Klickitat by Peter Rock Read Free Book Online Page B

she said. “I certainly miss mine—though I still talk to her on the radio.”
    â€œHow?” I said. “You said she was lost.”
    â€œBerglind died, yes,” she said. “But sisters have all sorts of ways to find each other. You are a special girl. Your Audra will come back, somehow.”
    â€œShe’s not dead,” I said.
    â€œDid I say she was? Good-bye, Vivian. Perhaps we’ll speak again. Look after your father, now.”
    I sat there for a moment in Dad’s rolling office chair. His old jacket was on the back of the chair and I pulled it over my shoulders. I put my bare feet in his scratchy grayboot liners. And then I opened the logbook and looked at it. On one side were some sentences —Audra, gone 3/12 or 3/13. Spending nights somewhere lately. Skipping school. Unhappy?— and on the other side were call signs and names.
    I shut everything down, then climbed out of the basement. I walked around the empty house until it was time to go to school.

NINE
    At school, kids whispered around me. They stopped calling me “Vivian Ritalin” or hissing “sweatshirt” to tease me in class. They treated me differently, and so did the teachers. Everyone knew that Audra had disappeared.
    I had stopped taking my pills by then, and I couldn’t tell if I felt any different. I couldn’t tell what my body might do as I sat there at my desk, looking out the window, surrounded by all these kids who weren’t my friends. It was the middle of the afternoon in my English class. Mrs. Morgan had put a piece of cardboard in front of the clock, so it wasn’t easy to tell what time it was, and I was hardly listening to her talk about
The Catcher
in the Rye
. Instead, I looked out the window, over the sports fields, out to Grant Park, along Northeast 33rd. I could see the statues reflecting the sun there, the figures of Ramona and Henry and Ribsy. There was no Beezus, and no explanation for why there wasn’t. I remembered the part when Beezus admitted she didn’t love Ramona, even though everyone knew that’s what sisters were supposed to do.
    â€œVivian Hanselman,” Mrs. Morgan said. “Are you daydreaming?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “Yes.”
    Everyone laughed.
    The bell rang, and kids started closing their books, putting things away. Everyone went straight out the door, and I followed them, quickly enough that Mrs. Morgan wouldn’t try to stop me, to ask me how I was feeling.
    The first week or so after Audra was gone, Mom dropped me off and picked me up from school, careful like she didn’t want to lose me, too. But then slowly that stopped and I could ride my bike again.
    I unlocked it at the rack, rode out past the groups of kids. I felt someone’s eyes, someone watching me, somewhere,keeping track; I saw Audra’s face on bus shelters and telephone poles, the bright blue MISSING posters we’d hung up everywhere.
    There was an old picture of Audra at a track meet, smiling, not looking at all the way she did when she disappeared, and another of her face where the copier made her eyes and mouth so black and you couldn’t even see her nose.
    MISSING
    AUDRA HANSELMAN
    17 Y.O. 5'5" 115 LBS.
    HAIR BLACK EYES BROWN
    NOSE PIERCING
    CAMOUFLAGE CLOTHING
    COULD BE WITH PERSON
    OR PERSONS UNKNOWN
    I rode, the books in my pack shifting on my back as I swerved around the corner, as I coasted down Siskiyou Street.
    Audra’s footprints still showed dark on the front ofour house, where she’d pushed off, when swinging. It was like she’d run up the side of our house and into the sky, or onto the rooftop, next to the window of her room. I stopped under the tree and looked up at her footprints. My handlebars knocked against the swing as I pushed my bike toward the garage.
    Inside the house, upstairs, I swung off my pack and set it on my desk chair, unzipped it. I took out my biology textbook, then the yellow