Page 21 of Jagged Line Paradise

There’s a half-full coffee mug sitting on the plastic table beside the plastic chair. It’s the same chipped white mug she always drinks from in the morning—she’s a coffee drinker, though the scrawling print reads “CUP OFCREATIVI-TEA.” I turn and walk toward it, letting the screen door slam shut behind me. I bend down for a closer look at a piece of paper that’s caught in the angled table leg.

I pluck it from the ground.

Shit.

It’s the piece of paper I left her this morning. It’s the note I wrote to her, discarded, and left behind like it means fucking nothing.

Cindy Briar pulls open the door just then. “What do you want?” she asks, her words slurring together.

Drunk, as usual.

“Is Avalon home?”

“I haven’t seen her in two...three days. What do you want?”

“Has she called you? Did she leave a note? We were supposed to meet tonight.”

“Nope,” she says dismissively, annoyance shading her tone. “Anything else?”

My eyes narrow at her. “Sorry to waste your fucking time, Mrs. Briar. But your daughter seems to be missing and didn’t happen to let either of us know. Don’t you think that’s a little unusual for her?”

Why do Ihave to be the voice of reason here?

“She’s an adult now, Andrés. She can make her own decisions. I’ll tell her you came by,” she says with finality and shuts the door.

I toss up my hands.

I pull out my cell phone to check for any missed text messages or calls. Lonnie doesn’t text or call much since her phone is shit, but I can’t think of another way she would’ve let me know she wasn’t meeting me tonight.

Fuck.

I decide to walk back home, see if maybe she came by there to wait for me or something. Maybe she left me a note. I take a step forward and fucking stumble over something. “Shit.” I turn and bend to pick up what I fell over.

It’s one of Lonnie’s pink flip-flops. I’d recognize these anywhere because she wears them nearly all the damn time. The pair is just sitting here on the ground outside her trailer, one of them flipped upside down.

I look back at the mug and then at the spot where the note I wrote her was left discarded on the ground. Maybe I scared her with the eagerness I portrayed in my note. Maybe she ran off and is hiding from me until tomorrow. If that’s true, I don’t know what I’ll do.

But why are her favoriteflip-flops sitting out here?

I could buy that she may have put on some more practical shoes if she was gonna go wandering around town, but she’s walked all over town in these sandals before, despite my nagging that she’s gonna break her damn ankle walking in them.

No…this, this is fucking weird.

Something is off and I don’t like the way it feels.

I turn back, open the screen door, and start pounding on the door again. I knock obnoxiously until Cindy finally opens it again.

“Jesus, what the fuck do you want?”

I push past her and walk right inside, heading straight on back to Avalon’s tiny box of a room. The accordion style door is slid open, so I step inside and flip on the light as Cindy comes yelling after me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I take one step and it’s as far as anyone can go in this space. She’s got a twin bed pushed against the far wall, a small window just above it, and that’s pretty much it. The rest of the tiny space is filled with the art supplies she’s collected in bits and pieces—half-empty bottles of paint and old brushes the art teacher saved for her, swatches of canvas fabric pulled tight and pinned on the walls. Her bed is unmade and the room is a mess, so everything is as it normally would be.

But there, on the small table next to her bed, beside a single lamp and a digital clock, sits her favorite tinted lip balm. And maybe to anyone else that would be a stupid thing for me to notice, but she puts that in her pocket first thing in the morning and it goes with her everywhere, all day long. She reapplies it at least seven times a day and if she forgets it, it’s a big fucking deal.

I just bought her this tube a week ago when she accidentally dropped the last one off the edge of the bluff one night and it was too dark to go looking for it. We left the bluff together to walk to the drug store so I could buy her a new one because she said her lips instantly felt dry and she couldn’t stand it. This particular brand cost me eleven bucks for a single tube, but it was worth the cost because for her, it’s not a splurge, it’s a necessity.

I look down and spin, scanning the floor for her shoes. Tucked halfway beneath the comforter, which hangs sideways off the bed, is the pair of dirty white sneakers she wears when I get on her case about wearing flip-flops through the desert and she’s sick of my nagging. I lift the haphazardly draped comforter, getting down on my knees to peek beneath the bed. When my eyes fall on the torn and tattered black pair of sneakers that she never wears, my heart sinks.

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