Every Missing Piece

by Melanie Conklin

  “Doesn’t your dad actually speak French?”

  She jabbed my arm. “You know what I mean! My dad is hopeless. If it isn’t something to do with Mia’s soccer team, he can’t handle it. I think he wishes we were boys.”

  Sometimes, when Cress and Mia are fighting and I ask what it’s about, Cress shakes her head and says, “Sister stuff.” I’ve wondered what that’s like, being a sister. Cress is the closest thing I’ve ever had to one. But sometime soon I’ll be a real big sister, which is so weird. By the time I’m Mia’s age, my little brother or sister could be five years old.

  “I’ll help you with the spaceship,” I said. “We’ll use cardboard and papier-mâché.”

  “Listen,” Cress said. “I’m not kidding.”

  “I believe you. You’re the most serious person I know.”

  She jabbed at my arm again, but I dodged her. “You better text me while I’m gone,” she said. “Especially if you find anything new about you-know-who.”

  “I will. Wait, I brought you a surprise.” I unzipped my bag and pulled Croc from inside. His purple face was all squished. “I thought you might want some company on your trip.”

  For a split second, Cress’s smile fell. Like she was surprised, but not in a good way. “It’s okay,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to lose him in Atlanta.”

  “You never lose anything.”

  “Well, maybe I’m done taking Croc on trips. He’s kind of a little-kid thing, you know?”

  The world tilted. Things were changing too fast again. We used to fight over custody of Croc, and now Cress was done with him, just like that?

  “Keep it together while I’m gone,” Cress said as she hugged me good-bye.

  She was only leaving for a long weekend, but it felt like more than that.

  It felt like she was leaving me behind.

  When I went back to school after Dad died, everyone stopped talking to me. I mean everyone. Even Diesel stopped poking fun at me on the bus. It wasn’t because they were being nice. It was because I didn’t have a dad anymore. It was like I’d turned invisible.

  Right after Halloween, a new fourth grader showed up at school. She wore a khaki skirt and a white button-down with short sleeves that glowed against her rich brown skin. Her hair was braided with white beads, and she had a gold-and-green turtle bracelet that matched her gold-and-green turtle earrings. Later, I found out her family had moved to North Carolina from Georgia, but her father was from Trinidad, where Cress spends part of every summer. That’s where she got the jewelry. She also had a wide, swinging accent that the other kids made fun of. I thought it was mean how they mimicked her, but kids will make fun of anything.

  Back then, I used to bring a book to lunch so I had something to do while the other kids talked and laughed. I was into this story called Tuck Everlasting about these people who drank from a magical spring and lived forever. The weird thing was, they didn’t like living forever. The boys always stayed the same age, and their parents were always their parents, and nothing ever changed. While part of me thought they were strange for feeling that way, I could also see how it would stink to stay a kid forever. Especially if you were in middle school.

  Mom always sent an extra cookie with my lunch for sharing, but I usually ate it myself and squished the foil wrapper into different shapes. If you rub a lump of foil against the edge of a table, you can shape it into something cool, like hearts or stars. I collected the foil shapes in my book bag until Mom found them and started asking questions. After that I recycled them.

  On the new girl’s second day, she brought a book to lunch, too. From then on, we sat together at lunch, reading quietly, until one day when she passed me her bag of barbecue chips. I passed her one of my cookies, and that was it.

  We clicked.

  It’s like we both saw something in each other that we didn’t see in other people, only that something isn’t anything you can actually see. It’s more like something you just know.

  21

  SEEING RED

  On holiday weekends there is no homework, so after I helped Mom dust and vacuum because she was sick of seeing dog-hair tumbleweeds everywhere, I took Frankie for a walk. I told myself it was a normal walk and that I was not going over to the Jessups’ or anything like that, but that’s exactly where I ended up.

