Elena Vanishing (15 page)

“And you and me,” she says, “we
have
to stick together.”

I feel my head bobbing, too. “That's right.”

“I mean—I'm not
saying
—I mean, we
want
to stick together.”

“That's right.”

“But we
have
to stick together. We
have
to.”

“That's right!”

And Meghan and I clasp hands with great emotion.

Somehow we have an entire bottle of Smirnoff in the backseat, and we are passing it back and forth like a peace pipe. I don't wonder how it got there because the backseat of the car seems like a place I have always known. It's a dark little room that I've lived in for a very long time.

Now I become aware that the car has a front seat. It's another room—a little room way up at the front of the car. Kirk is up there. Poor Kirk—he's such a good friend to stay so far away in that little room. He has a bottle of Jack Daniels, but he has no one to share it with. He's having to drink it all alone.

I glance at the speedometer: 110.

That's okay. We're on an autobahn. There's no speed limit on an autobahn. You keep to the left lane, and no one bothers you.

Like magic, Meghan and Kirk and I are walking into another party, even though I don't feel my feet move. This party is upstairs in a tiny apartment, and it's more tightly packed than the first one. White sheets have been hung on the walls and then splashed with fake blood. Meghan and I pose for a self-portrait, pouting prettily—two bright, happy college girls out having a good time.

There is a cowboy at this party. He thinks I'm wearing a Wild West barmaid's costume.

“How about setting off across the prairie with me, pretty lady?” he drawls. “Let's leave this here saloon.”

“It's a German costume,” I say. “It's a dirndl.” An unwelcome memory intrudes into my mind of dirndls in church on Sunday.

“How about pouring me a drink?” persists the cowboy. “We can ride off into the sunset together.”

“It's a German costume, you
moron
,” I say.

There is a wine cooler in my hand. I don't remember how it got there.

Now I'm in Meghan's apartment. Meghan's apartment? Yes, and there is a crisis. What is it? I look around and try to assess.

There's a pounding noise next to me. I feel the walls. No. I feel the door. Yes. The pounding is coming from the door.

Like a genie, Kirk materializes next to me. I realize that we are both listening to the pounding. I try the door, but it's locked.

“Open the door,” I say.

Meghan's voice sounds from the other side. “Elena, open the door!”

I look around. I am in the hall outside the bathroom. The bathroom door is locked.

“Meghan, unlock the door.”

The pounding continues. Meghan wails from the other side, “Elena! Open the door!”

“Meghan, you locked the bathroom door. You have to open it.”

“Open it!”

“I can't open it. You locked it! It's on your side. Unlock the bathroom door!”

Meghan pounds with greater urgency. “Let me out!” she howls. “Let me out!”

I turn to Kirk. “Kick in the door,” I say simply. Without hesitation, he does. There is a splintering crack, and the door bursts open. Meghan emerges. We are heroes!

Then I sit up. It's daylight.

Bright, bright daylight.

And I feel like I'm going to die.

I look around. I'm in a bedroom that looks like my bedroom, but there's a Harry Potter movie poster on the wall.

Did I come home with a Harry Potter poster? Would I do that? I'm not sure.

My whole body aches, and the room spins. My head and my gut feel like I've been poisoned. I get up to go to the bathroom and slip on vomit.

There's vomit all over the floor.

That explains the smell. I thought it was my breath.

I walk across the hall and slip on more vomit. There's vomit all over the bathroom.

It's Meghan's bathroom. That's right, I'm in Meghan's dorm. That must be her roommate's bedroom.

One mystery solved: that's someone else's Harry Potter poster on the wall. Another mystery to figure out: the bathroom door won't close.

I discover Kirk passed out on the living room couch. There's vomit on Kirk and vomit on the couch.

Meghan is asleep in her bedroom. There's vomit in here, too.

I follow the trail back into the living room, trying to piece events together. What happened last night?

