Thirty-One

I showed up early to school on the last day before Christmas vacation. I had had clean clothes stashed away in the trunk of my car, so I didn't have to show up in the same blue dress I had been wearing for twenty-three days. I had showered at the local YMCA so I wasn't wearing the same dirt I had been wearing for the past twenty-three days.

At five before seven I was the only one sitting in the cafeteria, reading Fahrenheit 451. Who even knew if my English class was still reading it. I had read it about four times in the past twenty-three days. It had been in my car.

At approximately 7:07, Chris Mathis walked through the back doors. Students had started to pass by a few minutes before that, but Chris was the first one to come in here. How appropriate.

Thirty

On the last day, it was cold.

It was bright.

Not one single person spared a thought for Elena Harrison.

Twenty-Nine

Madelyn was happy. And maybe things weren't perfect or anything, but she was generally cheerful. Which wasn't necessarily surprising, seeing as Maddie was a cheerful sort of kid. But she hadn't really felt this cheerful in the last week or so.

There was Matt, of course. And she'd gotten an A on her algebra test. Her mom seemed a little less stressed, but really not that much--but some was better than nothing. And school was ending and Christmas was coming. And she'd won Rookie of the Year for tennis.

Twenty-Eight

Mark had invited Natalie over to study for their last Psychology test of the calendar year. She said she had to go to her band concert and blushingly, nervously, asked him to come, as well. He agreed. Natalie played the flute.

Before the concert started, Natalie introduced Mark to her boyfriend, Paul. Paul went to the high school across town and was everything that Natalie was not: loud and effusive, generally gleeful. When Natalie introduced the boys he kissed her on the head and she blushed. Mark liked him.

Twenty-Seven

School was done for Sam. On Monday she got to do the lights for the combined band/choir concert and Tuesday was a half day, which didn't even count for anything, anyway. The tennis awards dinner had been Thursday, and she had won MVP of the team, and named captain for the next year.

And she was done with all of her Christmas shopping. Presents to friends were delivered. Racket was dropped off at the shop to be re-strung. The house was decorated, the tree was done.

Basically, all Sam had to do was survive the weekend and her Christmas was secured. Her little cousins were coming down the on Christmas Eve and leaving New Year's Day.

Twenty-Six

Matt thought the bruise on his arm made him look a little awesome.

Cute little Madelyn Harrison had actually commented on it, one day. That was two days after Derek went completely schizo on him and tried to beat the crap out of him. Matt had worn short sleeves and the bruise had looked ridiculously heinous, a mottled purple and pink and blue, like the colors in the sky when the sun was just starting to rise.

Or at least that was what Maddie had said. It certainly was a poetic spin for his disgusting bruise. And after that, they'd started talking.

Twenty-Five

Just on a whim, Chloe decided to call Elena's phone, just to see what happened.

Mostly, though, Chloe was procrastinating. She had this Chemistry test on Monday, you see, and she was not ready. It was one of this big tests, too, the one that made her teacher give the students stern glances over the rim of her glasses as she reminded them that, yes, this test would count for one-fourth of their marking period grades.

Besides, Chloe had been at Mike's, anyway. So her single bubble of cell service was delightfully close, and perfect for procrastination. She made her excuses to Mike and went outside. There were still clumps of snow on the ground. It cracked under her feet, very little sticking to the edges of her boots, as it had for the past few days.

Twenty-Four

Chris and Mark were playing basketball. Chris was getting beaten so badly. So badly. It was ridiculously cold out. Dribbling the ball hurt his fingers. Mark didn't seem to have any such issues.

Things were starting to go back to normal. Chris was possibly (probably) the only one who was still clinging on to the scandal.

Nobody else wanted to talk about it, anymore. Even Chloe was a little too absorbed with her new boyfriend to think about her missing friend too often. And so Chris couldn't talk about it, either.

"Hey, Mark," he gasped. Chris was not an athlete. Cold air hurt his lungs. Chris missed summer.

Twenty-Three

At three-thirty on Monday afternoon, Maddie realized she hadn't yet thought about Elena that day.

That made her feel guilty.

