Two Girls and A Cupcake Once | narrative fiction
They called it a disappearance.
Two girls vanished off the street near the underpass where the city hums too loud to hear anyone scream. One was sixteen. The other had just turned seventeen that morning. They had gone out to celebrate. One cupcake. Two forks. A red lighter with the sticker peeling off.
They didnāt find the cupcake.
They found a single shoe in the rain gutter three blocks from the club. They found a purse in a garbage bin with nothing in it except a lip gloss, a pack of gum, and a folded receipt that said āhomeā. The news ran their school photos. People whispered about drugs, about a bad crowd, about girls who didnāt know better.
What they didnāt show was the white van that circled the block twice. The man with kind eyes and the voice that didnāt match his face. The way the world doesnāt end with a bang, but with a hand on your wrist that doesnāt let go.
But before it all, they didnāt mention how we were just two girls. Always taking the long way home, even when it rained, just to keep talking. How we shared a pair of headphones between usāone bud each, always on her playlist, never mine. How she once said, āIf we ever go missing, make sure they use a better photo than that.ā We laughed too hard then. Now it echoes.
No one said her name with kindness.
But I remember her before. Before all of it.
She had chipped green nail polish and wrote lyrics in the margins of math homework. She hated when people asked what she wanted to be. āI just want to be,ā she used to say. Weād sit on rooftops and guess the lives of strangers walking by. She always gave them happy endings. I never did.
The world got cruel with her first.
And stillāshe looked after me.
I remember the other girls, too.
There were six of us in the room at one point. Maybe more. Time didnāt move right. The walls were gray. Not the kind of gray that tries to be blue or silver or something soft. Just gray. Like a dead screen. Like dried spit.
They didnāt talk. They were skin and eyes and silence. One girl had cigarette burns up her arms. One had no hair. One refused to sleep lying down. I think her name was Mia. Or maybe that was the name someone else gave her. We were all wearing borrowed names by then. Some of us wore them better than others.
The men never used names.
They didnāt need to.
They came through doors that locked from the outside. They smelled like gasoline and cheap cologne and something sour, like old blood. Sometimes they talked to each other like we werenāt there. āThis oneās new.ā āThat oneās done.ā āSheās too soft.ā āSheāll crack first.ā
One of them said I looked too much like his daughter. He laughed. I didnāt.
But they were wrong about her.
She didnāt crack.
She stayed soft. Somehow. In that room, in that hell, she still looked at me like I was her best friend. Still whispered stories to the walls, made fun of the guards under her breath, pulled me into herself when I started shaking too hard in my sleep. She took my fear like it was her own and tucked it away. She kept her softness like a hidden weapon, as if kindness might unlock a door before a key ever could.
They didnāt hit us much. It was worse when they were gentle. When they spoke like they were doing us a favor. When they called it love. I didnāt know what to call it. I still donāt.
I donāt think we were underground, but the windows were bricked shut, and the lights never turned off. It felt like being buried.
People talk about survival like itās a choice. Like strength is a thing you can hold. But the truth is quieter. The truth is ā you wait. You wait until someone forgets to lock a door, or turns the wrong way, or leaves their keys on the hook. You wait for a crack, and when it comes, you donāt think. You run.
Thatās what we did.
Me and her.
My best friend. My favorite person in the world, even before all this. The one who braided my hair to stop her own hands from trembling. Who used to hum songs we forgot the words to, and made up stories just to fill the silence. She had a scar shaped like a crescent moon on her shoulderāwe used to say it was where the sky kissed her. She was the one they forgot to break.
We ran.
I donāt know for how long. Just that our feet bled before our lungs gave out. The city was too loud. Too bright. We ducked behind dumpsters and flinched at every light.
Then we saw itāa stairwell. Metal. Rusted. Leading down. We thought it was a back entrance to somewhere. Safety. Maybe even people. We took it.
There was no one. Just a long corridor. And a door. And a lock that hadnāt clicked yet.
She pushed it open.
There was another exit at the far end, a red light above it blinking like a slow heartbeat. We didnāt speak. We just ran. She slowed before the last door. I felt her stop.
She looked at me and said, āGo.ā
I said no. I grabbed her wrist. She pulled back.
She said it again. Not loud. Not gentle. Just, "Go."
And then she shoved me. Hard. I stumbled through. I heard the door slam. Then the lock behind me.
I turned. I screamed. I hit the door until my fists split open.
She never came back.
They say we were missing for sixteen days. It couldāve been sixteen years. The people who found me didnāt believe me. They didnāt say it, but I saw it in their eyes. They thought I killed her. That I left her. That there was no girl at all. Just a crazy story from a girl who came back in pieces.
But I remember everything.
I remember her tracing circles and stars on my knee when I couldnāt stop crying. I remember her saying weād laugh about it someday, even when there was nothing funny left. I remember the way she pulled me behind her like it was instinct. I remember her saying, āYou have to make it out. One of us has to.ā
She chose me.
She chose me, even though she was stronger. Even though she was smarter. Kinder. Everything Iām not.
I still donāt say her name. Not out loud. Itās too soft for this world. But I write it, sometimes. On receipts. In steam on mirrors. In the fogged windows of buses I donāt take.
I light a candle for her every year on April 16th. The wax never burns right. It slides sideways, like itās trying to escape. Like it remembers the way we ran. I place it in a cupcake. Just one. Chocolate with too much pink frosting, the way she liked it. Two forks once. Now just one.
Sometimes, I dream of her. Not her face, but her hands. Her voice.
āGo,ā she says.
So I do.
But itās never far enough.