Kim

By the time she was fourteen-and-something she already had a reputation, whispered in the boys’ locker room and in conversations behind the bleachers. Ryan claimed to have gotten to third base with her and solemnly swore that she shaved down there, though we doubted that he knew for sure. Juan-Ho and Adam claimed to have met up with her in the birch grove behind the soccer field, and that she’d invited them to feel her up and that she wasn’t wearing a bra. And it’s true that there were no tell-tale bulges where the straps would be. We looked. But what girl would dare to come to school without one? Even if her chest wasn’t that big?

And she did nothing to discourage the rumors. She allowed the boys’ hands to brush against her, and sometimes she pressed against us so that we could feel the pressure of her breasts, and once she did something to Connor in biology lab when they were partnered together. Connor is shy, and he was so surprised that he knocked the stack of slides that they were supposed to be working on onto the floor and drew stares from around the classroom. Kim put her hands over her mouth, suppressing giggles.

After class, we crowded around Conner.

“Come on, what happened?’

“Did she grab you?”

“Shit, Connor, you’re blushing! Did she feel your…”

“Cut it out! No!”

“Connor, really? Right in class?”

“Was it just quick, like, or real slow, so she could…”

“Stop it!”

“Like the time that…”

“Jesus, Connor! You gonna take her to the woods?”

And it was only the approach of Ms. Arsenault that spared poor Connor from further interrogation.

From then on, Connor avoided Kim, especially between classes, and when she approached him in the halls from the opposite direction he looked down or looked away or looked at the lockers, anywhere but at her, because he could see that she was smirking at him and seemed to be sidling over so that she could “accidentally” bump into him. And there was probably no truth to the rumor that they were seen walking together out past the soccer field toward the birch trees with her hand in the back pocket of his jeans as she leaned against him. Probably.

The other girls hated her. Called her a slut. They would gather in groups of three or four around the door of the girls’ room, whispering, and scowling when she came near. They’d heard the same rumors that the boys had. She stole—or threatened to steal—their boyfriends, met up with upperclassmen in the stairwells, and wore low-slung jeans and skimpy crop-tops that revealed the smooth curve of her tummy and hinted at what lay south of it. Her Lycra tops showed pretty much everything. She could raise her long-lashed eyes invitingly to some boy, or lower them demurely when pleading with a teacher for an extra day to complete an assignment.

And naturally, those same girls envied her, and yearned to be among the best of her besties.

They invited her to parties, and when she and some boy would disappear and then reappear a half-hour later, they whispered among themselves and secretly wished that they had been in her place. They smoked the pot that she brought, and freely shared theirs when they had it. They vaped together in the bathrooms at school, and when they had no stories of sexual exploits to share, made them up, and she never challenged their authenticity but giggled delightedly at their wickedness.

There were other rumors, too, like the one that her parents belonged to some kind of weird religious cult and that she had to go through a complete costume change each day at school so as not to risk some kind of brutal punishment at home. Or that the parents weren’t really married, that they believed in free love, and gave Kim all the pot that she could smoke. That they were dirt poor, on welfare. That they were phenomenally rich. And yet, strangely, to all outward appearances Kim was a normal, happy, well-adjusted girl. Who just happened to sleep with about half the boys in the school.

Ty did not go to our school. He was older, like in his twenties, with shaggy hair, and a calculated slouch as he leaned against a tree or the side of the building and watched. Occasionally a school security guard would appear, and Ty would vanish like some kind of daytime phantom. We decided that he was Kim’s source, and it was from him that she was able to score her seemingly endless supply of pot. But how did she pay for it? Her rich parents? Was there more to it than just dope? And how did Ty’s name even get into circulation?

Some guessed that he was her hook-up, too, because the boys at school were too immature for her. That may have been so, because for all the talk, no one was able to determine if any of us had actually had sex with her. Not even at parties when cases of beer and bottles of vodka would appear, and the air was thick with the smell of weed and the parents were safely out of town.

