Summer Skies

00. Missing Time

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I REMEMBER WAKING UP, MISSING TIME. Danielle.

Flash.

I'd only seen her for half a heartbeat.

Flash!

Then I wake up lapped up in a dark surf, salty lips and cheeks and jaw. Chewing. My whole body aching.

Then I...

Danielle?

Danielle was gone. Danielle...

I remember her hair, feathered, all blurry and grainy. Fizzing. Burning?

Her body so... limp.

"They took her," I keep saying. They took Dani.

But I'm in the bed of a pick-up truck, all sandy-smeared and scraped raw. Very Texas Chainsaw chic. My head hurts. I'm laughing. I'm floating, heavy, sopping wet. Waves lapping. I'm watching wooden telephone poles and tangled wires and a water tower drifting further and further and further away. There's a bruised skyline—an endless fringe of trees passing by in a blur. My own rambling echoing.

"Who?" Who took her, Birdie?

I don't know.

"Did you see anybody?"

I didn't—

"Who?"

I wasn't...

"They took her."

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Somebody had picked me up on Fortunes Road, a long stretch of wilderness off Gulls Rock. I'd been stumbling along, shivering, clawing seaweed off. My clothes drenched. Disoriented.

I couldn't give an address.

Somebody delivered me to Back Bay's Police Department. It was tiny, in a crest off Main. Cruisers surrounded a shifty block of a neighborhood behind. Yummy Garden sat across and Empire DVDs beside it. Louis's Pizza. Coasters. Streetlights flickering. Everything quiet, but a dimly lit station lost at sea, swarmed by impossible darkness—a small town night of a small town summer I would always remember.

Danielle.

"They—"

They don't believe it. They don't believe me.

I wasn't lying. I couldn't—wouldn't. Not about Danielle.

"They took her," I said again, dizzy, dehydrated, desperately pleading. "Dani. They—

"Who?"

My lips are chapped, salty-dry.

Dani was gone.

Gone.

Did it sweep her away? Did it pull her under? Did Danie—

My stomach lurches.

No.

"Birdie," he's saying. "We can't help if we don't know anything."

My ass hurts. I'd been waiting for an hour in soaked clothing. They'd offered only a worn, ragged dishcloth, and I draped it over my damp shoulders silently. My flip flops keep squelching.

I don't know, I barely whisper.

Because I don't know.

"What about these, uh, bruises, Birdie?"

"Bruises?" My voice is strained, almost a harsh croak of disbelief. I blink, under a sheen of fluorescence, silvery-grey. There is a constellation of purple splotches roping around my forearms and biceps, burst off papery flesh. Wincing, I slink back, hugging myself. Hiding. Bruises?

"Can you, uh, tell me a bit about how you maybe got those bruises, Birdie?"

My fingers slip at a hem. Bewildered. Hopeless. My gaze low. Nobody believes you.

"I don't— I don't remember..."

"Were you and Danielle arguing? Fighting, perhaps?" It's a sickeningly sweet offer, as if I'm looking for a story, as if I'm fucking lying. "Maybe a boy was involved, a boy you're afraid of naming..."

"What? No—" I inhale sharply. Nobody else had been with us. No.

It was just... Dani and I.

It was us all summer long, wasting time together in Back Bay.

Dani and I wandering, under oaks in Price Park and by riverbeds in Framing and in wild gusts along Gulls Rock. There on Main Street, bumming in Lafayette Park. There at Hayfield, lying in Little Field. Everywhere I look in Back Bay, Danielle and I are alone. Nobody really knew us. Nobody cared about us.

"Danielle. I saw her, I was..." My brows crease as I remember in a hazy fog. I was... walking. Humid. My shirt stuck to my chest, sweaty-cold. My flip flops shucking up sand behind—

My head reels.

There was a raised flag of crossbones, and a dwindling bonfire of driftwood—colors sifting up smoky. Blue. Green. Crackling.

Her silhouette—

I wince. Suddenly, I'm swept by a wild pang of burning in my skull. Pressure. Pins.

"I can't..."

Her silhouette along a rocky ridge—

"I saw—"

Looking... up.

Pain lashes harder, and I bite back a cry. I choke. I can't breathe. I search frantically, blinking, heaving, wishing I could stop, stop, stop. Lights flickering around my memory, dying. My mind plummeting into flat-black darkness.

It's all I remember.

"Birdie..."

My empty gaze lifting. Numbness seems to be spreading with a slow buzz. I finally look at him: Officer Garrett Livingston.

"Hm?"

I look at him. Hard.

"Were you... running away?" Pause. "Was Danielle running away?"

"Nobody..." I grind, scraping a hand through my salt-crusty hair impatiently, "...was running away."

They took her.

Officer Livingston softens, a fucked up look in his rough-grey eyes, regarding my outburst with pitiful knowing. "We know Ms. Price's home life isn't perfect, Birdie." It's all dripping in honey, apologetically exasperated, as if she's in here every week with drama—and not just once when she was terrified of Robert.

(We know Danielle, Birdie.)

No, I know Danielle.

"If she was planning on going anywhere with anybody," he says, stiffening, "Danielle could be in danger."

"No. No— I..." My voice is breaking now, and I don't understand. I don't want to understand.

Why would Danielle go anywhere with anybody else? Why wouldn't I be with her?

They took her.

They took Danielle Price, and nobody believes me. 

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