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  “How are you kids doing?” she said. She was still practically shouting, though staring at something on my bookshelf, my old Encyclopedia Britannica, it looked like.

  David Nelson slurped his float, nodding.

  “Fine,” I said. “Trying to read.” I held up my book.

  “How are you doing, Mrs. Pasternak?” David Nelson said. I wanted to tell him she wasn’t a hall monitor; he didn’t need to use her name in every single sentence.

  “Melissa Anne wrote again,” Mom said, patting the back of her head, like maybe she’d just realized it was tangled back there. She recited the couplet, talked about wanting to call the police but knowing they would do nothing. Her words came out quickly. She was wearing the same sweatsuit that she’d worn the day before. David Nelson had a smile pasted on his face that was starting to look painful. My mom was on leave from her vet tech job. In the first days she’d said it was because she was needed by the police and the search-and-rescue teams and reporters camped out on our street, which was more or less true. Now, though, she filled her days scribbling notes, calling the Red Cross and Goodwill for food donations for the searchers, calling the police for updates, organizing and reorganizing the impromptu filing system that was taking over our kitchen, a tall rusting filing cabinet dragged from the garage and placed next to the table. It was filled with letters and area maps and newspaper coverage and less explicable items too: pictures of other missing kids ripped from milk cartons or junk mail flyers, handwritten lists of Danny’s favorite foods, a whole page of his nicknames—Nack, Danny-O, D-Man. I’d never heard anyone call him Danny-O or D-Man. Those, it seemed, my mother made up in some fanciful, self-soothing abandon.

  “Dad told me,” I said, reminding her of all the things that the police told us: harmless, nut case, best to just ignore it. She nodded at me, in a way that did not mean yes as much as Go on, go on.

  I didn’t know what to say. I never knew what she wanted, really. I held up my book again, reminding her of her interruption. This sort of dropping in and chatting, this wasn’t something she and I had ever done particularly well. It always seemed a strange, pale imitation of the way she stood in Danny’s doorway as he curled his free weights, the two of them talking lightly about nothing. How was his practice? What was that bruise on the back of his thigh? Was he getting enough sleep? Had she told him the story of the three-legged dog who came in for shots and nearly licked her to death? I would half listen to them through my door, derisive, curious, jealous, relieved.

  “I still need to call the Kiwanis for Saturday,” she said with a nervous laugh. “I’ve left two messages already and nobody has called back.” We were on to the searches. This is how conversations worked with my mom now. “And I don’t think the phone tree worked this week. I know there are still a whole lot of people who don’t know where we’re starting from.”

  “I’ll be there,” David said quickly. “Near Shore Acres Mall, yeah?” Mom nodded at David. It looked like she was going to say something, but Oliver started barking at her. She picked him up and cooed at him about being a good boy. He nuzzled his wet nose into her chin. “Good boy, good boy,” she kept repeating.

  “Okay, thanks.” I lifted my mug in a salute. “Thanks for this. We have to get back to work.”

  “Sure, sure, sure,” Mom said. She kissed Oliver on his dog lips. David Nelson and I exchanged disgusted glances.

  After she left, David brought his mug to the bed and sat Indian-style where Oliver had just been. I curled my legs under my butt, making myself smaller. I had the feeling of a cactus or a porcupine.

  “Your poor mom,” he said.

  “You sound like Min Mathers,” I said.

  “I’m just saying …” He paused, as if he were trying to figure out what he was saying. “It’s got to be tough.”

  “Duh.” I leafed through Richard III. Queen Elizabeth’s noblemen were begging for their lives; Richard, about to kill them anyway, didn’t give a crap.

  “Do you think about it a lot?” he said.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. You act like you don’t, but how could you not?”

  My float sat untouched on my nightstand, the ice cream melting into the pop. Today shalt thou behold a subject die for truth, for duty, and for loyalty, one of the noblemen told Richard.

  David scooted himself closer to me. A thin mustache of ice cream shadowed his upper lip. “It’s okay to be sad,” he said, sounding like he’d been practicing the line for a while.