Juan-Ho and Adam met up with her one Friday afternoon in May in the parking lot. She teased them, as she always did, smiling and adjusting her top so that they could see a just a little bit more of the smooth curve of her breasts, the protruding nipples, a little bit more skin.

“Where you going?” Juan-Ho asked. He was tall and good-looking, with dark eyes and bright, perfectly even teeth.

“I gotta get home,” she answered, still smiling. “Hadn’t you better be getting home, too?”

“Naw,” he grinned back. “Not right away. You wanna hang out?”

“You mean, with both of you?”

“Wouldn’t you like that?” He was facing her, and he put his hands on her hips as Adam stepped behind her. She was sandwiched between them.

“Adam, what’re you doing?” she laughed. He was attempting to grind against her and Juan-Ho brought his face close to hers, but she dodged his attempt at a kiss. “Come on, you’re getting yourself all excited. We can’t do anything here.”

“We could go somewhere else,” Adam answered. “The three of us.”

She laughed out loud. “Eew! That’s gross! What you wanna to do, make a porn film?” She laughed again and tossed her bright blonde hair and twisted one curl around her fingers. Even in refusing the invitation, her voice had a cheerful, seductive lilt to it.

Adam swore afterwards that she had actually groped him, and Juan-Ho said that they had Frenched. The details were unclear. What was clear, though, was that just then a car pulled into the lot. It was a Honda four-door, or maybe a Hyundai, something, light gray, or maybe blue, and the driver honked twice. Or three times. Kim broke free of the boys, laughing, grabbed her backpack and trotted over to the car. She threw her pack into the rear seat and opened the front passenger door, looked back at the two frustrated boys and wiggled her fingers at them, smiling happily. Then she was gone.

They were pretty sure they’d seen the car around before, and we all assumed that it was Ty’s. She was probably scoring some weed off of him.

She didn’t show up at the party Bryce threw at his house that night. Her absence seemed somehow to encourage us, if anything. One girl got so drunk that she puked all over the bathtub because she couldn’t make it to the toilet or couldn’t tell the difference. A game of truth-or-dare ended in boys peeling off their clothes and jumping into the pool, and the girls—some of them—stripping each other and diving in, too. It was pretty wild. But without Kim there, something just wasn’t right.

The next morning the cops were all over the place, knocking on doors. We all thought at first that it was on account of the party; we’d done our best to clean up, but you know how it is. But the cops didn’t seem that interested. Not in the party itself, that is. They shook their heads, kind of disgusted but obviously they had other things to worry about. Kim had been missing since yesterday afternoon.

Adam and Juan-Ho got the third degree, but in the hands of the cops they were nothing but a couple of sophomore boys jacked up on hormones and wishful thinking. The girls were more cautious, afraid that spilling their guts might lead to self-incrimination. But in the end, nobody seemed to know much of anything for certain.

We were sure that it was Ty, because it couldn’t be anyone else. But there was no license plate to ID, and blue—or gray—Japanese four-door sedans were as common as the Canada goose crap on the baseball field. The boys who bragged of getting blow jobs from Kim between classes became blushing virgins. The girls were pretty much the same. The groups that formed at certain cafeteria tables dissolved, and of course, none of them used illegal substances. Only a few had ever heard of vaping.

But perhaps the strangest thing was that we had to admit, out loud, that none of us really knew Kim at all. She was a mystery. True, her wardrobe pushed the dress code envelope about as far as it would go, and she had a way of attracting boys like a bitch in heat attracts dogs, and she smoked and drank with the rest of us, but she never passed out, or threw up, or took her clothes off and dove into the swimming pool. She just didn’t do any of that. We even considered the idea that Connor had been telling the truth, that she hadn’t felt him up after all. Take away the rumors, the innuendo, and she was just this achingly pretty girl with nothing but promising, happy teen years before her.

