The Vanishings Read Free

champagne a few times and didn’t like it, but he liked the idea of its sitting on the tray table in front of him. He would pretend to be on business, on his way to London for important meetings.
    Captain Rayford Steele came over the intercom, announcing their flight path and altitude and saying he expected to arrive at Heathrow Airport at six in the morning.
    Judd Thompson Jr. couldn’t wait. This was already the most exciting night of his life.

TWO
Vicki—The Rebel
    V ICKI Byrne was fourteen and looked eighteen. Tall and slender, she had fiery red hair and had recently learned to dress in a way that drew attention, from girls and guys. She liked leather. Low cut black boots, short skirts, flashy tops, lots of jewelry, and a different hairstyle almost every day.
    She was tough. She had to be. Other kids at school considered kids who lived in trailer parks lower class. Vicki’s friends were her “own kind,” as her enemies liked to say. When she and her trailer park neighbors boarded the bus on Vicki’s first day of high school, they quickly realized how it was going to be.
    The bus was full. It was obvious the trailer park was the last stop on the route. Only the first two kids of the twelve boarding from thetrailer park found a seat even to share. Every morning they jostled for position to be one of the lucky first ones aboard. Vicki had given up trying. Two senior boys, smelling of tobacco and bad breath and never, ever, carrying schoolbooks, muscled their way to the front of the line.
    No one on the bus looked at the trailer park kids. They seemed to be afraid that if they made eye contact, they might have to slide over and make room for a third person in their seat. And, of course, no one wanted to sit next to “trailer trash.” Vicki had seen them hold their noses when she and her neighbors boarded, and she had heard the whispers.
    How was a freshman girl supposed to feel when people pretended not to see her, pretended she didn’t exist, acted as if she were scum?
    The bus driver refused to pull away from the trailer park until everyone was seated, so the two senior trailer boys—who had already found seats—rose and scowled and insisted that people make room. Some “rich kids,” which they all seemed to be if they didn’t live near Vicki, begrudgingly made room.
    The first day, Vicki had found herself the last to find a seat. She looked in the front, where most of the black kids sat. They had tobe among the first on the bus, because no one seemed to want to sit with them either—especially the trailer park kids. In fact, Vicki’s friends called the black kids horrible names and wouldn’t sit with them even if they offered a seat.
    Vicki had been raised to believe black kids were beneath her too. No black people lived in the trailer park, and she didn’t know why they were supposed to be inferior, other than that they were a different color. Her father had said they were lazy, criminal, stupid. And yet that was how Vicki saw her father himself. At least until two years before.
    When she was twelve, something had happened to her parents. Before that they had seemed the same as most of their neighbors. Every Friday night there was a community dance where drunk and jealous husbands fought over their wives and girlfriends. It was not unusual for the dances to be broken up by the police, with one or more of the fighters being hauled off to jail for the night. Often, her mother bailed out Vicki’s dad, and then they would fight over that for the rest of the weekend.
    Vicki’s father had trouble keeping a job, and her mother’s waitressing didn’t pay enough to cover their bills. Vicki’s dad had been a mechanic, a construction worker, ashort-order cook, and a cashier at a convenience store. Being arrested or late or absent from work one too many times always cost him his job, and then they would live on welfare for a few months