Free The Darkest Corners by Kara Thomas Page A

you talking about?”
    “You and Ari. Last night, you said ‘I never got to tell her I’m sorry.’ ” I can’t tell Callie that I also know that she deleted Ari from her Facebook friends, not without admitting that I’m a huge creep who has been keeping tabs on her all these years.
    She fusses with her bun, clearly embarrassed. “Nothing really happened. I was a bitch to her, and she eventually got tired of it, I guess.”
    I raise an eyebrow. “That’s it?”
    Callie shrugs a freckled shoulder. “After you left, she became my best friend by default, or whatever. She was just so needy, and it got on my nerves.”
    Callie lets out a sigh, ruffling her side-swept bangs. “Anyway, if it’s true, what she was doing in Mason, she didn’t tell anyone in our group. They wouldn’t have been able to keep their mouths shut.”
    “Someone must have known,” I say, frustration creeping in. I’d sooner stab my eyes out than knock on Marie Durels’s door and ask who told her Ari was selling herself.
    Callie looks up. Pauses. “There’s one way we could find out,” she says. “We could go to the truck stop. Ask around and see if anyone ever saw Ari there.”
    It’s probably a waste of time; any other girls who work at the truck stop will clear out for fear of the cops by the time today’s newspaper, with Ariel’s face on the front page, gets delivered. Probably they’ll all avoid the area for a few days. The ones who stay behind most likely won’t talk. Definitely not to us.
    But the Fayette County Penitentiary is on the way to the truck stop. When Joslin visited my father the other night, she may have left a clue there about how to find her.
    “Sure,” I say. “We can start there.”
    It takes all I have not to bounce on the balls of my feet as Callie asks to borrow Maggie’s minivan. I can feel it. I’m going to leave that prison with a phone number or address for my sister. I just have to convince Callie to stop there on the way home from Mason.
    Maggie tells us not to eat lunch out, since there’s plenty of cold cuts she’ll have to throw away at the end of the week. We wave goodbye from the driveway, and she disappears from the living room window, smiling. As I buckle my seat belt and reach into my pocket for my iPod, I catch Callie giving me the side-eye.
    “You sure listen to that thing a lot,” she says.
    I shrug. “Helps me tune out the noise.”
    Callie’s forehead crinkles. It’s the same face she made as kids whenever I said something too dark for her tastes. One night when I was over at the Greenwoods’ house, Callie was whining about me having to go home after dinner. “Why, why, why do I have to do homework?”
    Maggie was losing her patience. “So you can get good grades, and get into a good college, and get a good job,” she snapped.
    I remember looking up from the armchair where I was tugging my shoes on. “What’s the point of life,” I asked, “if you go to school, then go to work, then die?”
    Callie looked horrified.
    I was always such a little nihilist. I blame it on my father’s drunken rants. They got especially bad after he was laid off from the steel distributor he’d worked for, about six months before it closed.
    Fifteen years I busted my ass for Ed, and he couldn’t even tell me it to my face. Human beings ain’t nothing but the shit on the heels of whoever dumped us onto this godforsaken planet.
    In any case, Callie and I were raised differently, and it seems to come up every time I open my mouth.
    Callie reaches for the radio. “Do you mind if I—”
    I shake my head. Put my iPod away. Callie sifts through the static until she finds an alternative rock station. I wait for a commercial break to clear my throat and speak.
    “I was thinking…if we want to know more about what was going on with Lori that summer, we should probably find my sister.”
    Callie turns off the radio. “Find her?”
    I look out the window. “I haven’t heard from her since she