Free Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell Page B

my father patted her tanned knee in mute agreement. They would have liked to have nothing at all to do with Gail, but complete avoidance was out of the question. We crossed paths with the Smiths at the police station often enough—at least in passing; generally, Carly and I were questioned separately.
    She and I tried to plot seemingly chance encounters. Once we even persuaded our families to have dinner together; we went to an outdoor hot dog stand that claimed to be famous, where I watched my mother shrinking from the crowds of vacationers as if she had developed a fear of strangers. My parents and Carly May’s settled down at a picnic table. I can still feel the hot, splintery wood pressing into the backs of my thighs; I can see the wasp that wanted to drown in my lemonade. Carly sat across from me wearing a Whiteface Mountain T-shirt, tight and cropped, revealing a strip of untanned skin, her hair in a ponytail, a touch of lip gloss making her shiny and a little distant. The world was already reclaiming her, I realized, panicking, afraid of being left alone.
    But then Gail made a stupid remark about Officer Hilton, the woman who had taken us in on the first day. “It’s not just the short hair,” she insisted. “It’s something about her, you know? I think you can just tell, personally. I have to say I’m a little surprised they let the girls go home with her.” My mother gazed stonily at Gail while our fathers, embarrassed, looked toward the sharp mountain peaks. Under the table, Carly gave me a sharp kick in the shin with her pointed bare foot. It was a characteristic Carly-message, familiar from the cabin, and I knew I hadn’t lost her yet.
    The dinner did not improve relations between our families. My father and Carly’s might have done all right together, but Gail was too loud, too anxious to assert control, too eager to name what she didn’t understand in order to diminish its power. Beneath her chatter I detected an edge, though, a sharp blade she was ready to wield, and I saw—with the strange clairvoyance I seemed to have possessed since our rescue—that it would be a mistake to underestimate her. In response to Gail, my own mother retreated to the Waspy, New Englandy hoity-toityness that was her all-but-abandoned birthright. She looked down her long, narrow, makeup-free nose at garish, babbling Gail and chilled us all. The fathers ate many hot dogs, commenting occasionally upon the weather or the beauty of the mountains. Carly’s father kept tugging her ponytail—but gently, as if it might come off in his hand. Every now and then she offered him a half smile, one side of her mouth twitching briefly upward, and he visibly relaxed.
    I wasn’t ignoring my parents, exactly; that would imply that I was aware of them and pretending otherwise. No, I was trying to register their presence in some emotionally appropriate way. I just couldn’t feel that they were really there.
    *   *   *
    At last it was settled to everyone’s satisfaction that Carly May and I had told all we could. There were no accomplices to our abduction and no additional victims. We had said this from the beginning; at last they accepted our story. According to the news reports, we had been rescued “just in time”—as if our kidnapper had been brandishing a weapon at us just as the cop cars pulled up.
    Finally, the police let us go. Carly and I insisted on being permitted to say good-bye, though our parents wouldn’t leave us alone. We hugged awkwardly, neither of us really being the hugging type, and we tried to think of things we could say in front of our parents that would mean something. We glared at each other, eyes full of secrets and promises.
    And so she went back to the farm and back to her pageants, and I returned to the inn. The touched-by-(near-)tragedy inn. A house full of strangers. Home.
    *   *   *
    My parents sent me to a psychiatrist, of course. It made them feel as if they were doing something, and