Messenger 93 Read online

  Her eyes shifted languidly from Krista back to me. “No, I’m sorry,” she said.

  I didn’t lose it. Instead I went into the menu and scrolled over to Dell’s profile, and tapped into the picture of her in front of our school. “She took this shot,” I said, showing Dell her own pink-coated self.

  “Oh right.” A smile crept over her face. It was strangely sly. Either she knew something, or she liked pretending she knew something. “The response to that post was lit. I owe that girl big-time.”

  “What happened after the girl took it?”

  Dell’s smile turned sensuous. “Like, did we kiss?” Her friends laughed — although it wasn’t equally funny to all of them.

  “No.” I tried to keep the edge out of my voice. “Did you guys talk to each other?”

  She stood up and all her friends shifted and seemed to tense. “No, we didn’t talk.”

  I took imaginary stock of where the exit was, how fast I’d need to run, how loudly I might need to scream. “Did she leave with you?”

  “What? No.” Her sly cool didn’t break, but I could tell she was calculating something.

  “Did you see her leave the park after?”

  “No.”

  I looked at the other kids. “Were you there that day? Did you see where the girl went?”

  They all exchanged glances and then settled back to look at me. My skin tingled. Something was brewing.

  “No,” Dell said. “I don’t remember her. None of us do.” The other kids put sorry expressions on their faces and shook their heads.

  I dropped my phone-holding hand and looked at my feet. What could I do? I wasn’t equipped with the Persuasion Superpower. I couldn’t force them to tell me what I needed to hear. And maybe they didn’t know anything at all. And maybe I should’ve been grateful they were talking to me at all.

  “I’m so sorry,” Dell said in her craftiest baby voice. She’d come close enough to touch my elbow. “Breakups suck. But your girlfriend is hot — you should try to get her back.” She turned to her friends. “She should come to the party next week, huh?” Her friends shrugged and murmured half-words. Dell rummaged in her purse and pulled out a pen. She lifted my left hand and clicked the pen to write. Krista’s phone was in my hand, so she wrote on the inside of my wrist. A date, time, address. The faint pressure tickled. “Password is sweet-sweet. You have to come. It’ll be off the hook.”

  I remembered Remy telling me how they’d just announced Dell as the host of that huge Influencers party next week. No one ever invited me to parties.

  “Who knows —” Dell clicked the pen and put it away. “Maybe your girlfriend will even show. You guys can kiss and make up.” She studied my face. “You should check out Radiant Beam. It’ll make your skin super-soft and bright. You can find it on my feed.”

  “Okay.” I wasn’t thinking straight. “Thanks.”

  “Here, we’ll do a before-and-after.” With one slick move, she pulled her phone from her pocket, unlocked it, and snapped a photo of my face. “Order it through my link today, and we’ll comp you an ‘after’ at the party.”

  Barbie-Boy leaned in. “Yeah, and don’t forget to like and leave a comment.”

  “Hey,” Dell said to me with a dazzling smile. “We can make you famous!” And then she stepped back among her friends and they became an artfully packaged pack as they walked towards the door.

  I don’t know why I had to blurt it out. I guess the crow and its over-the-top messages had screwed with my synapses. “You’re supposed to leave your eyes open.”

  Dell turned back first, and then the others followed — a fan of fake-curious expressions. “Hmm?”

  “The thing to make you fall in love. You’re supposed to stare at each other.”

  “For real?” Dell said. I nodded and she gave Barbie-Boy a smack on his arm. “I told you we were doing it wrong!” Then she let out a baby-laugh and spun towards the door. The other kids laughed too and lined up behind her and, one by one, they disappeared from the courtyard.

  “IF YOU THINK OF anything …”

  Clio had said it to me, and I had said it to Boyd, and Remy had brought me to Dell. As I headed down the street away from her school, I rummaged through my coat pocket for the card Clio had given me.

  Joseph B. Stanzi. Detective.

