Free Picture Me Gone by Meg Rosoff Page A

while we wait for the food to come. I’m really hoping that any fish in our meal don’t come from this tank.
    The food arrives and it’s not too bad, though the pad thai is quite sticky. Gil orders a Thai beer, drinks it and asks for another.
    What will we do if we find Matthew at the cabin? I ask.
    I guess we’ll talk to him, Gil says.
    What will we do if we don’t find him?
    Gil shrugs. One step at a time. At least we’ll have had a genuine American experience on the way, eh, Perguntador?
    As we eat, the restaurant fills up and I can’t help gathering facts about the people who eat here. Tourists, mainly. Some speak a weird-sounding French, which Gil says is French-Canadian. The American families don’t talk to one another much, though some of them shout at their children. I catch one father saying grace before starting to eat while his teenage son looks around, mortified. One man knows the waitress. He’s either related to her or a friend or he comes here a lot. A few people don’t bother with the menu. They know what they want. Two boys come in and when they order beers the waitress asks for ID, which they don’t have. But she’s nice, acts like it’s no big deal and brings them Cokes instead. People order huge plates of food and if there’s anything left over, they ask for doggy bags. I wouldn’t give this food to Honey; it’s not healthy.
    At last we go back to our hotel room and I watch TV with the sound turned off while Gil reads, but it’s mostly ads for losing weight or gigantic pizzas. As usual I don’t remember falling asleep but wake up in the middle of the night with the TV off and the neon glow of the motel sign seeping in through the blinds. In Gil’s room, the reading light is still on.
    A girl at school told everyone the story of a murderer who hid the body of a dead woman inside the box mattress in a motel. For ten days, people slept in the bed and the body wasn’t discovered until the hotel investigated complaints about a foul smell in the room.
    The idea of all those people sleeping on top of a dead woman scared me so much that I didn’t sleep for a week. The girl knew it would have that effect. You’d have to be either super- or sub-human to get that picture out of your head.
    This is something I’ve considered before: the story that ends up in your head unasked for, or that gets deposited by someone like that girl. I have a file of horrible images, but I won’t share them with you. What if I stuck one here, in the middle of a paragraph you happen to be reading, like a landmine? You’d never be able to forget it; it would be part of you forever, like a bit of shrapnel in your brain. It’s bad enough I told the one about the body in the mattress.
    I feel lonely all of a sudden for Marieka.
    Hi Mum. We’re hot on the trail but is it the right one? I don’t think we’re very good detectives. Defectives more like. Haha. How are u? Miss u tons. Love Mila
    Gil looks up from his book and asks why I’m still awake. I shrug, and get a text back.
    What are you doing up at this hour? Bet you and Dad are great detectives. I love you. XOXO Mum
    This makes me feel better. I get up and climb into bed with Gil for a while and he puts his book away so we can watch a nature program on fish who live in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean. Dad’s got his arm around me. Being in such a strange room with only the television for light makes me feel sad and lost in a deep place like an abyss. I push my nose up against Gil’s shirt and close my eyes and can smell home, which makes me feel better.
    I know Gil wishes I would read more but I prefer watching TV, preferably with the sound turned off. Just the pictures. If there’s a crime drama on, it’s obvious whodunnit from practically the first frame; particularly with no sound. The minute an actor knows he’s the bad guy, you can see it in his face, the way he walks. If I were a director I wouldn’t tell the cast whodunnit till