Klickitat by Peter Rock Read Free Book Online

eat the chicken casserole with us.
    â€œI feel so hopeless,” Mom said, then.
    Dad reached out and touched my arm. “How are you feeling, Vivian?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said.
    â€œWhat about the kids at school?” Mom said.
    â€œWhat about them?”
    â€œDo you think they know anything?” she said. “Is anyone saying anything?”
    â€œAbout Audra?” I said. “They wouldn’t. We don’t talk to the same people. No one really talks to me.”
    Audra’s white plate reflected the lamp in the ceiling. The room was too quiet and it was dark outside and the windows were like mirrors showing the three of us to ourselves. I felt awkward, bad for Mom and Dad, but right then we couldn’t help each other. Sitting there, I could see straight through the doorway, into the livingroom where the television still sat with its screen shattered in a web.
    â€œWe can’t really make her do anything,” Dad said. “We know that. She has to want to come back.”
    â€œ
If
she can come back,” Mom said.
    â€œWe have to assume she’s all right,” he said.
    â€œWe do?” she said.
    â€œ
I
have to,” he said.
    â€œIt’s just that she left all her things,” Mom said. “Where could she have gone without her things?”
    I’d already searched around Audra’s room, just as my parents had, looking for clues. There were no answers really, no notes or plans or letters or maps left behind. Just all the clothes Mom gave her from Nordstrom that she never wore, all her schoolbooks, her running trophies with the plastic, golden girls on top. The handprints on the wall.
    What I didn’t tell them was that the books were missing. It was hard to see that because the shelf was a mess and there were still so many books on it, but some of her favorites and all the survival books were missing, taken wherever she’d gone, where she’d need them.
    I didn’t know, I couldn’t believe that she was already gone for good, far away from our city like she’d said. I wrote her a note and left it folded in her desk drawer:
    Here I am. I am not panicking.
    Klickitat. I know that you would
    not truly leave me behind.

EIGHT
    The next morning, I slept late. The house was quiet when I woke up. I couldn’t hear anyone moving around.
    I got dressed and put my books in my backpack, and that’s when I saw it. My phone, the cell phone that had been Audra’s, was on my desk, all shattered. Not just the screen part—the whole thing was broken into pieces, so the plastic numbers and the battery and the wires were all loose, spread out so there was no way it would ever work again.
    Audra had come in the night, had stood so close and hadn’t awakened me. I went into her room, which looked the same, even though it felt different. Maybe I was justgetting used to her being gone, being in her room alone, but still I thought or wanted to think that she might be coming back in the night, picking up things she’d need, checking on me while I slept.
    Out the window I could see the tree, the swing, a blue car driving past.
    I looked at the handprints on the wall, her bed made more neatly than she would ever make it, the Nordstrom dresses hanging in her open closet.
    I was afraid to check her drawer, to be disappointed; when I looked, though, the note was gone. That meant that Audra had not left me behind, that she could not be too far away.
    Next, I went downstairs, past the kitchen table with my plate and cereal bowl and pill bottles where Mom had set them. As I began to sit down, I heard static, like wind in the basement, a hissing, then a beeping.
    â€œDad?” I said.
    There was no answer.
    Downstairs, I could see the needles, jerking in the lit windows, and hear the hiss coming from the headset where it hung on its hook. I fit it over my head, overmy ears. I listened, the static thick and then quieter, the