Have You Seen This Girl by Nita Tyndall

Author:Nita Tyndall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2024-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Lilah Crenshaw: January 26, 2018

A GIRL’S mother berates her as soon as she walks in the door.

“You missed church,” she says. “Again. We could’ve used your help today.”

The girl sighs, sets her backpack down. She knew this lecture was coming, has known it since she skipped youth group Wednesday and prep for the food drive tonight.

“I was at Sally’s, remember?” she says. “We were studying.”

At the mention of Sally, her mother softens. Sally Louise is the Right Kind of Girl for Lilah to be hanging out with, even if she does cause her to miss church every once in a while.

Lilah wasn’t at Sally’s, of course. She was at her boyfriend’s, who her mother absolutely doesn’t approve of. She especially wouldn’t approve if she knew what they were up to. It’s not the kind of thing good Christian girls do, getting high on weekends, but it keeps her from thinking about the stress of everything else.

Thinking about that stress causes panic to rise up in her throat, but she stuffs it down. If her mother sees her panic, she’ll send her back to the doctor for another round of talking and meds, and she doesn’t know how to make it clear that the actual panic isn’t the problem, it’s her mother. Her mother and her expectations.

She can’t be in this house a moment longer.

“I’m going for a drive,” she says, and heads out the door before her mother can respond, knowing she’s going to get hell for it later and not really caring.

She drives around until it gets dark, until the gas light in her car comes on. She thought about just driving back to her boyfriend’s, but she realized when she got in the car that all she wanted to be was alone. No expectations of who she’s supposed to be. The devoted girlfriend, the ambitious daughter. Only Sally really gets that, and she doesn’t even talk to her about it that much.

She stops at a stoplight on Main Street, one that stays red forever. She’s behind a pickup truck, and she catches a glimpse of a man’s face in the side mirror. Something about it chills her, but she doesn’t know what.

The light changes, and they both drive down Main Street before he slows his car to a crawl, pulling it off to the side. She goes around him, more annoyed now than panicked, but he pulls his car out just as quickly, nearly riding her bumper.

She thinks of Savannah. She thinks of June. She picks up the pace, going way over the speed limit, hoping some of Sheriff Kepler’s boys aren’t out patrolling tonight, because they’ll surely call her mother.

Abruptly she turns down a side road, one she knows no one goes down, just to confirm what she’s thinking. To her horror, the truck turns, too, and now she knows he’s following her.

The truck flashes its headlights at her. She speeds up, and it does, too. She feels the impact when it taps her car, the sound louder than she ever would have thought, and she swerves off the road into a ditch.

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