And when we finally saw the parents on the local TV news, red-eyed and clinging to each other, pleading into the camera for the return of their beloved daughter, we were struck by their ordinariness. The house behind them was pleasant enough, but no better than upper-middle-class. The father looked like a businessman who might work in an insurance company or a bank. There was nothing that suggested any of the extremes that our imaginations had concocted. We had to admit that we’d all been wrong.

And yet.

We couldn’t quite reconcile ourselves to the idea that Kim had just been, well, just an ordinary girl. If the stories the boys told were exaggerated, well, there seemed to be at least a foundation of truth there. After all, she’d been seen heading to the birch grove with Connor. Conner, of all people. And there couldn’t be any mistaking the look she’d give us that would leave our hearts throbbing and our privates aching.

There was fear, too. It was something far more personal than the rehearsed lockdown drills could ever be. It was the difference between fear of being blown up by a bomb, or the much more visceral fear of someone quietly breaking into your house at night. It wasn’t even the fear of being kidnapped or being abducted. It was the fear of being unwittingly, unsuspectingly, lured into something beyond your control. Like, for instance, the truth.

The police didn’t find squat for days. There was no ransom note. No contact from an abductor. At school, we exchanged what little news there was, all of which we had already seen on TV. There were whispered comments, exchanged glances, groups that would suddenly appear for a few moments and then disperse. The police were following leads. They were examining different makes of cars, of tire treads, of photos of boys—and men—of about 18, 20, 25, even 30, potential predators who might have been seen loitering around the school. They examined surveillance camera recordings. They interviewed. They held press conferences, answered questions with “no comment” and returned to their searching. After a week or so, they still didn’t have anything.

The TV anchors and reporters started making comparisons with notorious cases on national news. A reward was offered. Dogs were brought in. At school, we speculated that they might be cadaver-sniffing dogs, and though the boys laughed uncomfortably, some of the girls were genuinely frightened. Bare midriffs disappeared. Nobody seemed to stay still. Everyone had to be someplace after school. After the last class, the parking lot emptied. Teams continued to practice, but players kept glancing at the woods surrounding the fields.

Then, suddenly, Ty was found. We knew it was him, all along. The discovery had been almost accidental: one of the search parties came upon his hideout. He’d been staying in a remote cabin about sixty miles away, a place that had once been used by the forest service but had long been abandoned and forgotten. The news people suggested that Ty was some kind of survivalist, or at the very least had stockpiled enough supplies so that he wouldn’t have to shop and risk recognition. That might have been true. There was a woodstove and the hand pump gave a steady stream of clear water. There were a few kitchen utensils, some plates and cutlery. There was a blanket on the bed and some clothes hanging on pegs, a handsaw and some furniture. One could stay up there for some time.

But there was no food, no money, and of course, no Kim. No sign of her.

She had been there. Ty gave a statement to the police, which they refused to release, claiming that they needed to verify the details, that it might prejudice a criminal case that was still under investigation. They shook their heads a lot, and tried to dodge reporters’ questions. After a while, though, telltale words began slip into their statements: “Incredible” and “bizarre” and even “frightening.”

Nobody heard anything more. From time to time, the TV news would announce that there was no news. Days, then weeks, passed, and school was out for the summer. We reconnected, though usually with new friends. It seemed that our old groups had somehow turned toxic, and we all wanted to start fresh, possibly recognizing that it would not be possible to experience school quite the same way after the events of the past spring.

Then, finally, Ty’s story surfaced. Or some of it.

Kim had spotted his car from across the parking lot, where she’d been messing around with a couple of boys. “You teasing?” he demanded as she tossed her backpack into the back seat and slipped in beside him. If he didn’t sound very friendly, it was OK, because he rarely did. It was not that kind of relationship.

He pulled out of the parking lot. “Keep your head down,” he demanded. But instead of answering, she just smiled and stroked the inside of his thigh. He pulled out of the school parking lot.

“Got any weed?” she asked, and when he popped open the glove compartment she fished around until she found the baggie and papers. “Just don’t hit any bumps,” she ordered, as she unfolded the paper, carefully crushed several pinches of pot onto them and deftly rolled up the joint. “Where we going?”

