Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page A

phone. By this criterion, Delia and I were practically married–we spent far more time together than any couple in the Wexton Middle School–that is, until Fitz officially asked Delia to go out with him.
I knew it meant nothing-rumors about who liked whom flew around like gypsy moths in August–but all the same, I spent too much time wishing that I was Fitz, holding on to Delia's hand when we balanced on the railroad tracks or lying next to her on the damp grass when we tried to look at the solar eclipse through a pinhole in a Shoe box. After a while, Fitz stopped calling me, and then Delia; and I tried to convince myself that I'd never needed either of them.
I went stag to the end-of-school dance. I was listening to the boasts of Donnie DeMaurio, a twelve-year-old who had a mustache and a pack of bootleg cigarettes, when Delia appeared, crying. “Fitz broke up with me,” she said. I couldn't imagine why; later he told me the truth. I'd rather have both of you, he said, in that easy way of his, than just one. But at that moment, Fitz was absent and Delia was so close that the hair on my arms was reaching toward the heat of her. “I guess I could go out with you,” I said.
“You guess you could go out with me?” she repeated. “Gee, thanks for making the sacrifice. Don't do me any favors.”
I knew her well enough to understand that when Delia pushed you away, it was her way of making sure she didn't get shoved first. I grabbed her arm before she could run away. “I would very much like to go out with you,” I said more carefully.
“Is that better?”
“Maybe.”
“So what do we do?” I asked.
She chewed her bottom lip. “We could dance. If you want.” I had never danced with a girl before, and even though Delia and I had grown up skinny-dipping in ponds and sleeping so close in a pitched tent that we had to share each other's air, it felt unreasonably new. My hands skimmed over Delia's spine to settle on her hips. She smelled like peaches, and beneath her knit dress I could feel the thin elastic of her underwear.
She talked for both of us. She talked about how, on the phone one night, Fitz had asked her out, and how she didn't know whether to say yes or no and yes had just slipped out. She talked about how she fully intended to get back her Dwight Evans baseball card, which she had given to Fitz as a way of saying she really liked him. When the song ended, Delia didn't pull away. She stayed there, maybe even moved a tiny bit closer. “You want to keep talking?” I asked.
“No,” she said, smiling into my eyes. “I think I'm done.” When I find her, she is ten feet above my head, in the scarred elbow of an oak tree. Greta sits at the bottom, whining. “Hey,” I say, pushing aside some of the smaller branches and leaves. “You okay?”
Above me, the stars are coming out, a bright-eyed audience. “What if this was all my fault?” Delia asks.
“How could it be?” I reply. 'You don't even remember it happening.“ ”Maybe I do and I've blocked it out. Maybe my father hid that from me, too.“ I hesitate. ”I'm sure he's got an explanation for what happened.“ Delia drops down from the tree, landing like a cat beside me. ”Then why didn't he give it to me?“ she says, her voice striped with scars. ”He had twenty-eight years. Don't you think that's long enough to mention, maybe, that Delia Hopkins is a dead girl from Missouri? You know, 'Delia, honey, can you pass the Cheerios, and did I ever tell you that when you were four I stole you away from your mother?'“ Suddenly, Delia's face goes white. ”Eric,“ she asks, ”do you think I still have a mother?"
“I don't know,” I admit. “We'll find out once we get to Arizona.”
“Arizona?”
“After your father is arraigned on fugitive charges in New Hampshire, he'll be extradited to Arizona. That's where the . . . crime allegedly occurred. If it goes to trial, you'll probably be called as a witness.”
She seems horrified by this. “What