  I started laughing, which I felt almost bad about when I saw his mouth pucker in surprise. But this type of heartfelt earnestness, especially from David Nelson, had a tendency to make me itchy and restless, as if the last flimsy barricade protecting my life from a completely maudlin wasteland were giving way.

  “I’m trying to read,” I said.

  “You’re so tough.” I couldn’t tell if he meant it as an insult or a compliment. He sat funny, balanced strangely on his knees, hunching forward, his mug in one hand, the other grasping my comforter. He looked right at me. “Can you imagine how some other girls would be handling this? I mean, remember Gina LeShawn?”

  Gina LeShawn had been a passenger in a drunk-driving accident our freshman year. The driver, a junior from another school, wrapped the car around a tree and ended up with a broken collarbone and a jail sentence. Gina broke her ankle and ended up a local celebrity, regularly gathering swarms of people around her in the hallways to retell the story of the accident and the emergency room and, months later, the sentencing hearing for the driver. For a good portion of the year she could be found sobbing in the cafeteria, as girls in ponytails and polo shirts squeezed her shoulders in concern.

  “Well, I’m not Gina LeShawn,” I said.

  “And thank god for that.” He looked at me like Chuck looked at me, straight on and steady. His zit was huge.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Come on, what?”

  “Go away. Go back to your chair.”

  He didn’t go back to his chair. He kept staring, as if I had something on my face. “What?” I said to him. “What?” And then he sprang forward, far more agile and quick than I knew David Nelson to be, crushing my book, spilling some of his float into my lap, jamming his mouth to mine. His lips were sticky and sweet, his teeth clicking loudly against mine.

  There was one long, slow moment (really, it must have been just a nanosecond) during which I felt nothing at all, a weightless, limbless remove. And then, in a dizzying rush, I was back—in my room, in my bed, with the full weight of David Nelson upon me, a weight far more substantial than I would have guessed. He had me pinned, his nose buried in my cheek, a knee digging painfully into my thigh, an elbow poking my hip.

  He was a jack-in-the-box newly sprung, breathing hard, trying to shove his tongue in my mouth. His breath was sugary but sour. “Cut it out,” I managed to say, but he kept at it, lapping me with his tongue, one hand pawing at my hair, but hard, so it was more like hitting me in the head. For a few more seconds I just sat there and took it, stunned, a bug speared to the corkboard, wings splayed. The faces of all the boys I’d ever thought of kissing—Barry from World History Club, whose hair was the almost outlandish gold of fairytale princes’; bookish Mr. Jarris, who sometimes subbed for Hollingham and nervously twiddled his hands in his pockets as he talked of the Byzantine Empire; Joey Jeremiah, from that silly high school show that used to run on PBS—flashed through my head. David Nelson’s ceramic mug pressed coldly against my rib cage, giving me a feeling like I might cry.

  Finally I dislodged my arms from the tangle of him and shoved my palms against his chest. He bounced backward on the mattress almost comically, losing hold of his float entirely, the mug bouncing on the bed, pop spilling darkly along my comforter. He lay sprawled at the foot of the bed, panting, staring at me wide-eyed, like a cornered animal.

  “What. The. Hell?” I said, and his cheeks turned a bright, car-toonish red.

  “I’m sorry,�
� David said in the voice of a little girl. He wiped me off his lips with the back of his hand. “I’m really sorry.”

  “You should be,” I said, and I could feel my eyes stinging stupidly. I watched his chest as it flittered like a jackrabbit’s, his terribly cut, uneven bangs, his eyes that bulged from his skinny face. “What the hell?” I repeated, louder now.

  “Shhh!” he told me, as if it were his parents downstairs. He pumped his hands toward the ground, like he was tamping a fire. “Calm down,” he said.

  My blood coursed hotly through me, behind my cheeks, down my neck, through my cramped-up legs, as if it had turned to lava. “You calm the fuck down,” I said, “you rapist.” Some dark, crushed, nameless thing was propelling the words.