But she had been preoccupied! A boy from her history class had asked her out. Derek. She had said no, because she didn't really know him, but then hadn't known if she had wanted to say no. And she'd been very wrapped up in the whole drama of it and had had to tell all of her friends about it so they could all ooh and aah over how cute Derek was and why she should or should not have rejected him and this whole time Maddie was too busy thinking about the drama that was the first time she'd ever been asked out by a boy that she had completely forgotten to worry about her sister.

Twenty-Two

Curiosity got the better of her. Or maybe she was just tired of being crippled by some stupid girl she hadn't even known. Or maybe she just plain wasn't thinking about it.

Sam checked her email.

And, of course, there was an email from Elena Harrison, this one dated two days after the first. In her heart of hearts, Sam hadn't ever expected that there wouldn't be another email. If there wasn't another email, why had she refused to check for half a month? She knew there would be another email, but Sam hadn't wanted to be met with any more of Elena's optional challenges. She was stressed out enough as it was.

Twenty-One

Sam was avoiding Madelyn, which meant she was avoiding tennis, which meant the tennis coach was pissed as hell.

Unfortunately, the tennis coach was also Sam's history teacher.

"Going to be at practice today?" she asked Sam icily after the class' discussion on the Battle of Gettysburg. "Or are you going to be too busy again?"

In the past week or so Sam had excused herself, saying that her brother was sick, her mom had to work, she had a paper due, she had to go to her dad's house, she had a test tomorrow, she'd pulled a muscle in her leg--anything.

Twenty

"What're you reading?"

Early one morning in the cafeteria, Chloe Hart slid into the seat across from Chris Mathis. The roads were icy and so Mrs. Hart had been in nothing short of a tizzy about her daughter leaving early, giving herself time, driving carefully. Consequently, Chloe was at school nearly half an hour before she had to be to make first bell.

Chris was always here this early. Just in case. In case for what he didn't know, but the "just in case" policy had helped him out more than once: when he realized he'd forgotten to print papers, when he forgot entire assignments, when he had to make up tests and didn't have to get up any earlier.

Nineteen

It was snowing. Chloe and Mike were still sitting outside. Chloe had her head on Mike's shoulder and was thinking about how pretty snow was. Mike had his arm around Chloe and was thinking that he really did like her.

What Mike didn't know was that Chloe was also thinking about another boy.

Not that she was thinking about him in any way that would have rightfully made Mike nervous; rather, she was thinking about him in a way that would have made Mike feel stupid for feeling jealous.

Eighteen

Madelyn was doing her Christmas shopping.

And no big deal, right? Christmas shopping was Christmas shopping--you bought some small trinket for members of your family and close friends and that was that. No big deal.

Except Maddie didn't know whether or not to buy anything for Elena.

Normally, Madelyn wasn't very good at choosing presents. On Christmas morning, people always opened her presents and gave that fake smile that lied about liking whatever small thing she'd given them. Her mother, last year, had hated the bird ornaments. Her father hadn't liked the tie.

Seventeen

Natalie O'Malley was a little nervous, giving the presentation all by herself. It had initially seemed really petty to ask for another partner, when it became more or less clear that Elena wasn't coming back, but now she was wishing she had.

Natalie was nervous by nature. Getting so far set back in this project when Elena had up and disappeared had made her nervous. Giving the presentation made her nervous. Hell, even the project itself made her a little nervous, because parapsychology was a little freaky.

She was shaking when she finished. This had not been in the original plan.

Sixteen

On the sixteenth day, Chris had a moment. In this moment, he thought he saw Lena Harrison.

It was stupid, he thought later. In retrospect, it wasn't rational to believe that the first place Lena would turn up after being missing for almost two weeks was freaking Subway.

But.

But the last place, as far as he could tell, that she had been seen was freaking Subway. And so maybe that meant something?

Fifteen

A hole had formed in the ceiling and water was dripping through, forming a puddle about a foot next to my head. Initially it hadn't bothered me, but now it was starting to splash, to leave little drops flecking my face.

Maybe I ought to have picked someplace dryer to go. Maybe I should have gone someplace warmer. And I definitely should have remembered to put some jeans in my car. My dress was starting to get a little ratty.

But even though I was doubtlessly starting to smell a small bit, I wasn't ready to go back. I liked it here, even though it was drippy, and a little chilly, and I could frequently hear some sort of moderately large animal shuffling around. But the animal(s) didn't bother me, and I didn't bother it, and I had some food, and I had some blankets and everything was good.

