Beth knew he was the reason she’d been brought here, because she wasn’t supposed to say no to him, either. She knew that they looked very nice together, him in his tux and her in her green dress, and that the older adults were watching them. She thought of Lily saying, Your parents are going to marry you off by the time you’re nineteen, and you’ll have a baby by twenty. She already wanted another drink as the schnapps wore off.
Beth listened to Gray’s relaxed chatter as he filled in the gaps of her silence. He probably thought she was so quiet because she was shy. The truth was that her stomach was turning and she was sick with horror, with realization: I’m sixteen, and this is the map of the rest of my life. This is all of it. Unless I do something.
She wondered if she could find Lily. She could tell Lily this was happening to her . . . And then what? What did she think Lily would do? Swoop in and save her? She glanced at Gray, who was shaking the hand of an older man. She glanced around at the house—big, ugly, ostentatious, down the street from her parents. No one is coming, she reminded herself. No one is coming.
She had looked up clock towers after Lily had mentioned them that night on the park bench. That comment had made no sense, and Lily always made sense. Lily didn’t ramble about things she didn’t mean. It had taken an actual trip to the library, a place Beth never went, and after wandering helplessly and feeling like an idiot she’d broken down and told the librarian that she was doing a school paper, and was there anything about people in clock towers?
The librarian had looked bemused. “Clock towers? Do you mean Charles Whitman? What a strange thing to be doing a paper on.”
But she showed Beth a few newspaper clippings and magazine articles about the man who had taken guns into a clock tower in Texas in 1966 and started shooting people. There wasn’t a lot to read, but it was still too much. Beth was shaking when she left the library.
Lily had known about that. She’d thought about it. Why don’t you ever hear of a woman in a clock tower?
Beth drank more champagne, then excused herself to one of the huge marble bathrooms to throw up.
“You could have been nicer to him,” Mariana said to her when they left, as they were getting in the car and her father was starting it. “You could have laughed more. You can be charming when you want to be.”
Beth sat in the back seat, feeling the welcome cold air on her overheated skin. She wasn’t drunk anymore, and she found herself wondering how she could steal the bottle of red wine from the liquor cabinet. “Lily should be here,” she said.
“This isn’t the time for little girls to play together,” Mariana said sharply. “You have more important things to do.”
“Like what? Get married? I’m sixteen.”
“You need to be seen by important people,” Mariana said. “You’re old enough now. You can start planning your future.”
“You’re unbelievable,” Julian said to his wife. “You’re setting her up to be you, aren’t you? Is that what you want? Did you start at sixteen?”
“Stop it!” Mariana’s voice was cracked and shrill. “Stop it!”
The car was silent, the cold night gliding by outside.
“I want to talk to Lily,” Beth said. “I want to talk to her on the phone or send her a letter. I want to tell her that she should have been here.”
“You have no need to do that,” Mariana said.
Beth felt her jaw flex. She was grown-up enough to be introduced to boys named Gray, but not grown-up enough to send her own letters. “Where is she?” she insisted. “Where did she go?”
“She moved out of her foster parents’ house,” Mariana said. “She didn’t leave an address that I know of.”
“We have to find her!” Beth felt panic rise in her throat.