You ate a hot dog
, says the voice in my head.
You let yourself get forced into eating a hot dog, therefore you are a spineless, obese, out-of-control balloon.

I push past the voice and rummage in my memory. I remember a stupid cowboy. I remember Jell-O shots. I remember looking down and seeing blood drips changing color as they soaked into my blue miniskirt.

Blood. Red blood that dripped down my arm, turning black when it hit the blue skirt. I look at my arm. A long ragged gash wraps around it, and dried blood stains the skin nearby.

The door hinge. The doorjamb I am hanging onto because . . .

You bitch! Stop that, you bitch!

You bitch!
says the voice in my head.

Rough hands dragging at me, bruising, striking,
You know you want it, bitch!

You bitch!
shrieks the voice in my head.
You stupid bitch!

Hands are grabbing me, a hand over my mouth, a voice yelling in my ear.

Stupid bitch! Stupid bitch! Stupid bitch!

“Meghan!” I scream as I turn and bolt for her door. But darkness—welcome darkness—gets there first.

Quiet voices. A woman's voice. That's my mother's. Mom is here?

And then a man's voice:

“I suspect we'll find drug use.”

That's a doctor. I know. I don't even need to open my eyes. Oh, shit! My college career. My nursing career!

All you do is screw up your life, you stupid bitch!

I open my eyes. I'm in an ER. And an ER isn't a place to be sick. It's a place to be strong and busy and help others.

My parents are standing next to my bed. They look older than I remember.

“I'm fine,” I tell them firmly.

I try to sit up, but I'm in restraints. Restraints? Okay, that's weird. But that's not what's important right now. What's important is that I stop this train wreck.

“Don't worry,” I say, sinking back onto the pillow again. “This is just a misunderstanding.”

“You dissociated,” Dad says. “You haven't dissociated in over a year.”

“I stood up too fast,” I tell him matter-of-factly. “I couldn't sit down in time.”

“You were circling,” Mom interjects. “A girl named Meghan Harlow called 9-1-1. She thought you were having a seizure.”

“Meghan overreacted,” I say. “She panicked. Everything's fine. Hello, doctor,” I add politely as a stern face slides into view. “I'm sorry you were bothered. I'm fine.”

The doctor looks unconvinced and a little cynical. I'm guessing I'm not the first half-naked college chick to show up at his ER the day after Halloween.

“I'm ordering a drug test,” he says, and his eyes challenge me to react to this. “What were you taking last night?”

“Nothing,” I say with all the cheerful unconcern of a girl who
didn't
do Ecstasy with her friends the night before.

“I'll be sharing the results with your parents,” he continues.

Technically, he doesn't have the right to do this since I'm over eighteen. But I say, “Why not?” and give him such a steady look that he appears to rethink his diagnosis.

The nurse unfastens the restraints and draws my blood. The doctor leaves.

I haven't seen my parents in a couple of weeks, so I pretend this is a reunion and chatter away about everything that's been going on—everything except the things I don't want them to know, of course. I tell them about the eighty-nine on the exam and the A on the essay and start filling up the airspace with funny stories.

Little by little, my parents start to relax.

“What happened to bring this on?” Mom asks after a while. “The dissociation, I mean.”

“It wasn't dissociation. I fainted,” I say. “It was Halloween, and there were a bunch of parties. I had a lot to drink, but don't worry, I wasn't driving.”

A scene flashes into my mind: Kirk, tipping up the bottle of Jack Daniels. The speedometer at 110.

It's all I can do to hang onto my cheerful expression.
A hundred and ten?!
What the
hell
was I thinking?

“Still, I know I got dehydrated,” I conclude. “That's probably what made me faint.”

Sandra comes in with a set of clean clothes for me. She's awkward and doesn't know what to say. I wonder what Meghan told her.

Did Sandra see me? Did Meghan call her? Did Kirk wake up? Did he see me, too?

They're whispering behind your back
, says the voice in my head.
They're saying, did you see what happened? Did you see?

