wind like a sail and set it down.

  They sat. She unbuttoned her cotton blouse so that it hung open and he could see her red lace bra. He rubbed his hands on the legs of his jeans and tried to warm them for her. Everyone assumed they were doing it. The people who stopped by the shop, their families, even his brother joked about making sure there were no babies.

  But she was his girl, and he wanted to do right by her. Show her that he was good enough. He’d enlisted for the same reason. He was sick of people asking whether he missed his home country when he’d been born in Bangor. No one would be able to take the army away from him. So maybe Maddie didn’t know about waiting for the perfect moment, but he did. You only had one chance to get things right.

  When his hands were warm, he touched her. Reached under her felt skirt. She’d shaved her hair down below in the shape of a heart. He traced the curve with his fingers. He knew she liked it. He had learned, day by day, the things that made her squirm with delight.

  She touched him, too. He closed his eyes. Now, today? Was this right? One of her eyes was bigger than the other, but you had to look very closely to notice. He unbuttoned his jeans.

  He tore the foil from the Trojan Ultra Pleasure with his teeth. He knew this part, had practiced in the dark on his way home from work, tossing the evidence away so that his family would not find it. A garbage can on Micmac Street full of expectations. He pulled it out. Unrolled it. Put it on. She arched her back so that her stomach pressed against him. But he’d done it wrong. It wasn’t rolling. It was stuck. Hardly covered the tip. The blood rushed from his groin to his face: He’d messed up something real
ly important. He turned to his side so that she couldn’t see.

  “Wait!” he cried.

  Her silence was like a weight on his chest, and his fingers got clumsy. He knew she was looking. Her eyes were burning the skin on his back.

  “Don’t you want to?” she asked.

  “I do,” he said. How could he explain this? Men weren’t supposed to mess this up; they were supposed to hold a woman close, and promise to be gentle.

  “So what is it?” she asked.

  “The timing is not right,” he answered, before he realized how she would hear his words. He wished he could stop time and draw them back.

  Her voice was cold. Furious. “I’m not a fucking flower.”

  He nodded. “I know. You’re Maddie. I know.” He fumbled through his pockets, looking for another one. Had he brought two? Why hadn’t he brought two? Would this used one still work, if he flipped it to the other side?

  He turned around and faced her. Her brow had knitted together into a single black line, and her purple hair was a mess of leaves and knots, like a vengeful Shakespearean wood sprite. “Aren’t I pretty enough?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said. But already, he was going soft.

  “So what is it?”

  He sighed. Didn’t she know? Couldn’t she guess from the way he’d been fumbling?

  “Fine!” she cried. “I hate you.” She pulled on her blouse and ran into the brush.

  He lay there. What was wrong with him? He’d gotten through this like a pro when it had been only a table for one. Was he dying of prostrate cancer, and this was the first symptom? He frowned. Wishful thinking. It wasn’t cancer. And now he was going to have to explain to Maddie Wintrob that he’d gotten a case of nerves before she convinced herself that he and her brother were having an affair.