The Missing Hours Read online

  “Trevor!”

  He endured her hug, and then Whitney stiffened when she saw Claudia behind him.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, not even trying to hide her displeasure.

  “I asked her to come,” said Trevor.

  Before Whitney could continue her questions, someone hollered from the kitchen: “Trev! Where’s the pizza? I’m starving!”

  Shit. He’d been on the schedule to bring pizza this week and he’d forgotten. If Claudia hadn’t been with him, if he hadn’t felt the need to protect her from Whitney, he would have made a joke about being a bonehead, but he just stood there. Pastor Evan’s wife, Andrea, rescued him.

  “I’ll call,” she said, pulling out her phone. “We can get started.”

  Around her, the dozen or so people gathered for the Sunday evening session started choosing seats: on the sofa, the IKEA coffee table that doubled as a bench, the kitchen chairs, pillows on the floor.

  “I’m Andrea,” she said, extending her hand to Claudia. “Welcome.”

  “Thanks,” said Claudia. She sat down next to Trevor on the rug. Pastor Evan asked everyone to hold hands and Claudia went along with it, even bowing her head when they started to pray. Trevor felt deeply embarrassed by the earnest rituals. What good would all this do her? Claudia didn’t need forgiveness. He didn’t know what she needed, but he knew she wasn’t going to find it here.

  CLAUDIA

  If she’d been able to form a coherent thought at all, she would have said no thanks when Trevor invited her to church. Church! In an apartment! And her fucking roommate from Texas giving her the side-eye the whole time. She made herself stay put through the pastor’s little sermon and then bolted down the stairs and walked toward Washington Square Park. It was the warmest evening yet this spring, the sky still blue but the streets and buildings darkening. A month ago she would have thought the temperature hopeful: Summer! The Vineyard. The beach and the boys and riding her bike along the flat paths. Legs pumping against the wind. But hopeful was not a description she could imagine giving to anything now. Hopeful had been fried.

  Who else had seen Chad’s video? It could be a thousand people by now. And how would she know? Would anybody call her up and say, Claudia, there’s a video of you getting double-teamed on Snapchat. You might want to, like, call somebody about getting it taken down. Her head was bowed, hair obscuring her face for most of the fifty-eight seconds, so you’d have to freeze that one frame to know it was her. But if you did, you’d know. And it was never going to go away. It would live in the cloud or the wires or whatever the Internet actually was until the end of time. Anyone with high school hacking abilities could pull it up in five minutes. For the rest of her life she was going to have to assume that every person she met had seen her with a dick in her mouth. For the rest of her life she was going to see that look she saw on Trevor’s face when she knocked on his door. Pity and scorn and lust and revulsion. That was how she would be greeted for the rest of her life. And all because she’d agreed to go to the movies with Chad fucking Drake four years ago.

  If she hadn’t said yes they would never have held hands. And if they had never held hands he wouldn’t have had a reason to hate her.

  She could blame Edie, if she thought about it a certain way. If her sister hadn’t slept with Chad’s epically slimy dad, Ridley, Claudia and Chad would probably just have remained acquaintances. Students at the same school, occasionally seeing each other on the beach or at the ice cream shop or at a party on the Vineyard, where both their families had homes. For years, Claudia Castro and Chad Drake had been in the same rooms together, but she never found him especially attractive or interesting. He seemed to talk almost exclusively about sports. Then, all of a sudden, they had something in common.

  It was Memorial Day weekend and the annual Edgartown yacht club opening party. She had just turned fifteen and Edie was off to college in the fall. Claudia was standing by the railing of the club’s deck, staring at her sister and Ridley flirting in a corner they probably thought was private, when Chad came up to her.

  “He can do it in the open now,” said Chad. “They’re officially getting a divorce.”

