Now You See Her Read Free

me to Madonna’s “Vogue.”
    That was about it. The intervening hours, how I had gotten back to the hotel, were an impenetrable alcohol-induced fog, a complete mystery.
    A ball of panic began to burn at the lining of my stomach like guzzled vodka as I stared at Alex’s empty pillow.
    Was he OK? I thought groggily. Passed out somewhere? Worse?
    I was lying there, breathing rapidly in the dark, woodenly wondering what I should do next, when I heard the sound.
    It was a giggle, and it had come from the bathroom behind me on my right. I rolled myself up onto my elbows and tilted my head off the bed to look through the crack of its slightly open door.
    In the light of a strange, low glow, I spotted Alex leaning against the sink. Then I heard another giggle, and Maureen, my best friend, appeared in front of him holding a lit candle.
    At first, as Maureen put the candle down onto the counter and they began to kiss, I truly wondered if I was still asleep and having a nightmare. Then I heard Maureen moan. Realizing that I was very much awake, the enormity of what I was watching walloped into me like an asteroid into a continent. It was my worst fear, everyone’s worst fear.
    My boyfriend and my best friend together
.
    Crippling waves of anger and fear and revulsion slammed through me. Why wouldn’t they? Primordial betrayal was being enacted right in front of my locked-open eyes.
    I heard Maureen moan again as Alex began to peel off her T-shirt.
    Then they were cut from sight as the bathroom door closed with a soft, careful click.
    A T. S. Eliot quote from my last Modern Poetry class popped into my mind as I blinked at the closed door.
This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper
.
    Or a moan,
I thought, turning and looking at the clock again: 2:26.
    If my premed boyfriend wasn’t currently busy, he could have marked it down.
    Time of girlfriend’s death
.
    I didn’t scream as I sat up. I didn’t look for something heavy and then kick the door in and start swinging.
    In retrospect, that’s exactly what I should have done.
    Instead, I decided not to bother them. I just simply stood.
    Barefoot, I grabbed my jacket and stumbled out of the bedroom and through the hotel room’s front door, closing it behind me with my own soft, careful click.

Chapter 3
    I WAITED until I was outside the hotel’s empty lobby before I started jogging. After a minute, I broke into a sprint. Down the middle of the pitch-dark street, I huffed and puffed, sweating like a marathon runner, like an action movie star escaping an impending nuclear explosion.
    I was fast, too. Maureen was the tall, blond, long-limbed pitcher. Cathy was the short, tough catcher, and I was the lean, mean, in-between fast one. The now-you-see-her, now-you-don’t, lay-one-down-the-third-base-line-and-beat-you-to-first-base fast one.
    And at that moment, I needed every ounce of my speed to take me away from what I’d seen.
    Because what I’d witnessed wasn’t just the two-for-one end of my relationships with my boyfriend and my best friend.
    I guess you could call it the proverbial last straw.
    My dad, a Maryland state trooper, had died in the line of duty when I was eleven. All dads are special, of course, but my dad actually was an extremely special human being. Exceedingly kind, deeply moral, and a gifted, natural listener, he was the person everyone he came into contact with—coworkers, neighbors, the mailman, complete strangers—turned to for comfort and advice.
    Which was what made his unexpected death even more devastating. It tore something deep and fundamental inside of my mom. Once an intensely religious teetotaler, she started drinking. She put on eighty pounds and stopped taking care of herself. Everything came to a head in the spring of my junior year in college when she committed suicide in my dad’s old Ford F-150 with the help of a garden hose.
    Maureen and Alex had bookended me throughout my mom’s funeral arrangements. Since I had no