Page 113 of Dirty Chorus

“Just talk to her brother real quick and tell him you haven’t heard from her. He won’t leave.”

I stare out the window. The rain from earlier left streaks down the glass. I keep my eyes there because it’s easier than looking at the bed. “Yeah, that’s fine.”

The bell over the door jingles as the last customer leaves, and the store goes quiet. It’s just me and the hum of the fluorescent lights. The shop smells of dust and vinyl, like it always has. I should feel comfort in that because it smells like my grandfather, but instead it just weighs on me. I’ve been trying to keep busy restocking bins and cleaning shelves. The OCD kicked in, and I was cleaning things three or four times, alphabetizing the same albums I'd already organized twice. Anything to stop thinking. Anything to avoid the image of Charlie walking out of that greenroom. I want to forget my grandfather is laying in a hospital bed and that my phone is going to go off any second now with the hospital calling me to tell me he's gone.

The second that thought creeps into my head my phone lights up on the counter. Guess I should knock on wood before thinking too much. I glance at it, and a notification comes in from the local news. I get those notifications from time to time, but the title of it sends the coldest chill down the center of my spine. My thumb hovers over the screen, and something whispers in my ear that I need to brace myself. I opened the article.

“Oh shit...Charlie...”

My stomach drops. The oxygen in the room is sucked out like a vacuum. I can’t breathe. The phone slips from my hand and hits the floor with a sharp crack that echoes through the shop. I lean against the wall, my knees giving out before I can stop myself, sliding down until I’m sitting on the musty carpet.

My hand fists in my hair as I try to breathe. “Please, God. Why are you fucking doing this to me?”

Missing. It repeats inside my head. The letters spell out the title of the article. Missing. She’s missing. No sound comes out. It’s just the heavy pressure in my chest that keeps building and building and I might just die right here because I can’t breathe.

I stare at the floor, at the faint reflection of the neon “Open” sign flickering in the window. Her face won’t leave my head. Her smile, the way she said my name, how she told me she loved me. Even by the leather couches I see the poster boards we crinkled as I made love to her against the wall.

My hands shake as I pick up the phone. I open Safari and type Charlie’s name and find her Instagram. God, she follows way too many people. It’s a rabbit hole trying to find Payton. When I do, her profile is flooded with men harassing her – leaving comments on her pictures about wanting to sleep with her and calling her names. She’s tagged in videos with her phone number, telling everyone to call her for a good time.

What the fuck is going on?

I memorize her number and type out a message. I've gotta know if it’s even true. If I’m reading this headline correctly.

I’m leaning against my truck outside the store staring at the cracks in the pavement. Payton plops down on the sidewalk waiting for her Uber to arrive. She talked to me for a little while, and convinced me I needed to close the store and be with my grandfather. Her arms wrap around herself like she’s trying to hold in whatever’s left of her. I can barely hold myself together at this point too. Her best friend is missing, and the one and only person I think I’ll ever say I fell in love with is gone. Now all I have is a terrible memory of her. It’s the last one. Our last words. I want to erase them entirely.

“You don’t have to wait with me, my ride will be here any second,” Payton says.

“I saw those messages on your instagram, I don’t mind waiting.”

“But you really should go to the hospital and be with your grandpa.”

“I know he’s gonna pass away any day now... I’ve known for a while he was dying.” I bite my bottom lip. I don’t cry. I fucking can’t cry. Not like this. Not in front of a chick I barely know. “I don’t get it.” My voice sounds rough, like I’ve been screaming, even though I haven’t said much in days. “What happened at the concert? You have to remember something. One second Charlie’s with me, she tells me she loves me and the next she’s breaking my heart, and now she’s...”

Payton exhales, slow and shakily. Her hair is falling out of its ponytail, and she looks like she hasn’t slept in days either. “I don’t know what happened,” she says softly. “I woke up in a bathtub and Ryder said I was drugged. If I didn’t lie to her, then we would've been there together, and nothing would've happened.”

I glance at her, searching for something solid in her blue eyes, but all I see is guilt. It’s radiating from her.

“It’s not your fault,” I say.

She looks away. “But it is… if I was just honest about dating her brother, none of this would have happened.” She runs a hand through her messy hair. “I just didn’t know how to tell her I was seeing him... but it doesn’t matter now. We broke up.”

“Well, her brother seems like an asshole, to be honest. He almost beat the shit outta me from that stupid fuckin game she needed to play.”

“But that’s just Ryder being protective. If you had seen how guys treated her before then you would understand why he acts that way. He tried so hard to get her to break up with Brody, but she just ran back to him. It was weird she was so hung up on him. She would honestly get up at five in the morning to do her makeup and hair, and show off her tits and shave everything off her body just to get him to notice. She would wear skimpy dresses, and any clothes that would show her ass. It was bad.”

“Is this supposed to make me feel better?” I ask, hitting the back of my head against the metal of my truck.

“All I'm saying is he really messed her up mentally.”

“Yeah... but then I see them together at the concert.”

“I don’t think she wanted to be there with him. She was off.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“My last memory was us arguing,” Payton shrugs, her feet crunching under the gravel. “We were fighting about Brody and about Ryder. But Brody made two drinks, and he took something out of his back pocket. It was white, it looked like a pill, and it went into one of the drinks. I freaked the fuck out, I didn’t say a damn thing.”

I run a hand down my face. “He slipped her a date rape drug.”