The Art of Disappearing by Ivy Pochoda (popular romance novels .txt) 📕

I faced the magician. “I missed the bus, I think.” I tried to hide a smile. The sun reflected off the jet buttons on Toby’s black cowboy shirt—the only visible manifestation of his time in the West. A tumbleweed rolled down the two-lane blacktop toward us. I stared beyond it, at the rusted desert disappearing toward distant mesas.

“You shouldn’t mind missing things. Things go missing for me every day. Books, bags, even shoes, both of them. It’s an art.” Toby trapped the tumbleweed with the toe of his shoe.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Looking for you.” He bit his lip and looked away. I looked down at his angular shadow stretching across the highway.

“Really?”

“I’m not good with people, normally,” the magician said, the static of his voice almost swallowing his words.

“I thought you said that I was the lonely one.”

“Are you getting in?”

I already had my hand on the door. I peered into the back of the van. “No assistant?”

Toby bit his lip and shook his head. The bravado of the previous night was absent. He reached for the shift, brushing my thigh. My fingers extended toward his but coiled instead around my seat belt as he put the car in gear.

“My last assistant vanished,” he said.

“In a puff of smoke?”

“Something like that.”

I watched the desert stretch itself out alongside the road in swirls of sand and rough plants. When I shifted my gaze across the windshield, I often found that I was looking at the spot Toby’s eyes had just left.

“You never told me where you’re going,” the magician said.

“You never said where you’re taking me.”

“To see my show.”

I smiled as I watched the mesas pop up alongside us—tea tables for Titans.

The town of Intersection, Nevada, lies one hundred miles east of the Old Stand Saloon, just off the Tonopah highway—a slow road that’s hardly traveled, on account of its two-lane nonsense and lack of exit signs. Intersection was built around a gas station that expanded into a convenience store, which expanded into a diner when the old highway was first built. Tract houses sprouted around the diner, and then a visionary from Reno thought he smelled gold and tried his luck with a casino. Then came a whore house and then more tract houses. And soon the town was crawling with a first generation of Intersection natives.

Greta Civalier, called Sunshine, who wove her story into mine and Toby’s, was half Quebecois and half Navajo, and Intersection born-and-bred. At sixteen, she was attractive, but not so romantically attractive as the role she had written for herself. Although she had the benefits of her mother’s sun-baked coloring and her father’s elegant profile, she hid both of these under the tattered black trimmings of teen-goth style. Her thick brown hair was interwoven with patchy black dye. Chipped black nail polish covered her chewed nails. Stripes of dark eyeliner masked her eyes, while white makeup did its best to obscure the glowing skin beneath.

Along with her friends, Greta had experienced a period of eighth-grade rebellion, during which she haunted parking lots in ripped clothes and planned small acts of vandalism she never carried out. But when her friends moved on to the next fad—boys and glitter and faded denim—Greta’s personal style grew darker. Her multicolored punk fashion gave way to a mall-goth look of platform boots and oversized black T-shirts advertising bands like Obituary and Cradle of Filth. Soon Greta, no longer wanting to be a billboard for music she really didn’t enjoy, began to take an interest in the occult, finally fixating on death, dying, and the dead. At least death, unlike the rotating fads embraced by her friends, would never go out of style. Death was real. Immortality was even better.

The nickname Sunshine, taken from her mother’s favorite clairvoyant on the Psychic Friends Network, was an attempt by the Civalier family to rescue their daughter. Greta’s mother, who had abandoned her native religion, scorning its sweat lodges and canyon lore, tried everything to weed out what she called “that child’s morbid fixination.” She sent Greta to a summer camp run by a splinter group of fundamentalist Christians and enrolled her in several after-school Bible studies. But the Bible summer had served only to reinforce Greta’s fixination, and she came home with stories about how her counselors were looking forward to the day of Revelation, the day when, according to Greta, “Everyone would be, like, totally happy to die.”

We met Greta in the Route 66 Diamond Diner, which lies nowhere near the classic highway. After school, for $3.75 an hour, she tied back her half-dyed hair and traded her black uniform for a white apron and a sea green dress while she sloshed coffee, blended milk shakes, and cried “Order up!” Toby and I were seated at the far end of the counter, hoping to grab a quick burger before his show.

“Take your order?” Greta issued her questions without interrogatory words. It was just easier that way. She tapped her black nails on the counter and fiddled with the strands of ball-chain necklaces looped around her neck. Noticing that Toby was removing a creamer from underneath my chin, she said, “Cool.” And then she looked at me with the teenage horror of having ascribed coolness to something that might not be so. “That all you can do?” she asked.

“All?”

“Like, can you do real stuff?”

“Depends on what you mean by real. But I can do more than this,” he said, producing a saltshaker from the air with a pop.

“I was kinda into that when I was younger. But now it’s pretty dumb, you know.” She gave him a strange smile, one that seemed to mock the magician.

“I don’t know. Tell me.”

“Oh, not that you are dumb. Personally. It’s just that I think card tricks are sorta boring.”

“I don’t do card tricks. I promise,” Toby assured her.

Greta wandered off to the far end of the counter without taking our order. A moment later, she was back carrying a flyer. “You’re not