Page 57 of That's Not My Name

Me: sounds about right

Max: I can leave at lunch and come get you, if you want?? Or are you ditching????

Me: Can’t. Roane would be on my ass

Max: Okay, i’ll be there. I have third lunch today.

I send him a thumbs up, grateful for his never-ending willingness to help, but also because third lunch means I have an extra thirty minutes to listen to recordings and charge my phone. I set it back down beside the sink and finish brushing.

At least I have a ride. It’s over a mile to school, and I barely have enough energy to wash my face, much less walk there. I put the recording on speaker. Might as well multitask. I press play on the next recording while the water warms up.

“Yeah, is this the tip line?” a woman asks. “My name is Diana, and I think I saw that girl in Eugene yesterday. She was with a bunch of college students, but she looked way older and her hair was orange, and she—”

Skip.

“Anonymous here. That Lola girl ran away. Stop looking, it’s annoying to see her and her sad-sack parents on the news all the damn time—”

Skip. Though that sounded suspiciously like the preppy golf teamcaptain from my third-period political studies class. If I find out he’s calling the tip line to complain about how Lola’s disappearance is such an inconvenience forhim, he might find the tires of his Jetta mysteriously slashed.

“I’m tellin’ ya. She was abducted by alie—”

I roll my eyes and splash warm water on my face. Skip.

“Um, hi. My name is Meredith Hoyt. I already called 911, and they said they’d pass on the information, but I googled this number too, just in case. I think I saw that missing girl, Lola? She came out of a diner in Waybrooke with a man, and I’m not positive it was her, but—”

I reach over to skip when I hear, “—she was wearing the same jean jacket from the picture on the news. The one with the floral arms.”

I freeze, water dripping from my chin and down my forearms.

Did I just…hallucinate? Am I still asleep? I blink at my reflection. There’s no way. I must have heard that wrong.

I dry my face and rewind the recording.

Meredith Hoyt’s shaky voice fills my tiny bathroom again. “…the same jean jacket from the picture on the news. The one with the floral arms.”

I press pause because I think my heart stops beating.

A thousand memories of that jacket fly through my mind. At school. At the beach. At my kitchen table. At the pool. Faded jean fabric, with rose gold buttons that Lola picked out herself from the fabric store. Custom floral sleeves that Autumn meticulously hand stitched with rose gold thread as part of her final project for fashion design last year.

She made it for Lola. Even sewed her initials into the tag.

Lola wore it everywhere, including the night she disappeared.

I hit play again, needing to hear the rest.

“She had dark hair, short to her chin, and she was wearing a pair of jeans, a black T-shirt under the jacket, and a white hat thing,” the woman continued, taking a second to cough. “She left with the man. Older. Forties? Maybe her dad? He was pretty tall, sharp face, and he drove a big gray van with peeling paint. I didn’t get the license plate. This was at about noon. A couple minutes ago, actually. I swear it looked just like her.”

Holyfuckingshit. I check the date and time on the recording. The call came in just shy of twenty-four hours ago.

Lola was alive yesterday. She was standing outside a diner with some stranger, and I have the proof right here. Meredith Hoyt leaves her contact information, and the recording stops. I scramble to pause before it skips to the next one because whatever it is, it’s not important. Not as important as this call.

I brace my hands on the vanity and try to process. She’s been gone for weeks, and she’s casually hanging out with a guy in a creepy van? Nothing good ever comes from a nondescript van with peeling paint. And the man she’s with is definitely not her father, so who the fuck is he?

And why hasn’t she come home?

My stomach hollows. Maybe she can’t. Maybe he won’t let her come home.

Is he with her right now? What happened in the last five weeks while we all sat around wondering where she was?

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