Snapshots. Pamela Browning

you seen Martine lately?” I asked, frowning.

      “She was dancing with Hugh Barfield about twenty minutes ago.” A lightning streak of alarm rippled through me, a warning, an alert. A glance passed between Rick and me, an instant communication of alarm. We each knew what the other was thinking, as we so often did.

      I kept my voice calm. “Think I should check out the ladies’ room?”

      “Sure. We don’t want to be late for Alec’s party,” Rick said, devilishly trying to distract me from worrying about Martine.

      Exasperated, I punched him in the arm and left. He leaned against a column, hands in pockets, to wait.

      The ladies’ room was not as crowded as it had been earlier. “Martine?” I called as I entered the anteroom, where a couple of girls were applying lipstick or tucking stray wisps of hair into their elaborate hairdos.

      “She’s not in here,” drawled Kaytee Blackmon, one of the girls from Spanish class. “Are you two heading up to the sixth floor for the parties?”

      I didn’t feel like launching into the poor-pitiful-us explanation. “Not sure yet,” I said, pretending that everything was normal and breezing out of there as quickly as I could.

      Rick was still leaning against the pillar where I’d left him, but he had loosened his tie so it hung around his collar. He lifted his eyebrows. “So where is she?”

      “I haven’t a clue. Rick, I’m worried.”

      “Let’s check the ballroom,” he said.

      The only people still around were members of the hotel cleanup crew, our principal and Mrs. Huff, who was packing up the punch bowl.

      “Do you know,” she said, smiling as we approached, “this is my aunt’s Waterford that she willed to me? Aunt Eulalie would be so pleased that I’ve put it to good use.”

      “Mrs. Huff, do you know where Martine is?”

      “Oh, she was out dancing the boogaloo with some John Travolta look-alike a few minutes ago,” Mrs. Huff said.

      Rick and I exchanged grins. Boogaloo? John Travolta? What century was Mrs. Huff living in, anyway?

      Still, I couldn’t shake the sense that something was wrong, terribly wrong, with Martine. My concern mounted as we pressed into the lobby behind a couple of football players who were friends of Rick’s. We asked them if anyone had seen her.

      “Didn’t she go upstairs with some of the other kids?” asked one of the guys.

      “I doubt it,” I replied.

      “I’m sure she got on the elevator,” said one of the others.

      “Oh, shit,” Rick muttered. “What the hell is she up to?”

      I rested a hand on Rick’s sleeve. “Rick, she could have gone up for a while and meant to be back but lost track of the time.”

      “You’re right,” Rick said, a line of worry appearing between his eyes. He knew as well as I did that Martine had no business being on the sixth floor.

      We crowded into the elevator, and the exchange among the other kids was loud and jocular. When the doors opened and we all tumbled out, someone behind us yelled, “Party!” at the top of his lungs.

      Most of the doors to the rooms lining the corridor were open, and music blared from several. Shannon Sottile, one of my colleagues on the school newspaper, lounged in a doorway, sipping from a paper cup.

      “Hiya, Trista. Whassup?”

      “We can’t find Martine,” I told her. Shannon had changed into hip-huggers so tight that she must have slithered them on.

      “She’s not in my room,” she said, “but come in anyway. We’ve got a bunch of food that my mother sent over, Triscuits and cream cheese with hot-pepper jelly. Half a ham.”

      “Later,” Rick said, pushing past her.

      The next room’s door was closed, a discarded bow tie draped across the doorknob in a not-so-subtle signal that the occupants wanted privacy. I wondered who was in there doing the deed; I wondered whether I’d be having sex, too, if I had a boyfriend. I had never let anyone get past second base, though I was curious about how I’d feel if I ever did. Happy? Scared? In love? Who knew?

      Rick’s hand in the small of my back guided me to the next door, behind which a raucous gathering was in progress. Sam Gambrell, wearing a pair of wrinkled Bermudas and nothing else, staggered into the hall. In the room behind him, the cheerleaders’ captain danced on one of the beds to an MTV video playing loudly on the television set behind her. She was bouncing up and down, her hair loose and unruly, a group of onlookers egging her on.

      “Has Martine been around here?” Rick asked Sam.

      “Ummmm, yeah. A while back. She went through there.”

      Something was wrong with Martine, I felt it in my bones. I slipped my hand into Rick’s as we craned our heads far enough inside the door that we could see where Sam was pointing. A corridor in the room led past a bank of closets on one side, and an open door adjoined this room and the next. Rick stepped into the murky gloom inside and pulled me in after him.

      The closets in the hall between the two rooms faced a bathroom, where someone was washing her face.

      “Hi, Rick,” said Kim Yarbrough. “Hi, Trista.” She was stuffed into a royal blue satin dress like a sausage into a casing.

      “We’re trying to find Martine,” I said, standing on tiptoe to peer over Rick’s shoulder.

      “She was with Hugh Barfield,” Kim said in a confidential tone. “They went in there.” She angled her head over her shoulder toward the other room.

      “Hugh had a date with Abigail, didn’t he?”

      “They were fighting, and she ran down the hall crying,” Kim said.

      Just then we heard someone vomiting in the bathroom next door. I was right behind Rick when he rounded the corner into the brightly lit vanity alcove. The open door to the tub and toilet area revealed a pale Martine leaning over the white porcelain john and retching miserably.

      My heart sank. Somehow Rick and I had to get Martine out of there, and it didn’t look as if she’d be in any shape to leave for quite a while.