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A kid over at the picnic tables let loose a high-pitched scream and distracted me for a second – only a second.

When I turned back, she was gone.

12

Jagged Little Pill– Alanis Morissette

I panicked.

My instinct was still to panic, to shout her name, to draw attention to myself until someone else ran over to help. How could she have disappeared into thin air?

I jogged over to the restrooms to check them out, to see if I’d made a mistake and it wasn’t Brooke who’d walked out of them a few moments ago. But she wasn’t there. Only a woman with a small child were washing their hands, and the stalls were all empty.

Where the hell had she gone?

I grabbed my phone and called her number, and while it rang and rang, I went back outside and looked around again, straining for a glimpse of her ripped jeans and thrift store Giants T-shirt.

We cannot connect your call. Please hang up and try again.

I tried again.

And again.

Then, out of nowhere, a strange detachment settled over me. I’d experienced this feeling only once in my life, the day that I’d seen a dead body for the first time and decided to pack up my shit and get the hell out of Seattle, and feeling it again now was unsettling.

Brooke had either wandered off, or someone had forced her to go somewhere with them. Those were the only two possible options. I made myself go to a bench and sit my sorry ass down. Sit down, breathe, think.

My heart was going crazy, beating so hard against my chest it hurt, and I was grinding my back teeth and couldn’t stop.

She’s gone. She’s gone. She’s gone.

I forced that voice down until it was just static noise in my ears. Then a thought hit me – had Brooke left me on purpose?

No. She wouldn’t. A few days ago maybe she would’ve considered it, but not anymore. Not after Denver.

If I went to the cops, I’d have to tell them who I was, why I was in godforsaken Kansas City in the first place, and I wasn’t ready to have that conversation. I couldn’t. Everything that had happened back at home was two thousand miles and seven whole days away from me, and that was almost, almost enough distance that I could handle it.

On the bench, my fingers curled into fists, and I stretched each of them back out, one at a time, before bunching them up again.

I checked the time on my phone.

Brooke had been gone for twenty minutes.

This wasn’t normal.

I called her phone again, and it rang out, eventually switching over to the standard automated voicemail.

There was no getting around it. I was on my own.

When I was absolutely certain Brooke wasn’t going to walk out of one of the nearby stores and laugh at me for being ridiculous, I made my way back to the motel. It was getting dark now, and that seemed like both a good idea – finding somewhere safe – and stupidly irresponsible – to leave the area. But what else was I supposed to do? Brooke wasgone, and I had to figure out what I was going to do about that.

The motel room was cool and quiet, only the whirring of the ceiling fan providing any noise. Everything looked just as we had left it. The keys to the Mustang were on the table. She definitely hadn’t left on her own, not without the Mustang.

I sat down on the end of my bed, and cried.

I’d never been much of a crier – I’d become good at bottling up my emotions in the past few years, scared of what would happen if I ever let them out. So I hadn’t cried when I was packing to leave Seattle. Or that first night, when I was totally terrified and convinced I was going to get caught. I hadn’t cried in those dark moments just before falling asleep, when I remembered everything that had led to me running away in the first place – all the blood and the anger and the gut-deep regret that I had never had thecourage to stand up for myself. And that no one had ever stood up for me.

Not until Brooke.