Page 23 of Trapper Road

“What’s her deal?” I ask him instead of answering his question.

“How so?”

“With the missing girl and this case. How does Mandy play into it?”

“Oh, so now you’re interested?” he says, all haughty.

I lift a shoulder. “Curious is all.”

His grin is sly and knowing. “Odd you got curious after meeting Mandy. You got a crush, Vee?”

I stare him down instead of responding. What I feel about who is no business of anyone but my own, and he should know better than to pry. I arch an eyebrow. “You want to talk about the case, or would you rather talk about what happened at school yesterday?”

He winces, and the teasing glint disappears from his eyes. It’s like watching a light burn out, and I feel like shit for being the cause of it. He’s dealt with a lot of crap in his life, but somehow he hasn’t let it break him and turn him hard and cynical. Not like it has me.

I’m not used to caring too much about other people, but I like Connor and he’s always been nice to me. Plus, I know what it’s like to live through hard shit.

He starts to retreat into the backseat, and I stop him with a hand on his arm. I think about what I wish someone would have done for me back then, and so I say, “I’m serious, Connor. You okay?”

“I’m fine.” The most bullshit of all bullshit answers.

“Fine people don’t scream in their sleep,” I point out.

He scowls, clearly unhappy that I heard him the night before. “Just a bad dream.”

I snort at the understatement. That just makes him glower even harder.

There’s a lot I recognize in him in that moment. The way he’s holding himself hard and tight against the world, waiting for the next attack. I’ve lived most of my teen years that way and I know the toll it takes.

I don’t want that for him. I force myself to let my defenses slide just a bit and I say, “Connor.” Just his name. I’m calling him on his shit, and he knows it.

It takes a second, but he lifts his eyes to meet mine. It’s a hard moment, seeing all the pain and confusion in him and not backing away or trying to shut it down.

“It was just … I saw Kevin do it,” he says. “And I know him. We were — are—” he swallows back the word and shakes his head. “We were friends.”

I nod. I was the one to find my momma’s body after she’d been killed with a shotgun. We didn’t have the best relationship by that time, but she was still my mom. I could still remember the way she’d hold me when I was young and tell me everything would be okay.

I know I can’t fix it for him; no one can. But I can sit here with him and let him know he’s not alone. I reach over the seat and rub his shoulder without looking at him. He doesn’t acknowledge it, but he lets it go on for about thirty seconds before he shrugs my hand off. I watch as he collects himself. “So you wanted to know about the case?” He’s clearly ready to change the subject, and I’m fine with that.

“Hit me with it.”

He nods and pulls out his tablet, flipping to a picture and then turning it so I can see the screen. “This is Juliette Larson, the missing girl.”

I study the photo. Juliette’s a particular kind of pretty girl, the kind that gets born into a small town, studies social media for makeup tips like it’s a job, sets her sights on the popular boys and probably gets them. Guns for whatever small-town beauty queen pageant this place has, trains hard, makes it into the sash by her junior year and is a lock for her senior unless she does something socially disastrous. Every school has tropes for a reason; they’re templates. They let you become somebody, somebody who seems like someone who can lift you up out of the vast unknown. Me? Hard-core party girl for a while, though I reined myself in a little bit. There’s no shame in being a trope.

There’s shame in thinking that’s all there can ever be. I don’t know from that single glance at Juliette what she might grow into—something glossy, confident, balanced, successful. Not perfect because nobody is. But somebody human, the way I am, the way Connor is. We’re not done growing, either.

“Okay, so what happened?” I ask.

Connor walks me through the case, summarizing Mandy and her friend Willa’s accounts of the day Juliette went missing. Sounds like most of the day was pretty boring — just hanging out, trolling around town for something to do. Even though they were on their own most of the time, they were often glimpsed by people in the distance, people driving by, people in windows — enough to corroborate most of their story.

“Eventually they decided to go into the woods in the late afternoon. Apparently there’s some sort of old abandoned house back in there that the local kids refer to as the Shadow Shack.” He says the last bit with air quotes around the words. “They hung out there for a bit and then found their way back to the main road and started walking toward town. That’s when a boy in a truck saw them and pulled over. He and Juliette seemed to know each other, and she decided to go off with him. That was the last anyone saw of her.”

“And what does the boy say?”

“No one’s been able to find him. Cops tracked down every similar truck they could—color and model—but the problem is it could have been some non-local kid on his way to or from somewhere else, in which case they may never find him.”

“Willa and Mandy didn’t recognize the boy?”

---