  Chad was almost a foot taller than she was and when she turned to look at him she noticed his jaw was red with razor rash. Edie had commented on the bumps along Claudia’s bikini line just that morning, and she remembered thinking it must really suck to deal with that on your face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She was embarrassed by her sister’s behavior. Claudia was barely in high school and even she’d heard the rumors about Ridley Drake. Was her sister really that dumb? That desperate for attention?

  “I’m sorry,” said Chad. “Is Edie even eighteen yet?”

  Claudia nodded. “I don’t get it. He’s older than our dad.”

  “Women are attracted to power,” he said.

  “That’s such a cliché.” Maybe, she thought, if her parents hadn’t spent half of Claudia and Edie’s childhood on tour, leaving them for weeks every other month in the care of nannies and housekeepers, Edie wouldn’t find the affections of a man twice her age quite so exciting. Daddy issues. Nothing was more cliché than that.

  “Cliché is just a shitty kind of true, though, right?” said Chad.

  “I guess. That’s a weird way to think about it.”

  “The whole thing is weird.”

  It got even weirder when Edie got pregnant. Ridley connected Claudia’s sister to a doctor in Manhattan, paid for the procedure, and dispensed with her by Labor Day. In the years since, Claudia wondered whether Chad would have gotten so fierce about everything if what he’d had was just a regular crush, instead of a crush complicated by Edie and Ridley’s sordid backstory. The crush—was it mutual?—became apparent as soon as they returned to school that fall and were partnered in biology class. Now they had lots to talk about and none of it involved their awkward family connection. But that part of the connection was always in the background. They began building a friendship around shared humor and intelligence and a little bit of teenage chemistry, but the foundation was rotten. It stank the whole time.

  Almost from the beginning, Claudia sensed that Chad liked her in a way no other boy had yet, and it both frightened and excited her. She’d been French kissed, but the experiences were largely unpleasant experiments of saliva and tongue. She never knew where to put her hands, and she never felt anything below her chin. Until Chad. It came on suddenly. For months they cracked each other up as bio partners, stifling giggles and passing notes about asexual reproduction, studying occasionally at each other’s apartments, and texting late into the night. It was time of transition with her female friends, boyfriends starting to fill up conversations and weekends. What could she contribute to a discussion about sex when you’re on your period, or whether to wrap your lips over your teeth when you’re giving a blowjob? Nothing. So she found herself hanging out with Chad and his jock friends more often. Talking about music and school and even finding herself mildly interested in some of the details about who got traded and who got upset in the various sports they all followed. She didn’t know that Chad always left the party soon after she did. And she didn’t know, although she suspected, that they teased him about how much he liked her. Why shouldn’t she enjoy his attention? What could it possibly hurt?

  That April, the Castros went to Mexico with another family for spring break. While she was there, Claudia made out with another feel-nothing boy on the beach and when she got back to bed in the room she and Edie shared, she imagined kissing Chad. She buried herself beneath the sheets in the dark and closed her eyes and stayed awake for an hour marveling at, enjoying, the way her body was suddenly warm. She felt slinky. She felt, for the first time, sexy. She’d had a crush on Ben—then a sophomore in her studio art class—all year, but he hadn’t yet show any interest. So, while she could moon over him, the understanding that Chad actively wanted to do things with her made daydreaming about him more potent; she had the power to ma
ke it real.

  Unfortunately, the Chad in her Mexico fantasy was not the Chad in bio class. The Chad in bio class had more than mild acne and his ears stuck out and he bit his nails down to gross little crescent moons. Still, she liked being with him, so when he asked her to go see Trainwreck together she said sure. And when their fingers ended up intertwined forty minutes through the movie, she thought maybe she could get past the cringeworthy details of his appearance and his clumsy manner. She was ready for a boyfriend. Ready to do the things her friends were talking about doing, ready to enter that grown-up world of skin and dark and wet.

