How to Disappear(2)
At first, I don’t get that I’m the person who’s supposed to get rid of her. When I do understand, I say no.
It’s not as if I’ve never turned him down before. Being Don’s brother is a long string of refusals:
No to being his alibi.
No to being his lowlife friend’s alibi.
No to running errands where nothing could go wrong—unless someone shows up with a drug-sniffing dog.
“No.”
“You’re not listening,” Don says, leaning toward me in his orange prison jumpsuit, fuming.
Don is always fuming. He’s flunked out of court-ordered anger management half a dozen times. If he’d come to live with me and Mom instead of choosing Dad when our parents split up, one of us wouldn’t have survived childhood.
He says, “This isn’t optional, Jack.” It’s one of my dad’s lines. The man’s been dead for four years, but I can still hear the way he sounded when he said it. I can still feel the dread.
Don and I are sitting in the visitor’s yard at Yucca Valley Men’s Correctional Center, wedged between a cluster of tan stucco buildings and a fence with concertina wire looped on top. If you go through the visitor’s log, you can see what a dutiful brother I am. I’m the reliable, law-abiding one with the clean record and the El Pueblo High crew team sweatshirt from the preppy school I’ve never been expelled from.
But I’m also the guy with the killer pedigree that scares the shit out of people. I’m the one who’s been trying to live down our last name since the day I figured out what it meant to be named Manx.
I lean back across the metal picnic table. “Don’t try to jerk me around, Don. I’m not in.”
Don says, “Then I’m a dead man.”
“Shit, Don. What did you do?”
I’m slammed with memories of things Don did:
Don pushing me on my two-wheeler without the training wheels. Then he yells, “Die, *!” and lets go.
My mom hugging Don, holding on to him in a rib-crushing embrace in the courtroom, the first time he got sentenced to juvie.
My dad slapping him across the face, the ring streaking Don’s cheek with a thin red line.
“Stupid,” my dad said to no one in particular.
Don’s first big f*ckup was when he tried to hold up a 7-Eleven that had security cameras and a heavily armed owner behind the counter, his two crime-buster sons mopping the floor. The police gave my mom a security photo of Don, hands up, a hairline fracture in his right wrist from the mop’s wooden handle.
My father asked me, “What did he do wrong, Jack?”
I said, “He tried to hold up a 7-Eleven?”
My dad said, “He didn’t assess his target. Big mistake.”
I was twelve. I was crying because my big brother was going to jail, and even my dad couldn’t fix it.
I thought, I’d be better at this than Don.
? ? ?
Now I’m eighteen and I’m supposed to figure out how to murder a blood-crazed girl who disappeared. Because if I don’t, maybe my brother dies—or worse.
Murder.
Welcome to the family business.
3
Cat
It happened five weeks before I became Cat.
When I ran.
Five weeks and one day before I was Cat, I thought I was Xena, Warrior Princess of Cotter’s Mill, Ohio.
Up for anything.
Taker of dares.
Defender of downtrodden victims of mean girls and authority.
Invincible.
It’s not that hard to be the slightly wild girl everybody likes when the only dire consequence in sight is when your stepfather tells you not to be reckless and impounds your car keys.
Until that next day, there was no reason not to like me.
The smart kids liked me because I was a fellow smart kid who underachieved. No competition, but got all their jokes.
The football guys liked me because, in eighth, I was the only cooperative girl they could find who was small enough to fit through the Jefferson coach’s doggie door and let them into his house so they could hang the traditional COTTER’S MILL RULES, JEFFERSON SUCKS! banner in his living room.
The we-hate-football kids (stuck in track as their mandatory team sport) liked me because I led cross-country off-trail to Taco Bell.
The rich kids liked anyone with a big enough house on Green Lake.
And I owned the churchy girls (this would be half our school) because my best friend was the pastor’s foster kid, and it was a (slightly exaggerated) well-known fact that I didn’t go all the way despite a lot of opportunities. Also, I accidently dropped a chocolate shake down Matt Wagner’s crotch when he dumped Jody Nimiroff for saying no.
As for the populars, I was a cheerleader. I was the girl at the top of the pyramid, hurtling headfirst toward the ground with her ponytail whipping around.
The populars were kind of stuck with me.
Until I ran.
Until I rolled out of Ohio, hidden in a cement pipe on the back of a flatbed truck.
I’d spent the night before huddled in Jody Nimiroff’s lakeside tree house under the flannel sleeping bag she’s kept up there since we were eight, eating the dregs of last year’s Girl Scout cookies.
Every cell of me wanted to go home. I wanted to tell Steve, my stepfather, what happened. I wanted him to pull me into a bear hug, slightly pissed off but more than willing to take care of everything for me. Again.