But there's no time to worry about who saw what. I need to stay in charge here. So I reassure Sandra just as I did my parents, and she kisses my cheek and hurries away. She's a teaching assistant, and she has to get to a study group.

The doctor returns to report with a slight tinge of surprise in his voice that there are no drugs in my system. But there's still plenty of alcohol.

If he expects to see horror on my parents' faces, he's disappointed. I've already told them that. Plus, they're used to living in a country where the legal age for beer is fourteen and where my boarding school served the older girls a glass of wine with Sunday dinner.

We sign the forms. I wash up and change into my jeans, and we're ready to leave. “Where shall we go eat?” Dad asks.

My poisoned stomach gives a lurch.

Eat? After that hot dog?
says the voice in my head.
You can't let them feed you after all that alcohol! Do you have any idea how many calories you packed on last night?

“I'm not that hungry,” I say. “You know how you feel the morning after partying. . . .”

“It's three o'clock in the afternoon,” Mom says.

So I let them take me to Olive Garden, and I introduce them to the soup-and-breadsticks deal. Then the meal becomes a kind of game. For every breadstick they eat, I take one, too, so that I am never without a breadstick in my hand. But I eat only a bite or two and stuff the rest into my napkin. Breadsticks smash down into a wonderfully small space.

We have a great time at Olive Garden. Mom and Dad laugh over my funny stories about life as a freshman. Because I tell them so much, they probably think I tell them everything. But I don't tell them everything—for their sake.

“Your sister just got a promotion,” Mom says out of the blue. “She's in charge of the Polo section now.”

“My sister's a pothead dropout,” I say, “who parties with her pothead friends and barely works at all, and she's stuck in a dead-end job for minimum wage.”

Mom gives me a look.

“She isn't,” Mom says. “She found a perfectly respectable job, and she's been working since February. Even before this, she wasn't making minimum wage, and the promotion comes with a dollar-an-hour raise.”

“It's still dead-end.”

“It's a place to start. Your sister's not the loser you want to think she is. She and Clint have been together now for a year and a half, and they seem very happy. I like him. He's smart, and he's a hard worker.”

Dad is studying the tabletop menu card like it's written in a code he has to crack. Anger swells inside me. Why is Mom stressing us out like this?

She made you sick
, says the voice in my head.
Your mother made you sick!

“I don't want to hear about Valerie, okay?” I tell her. “I know you get along great with her now—it sounds like you're on the phone every day. Fine, but I don't have to hear about it. New topic. What about dessert?”

As usual, Mom won't let it go, not even if it means I'll be eating.

See how much she cares about your health!

“I've told you that it's up to you if you don't want to talk to your sister,” she says. “But I'll tell you the same thing I told her. I refuse to censor my conversation for anybody. I'm going to go right on talking about the people I love, and that means I'll talk about Valerie to you and you to Valerie.”

Valerie doesn't want to hear about me? What reason does she have not to hear about me? What right does
she
have to be angry?

“Anyway, we've invited Valerie and Clint out around Thanksgiving,” Mom says. “If you don't want to see them, you'll need to make other plans.”

Dad pays, and we leave in silence.

When I get home, I go over to Meghan's dorm, and together we clean the apartment. It takes hours. Then I trudge back to my building, smelling like the inside of a Febreze bottle.

Sandra is back from her study group. We make coffee, and I tell her about my night.

“I can't believe you almost got raped!” she says.

“That's not the crazy thing,” I say. “The crazy thing is: why am I not dead? I can't
believe
I'm not dead after last night!”

“You would have been one of those headlines,” Sandra says. “Another college statistic.”

“Seriously, I'm learning from this,” I say. “That will never happen again.”

“I'll help,” Sandra says. “We'll look after each other. We'll make sure we've got a safe ride, and we'll keep track of each other at parties.
And we'll keep an eye on each other's drinks, too.” She pauses for thought. “I can't believe that asshole tried to rape you in the bathroom!”