  He was so red and flustered-looking, it seemed like he was the one who was going to cry. I’d never talked like that to anyone, certainly not David Nelson, and I felt a quick pang of regret. I had to clench my teeth not to suddenly scream, my jaw trembling with the effort. Chuck would say later that it was because what David had done was assault. That I was a sexual assault victim reacting with perfectly normal and understandable shock. I believed Chuck for a while, relieved to have so easy an answer (and wasn’t that what therapy was for—providing self-satisfying and palatable answers to inexplicable questions?). But it wasn’t that. All David Nelson had done was kiss me. He hadn’t even tried to grab my boobs.

  It was that he’d crossed a line, a line which I knew—instantaneously—we couldn’t just cross back from with the hopes that everything would revert to its rightful place. He’d changed things, created a moment after which nothing would be the same. I already had one of those, recently acquired. One was too much. I couldn’t have another. Not now. Not from David Nelson.

  I started shaking.

  “I didn’t mean it,” he said in a low voice. Then, more shrilly, “I don’t mean I didn’t mean it. I meant it. I didn’t mean it like that.” And finally, terribly, “I’ve been waiting so long.”

  I felt my chest sinking into itself like he was sucking the air right out of me. Dupe, I thought, suddenly and quickly. Dupedupe-dupedupedupe. He stared at me as if he expected something. I could not imagine what. David Nelson was my only friend.

  “Shut. Up,” I said, but what I wanted to say was, You’re making it worse.

  “I should go,” he said, scrambling quickly off the bed, grabbing his books from the desk, his coat and backpack from the floor. He was a blur of motion, nodding fast, picking up his mug, rubbing his hand uselessly over the pop and ice cream that had already seeped through my comforter and sheets, already spread into a brownish stain in my mattress, one that would never wash fully clean, a blob I would spy for years whenever I changed the sheets, the sight of it reminding me of the scooped-out feeling of that night. The meaning would slowly fade, though, and I would eventually come to eye it dispassionately as I snapped clean linens between two fists and spread new sheets over the mattress. From one angle it looked a bit like the storm system on a weather map, from another a mangled butterfly.

  “I can clean this up,” David said, crackly-voiced.

  I jammed my palms against my eyes. “Just go,” I said. My chest filled back up with air, too fast now, my heart thumping like it could burst. I listened to him stumbling to get his shoes on. To him saying my name. To unintelligible mumbling, a swallowed sentence about didn’t want to and never mind. To the wriggling of my doorknob. To quick footsteps down the stairs. To my mom saying something and David Nelson saying something back. To the front door opening and closing. To the sound of this house without him—the low buzz of a television barely on, the creak of a couch spring, the hum of a cavernous fridge—noisy with quiet, teeming with it, like a breath held too long, painfully paused and waiting.

  He didn’t show up at the Saturday search. I knew he wouldn’t. We’d quickly and instinctively winnowed separate channels for ourselves through the school hallways. There was only one run-in, on Wednesday, between fifth and sixth periods, near the chem labs, corrected by Thursday. I chose the longer route to Ms. Villara’s Spanish class via the second-floor history and psych rooms. In Bar-dazian’s English class and Fontana’s trig we perfected the art of staring intently and unwaveringly past each other. He commented incessantly about Queen Margaret during the Richard III discussion, and I felt hotly satisfied when Mrs. Bardazian did her usual “Why don’t we give a chance to some of our quieter classmates?” as David raised his hand for the millionth time.

  I spent three days of lunches in the cafeteria, hounded by Lola Pepper and girls who ended every sentence with a question mark (“This tuna loaf is like a brick?” “We’re hanging out at Devon’s after school?”) and modified every verb with so (“I so failed that history quiz,” “I so wouldn’t wear those pants with those saddlebags”). They had predictable questions about Danny—What was he like at home? What did he have in his room? Do you have any idea where he is? Sometimes I pretended I didn’t hear. Sometimes I gave them a word or two, like “Just normal” or “Stuff” or “No.” Lola had a habit of looking at me a lot while the other girls talked among themselves, as if she were trying to gauge my response to their conversation about a CD from a band I’d never heard or how one of them could get Lyle Walker to notice her in world civ class. I didn’t really know what to do with myself as Lola stared. Pretend I didn’t see her? Act like I was absorbed in the conversation? Smiling seemed the most effective—a closed-mouth, noncommittal smile—placating her enough to turn her attention, at least for a little while, back to the rest of the table.

