Elena Vanishing (19 page)

You're a loser
, says the voice in my head.
They robbed you. You let them win.

Aspirin. I need aspirin. I need nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

I stumble into the bathroom to hunt for the Excedrin, and Dylan greets me with a swish of his long tail. Like a tiny blue dragon in flight, he floats across a big rectangular aquarium though a forest of silk plants that Mom bought him.

Dylan is more Mom's fish than mine now. She spends her spare time teaching him tricks.

The bathroom is 1970s kitsch: glittery Formica and pitted chrome. Dark wood paneling lines the walls, stained by decades of spills and splashes. Not even Dylan's graceful beauty can improve the place.

I wander back to my bedroom and throw myself onto the bed with a sigh. Come back, dreams. Come hide me away.

My phone dings. Somebody messaged me. I don't care.

My phone dings again. Another new message. They crowd in day and night. Why can't people just leave me alone?

But I grope for the phone out of habit.

lanie can u drive me to work? car wont start, love chris

I yawn. Maybe I can, if I still have enough time before my . . .

NO!

Mom is sitting in the living room, typing her new manuscript into her laptop. I hold the phone out at her accusingly.

“My alarm didn't go off!” I shout.

Mom raises an eyebrow. “It went off.”

“You heard it? I can't believe this! Why didn't you wake me up?”

“I tried. First you told me that you didn't have to go to class today. Then you told me to go to hell.”

“You shouldn't have listened to me!” I insist. “You should have made me get up! My physiology exam starts in forty-five minutes. You know how important this class is!”

Mom just looks at me—a long, steady look. My skull feels like it's cracking at the temples.

The voice in my head is chanting:
Loser! Loser! Loser!

“I'll never find a parking place in time!” I say. “She'll shut the door. I'll fail the test! Will you take me to school?”

“Will you eat breakfast?” Mom counters.

Anger flashes through me. It is so like Mom to drag food into this!

“You know there's no time for breakfast!” I say.

Without a word, Mom goes back to her manuscript.

Once upon a time, Mom's books meant the world to me, back when I was a homesick little girl in boarding school. Mom's stories would arrive from home a chapter at a time and whisk me away to another land. As I read them, I could hear her voice in my ear, saying the words to me. They weren't books yet, but they were more than books. They were Mom on paper.

Now Mom's books are a barricade she hides behind to keep away from me.

She loves her books more than she loves you
, says the voice in my head.
You and Valerie let her down. Her books are her favorite children.

“Okay, look,” I say. “If you'll drive me, we can take five minutes to run by Starbucks. I'll grab a caramel macchiato. Those things have protein and about a thousand calories.”

Two hundred and seventy calories if you get the whole milk
, says the voice in my head.
You're not actually going to drink whole milk, are you?

But Mom is setting aside her computer and looking for her shoes. I hurry back to my bedroom (Valerie's and my bedroom) and throw on my jeans and a T-shirt.

No time for makeup. I'll do it in the car.

On the way to campus, I keep up a steady stream of talk to deflect my attention from the rich, buttery toffee aroma escaping from my takeaway cup. Normally, I would sip noisily at it, but today I don't trust myself.

Besides, Mom's driving. She won't notice whether I'm drinking or not. Except that she does. As she pulls to the curb, she reaches over and hefts my cup.

“It's full,” she says in annoyance. “Those things aren't cheap, you know.”

“I'm taking it to class,” I say. “You know I don't like to drink things when they're hot. You might at least wish me luck on my exam. I was up till three studying for it.”

“Good luck,” she says in a softened tone as I slide out.

“Love you,” I say.

“Love you, too.”

Mom drives away, and I toss the Starbucks cup into the first trash can I see.

Other students breeze by me as I toil across campus. Has my backpack always weighed this much? Why isn't the Excedrin kicking in? Did I take it? Or did I just look for it?

I drop into my seat only seconds before the teaching assistant starts handing out the exams. I hate that! It messes up my whole pre-exam routine. I turn over the paper and stare at it for a few crazy seconds. What unit is this? Did I study the right notes?

