snaggletooth magazine

Writing To My Coworker Rebekah, Who Went Missing The Summer I Turned 19

I am going to be honest, Rebekah, I haven’t thought about you in months. One day you didn’t show up for work and then suddenly the summer was over and you still hadn’t turned up and whatever thoughts I had about you evaporated in the late-August heat. I didn’t really know you at all—a few shifts together now and then—and you might have never crossed my mind again, but then I went back to Montana for spring break and saw your face on a Missing Persons billboard on the side of the highway.

“Missing.” You’re dead, aren’t you? 

They found your car at the pull-out to Maura and I’s favorite swimming hole. It’s a perfect spot, really. The willows wall off the bank of the river but if you’re determined enough to crawl through them you can get to the secret beach—it’s a great place to hide, Rebekah, no one can see you. It would be a great place to hide a body, too, I guess.

Once the Search and Rescue mission got called off, once all the boats and men in wetsuits left, we went back there every Wednesday. I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t thinking about you at all—I was too busy watching river water stream down Maura’s bare stomach. Were you down there, spying from the riverbottom at our naked bodies melting together in the sun? I think our sapphic hedonism would have made you—a bigot with enough vitriol to make Reagan cringe—mad enough to rise from the dead, so maybe your body had already floated downstream by that point.

Do you remember that one night last summer, when you walked past Maura and I kissing out back after our shift was over, her right hand holding a cigarette, her left hand up my skirt? Do you remember spitting on the sidewalk in front of us? “Fucking lesbos.” I remember that, Rebekah. And when our other coworker took too many punches from her boyfriend and ended up in the hospital, you said she was such a whore she probably had it coming for her. I remember that too.

How bad do you have to be to deserve what happened to you, Rebekah? I think people can change for the better, but it’s hard to change at all when you’re dead. I don’t mean to make this about me, but I am scared I’ll die before I get the chance to be better. Maybe it’s the Catholic school talking, but sometimes I feel so guilty I think I might drown and how am I supposed to ask for forgiveness with a mouth full of silt? Are you down there, asking for forgiveness? 

You can be bad and still be forgiven, right Rebekah? Oh God, please tell me I’m right. ★

Maria McEvoy is a freshman from Missoula, Montana.