orange county jane doe
Patrick suggested the spot and we dumped our stuff. The dry scrub prickles against my ankles and I scratch. My fingernails are ragged from where I bit them to the quick and I dig harder and harder. Leave a mark. From up here we can see everything, see the Hollywood Hills and houses where stars lived and drank and died, look up and stare into the sun and hope it fries my eyes out, hope something happens. Instead I am here with Patrick and Maria. Maria wanted to listen to Fleetwood Mac on the radio on the drive over. Maria wants Patrick. Maria spun her hands through her honey-gold hair as we sped down the freeway and I imagined tilting the steering wheel and sending us careening into the other lane, imagine the bone snap. She likes to tell people that she ran square into Jim Morrison on the sidewalk when she was ten, before he got puffy and fat and while he still looked like God. I like to bite my lip so I don’t tell people she only moved out west last year, that she came from Utah and I heard her brother’s in jail but I don’t know why.
Patrick pulls the tabs out of his pocket. It’s so hot out here I want to drop dead. I imagine what would happen if I did. When they make us run the mile on the terracotta track under the beating sun I think about what would happen if my heart just exploded. Whether my limbs splayed out over the cracked clay and the white lines would get people to stop, or if they’d move into the next lane and keep going. I wonder if Maria would lend an arm to Patrick at my funeral, if he’d place his hand on her leg, creep it higher and higher. I wonder if he’d cry.
He rips off a square of the blotter paper and places it on the tip of his tongue, makes his way over to me. He pushes his thick tongue into my mouth. It’s like a piece of ham. The paper dissolves in my saliva. I don’t watch to see if he does the same to Maria. Sometimes, I think, let him. Other times I want to beat Maria over the head with her little tasselled purse. But instead I sink back into the grass and close my eyes.
Soon the sun will set and I will let the acid take me somewhere else, let it take me into the undulating lights of the city sprawling below me. Let time stretch and squash and stretch again. But for now I have thirty minutes. I do not notice the thick cloud of flies buzzing in the air just over the crest of the embankment. I do not notice the hair peeking out from under the scrub. I do not notice the smear of rust brown on the rock.
Patrick wanted to watch a movie at the Brentwood Twin and I thought it would just be the two of us. I am sitting on a low wall, my thighs are burning up on the faded concrete. I am concentrated on a hangnail. I pull the sliver of skin down so far it reveals a triangle of smarting red flesh. I do not wince and I never show my pain. Hey, Patrick says, and I look up. Behind him trails Maria, who is wearing sunglasses and who is sucking on a popsicle. Her lips are red like cherries. Her chin is streaked with juice. I tell her that we can’t go inside until she finishes although I am not sure why. I look to the left of her. I look at Patrick and he averts his eyes.
Maria rolls her eyes and tosses the popsicle stick into a bin. She looks around for something to wipe the sticky mess from her mouth and she fixes on a newspaper that was left on the wall next to me. On the front page there is a picture of a girl. She has long hair parted down the middle and a smile like the Mona Lisa. I suppose she knows something I don’t. Maria wipes the residue from her lips and when she throws the paper down onto the wall there is a red smear across the girl’s face. A car creeps past. We are three teenagers on a hot Saturday outside a movie theatre. Some young girl is on the front page of the paper. Nothing feels any different.
They started calling him the Hillside Phantom by late August but by that point none of the girls who had gone missing and then been found again were connected to me, not by first nor second nor third degree and so I wasn’t worried. Sometimes when I thought about the evenings we had spent up in the hills letting colours and shapes smash into each other I tried to make myself scared, tried to will myself to fear what had been stalking prey out in those hills, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything. I tried to imagine that every man I passed on the street could bundle me into his lacquered Cadillac and that would be that. I tried to imagine what happens after the initial abduction and my mind gets stuck on a tape loop. I replay the snatch over and over again but I can’t think what happens after the car stops out in those empty hills, what happens when he opens his door and walks over to open yours. I had long hair parted down the middle but felt no inclination to change it. Patrick calls and I don’t answer.
The only time my heart stops is when I, in a lapse of will, call Patrick’s home and it’s Maria’s voice I hear down the line. We say Hi at the same, but hers is cut off when she realises it's me and then I can hear nothing but the faint crackle of static. I slam the phone into the wall. That day another girl was found, another girl with a necklace of bruises and with legs sticking out from under the brush. I do not feel afraid. There is always a missing girl, always a phantom, always the sedan idling at the end of your street when you are walking alone at night with the man inside whose features you can’t quite make out. Instead the only thing I am thinking of is my boyfriend who does not love me, who I am not sure if I love back. I am thinking about a biology test and whether I prefer UCLA or USC. I do not think about whether the next girl would be me, because if I started thinking about that I would never stop.
First piece of fiction I have written since I was fifteen or whatever!! Feels incredibly alien… very much inspired by Nightstalkers by Eliza Clark and also California Dreamin’, which I think is the eeriest song I have ever heard. The name Maria is also taken from Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion and Eve Babitz are where the obsession with 70s California started…