Fourteen

Mark Goodman hated Psychology tests. They always messed with his head. They always made him analyze things. Last week he'd been all but convinced that he had a serious anxiety disorder. Three weeks ago he'd contemplated his likelihood of dying young as a relatively Type B, left-handed, tall, meat-eating male.

The prospect wasn't that good.

Worse was when he started analyzing his friends. It was better, too, in some ways, because it wasn't him with the debilitating mental condition, but it was also words, because voicing his opinions invariably pissed his friends off.

Like, now, with the stress, and the depression. Mark didn't think Chris was quite to the point of depressed, per se, but he thought that his best friend was definitely stressed as hell.

Thirteen

Nearly two weeks and Lena was still missing. Chris was starting to think he was going insane. At the very least, he was becoming obsessed.

Things were changing--he could feel it happening. Things were fragmenting, shattering into disconnected bits of what they had been before, and in the great scramble to put pieces back together, things were getting mixed up.

Or maybe that wasn't it. Maybe he was over-analyzing. Chris was, after all, quite prone to over-analyze things. He especially was prone to over-analyze the actions of girls. In his mind, "Can I have a pencil?" seemed to transform into, "I love you! I love you!"--he luckily always had the common sense to not act upon his falsely perceived declarations.

Twelve

Sam and Maddie were playing tennis.

That was the only time, really, when their paths crossed. And Sam was starting to hate tennis. Because every time she did, she saw Madelyn, and every time she saw Madelyn, she thought about that stupid, stupid email.

She hadn't deleted it.

But she wasn't checking her email anymore, either.

Because what if Elena wrote again? What if she'd said something else? What if she wanted Sam to definitely relay a message? What if she definitely didn't want her to say anything to her family? What if she said where she was? What if she said she was going to kill herself? What if she had been kidnapped? What if she wasn't okay?

Eleven

It had never (not once) occurred to Chloe to feel guilty about her friend being gone. She had never (not once) thought that maybe she could have done something, said something, tried something that would have prevented whatever had happened.

Because Chloe never could control Elena. When it came to the Batman-and-Robin of things, Miss Hart knew that she belonged firmly in the background, the sidekick to every adventure, the tagalong without whom the plot would have followed the same order, the unnamed character at the end: Girl Number Three, Chloe Hart.

Ten

And even as some things began to shift, some remained constant.

Derek Matthews was in love with Madelyn Harrison. Or at least he thought himself to be in love with Madelyn Harrison.

As was the way of most crushes (or love affairs) of freshman boys, she didn't know he was alive. But God was she beautiful, playing tennis, or doing math, or really just existing at all.

But the heart of a fourteen-year-old boy is not quite so delicate as that boy himself believes, and so Derek never had any trouble playing football with his friends on Friday afternoons.

Nine

Mike was having a week that would have made for a good episode of The Twilight Zone. Chloe Hart was talking to him. Frequently. No--Chloe Hart was confiding in him. And Sam was acting strangely, as if something about his newfound role as Chloe Hart's confidante bothered her.

Now, Mike was not a complicated boy by anyone's stretch of the imagination. Perhaps his most unique characteristics were his affinity for chess and his obsession with working his body to near collapse. But there was very little up in his head that was even remotely interesting, which may have been a sad state of affairs, had Mike not been completely oblivious of this fact. And so he lived a quite happy existence, cheerfully believing that Chloe wanted him and that the reason Sam was so upset was that she'd only been playing hard-to-get.

Eight

Sam had an email from an address she didn't recognize.

She opened it. She opened it because she had nothing better to do, no place better to go, and because she needed something to distract her from her brother yelling at a football game on TV downstairs.

Normally Sam didn't open emails from addresses she didn't recognize, let alone emails from addresses she didn't recognize with no subject. But she had nothing better to do than reboot her computer if a virus attacked it; Sam would wonder, later, if she was almost hoping it would, just for something a little less monotonous to happen. Something that would give her a little bit of a reason to freak out, to do some screaming herself.

Seven

Madelyn wasn't sure she should have told Chloe about her sister. But then again, Maddie was very rarely sure about anything. It was just her character.

