The Missing by Sarah Langan Read Free Book Online Page A

day.
    Temperatures today were supposed to spike at sixty degrees. Perfect sweater weather. Hooky weather, re- ally. She and Fenstad could call in sick, take a drive to Baxter State Park, hike Katahdin, and gorge themselves on the last of summer’s blueberries along the trail. They always meant to do things like that: take trips, rent rooms in cheap motels and have aerobic sex, go bowl- ing in the afternoon. They talked about these things all the time, but they never did them. Somehow, after all these years, they’d never found the time.
    Funny how that can happen. But no, let’s not be glib.
    It wasn’t funny at all.
    After the fire in Bedford, Fenstad had suggested that they sell the house and move to Boston. He’d worried that the hazmat signs on Exit 117 spelled disaster. But soon enough the signs came down, and talk of moving was forgotten. Still, it had gotten her thinking. In an- other year after Maddie finished school, they could sell the house if they wanted. Go their separate ways. Move on while they were both young-ish. Make that middle- aged. Such thoughts felt like hot metal coursing through her blood and turning hard. They were too painful to think, and yet they persisted.
    Not the type for sighing, Meg pursed her lips. A nest of birds that lived in the second-story gutter began to chirp. Bluebirds? Blackbirds? Sparrows? She didn’t know. Hummingbirds were her favorite. They flapped their
    wings so fast they looked like one big blur, just so they could stand still. Now that’s dedication.
    Meg put her hands in her pockets, and the poison ivy berries squished. Fenstad was probably awake by now. He and Maddie didn’t talk lately. Growing pains—he missed that she wasn’t his little girl anymore, and so did she. So now they ignored each other because they couldn’t figure out how else to act. Unlike Maddie, whose moods swung in a pendulum depending on what she’d eaten, whether she was getting along with her boyfriend, and the time of the month, Fenstad was the voice of reason. Quiet, considered, logical. He rarely laughed and never cried. Cold, really. Her husband was cold.
    Meg dropped the berries down the walk, where they rolled. Goose bumps rose on her arms and legs. She shaved practically every place on her body that grew hair except the top of her head, so her skin was smooth as a waxed peach. Her grandparents on both sides came from northern Italy and most of her family was light- skinned, but she was the dark and swarthy throwback from another generation. Adolescence hit when she was only eleven, and during the summer before she began the seventh grade, she started menstruating. As an added, awkward bonus, a furry black mustache appeared like a lost caterpillar across her upper lip. The teasing in school that fall was relentless. More mean-spirited twelve-year- olds than she cared to count fake-asked her out. ( Will you marry me, Dogface? Phil Payne had begged with tears of laughter streaming down his face. I love you, Dogface! ) A rumor spread by bathroom wall graffiti and her former friends insisted that she was a hermaphrodite. One girl even claimed to have seen her penis in the girls’ locker room.
    That Christmas break she bought a home wax kit. In
    no time, she learned to pluck, wax, shave, and diet her- self into a polished and shiny version of the former Meg Bonelli. Despite the persistent rumors about the ap- pendage between her legs, by the eighth grade she was dating the captain of the junior varsity wrestling team, and at the end of her senior year in high school she was the third runner-up for prom queen, a position she campaigned bitterly for. After the winner was an- nounced, she’d hidden her tears by squatting in a locked bathroom stall for twenty minutes. Still, when she met Fenstad three years later, he would never have guessed that her nickname had once been Dogface, or that if she skipped waxing her lip and chin for a week, she grew a formidable five o’clock shadow. She