  Detectives have resources and power that I would never have. I could tell Joseph B. about Dell. Get him to look into her whereabouts at the time of Krista’s disappearance. If I dropped Dell in his lap, he’d have to talk to her, right? He’d put the pressure on. And when he found Krista — and it would probably take less than six days — then I would deal with the fall, whatever it was going to be.

  The thought of watching Krista go down took on epic, thrilling scope.

  I rode the two transfers to Joseph B. Stanzi’s precinct, got off the bus, and found my bearings. The road was really wide, with three lanes traveling in each direction. Gas stations, fast food joints, coffee shops, auto repair garages, big-box hardware stores. That kind of neighborhood. The police station was on the other side of the road, a brick and glass rectangle with sliding glass doors as a front entrance.

  I crossed the busy street and walked inside. The lobby was state-of-the-art — leather and chrome benches, steel security doors, glass rooms-inside-rooms where, on the other side, female and male officers stared at multiple computer screens.

  It wasn’t clear right away how I should conduct myself. There were a few people waiting on the leather benches, and I decided to camouflage myself among them until I learned how the regulars handled the whole confessing business. Not that I was confessing to anything, but it would be helpful to see how it was done.

  I slumped into one of the benches against the back wall and hugged my bag to my stomach. It felt good to sit. I was tired in a way I’d never been tired before.

  THE NEXT THING I knew, I was flying out of deep smothering black and into an alien world that was tipped on its side. Spaceship steel and glass. Blue robots patrolling high-tech consoles. Outcasts from dying planets huddled in corners.

  There was a sharp jab in my ribs and I jolted up and rubbed my eyes. The police station came into focus and I had a strong and sudden urge to burst into tears.

  “You can’t sleep here.” It was a gravelly voice near my left ear and I turned towards it. An old man and woman were hunched on the bench beside me, staring at me through squinted, crinkled eyes. They both wore oversized woolen scarves and sweaters that had been thrown on in musty layers. The man was closest to me and he had his elbow up and aimed for my ribs, as if he was going to jab me with it again. The woman leaned over him and said, “They don’t like it if you sleep here. Word to the wise.”

  I tried to swallow, but my mouth was too dry.

  “If you’re here for the community meeting,” the woman said, “the coffee’s crap. I suggest you run quick and get a take-out.” She lifted her hand to show me the paper cup she was clutching. “Right at the corner,” she said.

  I couldn’t help eyeing my backpack. Was my wallet, my two hundred dollars, still in it?

  “They’s starting in a few,” said the man. His eyebrow hairs were out of control, curling over his forehead and onto his eye-lids. “Best hurry.”

  “I’m not here for the meeting.” My voice was raspy with sleep-phlegm.

  “No? Then why’re you here?” The woman sounded astounded. Like there was no other reason to be sitting in the lobby of a police station.

  “Gonna kick you out if you got no reason to be here,” said the man.

  I tried to pretend that my hand wasn’t searching for my wallet among the new sweatshirts and underwear in my backpack. “I’m here about a girl.”

  “And who is this girl to you?”

  The question, the whiff of suspicion, triggered some kind of brain malfunction. A sickening urge to justify myself
. I blurted, “My sister.”

  “Your sister?!” the woman said like it was incredible a person could have one.

  “She ran away,” I said, cringing so deeply inside that my teeth could’ve chewed my toes. “I’m looking for her.”

  “You got a picture?” said the man. “Maybe I seen her. I get around.”

  There was nothing to lose at this point. I took out Krista’s phone and tapped into her photo. The picture I’d shown Dell. The perfect one.

  The old people huddled over me, their crinkled eyes maniacally close to the screen. The man tapped Krista’s filtered cheek. “That there’s a mask. No way she looks like that.”

  The woman reached over him and tugged my coat. “Oh hey! Kreeboy’s also tryna catch a girl. Been here all day tryna get ’em to help. They keep kicking him out, he keeps coming back. You should talk to him.”

  “Who’s Kreeboy?” I said.

  “Got the raven on his back.”

  “No, it’s a crow,” said the man.

