The Year of Disappearances

The tradition took some getting used to. Three first-year students and two sophomores gave up and went home to recover from stress. Most of the juniors and seniors knew enough to stock up on caffeine and pills that kept them awake; they strode among us with bloodshot eyes and cynical sneers, like battle-hardened veterans.



But while some of us—such as Jacey, Richard, and me—virtually lived in the library and spent hour after hour at the computer keyboard when we weren’t in class or at our work assignments, a large number of the others blissfully self-medicated themselves against academic achievement. I was tired of the sight of Bernadette—yes, she did come back—wandering in and out of our room at all hours, sometimes with Walker in tow, sometimes with another boy or a couple of girls. She’d given up regular hygiene habits, and I could literally smell her before she came in. Sometimes I found a T-shirt or underwear that belonged to me, balled up on the floor, carrying the same smell. I washed the T-shirt, but I threw the underwear away.



Walker didn’t smell yet, probably because he liked to walk in the rain. Still, when I stood near him during our shifts at the recycling center, I noticed how straggly his hair and beard had become. He talked to me sometimes, a kind of stream-of-consciousness ramble. I felt sorry for him. After a while, I tried to avoid him.



Those two weeks were the period when the campus split into two groups, defined by use of the drug Vallanium. The younger students seemed more prone to take it, maybe because they tended to be less self-assured, struggling for a sense of identity. But I was struggling, too. If I’d tried the drug, I might have been one of them; since I hadn’t, I had a clear-eyed view of its effects, and the sight was not attractive.



Early one morning I awoke with a start. Someone was in the room, rustling papers at my desk. I switched on the light that replaced my lithophane lamp—an ugly ceramic lamp I’d rescued from the recycling center.



Bernadette was leaning over my desk.



“What are you doing?”



“Looking for your politics paper.” She blinked, adjusting to the light. “I’m stuck. Reading yours might help me.”



“You want to copy my paper?”



“Just a little bit.” She smiled at me.



I slid out of bed and went to the desk. “You have no right to go through my things.”



“Whatever.” She yawned again and went back to her bed.



“And stop taking my clothes.” I tried to keep the anger out of my voice, but it came through. “You already took Walker. Isn’t that enough?”



She pulled blankets up to her chin. “You don’t have to be so uppity about it. Anyway, I didn’t take Walker. You can sleep with him, too, anytime.”



I gave up.



I stacked the papers on my desk and left the room with them and a blanket in my arms. Tomorrow I’d lock them in a suitcase. Better yet, maybe I’d find a new roommate.



Jacey found me sleeping in the lounge the next morning. When I told her what happened, she said I should hide my work in her room. “You can move in with me, if you want,” she said.



Later that day, I moved my things into Jacey’s room.



Once I turned in my papers and classes ended, some of the pressure decreased. Still ahead were exams in philosophy and literature, but I didn’t need to prepare for them. I knew the material already.



Now I had time to catch up with laundry, talk to Dashay on the phone, and even, one Friday afternoon, collect my mail—something I rarely bothered to do, since no one wrote to me. The wall of metal mailboxes was in the student center basement, near the cafeteria. I turned the combination lock. Under some fliers advertising events long passed, I found a small blue envelope, with my name and address written in sharp strokes of black ink.



A small blue card inside was engraved with the initials NC in indigo blue. The handwriting read: “I’m going sailing this Saturday. If you’d like to come along, call the number below. A car will pick you up and bring you out to St. Simon’s, where I keep the boat. Hope you can make it. Neil.”



I’d never been sailing, or to St. Simon’s Island—part of a chain of islands off the Georgia coast that included Tybee. What would I wear? I didn’t know how to handle a rudder or tie special knots. What if I made a fool of myself? My head filled with anxious thoughts and questions, along with the certainty that no matter what, I was going to see Cameron again.



Jacey wasn’t in the dorm room, so I took my cell phone from my backpack and called the number on the card. After two rings, a woman’s voice said, “You’ve reached voice mail for the home of Neil Cameron. Please leave a message after the tone.”



I left my name and number, and hung up. Then I went to the closet and looked at my options. I looked best in the blue silk dress, but one didn’t wear dresses to go sailing, did one? Jeans and a T-shirt weren’t special enough. He’d already seen my trouser suit, but perhaps he wouldn’t remember it—



My cell phone played the familiar notes from Swan Lake, and I grabbed it. “Hello?”



A man’s voice said he was returning my call. It wasn’t Cameron’s.



“I was responding to Neil Cameron’s invitation to go sailing,” I said.



