Good as Gone by Amy Gentry Page A

Starbucks by our house. I borrowed a phone off someone. Listen, I had to get out of there, Mom and Dad were hovering. Can you pick me up?”
    “Are you at the Starbucks on Memorial?”
    “Yeah. I have to go, this lady needs her phone back.”
    “Just hang on, I’m at a friend’s house. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Jane hung up.
    She slammed the bar door behind her as hard as she dared, but it bounced on a cushion of air six inches from the frame and she could still hear the voices inside laughing at her as she hurriedly crossed the street.
    Fifteen minutes later, Jane pulled into the Starbucks parking lot in Tom’s SUV, rolled down the window, and said, “Nice shoes.”
    “Thanks.” Julie looked down and saw Jane’s Converse on her feet. “I mean, I’m sorry.”
    “It’s okay.” Despite the dark hair and bangs, Jane didn’t look much like Charlotte at all. Jane was taller, stronger, Julie told herself.
    “Mom got me all these flats,” she apologized. “I just wanted something I could walk in.” She pulled the heavy passenger-side door open and climbed in.
    “I said it was okay.” Looking closely at Jane’s face, especially when she smiled, Julie could tell she had never been very far from home. College didn’t count, even if it was halfway across the country—it was still closer to home than a single bus ride could take you. If you looked past Jane’s piercings (two: nose and eyebrow), tattoos (two small ones, one on her shoulder and one on her hip, and Anna didn’t know about either), and hair (the bleach-and-green was clearly a home job, but the black dye was from a salon), you saw a girl who’d never had to take the bus all that much.
    Julie regretted putting her own hair through this last round of bleach. It had looked smooth enough at first, but now the ends were getting ragged, the part below her shoulders breaking off and poofing out. Worst of all, darker hair was creeping in at her hairline. If she hadn’t needed to look the part so desperately, she could probably have gotten away with dirty blond.
    But she hadn’t wanted to be a dirty blond. She’d wanted to be Julie.
    Jane clicked her keys against the wheel impatiently. “So where are we going?”
    “I want to chop all this off,” Julie said, holding out a handful of split ends.
    “Like, right now?”
    “Yeah, right now. And dye it, maybe. I figured you’d know a good place for that.”
    Jane looked impressed. “I can take you to the place I go. It’s in Montrose. What color are you going to dye it?” She squinted shrewdly. “Better not be black.”
    “I don’t know, maybe red,” she said without thinking. At the Rose, she’d always made bank with red hair. Besides, white-blond Julie was starting to get to her. She’d stared at the pictures of the missing girl and at herself in the mirror beforehand, but when she started playing Julie for Anna and Tom and Jane, something shifted. She saw Julie’s innocence in the way all three of them looked at her, and it was unnerving. Anna, in particular, watched her as if she might break.
    Jane was already pulling out of the parking lot, her strong jaw set under its sprinkling of covered-up acne, saying, “Cool, let’s get out of here.” If Julie was worried about Anna, she should have started with Jane in the first place. Shutting Anna out was Jane’s superpower.
    Tom’s Range Rover was a smooth ride, just more ease and luxury so built into Jane’s existence she didn’t even know it was there. Jane wove in and out of the four-lane traffic on Westheimer as she drove toward the city, the SUV soon dwarfed by hulking black Suburbans with tinted windows, shiny trucks that were all tire and no flatbed, a Hummer that looked like it could transform into a robot. A few lanes away, a silver convertible idled like a half-melted bullet in the sun. The apartments gave way to sparkling-white office buildings set on lots kissed around their edges with manicured shrubs and palm