Page 24 of Did You See Evie

They look at one another, each expression more blank than the next.

“No,” Tara says. “I didn’t wake up until you were gone.”

“Me neither,” Amber adds.

“Someone must have heard something. Did anybody see her get up?” I ask. My eyes fall on Connie, who is sitting the furthest away from me. “You were in the bathroom. Did you see her?”

“I already told you,” she says, voice shaky. “She wasn’t in there. I was the only one.”

I know that much. I went to investigate the bathroom myself.

“Do you remember seeing her?”

Connie cranes her head to the left, where Evie’s pillow and blanket are strewn across the court. “I don’t remember. It was dark, and I’m not sure.”

It’s striking how quickly I’m starting to sound like one of the street cops that used to interrogate me over my petty thefts.What were you doing? Why were you doing it? Tell me the truth.This is far more serious than pocketing a tube of lipstick, and I’m desperate for answers.

“If you’re worried about getting in trouble, don’t,” Joanna says, taking over the conversation. “My friends and I always acted out when we had sleepovers. It’s part of the fun. Maybe you were playing a game or a dare? If something happened during the night, you need to tell us now.”

“Honest, Coach,” Beatrice says. “We were all in our sacks until we woke up just now. The last time I saw Evie, she was sleeping beside the rest of us.”

I search her face—all their faces—for a weak point, a lie. There must be some explanation for why Evie isn’t with the rest of us. And yet, I’ve never known any of the girls on my team to bold-face lie. If anything, they steer away from trouble, especially when I’m involved, too afraid their participation in anything unbecoming will cost them precious playing time. If something had happened in the middle of the night, a game or a dare as Joanna suggests, they would have admitted it by now.

“We’re going to have to search the school,” I say.

“I thought you already did,” Joanna says.

The open door in the computer lab flashes through my mind again, and I shake the image away.

“Really search it. Every room, every closet. There must be hundreds of places for someone to hide.”

Hide. Evie is far too old to be playing hide and seek at a slumber party. Even if some of the girls, like Connie and Delilah, were to busy themselves with such games, Evie wouldn’t. Her path is always straight and narrow. And yet, she’s still nowhere to be found, and everyone else inside the building claims they haven’t seen her.

“Should we go together?” Joanna asks me.

I look back at the girls, their hungry eyes watching everything unfold.

“No. Someone has to stay back with the others.”

“We could help,” Beth adds.

“It’s not safe for the rest of you to be roaming around the school, especially when we don’t know where Evie might be.”

My brain is rattling with so many possible theories and routes, it’s hard to keep up. I’ve worked in the school system for almost ten years, and in that time, sat through dozens of trainings on how to keep children safe. School has not been a safe place for most of my lifetime. Looking at the girls in front of me, I realize it’s never been safe for them. They’ve forever lived in a world where active shooter drills and terrorist threats have been normalized.

We take so many precautions to keep our children protected while they’re within these walls. Classroom doors remain locked during instructional time. Evaluating hard lockdowns and evacuation drills are as commonplace as reviewing lesson plans. Just last year, the school started installing panic buttons in the teachers’ rooms.

And yet, we’ve never been briefed on what protocol to follow if a student goes missing on our watch. I’m making up the rules as I go.

“We need some help,” I say. “Someone who can help me search the building while you watch the girls.”

“Are you calling the police?” she asks, panic in her stare.

“Not yet.” Doing that seems like a forfeit, admitting that the worst-case scenario has come true. I’m still clinging to the possibility this can all be explained away. “I’m calling Mr. Lake. He can tell us where to go from there.”

I pull out my phone, scrolling through my recent call log to find Mr. Lake, when another name captures my attention. Nadia.

Cutting my eyes over at Joanna, I see she’s distracted, trying to settle the girls back down. I press Nadia’s name, holding my breath as the phone rings. And rings. Eventually, it goes to voicemail. It’s long past the time Nadia and her team were supposed to invade the school, and yet the computer lab remains untouched. The only thing missing from this entire building is Evie.

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