Uncharacteristically, she was sure that Lena would have been furious to hear her name dragged around the school, a point for common gossip. Lena tended to fly under the radar unless she wanted to be noticed. And when she wanted to be noticed, by God, everybody noticed her. Lena was sort of like that.

And Maddie was pretty sure that her parents hadn't wanted news of Lena's defection to get out. But come on--it was Chloe. Even Madelyn knew Chloe, and Maddie didn't know any of Lena's friends. Lena didn't bring her friends home.

Six

Chloe Hart was not precisely well-known for her discretion. Chris knew about Lena by Wednesday morning.

The grapevine garbled events--that was the problem with gossip. Stories circulated from the clique that customarily clustered around Chloe, and spread through the school like currents, picking up bits of informational debris as they went. Reasons and speculation over why she left were mumbled from behind cupped hands, traded as if they were currency. But the fundamentals of the story remained the same:

Lena Harrison had gone missing sometime between Sunday afternoon and evening and nobody had seen her since.

Five

Mike watched Chloe. She had been talking on that phone in front of his house nearly constantly for the past few days; now she snapped it shut and threw it down onto the grass and began to cry.

Mike watched Chloe. She was hot, he supposed, in that traditional way you were supposed to believe that girls were hot; Mike typically preferred skinnier girls, taller girls, gangly girls. Like Sam.

The only thing that Sam had in common with Chloe, Mike though as he watched her, was that neither of them would ever give him the time of day, if he asked for it. He'd never asked Chloe, though, that was the difference. Sam was worth the try.

Four

The only place Chloe could get service for miles was directly under the telephone poles about a hundred feet from her house. Her house was located smack dab in the middle of that bubble of nonservice that covered most of the town. So whenever Chloe wanted to make a phone call, she had to drag her sorry ass down the street in the freezing December air.

Recently--which was to say, in the last two days--Chloe had been dragging her sorry ass down the street a bit more frequently than usual. The thing was that usually, when Elena got into these moods of hers, turning off her phone and not showing up for school, the only thing Chloe could do was ignore it, and hope she snapped out of it soon. It some ways, it was nearly a relief when Elena went all MIA like that: sometimes Elena could be a very tiring person to be around.

Three

Sam woke to the sound of her mother screaming.

That was how it always happened. That was how her mom lived: screaming. Screaming into the phone, screaming at the dog, screaming at books. She didn't scream at her kids. She hadn't really screamed at Sam's dad, before the divorce. That was just how you knew she was mad--when she wasn't screaming at you. When she was talking in that quiet, low voice that made you strain forward to catch every word.

And Sam supposed she could have dealt with the screaming--she wouldn't have dealt with it well; Sam had far too much of her quiet, nervous father in her--if it hadn't started until after six-fifteen in the morning. But some stupid client or other always wound up calling at like six-twelve, robbing Sam of her last few minutes.

Two

Chris Mathis had little to no experience with crying girls. He had, of course, had the occasional girlfriend cry when he'd broken up with them, and there were the old, fat crying ladies at the movies he took said girlfriends to before he broke up with them. However, since he was not breaking up with her, and since Lena Harrison was by no stretch of the imagination fat (nor was she old), her crying sort of threw him for a loop.

But Chris was no idiot. He knew that crying girl=distraught girl and distraught girl+cute=opportunity for him to offer his oh-so-sympathetic shoulder to cry on. And sympathy+girl+distress=good things for Chris.

In addition to being no idiot, Chris was also very, very good at math. Not for nothing was he taking Calculus.

One

On the last day before I did the most gloriously insane thing of my young life, I really wanted a sub sandwich.

Normally, this would have been no large issue. However, --horror of horrors!-- that night my favorite shop, a little local job, was closed. Which meant I had to go get a freaking chain-made sub, which was never, ever as good. And this was especially unfortunate because Chris Mathis was working in Subway and I may have been crying a little.

But Jesus Christ did I ever have a craving for a sub. So I just ducked my head, buried my face in my scarf and went in. The rush of warm air made my ears and fingers tingle in not a wholly pleasant way.

And whatever. It wasn't like I really knew Chris, or anything. He was just this kid in my math class. I had sort of known him in middle school, or maybe elementary school, but even then not that well. I'd only known him because everyone knew everyone in middle and elementary schools.