“You’ll see,” he said, and accepted the lit joint from her. “I got a really cool place.”

“Where?”

“Never mind. It’s a ways from here,” he said.

In a few minutes they were on the highway headed north. It was warm and bright; the oppressive humidity from the past few days had lessened, and the skies were bright blue and the clouds friendly. Ty spoke in monosyllables, and when Kim asked again where they were going, he only muttered, “You’ll see.” He drove carefully, always using his turn signal, and slowing down if it seemed that he was going too much faster than the other cars.

After an hour of driving, Ty pulled off and they took a number of secondary roads high into the hills where houses were further and further apart, until they finally disappeared altogether. He swerved onto a dirt track and after several miles arrived at the cabin.

“This is it?” she asked.

“We’re going to stay here for a while,” he answered.

“What you mean?” she demanded. “I gotta get back.”

“What for?” He sounded almost threatening. “You gotta meet someone? Your little boyfriends in the parking lot?”

“Like, what about my parents?”

“Oh, your parents. Yeah. We’ll be in touch with them.”

She got out of the car on her own but he almost shoved her through the front door of the cabin. She recovered and looked around: the place was actually tidy. He’d made it ready for them; there was cut wood stacked beside a cast iron stove, a battered table with two unmatched chairs in the center of the room and a bed with sheets and a blanket against one wall. She stepped in and he kicked the door shut behind them. She took her time, looking around, touching the furniture and lifting the lid to the woodstove. She kicked off her shoes and walked over to the bed and sat down on it, testing its firmness, then turned to him.

“So what happens now?” she demanded. “You gonna rape me?”

He moved forward a couple of steps. “That what you want?”

There was a long pause. A silence, as if they were waiting. She didn’t seem frightened. Then, suddenly, she smiled. “Just don’t hurt me too much,” she asked. An invitation. “Just a little. Some. I’ll do what you want.” She didn’t rush. She just stood up, undid her shorts and let them drop. Her hips swayed a little as she stepped out of them and, smiling the whole time, crossed over to him and slowly laid her hands on his belt buckle. She raised her head to him. “I like doing it,” she whispered. “I’ve done it before. Lots of times. But you knew that, didn’t you? And you can be rough if you want. That’s really cool. I like it rough. Then I can be rough with you. You think you won’t like it, but you will. You’ll see. You want? You want to do that? You can do me first. Then I’ll do you. It’ll be fun. Would you like that?”

When Ty was found, about a week after they’d disappeared, he had been zip-tied to the stove and savagely beaten. He was wearing only a torn flannel shirt and was covered with bruises, big ones, and burn marks, and cuts that looked like they’d been done with a razor blade. He hadn’t eaten in a long time and was, according to the stories, dehydrated and delirious. He was a difficult witness and sometimes gave conflicting versions of the events.

But it was all we had. Kim had vanished. Then it was fall, and there was no trace of her. A couple of us thought that they had seen her on the street, or at an ATM, and then nothing. Her parents moved away the next spring, about a year after Kim disappeared. Ty was never charged with anything. He died in a freak accident that October, when he set his own sleeping bag on fire. He’d been camping out in the woods, got drunk and passed out, and fell asleep too close to the fire. He died of smoke inhalation. As for the rest of us, the whole episode had a deeply sobering effect. Vaping became unpopular. Clothing got a lot more conservative. Dating was much more reserved; almost chaste. The orgiastic parties ceased—not exactly all at once, but everyone was kind of nervous about them. The older kids among us thought seriously about college, or steady work.

But we still kept glancing at the woods when we were out on the soccer field, or awaiting our at-bats in the dugout. Kept glancing over our shoulders. And we were all cautious about what we said about others, or to others, always trying to read each other’s thoughts. And we were particularly careful not to reveal too much about ourselves, what we were thinking, or feeling. And while we were all friends, and we trusted each other, no one knew where, exactly, the truth lay. Or what might happen to us if we suddenly learned it.