“Excuse me?”



“He sent me a note,” I said. “He told me to call this number if I wanted to go sailing tomorrow.”



“Neil’s in DC.” I heard static and noise that sounded like papers rustling. “Wait a sec. That invitation was for last weekend, when he was out at St. Simon’s. Looks like you missed the boat.”



Mortified is a word I rarely use, because it means “gangrenous” as well as “embarrassed.” But that day, I said, “I’m mortified,” without reservation.



“Don’t be,” the voice said. “I’ll tell Neil you called.”



When Jacey came back late that afternoon and found me lying in bed, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling, she said, “Oh, rocks. Did you fail an exam?”



“I missed the chance to do something really special,” I said.



She grinned. “Is that all?”



I quoted the Whittier line: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” I threw my arm over my eyes so that I couldn’t see her laughing.



Then I quoted Longfellow: “Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, /Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; /So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, /Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”



“Ari, stop.” Her voice was serious now. “That’s too depressing.”



“So is my life.” I wallowed in the deep pink pleasure of self-pity.



“Now you sound like Bernadette,” she said.



That was enough to make me sit up.



“Come on,” she said. “Grab a sweater. I’ve got just the remedy for you. We’re going to All-Mart.”



I’d never been to an All-Mart, and I had no desire to go. “Aren’t we supposed to boycott places like that?”



“Yes!” she said. “They mistreat the environment. They exploit workers. But we’re not going to buy anything. We’re going to take notes!”



I didn’t move. “I didn’t think they had All-Marts around here.”



“There’s one near Waycross.”



Waycross was at least forty-five miles away, near the entrance to the Okefenokee Swamp.



“I’ll drive,” Jacey said. “It will be fun. A real road trip!”



I supposed I had nothing better to do.



In her car, Jacey told me about the minicourse she was taking called Corporate Ethics. “It’s kind of theoretical,” she said. “For my final paper, I want to make it real. If we’re lucky, we’ll see some All-Mart abuse in action.”



Her car was old and battered looking. I wished it were mine.



We passed gas stations and vacant lots for sale, a Baptist church, a sign that read PRENATAL CARE CEMETERY, and several roadside shrines featuring crosses that bore the names of highway accident victims. Most of the shrines were festooned with artificial flowers and wreaths, and one was attached to four helium-filled balloons. We rode on concrete bridges over brown rivers. The marquee of a used car lot read GIVE GOD THE GLORY.



I clutched my cell phone, willing it to ring. When it didn’t, I reminded myself that service was spotty in this part of southeastern Georgia.



Jacey sat on two cushions to let her see past the steering wheel. She talked most of the way.



“Tonight we get a full moon,” she said.



“Then it must be a blue moon.” The moon had been full early this month, when I’d first been to Tybee Island.



“Really? What shade of blue?” Jacey’s enthusiasm never annoyed me. It was refreshingly genuine, in contrast with the attitudes of most Hillhouse students.



“Not literally blue,” I said. “It’s a term for the second full moon within a month.”



“We heard about blue moons last year in my folklore class.” Jacey pulled into the All-Mart parking lot. “That’s when the moon talks to people who’ve been unlucky in love.”



“Do you really believe that?”



She parked the car and we got out. “I’d like to believe it. I’d like to hear what it would say to me.”



I realized that never once had I seen Jacey with a boyfriend—or girlfriend, for that matter. I’d been so wrapped up in myself that I never wondered if she was happy.



“Thanks for driving,” I was saying, when I noticed the van: beige, Chevrolet, bald man at the wheel. I felt the words freeze as I spoke them. I saw only the back of the driver’s head, but it looked like Sal Valentine’s. I wondered if he’d followed us.



The van had parked along the curb outside the store entrance. A girl smoking a cigarette leaned against the passenger door, talking to the driver inside.



As we approached the store, I told Jacey to go in without me. “I’ll catch up in a minute,” I said.



She looked surprised, but she kept walking.



I came closer to the van. “Excuse me,” I said, loud enough to make other shoppers turn around.



The girl turned. She had short red hair, and she looked about fifteen.



“Get away from here.” I pitched my voice lower now, but I made each word as emphatic as I could. “This guy is trouble. He abducts girls. He killed a friend of mine. Get away now.”



She didn’t move. She didn’t even blink. She took a drag on the cigarette, and that’s when I noticed her eyes. They looked lifeless as a store mannequin’s.



It was too late. She’d already been recruited.



I felt Sal’s eyes fix on me, felt their heat reach my face. I turned and ran into All-Mart.