Chapter 13

Patient Narrative - Christina Melendez - entry thirteen: Yvonne’s disappearance and the end of the relationship

I was getting very stressed about what had happened to Yvonne, but I figured I’d finally find out when I saw her at school. There was a problem with that. There had been a meningitis outbreak in the District while I was away, so the School Board closed everything down for two weeks. No one was allowed in any of the buildings and we had to take our classes through remote learning. During all that time, there was not a hint of her. Her phone was still disconnected and I had absolutely no other means of getting a hold of her. I knew that she posted pictures online, so she must belong to some picture-sharing forums. But she had never told me which forums or her user ID.

To make matters worse, my parents were home that entire time. Dad was in and out a lot, but Mom was planted in the living room doing a bunch of contract work. For some reason, she took a real interest in my remote learning and watched me while I was working and checked my assignments. I was thinking: WTF? She’s been blowing me off for the last five years and now all of a sudden she’s interested in what I’m doing?

My parents tied up even more of my time by insisting I go out to eat with them. Mom started asking me a bunch of questions about how I was doing and what my life was like at school. After a while, I realized what was going on. I was about to graduate and leave home for college, and she knew I wasn’t going to be around much longer. She had blown her opportunity to spend time with me over the past five years, because she had been sitting around drinking on cruise ships and beaches. It suddenly hit home what she had done. Now she was trying to make up for it. Uh, a little bit late, Mom. Still, I felt I needed to indulge her. I knew we wouldn’t be seeing much of each other after I graduated, so I’d try to make her happy for the moment.

I had wanted to tell Mom about my relationship with Yvonne. I came close a couple of times, but it worried me that she had dropped off the face of the earth. Where the fuck was she? I decided to hold-off on saying anything to my parents until I made contact with her, and then hopefully I could bring her over to the house to introduce her. It would be embarrassing and weird to talk about her, only to have her never show up again.

In the back of my mind I always had that doubt, that Yvonne could disappear someday. In spite of all the time we had spent together, she had shared almost nothing about her personal life. She had deliberately made herself hard to track. The only reason I even knew about her job was her t-shirts. But I knew nothing else. If she disappeared, I’d have a hard time finding her. Was it possible that’s exactly what had happened, that she had decided to ditch me? Was it possible that she had planned to ditch me all along?

When school started up again, there were only three weeks remaining for us graduating seniors. The teachers were frantic to get us back on the class schedule so we could finish on time. The whole mood of school had changed and everything was rush-rush-rush. There wouldn’t even be a senior prom that year, partly because of the meningitis scare and partly because the planning got messed up with the District being shut down for two weeks.

Yvonne never showed up. I didn’t know what to do, because I didn’t know who to ask about what had happened to her. The day I got back to school, I saw that her locker had been cleaned out. That’s when I knew, for sure, she was gone. But, what happened? Why would she have just disappeared? Why didn’t she say something to me? Even just left a goodbye text, or something? How could she do that to me?