“It’s not her,” Dad said, then took the phone into the kitchen to talk about next steps in the investigation. And with those three little words their hopes were crushed. Mom followed him, asking things like “Are they sure?” and “How do they know?” I stayed on the couch in the living room alone for what felt like hours, listening to Mom weep. No one reminded me to brush my teeth. No one told me to go to bed. Finally I went upstairs on my own, down the dark hallway, past Sarah’s bedroom. I reached in and pulled her door shut before I went into my own room.
The calls came almost every day after that—from all over, fast and furious. And with each false alarm, I watched Mom turn in on herself, her hair sprouting white-gray roots among the honey blond, tiny lines appearing around her eyes and lips as her weight plummeted. She had always been a thin woman, but now, even without her twice-weekly Pilates classes, she grew bony and fragile. Dad became sullen and quiet, finally returning to work two weeks after Sarah disappeared, and then quickly throwing himself into a new merger. His hours got longer: he left at dawn and came home long after we had eaten dinner. It was as if he couldn’t bear to be around us, the blond girls, the constant reminder that his favorite was gone. Mom would practically attack him from the moment he arrived home, weary and stooped, carrying his briefcase like a heavy weight, and tell him all the updates about the search for Sarah in a quick rush, following him into the den, where he would pour himself a Scotch.
Mom never went back to her part-time job at the law firm, instead taking on the full-time job of running the search for Sarah. The home office turned into a command post, with a huge poster of the United States taped to one wall, red pushpins at every location where someone thought they had seen Sarah. By the end of the first month, it looked like most of the United States had chicken pox.
I went back to school, even though I had missed the first couple of weeks of seventh grade. Every morning, I would wake, barely rested, a gritty feeling under my eyelids, and just for a moment forget that Sarah was gone. Sometimes I wouldn’t remember until I’d stumbled to the bathroom or heard Mom telling me it was time for school. Then it would come back to me all in a rush, that sick feeling of dread, of emptiness. It wasn’t a bad dream. It wasn’t a book I had read, a movie we had watched. It was real.
At first, school was no escape. I was known as “Sarah’s little sister” or “that girl.” People always asked—they had to ask: Was there any news? How are your parents? But after a couple of weeks the worried looks from teachers and visits to the counselor’s office were less frequent. Sarah had gone missing in August, and as we tumbled into October and then November, the holidays loomed like the mouth of a dark cave that no one wanted to enter. I had been walking around in a daze, taking the pills that Mom’s doctor gave her, not really connecting with anyone at school. I hadn’t noticed the new girl who started at our school that fall. A girl who had never known Sarah, who didn’t know anything about me. Except one thing.
“You lost a lot of weight, huh?” she said, joining me at my locker after English class one day. I hadn’t been trying to, but she was right. A growth spurt and lack of appetite over the past few months had led me to thin out. I thought no one had noticed.
“Me too, or I’m trying to,” she whispered, leaning in close as she walked with me to my next class. “I wanted to make a new start at this school, and I didn’t want to be known as the fat girl, you know, so I went on a cleanse. . . .” She smiled and I noticed that just the ends of her dark curls were dyed a light purple hue. “You’re Nico, right? I love your name. I’m Tessa.” The bell rang and cut her off. “Well, see you at lunch.”
Because of our last names, Morris and Montford, Tessa was seated near me in almost every class. She also played tennis—not well, but it was enough to join the team. And while Mom still insisted on driving me to school every day and walking me through the gates, watching until I was inside the building, she slowly came around to the idea of letting Tessa’s mom drive us home after tennis practice some days. It was so freeing to be in someone else’s car for a change, to go out for fro-yo and talk about boys and school—anything but my missing sister.
With Tessa it was easy to forget—and I did—until there would be a Sarah sighting, and then it would all come crashing down, especially if my parents took the report seriously enough to pull me out of school. The first time it happened was only about six months after Sarah went missing.
I knew something was wrong when I heard the announcement over the loudspeaker that I should report to the office and collect my things, as I would be leaving for the day. I knew at once it had to do with Sarah—and so did everyone else. Their eyes were on me as I stuffed my notebooks into my backpack and made my way from the classroom. I heard whispers, or imagined I did. Tessa bravely stood up and told our English teacher that she would be walking me to the office. I liked how she didn’t ask.