21. Dorien
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DORIEN
Iwas nine that summer. June was eight. We were old enough to roam the neighborhood without adults and young enough to think that meant we were free.
The Matsudas’ lake house sat at the end of a gravel road. It was a white house with a screened porch that faced the water. Our families rented the neighboring cabins every July and became friends with the Matsuda’s easily, thanks to their warmth and generosity.
My parents were there—a miraculous moment where I actually saw them for an extended period—but they were often taking phone calls, physically present but mentally vacant.
June’s father wasn’t there because her parents were officially separated, and Aeron was staying with him. Melia was the one who actually watched me and June that summer. She made lemonade in a plastic pitcher and yelled from the porch when we swam too far out into the lake.
Eli Matsuda was two years older than us, lean and tall for his age.
He had a laugh that came out in bursts, like he surprised himself with it.
He was nervous about most things, like new food and water deeper than his waist. But he was the kindest kid I’d ever met.
He would give you his last piece of candy and then apologize because he thought you might not like the flavor.
The three of us spent that July inseparable.
We built sandcastles along the shoreline where the rocks were thin.
Caught frogs that June would name and Eli would insist we release.
The sun sat low every afternoon and turned the lake a color I didn’t have a name for yet but would later learn was burnt sienna.
The day it happened we had wandered away from the cluster of cabins to an empty part of the lake. We were throwing flat rocks across the water. June was trying to beat my record of four skips. Eli sat on a log behind us, peeling bark off a branch. He’d lost interest ten minutes prior.
Music floated through the trees.
It was faint at first, winding through the branches from the road above.
It was that cheerful jingle every kid on the planet knows in their bones.
I stood up and grinned because I’d missed the truck yesterday.
It had come while I was in the cabin, and by the time I got outside it was gone.
So today I was prepared. I had ten ones in the pocket of my swim trunks, bills I’d taken from my mom’s purse.
She wouldn’t notice ten missing from the several hundred in there.
I took the money because of June.
She loved ice cream like it needed to be its own food group.
She’d eat it too fast, get a headache, then eat more anyway.
I wanted to buy it for her. I wanted to hand it over and watch her face light up, mouth opening before the smile caught up to the rest of her.
I was nine years old and I was already building my life around making her happy.
“Let’s get some,” I said, grinning at June.
Eli shook his head. “I can’t eat it. Makes my stomach hurt.”
“Maybe they have fruit pops,” June said. She was already bouncing on her toes, scanning the tree line for the road.
“I don’t want to.” Eli pulled at the bark in his hands, shredding it.
June grabbed his arm. “Come on. They have fruit pops.”
“Yeah. Don’t be lame,” I said.
I said that to him. To Eli, who was nervous about everything but had the confidence to advocate for himself. And there I was trying to pressure him into going because I wanted to impress a girl and he was in the way of that.
Petit con. Little asshole. That’s what I was.
June and I badgered him with more words until he finally agreed to come along.
We scrambled up the slope from the shore, through the trees, then onto the gravel road. The music was louder. We followed it around a bend and found the van parked on the shoulder where the road widened near an empty lot.
I say van because that’s what it was.
Real ice cream trucks are square and boxy, actual food trucks plastered in decals and a full menu board. There’s a sliding order window and someone smiling down at you from inside. And speakers on the top that play the music.
The vehicle in front of us was a white van with faded pastel stripes spray-painted along the sides, sloppy enough that the pink bled into the blue.
A few ice cream stickers pressed onto the paneling, peeling at the corners.
No menu. No order window. Just a regular van somebody had tried to disguise, its back doors propped open, and a man standing behind them. Music came through the radio.
I didn’t notice all those differences; I only wanted to make June happy.
We were at a vacation spot full of kids who ran around unsupervised. Everyone trusted their neighbors. The nearest adults were back at the cabins, out of earshot.
Everyone trusted the world, including me.
I approached the van, touched the bills in my pocket and felt like a man who could provide. “Pick whatever you want,” I told June.
The man had a small cooler propped behind the open doors. He was average height, maybe thirties, wearing a baseball cap and a T-shirt with a faded logo. I remember his hands. Big with red knuckles. Nails bitten short.
June pointed at a chocolate-dipped bar. “That one.”
“Good choice,” the man said.
I paid the two dollars. I puffed up counting the bills, certain I looked like someone who did this every day. June was already unwrapping the bar, and the look on her face was exactly what I’d wanted.
Eli touched my shoulder and whispered, “Let’s go. I don’t like this guy.”
“Chill,” I said.
I asked the man for a strawberry fruit pop for my friend, because Eli likes strawberries.
“Sure,” he said. He climbed into the van and disappeared behind the doors, rustled around, then came back wearing an apologetic look.
“Sorry, bud. I’m all out of those. How about a rocket pop?
Come in and see what I’ve got.” He jerked his chin toward the van’s interior.
“Your friend can come have a look, pick whatever he wants.”
Eli turned pale. He shook his head at me, a small frantic motion.
“I’ll go find him one,” June offered.
“No,” I said. I looked at Eli with a knot of irritation tangled in my chest. He was always like this.
Scared of new things, new people, new situations.
I thought I was helping him. I thought it was what friends did.
You pushed each other past the fear until the fear stopped.
“Don’t be lame and just go look. Two seconds. ”
“I don’t want to,” Eli said.