  My skin prickled.

  “Dropped a feather on his neck,” said the woman.

  A crow. A feather.

  I tried to hide the slight tremor in my voice. “Is there a crow in here?”

  The man leaned back so he could eye me. “I guess you gotta go to the march.”

  The woman leaned over his lap, towards me. “It’s for missing girls.”

  “The boy’s people are organizing it. He was just here tryna get us all to go.” He looked around at the collection of huddled outcasts. “No one seemed too interested.”

  “Yeah,” the woman said, lifting her coffee for a sip. “Felt kinda sorry for him.”

  “It’s a sorry thing, that’s for sure.”

  “He said they were meeting at the owl.”

  “Owl?” So much adrenaline surged on my tongue, it was as if I was being force-fed mercury.

  “The bird of the city,” the woman said.

  I shook my head.

  “You know,” the man said. “The important one.”

  “With the wings.” The woman lifted her arms to show me. Coffee sloshed out of the sippy part of her cup and landed on her sweater. I watched the stain sink into the faded, patterned wool. Then I knew what they meant. “Oh,” I said, “you mean City Hall. The Celebrate Your Fears statue.”

  Even as I said it, my ears began to burn. Back in fourth grade when Remy and I were still friends, our class had toured City Hall. We were all too hyper to pay attention to the lectures about local politics and who did which job for what reason. I was following Remy around, giggling at everything she giggled at — the stinky carpets, the guide’s faint lisp, each other, ourselves. And then the large bronze owl in the plaza with its stoic face and open wings. It’s no wonder I’d misheard the guide. Celebrate Your Fears, I was sure he’d said. He paused at the statue so we’d take a moment to contemplate its brilliance. And I did stop giggling for a second. I did marvel. I had a lot of fears to celebrate. The unexpected twist had been a revelation.

  “Celebrate Your Fellows,” I said to the old people, my whole face burning. My revelations were always imploding. “That’s what I meant.”

  “Now you got it,” said the man.

  “When is the march?” I said.

  “Today at two.”

  Owl emoji, Fri at 2.

  Once, all of us had hung out together at City Hall plaza — me, Krista, Boyd, L.J., Anusha, Hattie. There’d been some kind of music festival going on — no performers I liked — and we’d traveled down by bus when we were supposed to be studying at Boyd’s. It had started out fun. Boyd and I running around the square, playing tag while the others watched, him catching me, me letting him. Krista coming up to us, vigilante-style, and pulling out a water bottle she’d brought from home, filled with orange juice and mostly vodka. I couldn’t say no. Not there, like that, with everyone watching. We took turns drinking. I was the first one out. Sick and puking behind the pedestal of the owl statue. I couldn’t look at any of them afterwards as we rode the bus home. Krista kept poking the back of my neck.

  I checked her phone. Ten a.m.

  “There he is,” said the woman. She pointed her sweater-covered hand down the main hall.

  A young guy, maybe a couple of years older than me, was walking towards the lobby, wielding a rectangle of poster board above his head. He was tall and lanky and wore a black zippered hoodie. Faded black jeans clung to his hips and a tweed newsboy cap was pulled over his short-cropped dark brown hair. His eyes were intent, focused. Not someone named Kreeboy, I realized. A boy who is Cree.

  An enlarged printed photo was glued to the poster board in his hands. It was a picture of a girl with long, dark hair. Scrawled in blue marker above her: Have you seen Jocelyn? Missing for 27 days.

  He arrived in the lobby and turned to face the pass-through door that secured the police station from the lobby. He angled his body in a way that allowed me to see the back of his hoodie. Fluorescent yellow eyes stared at me, fluorescent feathered eyebrows slanted sharply over them, a black beak was outlined below. The crow.

  Even though no one paid attention to him, he stood his ground, aiming his poster one way then the other. He glanced back over his shoulder and for that one heartbeat our eyes met.

  An electrical charge went through me.

  It was the crow, I told myself. It was both of us looking for a girl on the same day in the same place. The chance of it. The wonder. Nothing more than that.