  As usual, I couldn’t help ogling their gigantic house. The rounded windows on the castle section were lit up. I always thought that would be the coolest place to have a bedroom. Of course that would mean sharing a house with Diesel, so maybe Mr. Jessup could build a new bedroom for me at my house, a slightly smaller one, with a rounded section for my bed.

  Frankie pulled me toward their lawn, so I stopped and let her take a bathroom break. We kept doggie bags clipped to the leash in case of this exact situation. After I bagged her poop, she bounded around me like she’d accomplished something great.

  “You’re a good girl,” I said as she wagged her butt.

  I was about to get walking again when I heard a strange noise. It wasn’t quite a laugh, more like the snort you make when you’re trying not to giggle at something really funny.

  I studied the house more carefully.

  There was a blanket fort on the Jessups’ front porch, and Devin and Donny were hiding in it. They burst out laughing when I spotted them.

  “Doo-doo, doo-doo, you touched doo-doo!” they chanted.

  I am way too old to get upset about something like that, but I felt my aggravation rise.

  As Devin and Donny laughed at me, I started swinging Frankie’s poop bag in circles.

  Swoop, swoop, swoop.

  I hadn’t made up my mind about exactly what I was going to do until Diesel stepped outside and said, “What are you dorks going on about?”

  There is something that happens to your body when rage flushes through you. It’s a prickly feeling, like every part of you is coming awake to the wrongness of the world, all at once. All I could think was that Diesel was the one who’d taken away the pond and stolen my bike, and now he was trying to take Cress from me, too.

  They call it “seeing red” in the movies. It’s when you get so angry that the emotion takes over your body. For me, it meant winging that bag of dog poop at Diesel’s big block head.

  He ducked, and the poop bag hit the Jessups’ front door with a sickening, squishy thud.

  “That’s for stealing my bike!” I shouted.

  I’d expected Diesel to mouth off, or even throw something back at me, but he just stood there looking stunned. We stared at each other, him holding the screen door wide, the poop bag lying at his feet like the saddest goody bag ever, and me, feeling downright sick to my stomach. Part of me wished I hadn’t done it, but I had. And then, like a coward, I ran.

  After I do something embarrassing, I can’t sleep. I lie there in bed, thinking about whatever I did over and over, wishing I could change it. I was lying in bed not sleeping and thinking about throwing that poop bag when I heard our porch boards creak in a way that was not the wind. For a second I lay there frozen, clutching Croc to my chest. Then I drummed up the guts to crawl to the end of my bed and press my face against the cool window glass.

  As I watched, a kid-size person hopped from the porch onto the pebbled path that led to the driveway. I could tell from the shape of his big block head that it was Diesel Jessup. He stopped halfway up the path and turned around. For a second, I swear he looked right into my eyes. I felt sick about what I’d done all over again, even though he totally deserved what he’d gotten for stealing my bike. In fact, he was probably out for revenge.

  My blood started thrumming, thinking of what he might have done to our house.

  When I was sure he’d left, I snuck downstairs and went outside.

  My bike was sitting there on the porch, waiting for me.

  22

  A TROJAN HORSE

  I didn’t know what had come over Diesel, but I wasn’t giving him more credit than he deserved. Maybe he felt guilty, or m
aybe that poop bag had done the trick. For all I knew, my bike was covered in poison ivy.

  Miss Rivera once told us the story of how the Greeks gave the Trojans a giant horse sculpture as a gift, but the sculpture was actually full of Greek soldiers who came out at night and attacked. The Trojan horse was a trick. My bike might be a trick, too.

  First thing Friday morning, I scrubbed the entire thing with dish soap just to be sure. Our family is not religious, so Good Friday is like any other Friday for us, only with school off. Meanwhile, Stan went to work and Mom rested, catching up on sleep after her night shift. She was already in bed when I woke up, but she’d left Munchkins on the table.

  One of my favorite things to do when Mom is asleep is watch those talk shows she says will rot my brain. The people on them are so interesting. They have these weird problems that would embarrass most people, but instead of covering them up, they go on national television to talk about them. I can’t decide if they’re brave or foolish.

