Page 27 of That's Not My Name

The rest is a soggy mess after last night’s rain.

The sheriff eyes my balled-up hands. “If it’s so hard to be here, why’d you crash the search?”

I shrug. “I wanted to see who was dumb enough to give up on her.”

“And today? Why’d you leave school?”

“I didn’t feel like going home, and my options were limited without my car,” I say, pointedly. “I guess I figured I’d have to face this place eventually.”

“No time like the present?” Roane shifts in his seat and looks over at me. “Can I ask you a couple questions while we’re out here?”

Oh fun, he’s playing the supportive sheriff today. Next he’ll tell me it’s totally understandable if something did happen to Lola, becausewe all lose our temper sometimes, elbow elbow.

“That depends. Can I have my car back?”

He shakes his head. “Not until we’re done.”

I match his posture, crossing my arms. “Not until you’re done doing what? All my car will tell you is that she was in it. Which you already know. I drove Lola to and from school every day for the last two years. Her hair is all over that passenger seat, and she probably hastampons in the center console. So what the hell are you expecting to find?”

“Blood.”

I feel all of mine leave my face. “Blood? Why?”

He doesn’t respond.

“Do you have reason to believe she’s hurt?” My volume raises with every word until I’m practically shouting. And I can’t stop it because now instead of a ravine, I’m imagining her lying along the banks of this river, slowly decomposing and—“Are you saying she’s…?”

He throws up his hands. “Stop. Just stop.”

I can’t breathe. “No. Are you…are you saying you found—”

He reaches across and flings my door open. The rush of cool air hits me in the face and I gasp it in.

“We don’t know anything yet,” he yells over my panic. “Listen. We were looking for any sign of her being hurt. And since you were the last person to see her, it’s a logical jump to search for signs of injury in your car. If there was blood in the Trooper, that’s something we’d need to know.”

I take another breath. It rattles in and out. “There’s not.”

“I know. I got the report twenty minutes ago.”

My mind scrambles to catch up. So he knew there wasn’t any blood in my car before he even picked me up.

“You take my car, and when that tells you nothing, you try and shock me into admitting I hurt her? Why are you screwing around with me when you should be out there finding Lola?”

“I am trying to find her, and I thought you could help me with that. I need more information. So far, your statements have been vague at best. What really happened that night? Why were you here in the first place?”

I sigh and let my head drop back. My statements haven’t been vague—not entirely anyway. Not about the stuff that matters. He’s looking for a hole in my story, but I tell him the whole thing again anyway, because I live to disappoint him. “She sent me a message just after nine o’clock. She’d gotten into a fight with her parents and asked me to come get her. They’ve been fighting a ton the last few months, so this was pretty much a routine. I picked her up a little after ten. We stopped at Dairy Queen and came here with takeout. We talked for a while, then she wanted to walk home, so she got out of my car, and headed toward her house. How many times do we have to go over this?”

“As many as it takes. Why were they fighting so much lately?”

“Her parents are great, but they’re in their own world a lot. They wanted her to learn to handle things on her own, be independent, but to Lola, it felt like they didn’t care. Like she didn’t matter. So she started acting like their rules didn’t matter either. Suddenly they were fighting about everything. Her grades, the team, curfew, how loud she played her music, when I was allowed over, how much time she could spend at my house.”

He nods, and I wonder if Lola’s parents told him this too. “And that night? What was the fight about? Why did she want to leave her house so badly?”

I try not to roll my eyes, because we’ve been over this multiple times. I can feel him looking for a discrepancy. He won’t find one. “Lola wants her own car. She’s had her license for, like, a year, but no car to drive, and it made her feel stuck. She tried to make a deal: if she followed all their rules and got her grades back up, would they be willing to match what she’s saved so she could get a car by the end of the semester? But they said no. Repeatedly. They said it was important for herto make her own way in the world or some shit, and her mom said she didn’t deserve a car yet. Lola flipped out and they started screaming at each other. She said she couldn’t be there anymore and waited on the front porch for me.”

He nods, like he’s digesting new information. He has all this written out somewhere, from interrogation number one, two, five…

“Why are you wasting time with this storyagaininstead of going out there,” I say, jabbing my finger toward town, “and figuring out where she went when she left here?”

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