Kara sat by the side of the road with cold rain rapidly soaking through her thin clothes, her dirty blonde hair matted down with a mix of sweat and freezing water. Shivers of exhaustion, cold and hunger coursed through her body. She looked again for a red Pontiac Vibe that she already knew wasn't there, and decided she'd pretty much had it with Vanessa's bullshit. Fuck 'something came up', fuck 'family emergency', fuck 'I wasn't feeling good', and oh by the way fuck 'I don't know what you're talking' about three times sideways with a rusty pitchfork. Kara was going to find out what Vanessa's deal was, because it was the alternative to murdering her best friend.
It had been funny at first. Back in freshman year, Kara greeted each new excuse with a mixture of amusement and pity. Vanessa showed up thirty minutes late for an afternoon class with a mumbled excuse of, "I overslept." She went to get popcorn five minutes after the movie started and never came back, saying, "I had a blonde moment." (Which was even funnier, because she was a redhead.) She missed entire shifts at work, and said, "I had the wrong day on the schedule." She managed to get a reputation as the flakiest girl on campus, which was hella impressive considering that the student body numbered in the tens of thousands.
But that didn't stop Kara from liking her. In a way, it was what brought them together-well, that and a meteorically unsuccessful pledge of Chi Omega that wound up seeing both of them walking backwards across campus while holding an egg on a spoon. Vanessa was a flake, but she was such a sweet person that you wound up feeling sorry for her. It clearly wasn't her fault that she was such a scatterbrain that she showed up at the wrong bar for karaoke night and didn't realize where anyone else was until three minutes before closing, and she always looked so flustered by her constant mistakes that Kara felt like someone had to look after her.
So Kara took all the same classes Vanessa did so there'd always be someone taking notes. Kara picked Vanessa as her roommate even though Vanessa had never managed to hold a steady job for more than a month and half the time she only made rent due to the generosity of her parents. Kara made sure to invite Vanessa to every party and movie and social event even though there was only about a one in three chance that she'd show up at the right place, the right time, and be able to stay for the whole thing without an 'unexpected' scheduling conflict. Kara made sure Vanessa had someone to rely on, and she thought before today that she had learned to accept the fact that she couldn't rely on Vanessa in return.
But today was Kara's first full marathon, after months of training. Her parents couldn't make it down to Austin, a variety of coincidences had crossed one friend after another off the list of people who could pick her up afterward, and she wasn't going to carry her handbag for twenty-six miles. She had made, with grave misgivings even at the time, the reluctant decision to turn to Vanessa to help.
Kara had extracted a solemn oath from Vanessa, made under pain of gargling fire ants and freebasing scorpion venom and every other ludicrous thing Kara could think of, that she would remember to pick up Kara at the finishing point of the marathon at five o'clock in the afternoon. Not at the starting point, not at five o'clock the next day, not six hours later because there was a 'family emergency', but 5 PM sharp. And Vanessa, her eyes wide with sincerity, had agreed.
And now it was six thirty. A steady, cold rain was falling on Kara's exhausted body as she sat there, too tired and angry and miserable even to go find someone to ask for a ride. And Kara decided it wasn't funny anymore. Vanessa had pulled her little vanishing act one too many times for Kara to keep believing her excuses. There had to be something more to it, something her best friend wasn't telling anyone-not even her. And Kara was determined to find out what.
*****
It was a determination that outlasted Vanessa pulling up at seven o'clock with an expression of sheer panic on her face and an armful of dry towels and warm blankets and a sob story about engine trouble on top of a flat tire. It even outlasted homemade chicken soup and a rubdown with Ben Gay (and a few terrible jokes about rubbing another woman with 'Ben Gay' that Kara snickered at because one of the reasons she liked Vanessa so much was that they both had roughly the same sense of humor as a twelve-year old boy). Kara was going to find out what Vanessa was up to. She just wasn't sure how.
The next day, during CS 314, Kara divided her attention a bit from the lecture (which was mostly review anyway) to brainstorm ideas in a notebook that she carefully kept averted from Vanessa's seat. The most obvious idea was to just wait for Vanessa to have one of her 'blonde moments' and follow her to see where she went. But Kara quickly decided that was pretty much out of the question-the whole problem was that Vanessa kept dashing off while Kara had to stay put and be responsible. Not to mention, Kara didn't know the first thing about tailing someone.
Maybe she could hire a professional? Kara surreptitiously took out her phone and did a search for private investigators in the area. Most of them talked about tracking down cheating spouses, which made Kara feel a little weird for a minute-was she maybe going a little bit off the deep end here? It wasn't like Vanessa was really hurting anyone, except maybe her own job prospects and college career. Maybe Kara was overreacting just a bit.
Then Vanessa looked up from her own slightly concealed cell phone with a tiny yelp. She dumped her stuff into her book bag and hastily dashed out of the classroom with a hastily mumbled apology. "GottagocatsathepoundKaracanyoufinishtakingnotessosorrybye!"
They didn't have a cat. Kara started looking through the list of private detectives.
A few minutes later, she gave up on the idea. Most of the websites she found were reluctant to list any actual dollar amounts-never a good sign-but Kara finally found a consumer awareness site that listed $95 as an average rate. Per hour. At that rate, Kara could probably pay for about fifteen minutes of hard-boiled detecting without having to sell plasma.
Her thoughts drifted into fanciful solutions. Maybe she could put a radio tracking collar on Vanessa, like the ones that zoologists used to track bird migrations. "Here," she'd say, "I got you this giant clunky necklace for your birthday! Promise you'll never take it off!" Kara let out a chuckle, hastily stifled when she realized she'd apparently laughed at an explanation of database organization schemes.
Suddenly, she started scribbling notes. A radio collar was silly, but it wouldn't be that hard to make a GPS sensor. These days, you could get most of the components off the shelf, and Kara was pretty sure she could make something smaller than a deck of cards that would send its location to Kara's laptop. She could hide it in Vanessa's car, maybe, and at least see where she went if she was driving...
But what if she didn't drive wherever she was going? What if it was someplace near campus? It had to be something Vanessa would carry on her person, something that she'd never leave behind. Something inconspicuous, something she'd never connect with tracking her...
Kara looked down at her phone. She smiled wickedly. She scribbled down one last note, and then returned her thoughts to the lecture.
