“You should pick me up in that car of yours sometime,” she yelled back, raising the bottle into the air.
I was drunk for the rest of the day. Cooper seemed annoyed at first, annoyed at me. At my stupidity, my naivety. At my slurring words and random giggles and running into light poles. He had left his friends for me, and now he was stuck babysitting me—drunk me—but how was I supposed to know that was alcohol? I didn’t know alcohol came in Sprite bottles.
“You need to loosen up,” I had said, tripping over myself.
I looked up at him, registered the shocked expression on his face as he stared down at me. At first I thought he was mad; I started to regret it. But then his shoulders loosened, his hard expression melted into a smile, then a laugh. He rubbed his hand through my hair and shook his head, and my chest swelled with something that felt like pride. He bought me a crawdog after that and watched in amusement as I gobbled it down in two bites.
“This was fun,” I said as we walked back to the car together, hand-in-hand. I didn’t feel drunk anymore; I felt droopy. It was getting darker then; our parents had left hours before, leaving us with a twenty-dollar bill for dinner, a kiss on my forehead, and instructions to be home by eight. Cooper had just gotten his driver’s license and had ordered me not to talk when he saw them walking toward us, cautious of my heavy tongue and slurring words. So I didn’t. Instead, I watched. I watched the way my mother chattered incessantly about another successful year and goodness my feet are aching and C’mon, Richard, let’s leave these kids to it. I watched the way her cheeks flushed with red and the edges of her dress rippled when the wind blew. I felt my chest swelling again, but it wasn’t pride that time. It was contentment, love. Love for my mother, my brother.
Then I glanced over to my dad and almost immediately, the swelling died down. He seemed … off. Preoccupied. Distracted, somehow, but not by anything going on around us. Distracted in his mind. I tried to get a whiff of my breath, worried that he could smell the vodka on me. I wondered if he saw Lena hand us that bottle—after all, I saw him watching. Watching her.
“I bet it was,” Cooper said, smiling down at me. “But don’t get in the habit of that, okay?”
“Habit of what?”
“You know what.”
I furrowed my eyebrows. “But you did it.”
“Yeah, I’m older. It’s different.”
“Lena said you gotta start somewhere.”
Cooper shook his head. “Don’t listen to her. You don’t want to be like Lena.”
But I did. I did want to be like Lena. I wanted her confidence, her radiance, her spirit. She was like that Sprite bottle; from the outside, she seemed one way, but on the inside, she was something completely different. Dangerous, like poison. But also addicting, freeing. I had had my taste and she left me wanting more. I remember getting home that night and seeing the lightning bugs in our driveway, twinkling like constellations in the sky, the way they always did. But that night, it felt different. They felt different. I remember catching one in my palm, feeling it flutter between my fingers as I brought it in, placing it delicately inside a water glass, covering the lip in plastic. Poking little air holes and watching it flicker in the dark for hours, trapped, as I lay beneath the sheets in my bedroom, breathing slowly, thinking of her.
I memorized everything about Lena that day—the way her hair got frizzy around the edges, leaving her with a kind of blonde halo when the air turned moist. The way she teased people with her wiggling bottle and wiggling hips and wiggling fingers as she waved in the direction of my dad. The way she wore her hair and her clothes and especially that little firefly dangling from her belly button, the way it glowed in the dark when she cupped her hands around her stomach and pulled me in.
And that’s why I remembered it so vividly when I saw it again, four months later, hidden in the back of my father’s closet.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The discovery of Aubrey’s earring is not a good one. The sight of it pushed into the graveyard dirt had made my blood run cold, the implications of it draping over the entire search party like a fire blanket, extinguishing the flame that had been pulsing through the cemetery minutes before. Everyone’s shoulders sagged a little more after that, their heads hung a little lower.
And I was left thinking of Lena.
I drove straight to my office after I left Cypress Cemetery; I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take the noises—the screaming cicadas and the crunching of shoes against dead grass, the occasional snorts and spits of the search party, the buzz of a mosquito followed by a rogue slap of the skin in the distance. Khaki-cargo-pants seemed to be under the impression that we were now a team after the police officer walked away with her discovery safely sealed inside an evidence bag. She stood up from her frog-legged squat, hands on hips, and looked at me, expectantly, as if I was supposed to tell her where we should go to find the next clue. I felt like an intruder in that moment, like I shouldn’t have been there. Like I was playing some kind of role in a movie, pretending to be something that I’m just not. So I turned around and walked away without uttering another word. I could feel eyes on my back until the moment I got into my car and drove away, and even then, I still felt like I was being watched.