Page 2 of The Missing Half

At first, I tried to keep the details of my “program” quiet, but my hometown is small, and a DWI is a juicy piece of gossip. Plus, I never had a shot of keeping it from Brad. He and my dad have a beer together every week. “I’m fine,” I say again.

“Good. Good.” Brad bobs his head. “Well, listen. You’ll let me know if you need anything, yeah? If you ever want to talk…”

I soften a little at this, but we both know I won’t take him up on it. Between working this job to pay off the state fine, going to my weekly AA meeting, preparing for my appearance in court, and fulfilling my mandatory community service at the local animal shelter, I don’t exactly have the emotional bandwidth for a heart-to-heart. But more than that, I learned years ago that numbness is better than pain. I’ve been not talking for so long, I’m not sure I’d even know how to start.

My gaze flicks to the woman in blue, but she’s gone, her table empty, her drink still half-full. Did she see me talking to the manager and leave before we could kick her out?Stop,I tell my churning mind.You’re being paranoid.

“I should probably get back to it,” I say to Brad.

He claps my shoulder. “You should come over for dinner soon. Sandy would love to see you.”

As he turns to walk away, I scan the place one last time for the woman, but she’s nowhere to be found.

—

We close an hour later, and I walk out the double doors of Funland into the Indiana summer night. The near-empty parking lot sprawls before me, telephone wires crisscrossing the black sky above. The heat is a muggy slap. I unlock my bike from the rack, then slip the lock into my backpack.

“Nicole! Nicole Monroe.”

I turn and see the woman in blue emerge from the shadow of a tree on the edge of the parking lot. My fingers tighten around my bike handles. Most people’s reaction when they’re confronted is fight or flight. I freeze. And I hate myself for it.

“I just wanna talk.” She lifts her hands as if she’s approaching a wild animal. “About Kasey.”

My sister’s name is a fist in my gut, and I want to smack it out of this stranger’s mouth. Although no one has showed up at my work like this in years, there have been countless like her in my life. Reporters, podcasters, bloggers. People who expect my eager participation as they turn my tragedy into their dollars. “Unbelievable,” I mutter, turning to leave.

“Wait!” There’s a flicker of desperation in her voice. She probably has a tight deadline, and I feel a stab of cruelness.Good,I think.Let her squirm.“I just want a minute of your time. Please.”

“I have to catch a bus.” My lawyer petitioned the court for an occupational license to drive to work, but until it goes through, I’m stuck like this. Hauling my bike onto the bus, riding five miles to the stop nearest my apartment, then biking the remaining two miles to my door. This bus is the last one of the night. If I miss it, I’ll have to bike the entire trip in the dark.

I’ve already started to walk away when she says, “I know it hurts to talk about—”

I whirl around. “Youknow?” I don’t have time for self-righteousness right now, but this is my button. People thinking theycan empathize with my pain because they listened to a fifty-five-minute episode about it once.

“I…”

“Go on,” I say. “Really. I’d love to know how you, a perfect fucking stranger, could know how it feels to talk aboutmysister.” Over time, my grief has morphed to anger. Now it lives just beneath my skin. Prick it and I bleed. “Are you some sort of psychic? Or wait, no, let me guess. You’re an empath. Right? You just feel everythingsodeeply?”

“No, I—”

“You don’t know what it feels like. You couldn’t. So please just leave me the fuck alone.”

This time I’ve already hopped onto my bike and am pedaling off when she calls after me. I didn’t think there was a single thing this woman could say that would make me stop, but I was wrong.

Chapter Two

It feels as if I’ve been plunged into water. The air is viscous around me, the sounds muffled. Everything is blotted out by the woman’s words echoing in my mind.

“My sister disappeared too. Just like Kasey.”

I so rarely say my sister’s name aloud anymore—my life is a little less painful that way—the syllables thrum through me like rushing blood.Ka-sey, Ka-sey, Ka-sey.It tugs me backwards into the past, and though I try to resist, it’s like trying to hold on to a wet, writhing fish. Then suddenly, for the first time in years, I’m back in 2012. It’s the summer after my junior year of high school and Kasey is still alive.

—

I woke around nine-thirty with a dull sort of hangover. My mouth tasted like beer, and when I looked in the mirror, my eyes were black. Like I had so many times before, I’d forgotten to wash my face when I got home. My day stretched before me like all the rest that summer—a mind-numbing shift at Funland during the day, then whatever diversion Kasey and I could come up with at night.

I padded barefoot down the hall to her room, knocked softly on the door. “Kase? You up?”

I wanted to sprawl at the foot of her bed like I’d done so often these past few months, chat about the night before. It was an irregular tradition of ours, something we did whenever we had time. We’d lie together, Kasey under the blankets, me on top, our voices still thick with sleep, and we’d talk until we were both laughing so hard we couldn’t stop. It was our most beloved competition: who could make the other laugh harder. My favorite Kasey stories were the ones where she did impressions of the clumsy, fumbling guys who’d hit on her that summer. “They’re such boys,” she always said in her placid voice. “I need a man, Nic. A real fucking man.”

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