A Girl Named Digit

My Life is Based on a True Story

My Life is Based on a True Story

[Chapter One]

On the morning of my kidnapping, my mom's makeup was perfect. After years of training in television and film, she had mastered how to apply exactly the right amount so that she would appear flawless to the camera, while not looking garish in person. Smoky gray eye shadow framed her lids, and the lightest application of mascara-waterproof for the somber occasion-darkened her lashes. She'd lined her lips in what I knew was her go-to lip liner and filled it in with the palest nude lipstick. To the untrained eye, she looked as if she could have woken up like this, at once tragic and gorgeous.

What surprised me more was her outfit, which had taken some serious thought. Our house is painted French blue, with a darkly stained brown door, surrounded by hot pink bougainvillea that creeps down the walls like ivy. She stood perfectly framed in the doorway in a turquoise T-shirt with the thinnest stripe of the same exact hot pink. Her white linen pants looked crisp against the backdrop and picked up the trim around the door. Perfect. I'm sure I'm the only one who noticed this, as everyone else probably focused on the brigade of television cameras that surrounded her. And the fact that she was sobbing.

One guy from CBS yelled out above the others, "Mrs. Higgins, when did you notice she was gone?" She looked down and whispered, "Gone," and started sobbing again. The hungry reporters realized that, besides the dramatic clip for the evening news promo, they were getting nowhere with her. They turned to my dad, who looked a little disheveled in his normal college professor way, no different at eight a.m. than at eight p.m. Always direct, he spoke right into the camera. "We found the ransom note by the front door at 6:47 this morning. We immediately checked our daughter's room and found her missing. We called the police at 6:55."

A chipper young woman from Fox asked, "Does your daughter have a habit of disappearing? Has she ever been in trouble before? Are any of her friends involved?"

My dad squared his shoulders at the camera. "We have a missing seventeen-year-old and a ransom "note. The police and her mother and I are treating this like what it is-a kidnapping. My daughter has never been in any danger before this."

NBC local news asked, "Didn't the ransom note say not to call the police? Aren't you worried the kidnappers will see this on TV and harm your daughter?" Dad looked like a deer in headlights. Apparently he hadn't thought this all the way through. The past twenty-four hours had been a blur of constantly changing lies, all strung loosely together. "We have nothing more to say." He and Mom walked back into the house.

I watched this whole scene from a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles on a six-inch TV with an actual antenna. Big-budget kidnapping. Not. I sat on one of two mismatched upholstered armchairs in a windowless room where I couldn't even tell night from day. The only reason I knew it was five o'clock just then, besides the replay of my kidnapping story on the five o'clock news, was that my captor came in with dinner.

He caught the tail end of the segment and watched with me as my mom opened the front door for a second time to offer a despondent wave to the cameras. He plopped down in the other chair and smiled. "What do you want to do now?"