  When I got tired of watching strangers argue, I spent a few minutes looking up Georgia O’Keeffe. She painted all kinds of flowers and rosy pictures of the desert with lots of bleached white bones, but her clean, swoopy lines made everything look a lot simpler than it is in real life.

  I bookmarked a few websites and pulled out the list of newspapers from Miss Rivera.

  It turns out there are eighteen different online newspapers that cover Fayetteville, North Carolina. Most of them had the same information I knew by heart: Billy’s description, his last known sighting, and what happened the day he disappeared. Everyone seemed to have the same information said different ways. Sometimes, there were pictures with the articles. I’d gotten so used to seeing that one school photo of Billy that I skipped right past the photo of his dad at first. I think my brain assumed it was some random guy in an internet ad until the sunglasses registered. They were the same ones Billy’s dad had worn in the news conference, the one where he spoke into the cameras, squinting into the sun.

  I scrolled back.

  That’s when I saw Billy’s dad was wearing a Carolina-blue sweatshirt. The thing about Carolina blue is that it’s a very specific color. You can’t mistake it for any other shade of blue. It’s not cobalt or baby blue or cerulean, which means “sky blue” in Latin, according to Cress. Carolina blue is the color of a sunny day, when there isn’t a single cloud in the sky, not even those wispy ones the airplanes leave behind. Carolina blue is the color of summer and vacations and the ocean. Maybe for that reason, it’s not a color I like very much.

  In the photo, the sweatshirt is still bright blue and the man is still young. His hair is dark, his skin tan, and his teeth white. But none of that matters. What matters is that his Carolina sweatshirt has a little triangular tear next to the second a. Exactly like the one Eric always wore.

  It’s weird when you find something you’ve been looking for but that you didn’t quite believe was real. Staring at that picture of Billy Holcomb’s dad was like seeing an actual photograph of the Easter Bunny. Real and not real at the same time.

  In the photo, Billy’s dad seems like a nice guy. This time, looking at his smiling face, all I could see were those angry red scars on the inside of Eric’s arm. If Eric was Billy, this was the man who’d hurt him. I’d felt bad for Billy’s father. When I first saw his video, I’d cried. But that wasn’t who he really was. That video was a lie, like the Trojan horse.

  My stomach twisted, sick with truth.

  I scrolled all the way to the top of the article and found an update that had been added to the text a few weeks after Billy went missing.

  “UPDATE: Billy has been located and is safe, according to officials.”

  My breath caught.

  If Billy had been found, what was he doing in our town? And why was he hiding who he was? Maybe he was in trouble again. Or maybe he’d never gotten out of trouble to begin with. It wouldn’t be the first time officials had gotten something wrong.

  All I knew was that this sweatshirt was a match.

  It was proof.

  I’d spent so much time worrying about being wrong that I hadn’t thought much about what it would feel like to be right. Maybe that was because I’d gotten to know Eric, and even though I had the proof right in front of me, I didn’t want him to be in trouble.

  I wanted him to be safe.

  If I called the sheriff’s office, what would happen?

  Would I be taken seriously, or would this proof be ignored, too?

  I tried to think like Sheriff Dobbs. He wanted facts. He wanted to know beyond a shadow of a doubt. The goose bumps along my arms told me this photo was exactly what he wanted.

  WHAT IS

  23

  NOW

  I don’t know what to do with this picture, so I call Cress. She doesn’t pick up the first time. The second time, she answers but she is somewhere so loud that she can’t hear me, even when I shout into the phone. Then there are a bunch of scuffling noises and the call goes dead. I text her that I have HUGE NEWS, but she doesn’t text back, so I’m pretty sure her phone got taken away.

  I think about calling the sheriff’s office, but something is holding me back.

  I guess it’s the fear that even if I’m right, the call will still go wrong somehow, and Sheriff Dobbs will show up at our house to talk with Mom about how messed up I am again. Or that if he does believe me, somehow it will be bad for Eric.

