The Night My Sister Went Missing by Carol Plum-Ucci

down to the Jesus House," True finally got out. "You know those kids who are here in the summers that rent the house up Bayberry Road, and they go to the beach and drive everyone crazy while giving out religious tracts? I wanna go with them."
    Lutz cleared his throat and muttered something I couldn't hear, but it had the word
escapism
in it.
    "You don't understand!" she said. "I want to be
good
! I am sick of my life!"
    "What'd she ever do that was so awful?" Drew grumbled beside me.
    My mom always says that my dad's study of psychology,
just to build his characters, makes him a better shrink than Cecilly's dad. He can keep me hypnotized at the dinner table for an hour, blathering on about how families act strange, just because they're families, and how family weirdness is all tied up together. I pulled instinctively from what I figured he would say. "Someone in the family has to pay for Melanie's sins."

    Drew stared at me sleepily. Again he muttered the word
profound,
which made me raise my usual smirk. But maybe being "profound" all the time was why I couldn't talk to Drew about the Naval Academy. Maybe I liked the way he admired most of the stuff I said. Maybe I didn't want to sound like an idiot and have to watch his face seize up for once when I opened my mouth.
    Maybe all this stuff about me holding my tongue on the island was about having a big head. Maybe I'd walk out of here tonight feeling like a conceited jerk, along with feeling irresponsible and like a horrible big brother.
    Lutz was giving True some spiel about how it might be good for her to try practicing the Golden Rule before moving into the Jesus House, and seeing how that went.
    "Like you could tell me everything you know now. That would be
golden.
"
    She shifted around uncomfortably in her chair, threw her head back, and stared up at the ceiling. "I'll tell you anything you want! Problem is, I didn't see anything. I was sitting there with Todd Barnes, who was trying to whisper in my ear, and all I could think about was Alisa over by the rail
watching. They just broke up. I thought the pistol crack came from the stars! I thought it was, like, fireworks that never burst open ... something. I didn't see Casey fall, and I didn't see where Stacy Kearney was, before or after."

    He wrote all that down but looked like he was taking his time about it, deliberating over something. He finally said, "You mention Stacy. Do you have some reason to think she was involved?"
    I almost laughed at how he could take things right back to the bare beginnings and play totally innocent so well. At two in the morning.
    "Yeah ... but..." True's swallowing reminded me of Stacy's swallowing. True was the middle child in a very flamboyant family, almost like a pigeon in with a bunch of seagulls, despite her being pretty cute—cuter than her sister Melanie by far. Maybe she couldn't get a word in edgewise around that family and decided her thoughts didn't matter. I could tell by her bobbing jaw that this was agonizing for her.
    "Golden Rule," Lutz reminded her, and though she didn't move from that ceiling-staring, sprawled-out, gangly way, she started to talk. It was low. I had to breathe silently to catch it all.
    "A few nights back, Mark told Cecilly that he thought Stacy was cheating on him. He said that the last month they were going out he couldn't find her a lot of nights. Cecilly just ... had to know. That's Cecilly's way. I'm used to her nosiness. Maybe I shouldn't be."
    "Okay," Lutz said.

    "The other day we were on the beach and Stacy got mad because Cecilly was dominating the radio. A lot of the girls really hate this thing about Cecilly. She doesn't exactly have good, um,
boundaries?
No matter whose radio it is on the beach, she'll just act like it's hers and turn the station whenever she doesn't like a song." True took a big breath, let it out, and then talked on to the ceiling. "Stacy was in the mood from hell anyway. She went down to the water's edge to get away