Free The After Party by Anton DiSclafani

strangely satisfying, to see that I’d hurt myself. I wanted to show the world that Joan’s departure had scarred me.
    But I was too practical for that. The world would only think I’d lost my mind.
    After that, I slept in Joan’s clothes when I was particularly lonely. No one ever knew.
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    E very day, Stewart, the Fortiers’ butler, stacked the mail into a neat pile and left it on a silver tray in the foyer, and every day I looked for a letter from Joan. A month after she disappeared a postcard arrived, a picture of a field of bluebonnets on the front.
    I’m fine
, it read.
Don’t look for me
.
I love you all
.
    I turned the postcard over. The postmark read Fort Worth, but I knew Joan was not in Texas any longer. She was in NewYork. She was in Hollywood. The rumors were varied. But I only knew she was nowhere near me.
    I wanted to rip the postcard in two but instead tucked it back into the sheaf of envelopes and slipped into the downstairs powder room before Stewart or Mary saw me snooping. The mirror in there was a Fortier antique, its surface dotted with black marks of age. I could hardly see my reflection in the dim light.
    Who would see me, now that Joan was gone?
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    I waited for my own postcard, my own signal. An acknowledgment at least. She couldn’t send it to Evergreen, so perhaps she would send it to Ciela. “Gotten any unusual mail?” I asked Ciela one day, as we were leaving school. Fred waited for me at the bottom of the steps. “No,” she said slowly. She could see straight through me, but I couldn’t help myself.
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    T here were hushed meetings between Mary and Furlow in Furlow’s office. A private detective was hired, then another when the first found nothing.
    I would never tell anyone else about what Joan had said to me about wanting to leave Houston. I would never tell anyone about what I had seen in the gymnasium. It became clear, in those months, that Mary’s plans for Joan had been more concrete, more realized and nuanced, than I had ever known. I once heard her say to Furlow that Joan was “meant to be something the likes of which the world has never seen.” But she didn’t mean the world.I knew that even then. She meant Houston, and her plans did not involve Joan living elsewhere, far from her parents, in an orbit they couldn’t influence and control.
    I sleepwalked through the next month and graduated from Lamar High School without Joan next to me. My father flew in from Oklahoma and we had a sad lunch at Sonny Look’s afterward, just the two of us. I missed Joan with a blinding intensity. I could not see my way forward without her. My father offered to take me back to Oklahoma City and I all but laughed in his face. What would I have done there? Served canapés with his wife? I needed to stay here for when Joan returned.
    â€œBut what will you do, Cecilia?” my father asked, his forehead creased.
    â€œIs now the time to start worrying about me?” His face fell. I’d forgotten how sensitive he was. He wasn’t a good man but he wasn’t a bad man, either. Mainly, he had been no match for my mother.
    â€œI’ll manage,” I said, and patted his forearm, awkwardly. We took great pains to avoid touching each other. “I always have.”
    I wonder now how my life would have unfolded if I had moved back to Oklahoma with my father. Established a life for myself in a different world. A world without Joan.
    â€œWell, Cecilia,” Mary had said, one morning a month after graduation, as I ate my oatmeal alone at the breakfast table. I’d been spending my time as Joan and I would have spent it, had she been here: going every morning to the pool, shopping, seeing movies with the girls. Occasionally Mary, Furlow, and I had joyless cocktails before dinner. “I think