“You never want to do anything. Maybe we shouldn’t hang out with you anymore.”
His eyes widened because that was a sore spot for him; he was picked on at school and felt left out.
June touched his arm. “It’s okay. We’re right here. Just pick one. I promise it’ll be fine.” She gave him a big smile that seemed to relax him.
Between the two of us, we talked him into it. Her gentleness and my insistence. He climbed into the back of the van with his shoulders pulled up to his ears and his hands curled into fists at his sides.
The man climbed in after him and started showing him options. Flavors, colors, different pops lined up in a second cooler. His voice was easy and patient. See, I thought. Nothing to worry about.
Then the man leaned back toward June. “You want to come pick another one too, sweetheart? No charge.”
June paused. She was licking the last of the chocolate off the stick, and she glanced at me with a tightness around her mouth, the first sign of unease.
“Nah,” she said. “I’m good.”
“It’s fine,” I told her confidently. Because I was nine and nothing truly bad had ever happened to me. My parents were rich so I grew up with anything I ever wanted. Except them.
June shook her head, and because I had a crush on her I didn’t push her the way I pushed Eli.
He was still in the truck with the stranger, so June and I began talking about her ice cream bar, whether chocolate-dipped was better than plain vanilla.
She laughed about the chocolate smeared on her chin and I reached out and wiped it off with my thumb because I’d seen my father do that to my mother once, and June looked at me with those blue eyes and for two seconds the world was exactly what I wanted it to be.
The van doors slammed shut.
Eli screamed.
It cracked in the middle, like his voice couldn’t hold the full realization of what was happening: an eleven-year-old boy calling for help from inside a locked van.
June and I threw ourselves at the back doors. I grabbed the handles, pulled, but they didn’t move. June was hitting the metal with her open palms, screaming his name.
The van started to back up suddenly, so we jumped out of the way. The man was now in the driver’s seat, window rolled down with the same cheerful music playing. He was holding a small, black gun in those red-knuckled hands.
He pointed it at us. “Too bad you didn’t want to join your friend.”
He spat on the ground and leveled the gun.
Adrenaline kicked in, and I acted on pure instinct. I grabbed June and pulled her behind the nearest tree, a thick oak ten feet from the road. A shot whizzed past us as we ran. Thankfully, the stranger was a bad shot.
Unfortunately, hunting was allowed in the woods so no one would pay attention to the gunshot that just cracked through the air.
We ducked behind a tree before the second shot rang out and pressed ourselves against the bark. I felt June’s body shaking against mine, or mine against hers. The bark bit into my shoulder blades. My legs wouldn’t hold me, so we both slid down the trunk until we were sitting in the dirt.
After an eternity of holding our breaths and shaking, the man fired a third shot into the tree that made June shriek. Then the van drove away. Tires crunched the gravel and faded into the distance.
June tried to stand. “We have to tell someone.” She was pulling at my arm, her fingers slick with tears she’d wiped across her face. “Dorien, we have to run back right now.”
I couldn’t move. The man had a gun. What if he was circling the road? What if he was waiting around the next bend, parked in the trees, watching for us to come out?
“We can’t,” I said. “H-he’ll come back. He could be anywhere.”
“Eli is in that van.”
“I know.”
“We have to go,” she pleaded.
“No! If he sees us, he’ll shoot us. He’s just waiting for us to come out because he likes games.”
I had no way of knowing that. The truth was, I was terrified, about to piss myself, and needed any excuse not to move.
She fought me. She pulled at my arm, voice breaking, and she said Eli’s name so many times it stopped sounding like a name.
But I held my ground and kept saying we have to stay, we have to wait, and eventually she stopped pulling.
She pressed her face into my shirt and gripped the fabric so hard I felt her nails through the cotton.
I wrapped my arms around her and stared at the lake through the trees and listened for the van’s engine.
One hour passed.
Je suis désolé, I mouthed into the top of June’s head, over and over, but no sound came out. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t know who I was saying it to. Eli. June. Myself. All of us.
Désolé désolé désolé désolé désolé.
We sat behind that tree for about an hour while Eli was in that van.
When we finally moved, we went through the woods and stayed off the roads.
Branches snagging our clothes. It took thirty minutes to reach the cabins.
Our parents were happy to see us but that happiness soon turned to concern when they saw our expressions.
June couldn’t speak, so I told the story. Ice cream truck. Van. Eli. Gun. Hiding.
My mother’s hand flew to her mouth. My father grabbed his keys. Melia got on the phone with 911.
But we’d given the man an hour and thirty minutes to escape.
They found Eli’s body four days later, dumped by a lake, two counties over.
The man wasn’t caught for five years. He’d hurt children before Eli, and he did it many times after. They locked him away and I read about the trial when I was sixteen.
If we had run…
If I had let June go for help right away…
If I hadn’t held her behind that tree for sixty minutes because I was too scared to move…
Twelve years and I’ve never been brave enough to finish that thought.
I open my eyes. Eli’s headstone is still there. The time between his birth and death dates is so small it barely exists.
Behind me, June is crying.
The last time I chose her, someone died.
That’s why I’ve kept my distance, that’s why I’ve molded myself into what I am today. Every fight I’ve picked with her since. Every wall I’ve built. Every time I’ve opened my mouth to say something true and said something sarcastic instead.
If I choose her again, it will happen again.
I believe that the way I believe in gravity.