Page 11 of The Missing Half

“Okay…” I chewed at a nail, my gaze roaming around her room. She’d always had this obsession with old music, and posters of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles overlapped with academic stuff—her high school diploma, her acceptance letter from ASU. There was a piece of computer paper where she’d drawn and decorated the words of her favorite song lyric from “Strangers” by the Kinks:We are not two, we are one,and another where she’d doodled her full name over and over: Kasey Marie Monroe. Littered among it all were photos printed at Walgreens. In one, she and I were wearing heart-shaped glasses, our lips glossy and pink. In another, Irecognized our aunt’s backyard in Dayton, where we used to road trip every summer. Kasey and I were in bikinis, our hair styled with pool water, slicked back from our foreheads in what we called the George Washington. My favorite was from when I was a baby. Kasey, all of two years old, was sitting on the couch we still had today, her little legs straight out in front. She was holding me swaddled in the hospital blanket, looking down at my sleeping face with a kind of ferocious love, as if she was the one who’d just had me, the one whose job it was to protect me.

“You wanna hang out tonight?” I said. “Zach Walton’s parents are out of town. He’s having a party.”

“A party?” Again with that knife-sharp tone. “I’m good.”

“Okay…” I started to get up.

“Wait,” she said. “How’re you gonna get there?”

“Brianna’s picking me up. Hey…” I didn’t know what to do with her mood, but I took a gamble. “Would you mind braiding my hair? Kyle’s gonna be there, and you know how cute I look in French braids.” This would have usually made her laugh, I thought, but her face was stone.

“Is that why you came in here? So I could do you a favor?”

“Uh…no?”

“I can’t do everything for you for the rest of your life,” she said.

“What are you talking about? I came in here to invite you out tonight.”

“Well, I’m studying. I just told you.”

“Jesus. Fine.” I stood up. “You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”

She let out a breath of bitter laughter. “God, Nic. Sometimes you can be really fucking self-absorbed.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

She flipped the page of her notebook violently. “Nothing. Never mind.”

Kasey and I didn’t fight often, but when we did, we battled. One time, when she discovered I got a C on a paper, she told me I didn’t work hard enough in school. I told her she wasn’t my mom and could shut the fuck up about it. The argument turned into a shouting match, but just a few hours later, we were splitting a bag of Oreosand watching a movie on the couch, everything forgiven. Our fights were like lancing a wound. We didn’t hold off until we bled it dry. So Kasey’s passive-aggressiveness now felt more ominous than if she’d slammed the door in my face.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Nothing.” But she still wasn’t looking at me. “I’m just stressed, okay?”

“Kase, you know you can tell me if something’s wrong.”

Finally, she looked up and her expression slowly softened. “I know. I’m just…I really am stressed. This summer course is harder than I expected, and with school about to pick up again…”

“Hey,” I said. “You’re, like, the smartest person I know. You’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be a really good nurse.”

She smiled, but it wasn’t quite right. After a moment, she said, “Oh, fine. I’ll braid your stupid hair.”

As I was walking out the door a few minutes later, she called out to me. “Hey, Nic? Be careful tonight, okay? Don’t drink too much. Don’t, you know, go anywhere alone.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

—

“Nic…Nic. Nic!”

It takes me a moment to register that I’m in AA, and for some reason, I’m standing. A dozen sets of eyes are on me as Nancy asks me if I’m okay. I realize I’ve interrupted Michaela’s story. “Oh,” I say. “Sorry, Michaela, I…sorry. I’m fine.”

“That’s okay, Nic.”

I sit, and everyone’s attention shifts back to Michaela, but I feel Nancy’s eyes on me, so I give her a reassuring nod.

When Jenna approached me outside Funland last week, I thought revisiting our sisters’ disappearances was futile and masochistic. I believed her lie about finding a new development because I wanted it to be true, but I think a part of me knew better. Over the course of seven years, two different police jurisdictions have been able to come up with nothing more than a theory. How could we, a Funland waitress and a dentist’s receptionist, uncover anything they did not?

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