feel the woman struggling to care. Then someone called “Bev!” from the end of the bar, and the bartender glanced anxiously over her shoulder, and by the time she looked back at Mercy, she was having none of it. “Sorry, señorita,” she said, all the patience draining from her voice. “You don’t look twenty-four, and it’s an out-of-state ID. I gotta be careful in this neighborhood. For all I know, you wandered over from the high school.” Bev threw the ID down on the counter and hustled off.
This goddamn city. She wasn’t planning to be here long, but she’d already flashed a fake ID within ten blocks of Tom and Anna’s house and been turned down. Don’t shit where you eat meant something different when she was working at the Black Rose, but it applied here too. She grabbed the ID off the counter and shoved it back into her pocket.
Now the two men at the bar were staring at her. One of them said, “Come on, Bev, have a heart!”
The other chimed in, “She’s old enough. I can always tell, like rings on a tree.” He guffawed.
Now she really had to get away. On a sudden instinct, she pulled the phone out and dialed one of the numbers Tom and Anna had made her write down on a scrap of paper and keep in her new wallet.
“Hello?” The voice had the doubtful tone of someone picking up an unknown number.
“Hey, Jane,” she said. “It’s Julie.”
“Where are you? What number is this?”
She looked out the window and saw a sign across the street. “I’m at the Starbucks by our house. I borrowed a phone off someone. Listen, I had to get out of there, Mom and Dad were hovering. Can you pick me up?”
“Are you at the Starbucks on Memorial?”
“Yeah. I have to go, this lady needs her phone back.”
“Just hang on, I’m at a friend’s house. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Jane hung up.
She slammed the bar door behind her as hard as she dared, but it bounced on a cushion of air six inches from the frame and she could still hear the voices inside laughing at her as she hurriedly crossed the street.
Fifteen minutes later, Jane pulled into the Starbucks parking lot in Tom’s SUV, rolled down the window, and said, “Nice shoes.”
“Thanks.” Julie looked down and saw Jane’s Converse on her feet. “I mean, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Despite the dark hair and bangs, Jane didn’t look much like Charlotte at all. Jane was taller, stronger, Julie told herself.
“Mom got me all these flats,” she apologized. “I just wanted something I could walk in.” She pulled the heavy passenger-side door open and climbed in.
“I said it was okay.” Looking closely at Jane’s face, especially when she smiled, Julie could tell she had never been very far from home. College didn’t count, even if it was halfway across the country — it was still closer to home than a single bus ride could take you. If you looked past Jane’s piercings (two: nose and eyebrow), tattoos (two small ones, one on her shoulder and one on her hip, and Anna didn’t know about either), and hair (the bleach-and-green was clearly a home job, but the black dye was from a salon), you saw a girl who’d never had to take the bus all that much.
Julie regretted putting her own hair through this last round of bleach. It had looked smooth enough at first, but now the ends were getting ragged, the part below her shoulders breaking off and poofing out. Worst of all, darker hair was creeping in at her hairline. If she hadn’t needed to look the part so desperately, she could probably have gotten away with dirty blond.
But she hadn’t wanted to be a dirty blond. She’d wanted to be Julie.
Jane clicked her keys against the wheel impatiently. “So where are we going?”
“I want to chop all this off,” Julie said, holding out a handful of split ends.
“Like, right now?”
“Yeah, right now. And dye it, maybe. I figured you’d know a good place for that.”
Jane looked impressed. “I can take you to the place I go. It’s in Montrose. What color are you going to dye it?” She squinted shrewdly. “Better not be black.”
“I don’t know, maybe red,” she said without thinking. At the Rose, she’d always made bank with red hair. Besides, white-blond Julie was starting to get to her. She’d stared at the pictures of the missing girl and at herself in the mirror beforehand, but when she started playing Julie for Anna and Tom and Jane, something shifted. She saw Julie’s innocence in the way all three of them looked at her, and it was unnerving. Anna, in particular, watched her as if she might break.
Jane was already pulling out of the parking lot, her strong jaw set under its sprinkling of covered-up acne, saying, “Cool, let’s get out of here.” If Julie was worried about Anna, she should have started with Jane in the first place. Shutting Anna out was Jane’s superpower.
Tom’s Range Rover was a smooth ride, just more ease and luxury so built into Jane’s existence she didn’t even know it was there. Jane wove in and out of the four-lane traffic on Westheimer as she drove toward the city, the SUV soon dwarfed by hulking black Suburbans with tinted windows, shiny trucks that were all tire and no flatbed, a Hummer that looked like it could transform into a robot. A few lanes away, a silver convertible idled like a half-melted bullet in the sun. The apartments gave way to sparkling-white office buildings set on lots kissed around their edges with manicured shrubs and palm trees. Everything gleamed, even the street signs, which were mounted on giant chrome arcs.
“Can you believe how much the Galleria has changed?”
She caught the small dip in Jane’s voice and immediately felt a prickling on the back of her neck, alerting her to a shared memory she was in no position to ignore.
“Yeah, I know,” she said.
“Do you remember that time Mom dropped us off at the Galleria to do our Christmas shopping?”
“That’s what I was thinking about too.”
“I thought we were so cool,” Jane went on, her eyes on the taillights ahead of them. The traffic light had changed and they were inching sluggishly forward, but they weren’t going to make it past the danger zone on this green. “It felt like we were so grown up. You must have been in, what, sixth or seventh grade? Because —” She broke off. “And I would have been in fourth or fifth. We bought lunch at that one fancy food-court place with the crepes. Do you remember splitting up for an hour to buy each other’s presents? That was my favorite part. We, like, synchronized our watches and met at the bakery afterward.” She laughed. “I even doubled back and hid which direction I was coming from so you wouldn’t guess where I bought your present. I think it was Claire’s or something.”
Jane’s voice tugged at her ear, but Julie was distracted by a boy of around twelve or thirteen in a T-shirt and saggy, wide-legged blue jeans weighed down with a heavy wallet chain who was striding through the still-sidewalk-less guts of the drainage ditch parallel to the road. His tangled hair was long and brown and very deliberately shielding his face as he marched, hands in pockets, visibly sweating. He reached the base of one of the chrome arcs, which proved to be a formidable obstacle at ground level. Trapped between an evergreen shrub and the curved chrome, he hiked up his billowing, half-shredded pants leg with one hand and stepped over it, like a cartoon lady pulling up her skirts to step over a puddle.
“Julie?” Jane’s voice came back to her, and she realized she’d missed a question. The music was quieter; Jane must have just turned it down. “Do you remember? What you did that time when we split up?”
“Tried on prom dresses,” she said. “Pretended I was a princess.”
“Oh,” Jane said, and laughed. “Well, that definitely explains why I ended up getting a gift certificate from Waldenbooks that year.”
She