Slowly, answers begin to dislodge themselves from the mud between my ears. Yes, I know this one. Or do I?

You're getting them all wrong!
says the voice in my head.

God, I'm so tired! Why do I have to do this? Why can't I just sleep?

Because you're a loser
, says the voice in my head.

After we've turned in our exams, the professor pulls out her lecture notes and starts in on the new unit. I didn't get to the reading last night. The chalk figures she draws might just as well be hieroglyphs.

As I stare at the professor, a bright halo creeps up around her. Then she turns into a dark silhouette.

There's a noise like the ocean in my ears.

NO!

This is
not
a fainting spell! I am
not
going to faint! I'm sleepy, that's all. I'm falling asleep. Under my desk, I twist one hand with the other until a sharp current of pain sizzles up my arm. The halo disappears, and for a minute or two, the professor almost makes sense.

The other students stand up. I blink in confusion. Then I realize: you moron, it's the end of class.

You moron
, whispers the voice in my head.
You moron-moron-moron!

I am walking away before I realize that the student next to me is talking. I turn around and look back.

“Sorry,” I say. “What?”

He is flustered now. Broad shoulders, nice eyes. Has he always sat next to me?

“I was just asking—I mean, I wondered—”

The haze clears, and I know what he was just asking. He doesn't need to tell me what he wondered.

Maybe he thinks I'm beautiful. What number am I? What number made me beautiful?

You don't know because you didn't check this morning
, says the voice in my head.
You've gotten fat since yesterday.

The student is continuing to talk. I give him a closer look. He has nice hands. I like that.

What about putting him on my list? What about adding him to my collection—the collection of men who think I'm beautiful?

But no. He sits next to me in class. It won't be a simple hookup. He'll think it's the beginning of something. Next time he sees me,
he'll greet me with a smile—that secret smile. And when I freeze him with my blankest, most impersonal stare, he'll follow me like a puppy, asking what's wrong.

This is the kind of guy who will keep calling. He'll want to learn all about me. He'll want to save me. So I turn away from those nice hands, and I say, “Sorry, I'm in a relationship.”

With who?
the voice in my head wants to know. Y
ou've got nobody, you loser! With who?

I make the hike to my next class, across dead weeds and packed dirt, up outdoor steps, through a building, down indoor steps. My shoulders ache, my neck stiffens up, and my head pounds until the pain of it makes tears gather in my eyes. It's all I can do not to curl up in the hallway and rest my head on my arms.

I must not have taken that Excedrin after all.

I stop in at the student wellness center. “You again,” murmurs the gray-haired secretary, giving me the kind of look Mom does. I ignore her and take a sample pack of ibuprofen from the bins by her desk, then tear it open and wash down the pills at the water fountain by the door.

Above the water fountain is a poster of a smiling college boy: SHE SAID NO—I LISTENED.

The poster makes me feel sad and very, very old, as if nothing that happens to me will ever matter again.

My stomach starts burning as I walk away, so I shake a couple of Tums out of the bottle in my purse. Almost out. Better buy more. I can run out of Excedrin, but no way can I afford to run out of Tums.

Ding! Another message. I glance at it.

elani, where are you? i need help! Meghan

I stick the phone back in my pocket. Meghan always needs help.

Another interminable class. Even on the best of days, my brain wasn't made for statistics. I blink at the chalkboard. My gummy eyes splinter the light and make the formulas unreadable.

“Who's willing to lead our study group tomorrow?” asks the teaching assistant at the end of class. “Oh, good, Elena.”

Damn! I knew I shouldn't have held up my hand.

Hauling the heavy backpack, I struggle out to the parking lot. Hazy blue sky and dusty metal. It never rains here anymore. Endless rows of small sedans. Here and there, the occasional hatchback.

I scan the lines of inert metal forms, waiting for a tan Hyundai to pop out.

Nothing.

I hit the panic button on my fob.

No answering siren wail.