  But when she saw Chad at school on the Monday after the movies, she knew it wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t want to kiss him. In fact, the idea made her feel a little bit sick. Instead of meeting him before biology at her locker, she dawdled in the bathroom, then avoided eye contact by sneaking in just as the bell rang. After class, she bolted back to the bathroom. They usually saw each other again at lunch, sitting with one of their rotating groups on the benches in the school courtyard, or across the street at the deli. But Claudia left the building out a side door and when he texted if she wanted to meet up later, she didn’t text back. Should she have just had the awkward conversation with him? Yes, obviously. And, obviously, she shouldn’t have been surprised when he started a rumor that he’d seen her give a blow job to a junior from another school at a party. Or, after that, when the friends they shared shunned her. But she was, a little. It seemed like asymmetrical punishment. The furthest she’d gone with a guy was getting felt up in the back of an Uber, and now her classmates were tagging her on Snapchat stories of “famous sluts.” Cleopatra; Angelina Jolie; Kim Kardashian; Claudia Castro. Fine. She endured, and that summer Chad went to California to stay with his mom; he finished the rest of high school in L.A. His friends were still assholes to her, but by the middle of junior year she was with Ben, so she didn’t care.

  She and Chad had un-followed each other on social media by the time he left New York, so it was a legitimate shock that August when, almost three years later, he plopped down on the couch next to her at the dorm orientation. He’d come back to the city for college. He smiled at her, and she let it all go. Claudia was done with Ben and his polyamory pretext; she was ready to start college looking forward, not back. She wasn’t the person she’d been when she’d embarrassed Chad. She’d changed, and maybe Chad had, too. Maybe he was ready to forgive her. If Chad Drake could be her friend again, she figured, anything was possible.

  “You ready for all this?” Chad asked, as the counselors droned on about academic integrity and coping with stress.

  “All this?”

  He gestured to the room. “Living in a dorm. Hanging out with people from, like, Ohio.”

  “Are you?”

  “I’m ready to leave all that shit from high school behind. I’m diving in.”

  “Me, too.”

  He said he was thinking about studying business, or maybe political science. His dad, of course, wanted him to go to law school.

  “Did either of your parents get remarried?” Claudia asked.

  “My mom’s got a boyfriend.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “He’s still an asshole.”

  The day before, if someone had asked her to describe Chad, she might have used the same word. But this Chad was talking to her. He wasn’t recoiling at her very presence. And it was easy to remember why she’d liked him in the first place.

  After the orientation, she and Chad joined a group headed to a pho restaurant that didn’t card. Around ten, Claudia paid her share of the bill and got up from the table. Chad stopped her at the door.

  “Hey,” he said quietly. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Me, too.”

  “I just liked you so much.”

  It was the nicest thing she’d heard in months. So she kissed him. But when he texted asking if she wanted to hang out the next day, she texted back that she had plans: i’m sure i’ll see u around!

  A couple days later, she kissed Jeremy from Long Island. They’d been on line to buy textbooks. Everyone around them was wearing a T-shirt that announced some aspect of themselves—FEMINIST; NYU VOLLEYBALL; NICE STORY, BRO—but Jeremy was wearing a faded plaid button-up and jeans that fit just right. He had short brown hair and blue eyes and the new Claudia was ready to start life as a sexually active single woman. Being with Ben had taught her how to get pleasure, and if she couldn’t be fooling around with Ben, she wanted to be fooling around. Because fooling around was fun. She was on the Pill and she’d insist on condoms, of course. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t have sex unless she wanted to. And she wanted to.

  “Where you going after this?” Jeremy asked. It was six thirty, and she didn’t have plans until nine. “I’ve got pot,” he said. “Wanna go to the park?”

  They made out on a bench next to the playground. Somebody walked by and muttered, “Get a room.” In response, Jeremy slipped his hand under her shirt. She loved it. Jeremy told her he was in a band and they were recording at a studio on Bleecker later that night. He said he was studying classical guitar, but liked making all kinds of music. Music, he said, was his life. He asked her if she was into music and she almost laughed—should she tell him who her dad was? But she didn’t want to seem like a bitch. She was working on that. As the sun started to go down and the performers by the water fountain changed shifts, Jeremy asked for her number and she gave it to him. But she didn’t program his name into her phone; if he texted after that, she probably missed it.