  Eric who is really Billy.

  In the end, I text Dad about what I found, give Croc a hug, and promise myself that I’ll figure it out soon. I just need a little more time to think about it.

  When I walk downstairs for lunch, Mom and Stan are laughing about something while she’s slicing tomatoes. His arms are around her waist. They see me, and Stan moves away from Mom like that’s what he’d planned to do all along, but I know it has more to do with me.

  “Turkey okay?” Mom asks.

  “Sounds good.” I perch on a stool next to the island while her soft hands make quick work of my sandwich.

  “Big plans for today?” she asks.

  It’s Saturday, time for me and Stan to hang out, but I am too distracted for goofing off.

  I shrug, and Stan says, “I thought you might want to see the new kid movie that’s out? The one with the dogs who run a day care?”

  I do want to see the new kid movie, but right now all I hear is the word kid, and the way Cress said it when she turned me down about taking Croc, like anything for kids is bad. I don’t want to grow up, but I don’t want to be a little kid, either.

  I swallow my bite of sandwich. “No thanks.”

  A wrinkle appears on Mom’s brow. “You feeling okay?”

  I shrug again.

  Meanwhile, Stan has the paper out, looking for something to do. He has no idea. None at all. I know he can’t possibly understand what’s on my mind if I haven’t told him, but he just looks so ludicrous reading the paper while kids are out there being hurt.

  “There’s a new sculpture exhibit at the Arboretum,” he says.

  “No thanks.”

  “Roller skating?”

  “Pass.”

  “I guess we could go for a bike ride?”

  There must be something on my face that tells Mom I’m about to say something horrible, because she says, “Actually, I could use some help today. It’s time to dye the eggs.”

  Stan raises his eyebrows. “Sure. Sounds fun.”

  Last year, Stan wasn’t here when we dyed the eggs. He and Mom were a thing, but she still kept all of our traditions just for us. I filled the rainbow assortment of egg-shaped cups with warm water and stirred the little dye tablets until they dissolved like we always did.

  This year, Stan suggests we use vinegar.

  “Vinegar is acidic,” he says. “Food coloring only works in an acid environment, so if we make the water more acidic with vinegar, we should get brighter colors.”

  I snort. “Is there anything you don’t know?”

  “Actuall
y, it’s written right here on the package,”

  Stan says.

  I can feel the barrier forming between us, like a shield wrapped tightly around my heart. All the while we dye eggs, I can’t shake my aggravation. It feels like everything Stan does is on purpose, to irritate me. Which can’t be true, but I shouldn’t even be sitting in my kitchen making pretty Easter eggs when Eric is out there, right now, waiting for someone to help him.

  Waiting on me to do something about it.

  “I found something,” I blurt out as Stan completes a perfect gradient on an egg.

  “Something wrong with your egg?” Mom asks.

  “No, my egg’s fine.”

  Now they’re both staring at me, and I’ve already said there’s nothing wrong with my egg, which looks like a lemon, exactly the way I wanted, so I can’t make that excuse.

  My throat gets dry.

  If I say this, will Mom think I’m overreacting again?

  I fix my eyes on my egg and brace for concern. “I found this picture of Billy Holcomb’s dad and he’s wearing the same sweatshirt as that new kid, Eric. Plus I found hair dye in their trailer and this big wad of cash in their cookie jar. I think they might not be who they say they are. I think Eric might be Billy Holcomb, that boy who went missing last fall.”

  There is definitely concern on Mom’s face now. “Mads.”

  My chest tightens. “I know it’s him, Mom. The news said they found him, but what if he’s hiding out here, pretending to be someone else?”

  She shakes her head. “John said his visitors are friends from out of state.”

  “Eric told me they were from Asheville. Mr. Jessup’s lying!”

  Mom frowns. “John would never do that.”

  “I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think Eric is Billy Holcomb and I don’t want you to say I’m overreacting again, because I’m not!”

  Now she looks disappointed, like I am failing her.