  The front doors flew open and a force blew in. He was imposing enough that everyone looked over, watched as he headed to the security door by the front desk. The boy stepped in front of him. “Detective Stanzi —”

  Detective Joseph B. Stanzi. The grizzled man, wearing the same wrinkled brown suit, that I’d seen coming out of Clio’s house the day before.

  Stanzi put up his hand to stop the boy. “We’re working on it.”

  “Are you working on it though?” The boy took another step to block Stanzi’s way in. “Because none of your guys are up there looking for her.” His voice was deep and sure.

  Stanzi tried to get around him. “And I keep telling you. That’s a different jurisdiction. They have a team in Deerhead assigned to that case.”

  The boy took another step to block him. “There’s no team in Deerhead looking for her. They haven’t even put a trace on her phone! What if she’s in the city? She could’ve come down here. She comes down here sometimes.”

  Stanzi took a step again and so did the boy. “If there’s any evidence she came down, we’ll hear about it and we will look into it.”

  “And I’m telling you, not one single authority is looking for her.”

  “Listen, kid, I don’t have time for your politics.”

  “Politics? This is a missing girl!”

  “Hey, hey!” Stanzi held up both hands like he was stopping himself from manhandling the kid. “Settle down or we’re gonna have a real problem here.”

  The boy foisted his poster at Stanzi. “But you won’t look for her! You never look for any of them!”

  “Okay, I’ve had enough of this BS.” Stanzi looked through the glass at the welcome desk. “Someone get this kid out of here.” The officers behind the glass looked up, each for a half-second, then they went back to deciphering whatever was on their screens. Stanzi waved his hand like he was fed up with everyone. He pushed past the boy, opened the secured door, and went through it, stranding the boy in the lobby.

  The boy glanced down at the poster board in his hands. He stared hard at the photo on it. An imaginary film of his missing girl — Jocelyn — played in my mind. Their idyllic but tragic-fated love. He is so into her, she is so into him. Him holding her, laughing with her, kissing her. Then she’s gone, and he is devastated.

  I felt a sharp jab in my side, and I started and looked over at the old people. “Now
you gotta go for it,” the man said, his elbow angled to jab me again.

  I couldn’t speak, couldn’t decide what to do. I’d come here for Detective Stanzi. I was supposed to tell him about Dell. He’d walked by me only a few moments before. All I had to do was go up to the front desk and ask to speak to him.

  But Stanzi was different than I’d imagined. Clio was so, so grateful to him. I thought he’d be reassuring. Concerned, determined. Not someone who challenged claims and said there was nothing he could do.

  “Go talk to him,” the old woman said.

  I didn’t know who they wanted me to talk to. The kid? Detective Stanzi?

  The boy was hunched over now, spinning the Jocelyn poster into a roll against his knees. I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his fingers flexed around the board. His anger.

  He pulled out a backpack that had been shoved under one of the benches, slipped the rolled poster under the top flap. Then he strapped the backpack over his shoulders and stood tall.

  I waited for him to look my way again. If he looked at me, it would be a sign. A direction.

  But he didn’t look at me. He shook his head with disdain and zipped his hoodie and set his expression. Then he walked to the main entrance and pushed his way outside. The glass double doors slid closed behind him.

  “Is that you?” the old man jabbed me in the ribs again. I followed his pointing finger. Behind the police window, one of the officers had flipped her computer screen our way so she could get at something behind it.

  My face was on her computer. A terrible photo.

  It was really a picture that Mom had taken of Trevor at Christmas the year before. The shot had been framed to cut him out, but you could still see his hands cradling an unwrapped collection of manga. I was in the background, waiting for my turn. My face was too white — Mom had forgotten to turn the flash off — and my pupils were red spots. It surprised me that no one had bothered to fix that. My usual long hair framed my face, but bangs cut across my forehead. The bangs had been a desperate attempt to salvage my grade nine reputation. But they looked awkward, had made me feel awkward, and I’d grown them out.