Chip shrugged, which might mean, “Yes,” or “Would I tell you if I did?” or “I haven’t decided yet.” Jonah wasn’t sure he wanted to know anyway. He and Chip weren’t really good friends yet, but Chip having a crush on Katherine could make everything very weird.
Chip lay back in the grass, staring up at the back of the basketball hoop.
“Do you ever wonder what’s going to happen?” he asked. “I mean, I really, really want to make the basketball team. But even if I make it in seventh and eighth grades, then there’s high school to deal with. Whoa. And then there’s college, and being a grown-up…. It’s all pretty scary, don’t you think?”
“You forgot about planning your funeral,” Jonah said.
“What?”
“You know. If you’re going to get all worried about being a grown-up, you might as well figure out what’s going to happen when you’re ninety years old and you die,” Jonah said. Personally, Jonah didn’t like to plan anything. Sometimes, at the breakfast table, his mom would ask the whole family what they wanted for dinner. Even that was way too much planning for Jonah.
Chip opened his mouth to answer, then shut it abruptly and stared hard at the front door of Jonah’s house. The door was opening slowly. Then Katherine stuck her head out.
“Hey, Jo-No,” she called, using the nickname she knew would annoy him. “Mom says to get the mail.”
Jonah tried to remember if he’d seen the mail truck gliding through the neighborhood. Maybe when he and Chip were concentrating on shooting hoops? He hoped it wasn’t when they were rolling around in the grass laughing and making fools of themselves. But he obediently jumped up and went over to the mailbox, pulling out a small stack of letters and ads. He carried the mail up to Katherine.
“You can take it on in to Mom, can’t you?” he asked mockingly. “Or is that too much work for Princess Katherine?”
After what he and Chip had been talking about, it was a little hard to look her in the eye. When he thought about the name Katherine, he still pictured her as she’d been a few years ago, with pudgy cheeks and those goofy-looking pigtails. Now that she was in sixth grade, she’d…changed. She’d slimmed down and shot up and started worrying about clothes. Her hair had gotten thicker and turned more of a golden color, and she spent a lot of time in her room with the door shut, straightening her hair or curling it or something. Right now she was even wearing makeup: a tiny smear of brown over her eyes, black on her eyelashes, a smudge of red on her cheeks.
Weird, weird, weird.
“Hey, Jo-no-brain, can’t you read?” Katherine asked, as annoying as ever. “This one’s for you.”
She pulled a white envelope off the top of the stack of mail and shoved it back into his hands. It did indeed say Jonah Skidmore on the address label, but it wasn’t the type of mail he usually got. Usually if he got mail, it was just postcards or brochures, reminding him about school events or basketball leagues or Boy Scout camp-outs. This envelope looked very formal and official, like an important notice.
“Who’s it from?” Katherine asked.
“It doesn’t say.” That was strange too. He flipped the envelope over and ripped open the flap. He pulled out one thin sheet of paper.
“Let me see,” Katherine said, jostling against him and knocking the letter out of his hand.
The letter fluttered slowly down toward the threshold of the door, but Jonah had already read every single word on the page.
There were only six:
YOU ARE ONE OF THE MISSING.
TWO
Katherine snorted.
“Missing link, maybe,” she said.
Jonah reached down and picked up the letter. By the time he’d straightened up again, Chip had joined him on the porch, either because he was curious about the letter too, or because he really did have a crush on Katherine.
“What’s that?” Chip asked.
Jonah shrugged.
“Just a prank, I guess,” he said. Seventh grade was all about pranks. You could always tell when someone in the neighborhood was having a sleepover, because then the kids who weren’t invited suddenly had gobs of toilet paper in all the trees in their yards. Or their cell phones rang at midnight: “I’m watching you….” followed by gales of laughter.
“Pranks are supposed to be funny,” Katherine objected. “What’s funny about that?”
“Nothing,” Chip said. Jonah noticed that Chip was smiling at Katherine, not looking at the letter.
“Now, maybe if it said, ‘It’s ten o’clock—do you know where your brain is?’ or ‘Missing: one brain cell. Please return to Jonah Skidmore. It’s all I’ve got’—maybe that would be funny,” Katherine said. She yanked the letter out of Jonah’s hand. “Give me a few minutes. I could turn this into a really good prank.”
Jonah snatched the letter back.
“That’s okay,” he said, and crammed the letter into his jeans pocket.
He knew it was just a prank—it had to be—but for just a second, staring at those words, You are one of the missing, he’d almost believed them. Especially since he’d just been telling Chip about being adopted…. What if somebody really was missing him? He didn’t know anything about his birth parents; all the adoption records had been sealed. He’d had such trouble understanding that when he was a little kid. He’d been a little obsessed with animals back then, so first he’d pictured elephant seals waddling on top of official-looking papers. Then, when his parents explained it a little better, he pictured crates in locked rooms, the doors covered with Easter Seals.
He’d been a pretty strange little kid.
In fact—his face burned a little at the memory—he’d even given a report in second grade on all the different uses of the word seal, from Arctic ice seals to Navy Seals to sealed adoption records. The report had included the line, “And so, that’s why it’s interesting that I’m adopted, because it makes me unique.” His parents had helped him with that one.