  By Saturday morning I was tired, more tired than usual. It was a lite version of those first days after Danny was gone, when it seemed like there was so much effort to every step, every word, every eye blink, not because of grief so much as disorientation. The reference points had gone awry: cop cars parked regularly in our driveway, strangers brought casseroles, our name was flashed over and over again on the local news as if a recent hurricane or tornado had been named for us. I found myself doing things like opening the medicine cabinet and, upon seeing the Listerine bottle, thinking, Lister-ine? What is Listerine? even though that same green bottle, or one just like it, had been sitting in that same spot for years. Everything was suddenly being relearned—Did I have a brother? Did I not have a brother?—causing my brain to stutter and buckle.

  This time it wasn’t so bad, not nearly as dramatic; now I just longed for sleep more than usual. I was gritty-eyed and exhausted by the time we got to the field where this week’s search would begin. People milled about, standing in weeds and grass still wet from the rain that had just fallen and was sure to return soon. They all had their hands pocketed in raincoats, heads tucked under hoods. A few grown-ups held bullhorns at their sides. Several ladies in bright plastic ponchos passed out the orange safety vests and whistle necklaces. People always brought their dogs; today, a German shepherd pulled at its leash and a pit bull barked at a patchy mutt. Some off-duty cops spoke into walkie-talkies. The on-duty cops had been pulled the week before, after we’d passed the two-month mark. “Can’t justify the overtime anymore,” a lieutenant with a walrus mustache had told my dad. “We still have to entertain the very real possibility of a runaway.” The vein in my dad’s temple pulsed so quickly and so visibly I thought he would pass out or punch the guy instead of just walking away like he did. No other idea was as quick to incite rage in my dad or hysteria in my mom as the runaway one. Whenever police or even Howard the PI mentioned it, my parents heard an accusation, one meant to squarely shift responsibility—This is your problem, not ours.

  Lacking a ransom note or direct witness of abduction, my parents had spent the first weeks after the disappearance yelping to anyone who would listen, Starting defensive ends does not run away. Popular kids about to begin their senior year do not run away. Someone just finishing a neighborhood basketball game with friends does not suddenly run away. If the runaway idea should have held some comfort in its relative quaintness or normalcy, this seeme
d lost on my parents. They loved Danny slavishly; he loved them back, if not quite slavishly, then with his own brand of brutish devotion. So there was never any doubt for them that he’d been gotten. And the idea of gotten mobilized people. It evoked panic, contagion, a need to march through wet, marshy fields or across vast cement lots for the wildcard possibility of finding who had done this getting, or where, or why, or how. And my parents needed this. They needed everyone to step up and help, to be squawky and persistent and hysterical on our behalf.

  A quick scan of today’s crowd revealed the swelling ranks of kids from Franklin—Tip and all his athlete buddies, the kid who sat behind me in Hollingham’s history class, a freshman girl who was already famous for bleeding through her pants on the second day of school and then again on the fourth. The Saturday searches had quickly become the official time for the student body to display their collective, vicarious grief. A knot of girls from the student council stood crying loudly in the center of the field now. They seemed to have an endless reserve of tears, truly an amazing, regenerative supply.

  A ripple of attention moved through the crowd as we arrived. My mom had her hand on my shoulder in a distracted grip. We’d gotten another letter from Melissa Anne the day before, written on the back of a soup label (He is suffocated by soil), which made them extra-jittery. My mother passed out the laminated cards she always prepared for the searches: Things to Look For, they read across the top, with a list beneath, starting with Tigers cap, blue nylon wallet, Reebok shoes. People stopped their conversations; one girl gulped down a laugh in a quick hiccup as we passed. Several women stopped us, holding on to my mom’s forearm and saying low, consoling things about faith and mysterious ways. Bernice, they kept re-peating, Bernice, Bernice, Bernice, and it still surprised me how many people knew her name. Men nodded at my dad, a wordless parade of bobbleheads. Soon they were both sucked into the crowd. My mom used a megaphone to thank everyone for coming, and my dad talked to the off-duty cops huddled around him like a football team around its coach.