The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer: A gripping new thriller with a killer twist Joël Dicker (booksvooks TXT) 📖

Our move to Rego Park had involved a change of school. A few weeks after I started in the new school, one of my classmates decreed, “Your name’s Jesse . . . short for Jessica!” It took less than fifteen minutes for my new nickname to spread. And all day long I had to endure taunts like “Jesse the girl!” or “Jessica the chick!”

That day, I came home from school crying.

“Why are you crying?” Grandpa asked curtly. “Men who cry are girls.”

“My classmates call me Jessica,” I said.

“Well, you see, they’re right.”

Grandpa led me to the kitchen where Grandma was making my after-school snack.

“Why’s he sniveling like that?” Grandma asked Grandpa.

“Because his friends are calling him a girl,” Grandpa said.

“Huh! Men who cry are girls,” Grandma decreed.

“You see!” Grandpa said to me. “At least everyone agrees.”

Since I had not overcome my distress, my grandparents made some useful suggestions.

“Don’t just do nothing, hit them!” Grandma advised me.

“Yeah, hit them!” Grandpa said approvingly, searching in the refrigerator.

“Mom doesn’t want me to get into fights,” I said, hoping that would make them come up with a more dignified response. “Maybe you could go talk to my teacher?”

“Talking is shit!” Grandma said definitively.

“Bunch of jerks!” Grandpa added, taking some smoked meat out of the fridge.

“Hit your grandpa in the belly,” Grandma said.

“Yeah, that’s right, come here and hit me in the belly!” Grandpa said enthusiastically, spitting out pieces of the cold meat he was greedily chewing.

I refused categorically.

“If you don’t do it, that means you’re a little girl!” Grandpa said.

“Which do you prefer, to hit Grandpa or be a little girl?” Grandma said.

Faced with such a choice, I said I preferred to be a little girl rather than hurt Grandpa, and my grandparents called me “little girl” for the rest of the afternoon.

The next day, when I got to their house, a gift was waiting for me on the kitchen table. The words For Jessica were written on a pink Post-it note. I undid the wrapping and found a little girl’s blonde wig.

“From now on, you will wear this wig and we’ll call you Jessica,” Grandma said merrily.

“I don’t want to be a girl,” I protested, as Grandpa put it on my head.

“Then prove it,” Grandma said. “If you aren’t a girl, you’ll be capable of getting the shopping from the trunk of the car and putting it away in the fridge.”

I hastened to do as I was told. But once it was done, and I had demanded to be allowed to take off my wig and recover my dignity, Grandma said it wasn’t enough. She needed more proof. I immediately asked for another challenge, which I again met successfully, but, once more, Grandma was not convinced. It was only after two days spent tidying the garage, rearranging Grandpa’s chest of drawers, fetching the clothes from the dry cleaner’s—which I had to pay for with my pocket money—washing the dishes, and polishing all the shoes in the house that I realized that Jessica was no more than a prisoner, my Grandma’s serf.

Deliverance came with an episode that occurred in the parking lot of a supermarket where we went in my grandparents’ car. As we drove in, Grandpa, who was a terrible driver, hit the bumper of a car that was backing out, although not hard. He and Grandma got out to check on the damage, while I remained in the back seat.

“Bunch of jerks!” Grandpa screamed at the other driver, a woman, and at her husband, who was inspecting the bodywork.

“Mind your language,” the driver said, “or I’ll call the police.”

“That’s shit!” Grandma said with her habitual good timing.

Becoming more agitated, the woman now scolded her husband, who was saying nothing, merely passing a finger sluggishly over the scratch to see if the bumper was damaged or if it was just a surface scrape.

“Say something, Robert, dammit!”

Onlookers were stopping with their shopping carts to observe the scene. The Robert in question looked at his wife without uttering a word.

“Lady,” Grandpa said to the driver, “I suggest you look in the glove compartment, maybe that’s where your husband keeps his balls.”

Robert rose to his full height and lifted a threatening fist. “Are you saying I have no balls?”

Thinking he was about to hit Grandpa, I quickly got out of the car, still with my wig on my head. “Don’t touch my grandpa!”

In the excitement, presumably misled by my blonde locks, Robert said:

“What does this girl want?”

That was too much. When would people finally understand that I wasn’t a girl?

“This is where your balls are!” I cried in my childish voice, landing a well-placed punch that made him slump to the ground.

Grandma grabbed me, threw me in the back seat of our car, and climbed in after me. Grandpa, already back in the driver’s seat, set off at speed. Both “Bunch of jerks!” and “That’s shit!” were again heard by the witnesses, who took the license number of Grandpa’s car and did indeed call the police.

Several good things came from this incident. One of them was the arrival of Ephraim and Becky Jenson in my life. They were my grand-parents’ neighbors and I had seen them occasionally. I knew that Becky sometimes went shopping for Grandma and that Ephraim did little favors for Grandpa—when, for example, the changing of a light bulb involved the skills of a tightrope walker. I also knew that they had no children, because one day Grandma had asked them:

“Don’t you have any children?”

“No,” Becky had replied.

“That’s shit!” Grandma had said, sympathetically.

“I quite agree with you.”

But it was soon after the incident in the parking lot of the mall in Rego and our hasty return from the supermarket that my relationship with them blossomed in earnest, when the police knocked at my grandparents’ door.

“Has someone died?” Grandpa asked the two officers as they stood outside on the landing.

“No, sir. It seems you and a little girl were involved in an incident in the