Last Girl Ghosted
Lisa Unger
PART ONE
ghosted
Disguised since childhood, haphazardly assembled
From voices and fears and little pleasures,
We come of age as masks.
Rainer Maria Rilke
prologue
mia
Mia Thorpe drove, the road ahead of her long and twisting. Dark. She’d been driving on and off for two days, was stiff and bleary-eyed from the trip. She’d stopped last night at a motel for a fitful sleep, half-waiting for word from Raife that didn’t come. Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me, he’d told her. Cell phone service is spotty. Just follow the directions. I’ll be there when you get there.
She believed him. She trusted him. She did.
She’d lain on the hard, uncomfortable mattress in a motel room that smelled like cigarette smoke and industrial strength cleaner. Each time she’d managed to drift off a passing car would cast its headlights on the wall beside her bed, shining through the too-thin curtains, waking her. She doubted if she’d nabbed two solid hours.
She was on the road again before the sun rose.
“I think I love him, Mom,” she said out loud. Though her mother was long gone, Mia was sure she was still listening.
When Mia was six years old, she wanted to change her name to Princess Rainbows. She knew that it was possible to change her name because her dad told her that when she was grown up she could change her name to whatever she wanted. But while she was still his little girl, he would very much like her to keep the name that he and Mommy gave her.
A name is like a gift, he told her. We gave it a lot of thought and picked something we thought was as beautiful as you are. Mia Belle Thorpe. And technically, isn’t Belle a princess name?
That was true. But there were three other Mia’s in her class, and one other Belle. And a Bella and an Isabella who liked to be called Izzy. Mia Belle Thorpe wasn’t like Mia with the red hair who frowned miserably at her corner desk, and cried all the time. She wasn’t like the Mia who was really good at math and always shot her hand up like a rocket when it was time to volunteer to solve problems at the board. And she definitely wasn’t like shy Mia who was pale as an egg and never spoke at all, was frequently absent.
She was Mia, herself. She didn’t want to be one of four Mia’s in the room. The teacher, to avoid confusion, took to calling them by first and last names. Mia Thorpe. She remembered hating that. She couldn’t even say why.
Maybe it started then, this idea that she had to assert her “specialness.”
Her mom always told her she was special—that she was pretty, and smart, and a ray of sunshine. There’s no one like you, little star. You’re my special girl. But how could that be true if there were three other Mia’s in her classroom alone? Mia Belle Thorpe was pretty sure then that no one else in the world was named Princess Rainbows.
Around this same time, she discovered the wild pleasure of slamming doors in anger. So after another argument erupted, over her afternoon snack where she’d listed all the ways in which having the same name as three other people had annoyed or inconvenienced her that day, her mother ended it by saying: Mia Belle Thorpe, we will not discuss this further. You are not changing your name to Princess Rainbows. Now please go do your homework.
Mia had stormed up the stairs, and slammed the door as hard as she could, making, it seemed, the whole house vibrate with her misery. She lay on her bed weeping, and must have fallen asleep because when she woke up, the afternoon had turned to dusk. The light in her room was an unfamiliar gray.
She and her mother rarely argued. Mia might get very mad at her dad for being bossy, or for tooting, or for trying to help with math when he really had no idea what he was doing. But her mother was soft and sweet, rarely said no, always knew how to fix anything that was wrong, and consistently smelled like flowers. And when Mia woke up, she felt regretful for storming off and slamming the door so hard.
The house was quiet when she left her room. Which felt odd. Because usually she heard her mom in the kitchen—cooking, or talking on the phone with a friend, or listening to the radio while she made dinner. There were all kinds of familiar noises in the house. But silence was not one of them.
She crept down the stairs. It was easy to apologize to her mother; she knew it would be accepted with hugs and a kind conversation about why things couldn’t be the way Mia wanted them to be. There would be some consolation prize—maybe a cookie, or a concession on another matter of conflict.
But when she entered the kitchen, she found her mother lying on the floor. One of her mom’s red velvet flats had fallen off her tiny foot. And it looked just like she was sleeping.