Page 25 of Ask for Andrea

My parents stood near the lobby entrance for two hours, watching for anyone they thought they recognized in the parking lot while my mom sent texts and Facebook messages to anyone who appeared in my “friends” list. Asking if anyone had seen me. If I’d said anything that might offer any kind of clue as to where I was now.

Nobody knew anything.

My parents asked every single person who walked through the door to get coffee if they had seen me yesterday, while my dad flashed them my senior photo on his phone.

Everyone shook their heads sadly and told my parents that they hoped I showed up soon. One woman, who looked familiar, said she remembered me but hadn’t seen me leave work yesterday. A couple of college kids who I had definitely kicked out of the lobby for making out nodded and said they remembered me too. But nobody had seen me leave work.

As the afternoon wore on, I could see that even Ken was getting antsy inside the lobby. He brought my parents a couple of iced lattes and asked if they’d seen anything on the video footage. But he quickly added that he wouldn’t be able to give them any additional security footage, glancing back inside the store as he said it. Someone had clearly narked to the owner about the security tape this morning. Even I could feel the desperate, frenetic energy in front of the store. It wasn’t good for business. People just wanted their Americanos.

Officer Willis finally called around 2:00 p.m., and my parents agreed to meet him back at the house, in case he needed any of my things. The unspoken understanding being if search dogs were needed.

We piled back into the car. My dad driving, my mom still glued to her phone, copying and pasting the same message to my 541 “friends” on Facebook. “I’m sorry to bother you, I’m Skye’s mom. She didn’t come home last night, and we’re so worried. Please message me if you can think of anything that might help us find her, even if it doesn’t seem very important.”

I sat watching over her shoulder as the replies poured in, some of them almost instantly. Mostly people whose names I only vaguely recognized responding with some variation of, “Oh no! I’m so sorry. I can’t think of anything.” I cringed as I saw David Hauser’s name pop up. We’d had classes together all through high school. He was an entirely different level of popular, aka people knew who he was. But he was also funny and genuinely nice. I’d heard he was going to ISU in the fall too. Sometimes I thought about what might happen if I, you know, stopped being a social caterpillar and transformed into a social butterfly.

Instead I was dead and my mom was messaging him on Facebook, her tired eyes flicking back and forth between the new message she was typing and the replies coming into her Messenger app.

I didn’t realize the car had stopped—and that my dad was saying something—for a few seconds. “Mari, hello? MARISA. Do you see that?”

I tracked where he was pointing and saw the entrance to the FroYo. It was mostly empty, with one older guy hunched over at a patio table, concentrating on eating his frozen yogurt.

My mom frowned. “No, what? I think we need to hurry so we don’t miss Officer—” She stopped talking.

I leaned forward over the jockey box in the car and finally saw what my dad was pointing at.

Above the door of the FroYo was a security camera.

Angled out, toward the parking lot.

If that footage still existed, I was on it.

And so was the freak in the blue Kia.

16. MEGHAN

Oquirrh Mountains, Utah

1 year before

For several days after the girl with the messy blond bun drove away, I stayed where I was, sitting shiva by the shoe. Waiting. Hoping that the photos she took would lead someone to this place. To find me. To take my body—and what was left of my soul—home.

I still couldn’t have explained why. I didn’t know what good that would do. I would still be dead. I would still be invisible to everyone I loved. But at least maybe I could be near them. For reasons I couldn’t really articulate, every part of me wanted to be found.

A few more cars passed me on the rutted dirt road on the way to Ophir Canyon. None of them stopped. The raven returned every few days with new tiny treasures to add to the collection by the shoe. A piece of glass. A little white slice of quartz. A black pebble.

I drifted carefully while I waited, treading lightly through memories of my first job, some of the lectures I’d attended in college, a campout with my church group in high school. I re-read my favorite book, The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. I got drunk with Sharesa in San Diego during spring break.

The sun rose and set in the dusty hills, and rose and set again. The darkness still scared me when the shadows finally overtook my corner of the woods each night. I saw the coyotes every once in a while, their eyes flashing green and white when the moon caught them right. They gave my little shrine by the side of the dirt road a wide berth. I didn’t approach them again, either.

When the sun had risen and set at least five times, I ran my hands—which I had given an intricate rainbow manicure—over the raven’s altar. The shoe had bleached even further and was covered with a new layer of dust from a windstorm two nights earlier. It was getting hard to recognize as a shoe at all, unless you saw it from just the right angle.

As the days wore on into weeks, I couldn’t bear to be alone with the shoe any longer. And I couldn’t bear to leave it.

So finally, I drifted back to the memory of Bubbie Rosie.

If this was all I had left—this dusty road and the raven and the coyotes and the bleached shoe and the precious memories I turned over and over in my mind like a worry stone—I needed to know.

I started at the beginning of the memory. To the challah dough, to the sound of my grandmother’s delicate laughter and the way the bowl clinked against the counter as Bubbie tipped it out onto the countertops and dipped her hands into a little hill of flour.

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