  So, Claudia wasn’t thinking about Jeremy or Chad when she walked into Down Under with Lolly and Adrienne last Friday night. The three of them had shared a joint before treating themselves to the tasting menu—plus wine pairings—at a new SoHo restaurant. They giggled and pranced north into the Village, and when they passed the revelers spilling out of the bar Lolly announced that the irony of starting the evening at a Michelin-starred restaurant and ending it at a notorious dive was too perfect to ignore. To the extent that she could think straight at all, Claudia was thinking about Ben, and what he’d called her. She was thinking about all the strangers online who’d seen the stupid TV show and were calling her the same thing. She was thinking that everybody makes mistakes when they’re eighteen and wasn’t it just her shit luck that hers got captured for the whole world to see. But she wasn’t going to let Ben or a crappy reality show ruin her life. She was in the greatest city in the world and she was on spring break.

  Had Chad and Jeremy known each other before that night? Did she try to fight? Was that how she’d gotten hurt? Or was hitting her in the face part of the fun? And who was going to believe her when she said she’d been wronged? Please. She was a drunk rich girl. There was probably video of her leaving the bar with both of them. She’d probably been laughing.

  * * *

  After leaving Trevor in the pastor’s apartment, Claudia paced the paths in the park for what felt like hours. What was going to happen next? Near the new playground, she saw a group of kids from her dorm and quickly turned away, scrambling to shove her earbuds in so she could pretend not to hear if someone called her name. She didn’t want to leave the park until she had a plan. But as evening turned to night, as the moms pushing strollers were replaced with people dragging shopping carts, she became more and more agitated. All around her men were looking at women, talking to women, touching women. What had those men done the night before? What didn’t those women know about them? She wanted to grab every girl she saw: Don’t trust him, she’d warn. It’s getting dark and you can’t possibly know what he is, what he’s done, what he’ll do. She saw herself running and screaming through the park, pushing people apart, interrupting picnics and photo sessions below the arch. Someone would get a picture of her and sell it to the Post. “CLAUDIA CASTRO GOES CRAZY!”

  At the corner of the park and West Fourth, someone touched her shoulder. She looked up, and there was Daphne Daniels, from
her art history section. And beside her, Jeremy.

  “Hey,” said Daphne, smiling. “How was your break?”

  “Fine.”

  “Mine went so fast.”

  Claudia did not respond.

  “Jeremy, do you know Claudia?”

  “Sure,” said Jeremy, hiking up the guitar case on his shoulder. “Everybody knows Claudia Castro.”

  Daphne giggled. Oh, God, thought Claudia, she likes him. Jeremy smiled at Claudia, smiled at Daphne. Winked. Claudia didn’t lunge at him. But she thought about it.

  “Did you end up going anywhere?” he asked her.

  Claudia’s stomach started to cramp. Had she talked about her broken plans? Had she mentioned Ben? Why was he smiling? She shook her head.

  “Okay. I’m off. See you ladies later.” He walked backward a few steps, grinning at them both, his arms positioned as if he were playing a guitar. “Practice time,” he said, twiddling his fingers dramatically.

  “He’s not my usual type, but I think he’s really cute,” said Daphne. Claudia focused on the streetlight. The red hand blinking, the crosswalk countdown clock: 10, 9, 8, 7 …

  “Are you okay?” asked Daphne.

  “What?”

  “You look a little sick.”

  Claudia bent forward and vomited onto the sidewalk. Daphne jumped back. Claudia vomited again. Tears leaked from her eyes and she felt the wet splatter on her ankles. Her face had healed but what Jeremy and Chad did had infected her. She was different now, and they were the same.

  PART 2

  ONE WEEK LATER

  EDIE

  “I wanted your sister to be here but she isn’t answering my texts,” said Michelle.