Fruitlessly, hopelessly, I wander from row to row, holding up my keys and hitting the panic button.

Where did I park? Where did I leave my car?

I am seconds away from crying with frustration when my phone vibrates. I dig it out of my pocket. It's Mom.

“I thought you would have called by now,” she says. “Are you ready for me to pick you up?”

And the voice in my head whispers,
Loser! Loser! Loser!

Mom's white Hyundai rolls up a few minutes later, and I look out the window while she drives me away from campus. It's nice not to have to do anything, and it's pleasantly familiar to be carted around by Mom.

“Can we stop by the tattoo place so I can pick up my sketch?” I ask.

Mom grimaces. “You know I don't like tattoos.”

“But this one is Kate. It's your book!”

Mom shakes her head. “You're not a canvas,” she says. “You don't need a person from a book on your body to remind you of who you want to be.”

“I don't get tattoos to remind myself of anything,” I say. “I get tattoos because of who I already am. They're things that come from the inside, not the outside.”

Mom says nothing.

“It's just a sketch,” I say. “It's on the way home. If I have to go get it, I'll waste gas.”

Mom doesn't answer. She stares out over the steering wheel. Her eyes look cold, and she has serious frown lines now.

Mom's gotten so bitchy this year.

“It's not a tattoo yet,” I say again. “It's just a piece of paper. Please?”

Mom still doesn't answer, but she takes the turn to the tattoo place.

Tattoos conjure up images of badass bikers, but Andrew, my tattoo artist, is slight, shy, and clean-shaven. His work is colorful but delicate. And when he shows me the new sketch, it's perfect.

At the house, I pull out the sketch and try to explain it to Mom. “See, here's Kate, from the book cover,” I say, “alone in the forest at night, and she knows she's being watched.”

Mom is cautious but not warm.

“A forest?” she says. “There are no trees here.”

“Maybe later we'll add the trees,” I say. “Anyway, you can tell by her face where she is.”

“Is that the goblin wedding dress?”

“Yeah, I read Andrew the description. When I used to read the book in boarding school, I always wanted a dress like that.”

“Hmm,” says Mom. And I suddenly wonder: did she write that dress into the book because she wanted one, too?

“But her hair,” I say, “floating out in this cloud, that's from Tori Amos, you know—the singer. I showed Andrew a painting of Tori. It's very famous.”

I go get my laptop and pull up the painting of a beautiful woman with red hair. The hair floats out in long strands around her body like a protective charm.

“Tori Amos survived rape,” I say. “A lot of artists have painted her. Well, she didn't just survive it. She's very strong. . . .”

Mom looks at the picture. She doesn't ask. But even if she did, I wouldn't tell her.

“It's your book,” I say again, struggling to explain, but nothing that comes out of my mouth today makes sense.
We don't have a connection now
, I want to tell her.
What's between us now is broken. But back here, back in the past, we still connect.

Mom shakes her head.

“It's a beautiful sketch,” she says. “Put that on your wall. But not on your body.” And she opens her laptop again.

My phone buzzes as I walk off to my room (mine and Valerie's room). It's Valerie. “Hey, slut puppy!” she says briskly. “I can't bend over anymore. It's hell putting on my shoes.”

Valerie is in her middle trimester. Everything is going swimmingly. She and Clint are happy, and they're both still working to save up money. In the evenings, she helps him study for the college classes the Air Force told him to take.

As she and I talk, I thumbtack the sketch up over my desk, and I try to explain the new tattoo to her. Valerie loves tattoos, but today, she talks over me. The experience of pregnancy is all she can think about.

“I'm getting huge,” she tells me. “It's like I've been taken over. I swear, aliens have invaded my body.”

Invaded. Huge. My stomach lurches, and I hear myself say, “I can't talk right now.”

“Suit yourself,” she replies with an edge to her voice. “I was just calling to say hey. If you're too busy with your university buddies, then you shouldn't answer the phone.”

She hangs up.

It's two o'clock in the afternoon. I want so badly to lie down and sleep that I force myself not to do it.