The Night She Disappeared by April Henry Page B

was.
    “You should probably go,” I say. I don’t want to talk about what just happened. I don’t want to think about what just happened. It feels like whatever was between us has shifted. Before, I was giving Drew what he needed—more days on the schedule, the keys to my car, even fishing him out of the river. Now I realize how much I need him myself.
    Except I don’t need anyone. I learned that a long time ago. I don’t need my parents. I don’t need brothers and sisters. And after Maya’s family moved away last year, I learned I don’t even really need a best friend.
    In some ways, Pete’s is the closest thing I have to friends and family.
    Drew gets to his feet. I turn to look out the window at the deep blue sky and the dark green oak leaves silhouetted against it. I’ve always liked those colors, the contrast. When I was a kid, I used to lie on the front lawn and stare at them. I could lie there and not think.
    Now I think way too much. So much that I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. What’s stupid and what’s smart.
    I know what my parents would say. They would say Drew is a mistake. I’m going to Stanford next fall. Drew isn’t going anyplace.
    I wait to hear his footsteps walking away, muffled on the soft carpet. Instead, I feel his warmth as he comes to stand behind me. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t need to.
    “Cerulean,” he says, looking past me. Suh-roo-lee-uhn.
    I turn to look at him. “What?”
    “That’s what color blue the sky is.”
    “I know what it means. I’m just surprised that you know the word.”
    Drew’s face closes up like a fist. He pivots on his heel, and in two steps he has picked up his backpack and skateboard. In another two steps he is at the door to my room.
    “Wait, I didn’t mean it like that,” I say. “Drew!” I run after him, but he’s already halfway down the stairs. My dad stands up, like he wants to challenge him. Like he thinks something is wrong. It is, but not the way he thinks. I can’t go bleating after Drew now. So I head back to my room before he can ask what’s going on. Drew closes the front door at the same time as I close my bedroom door.
    I just never thought of Drew as a reader. But cerulean is a reading word. Nobody says it. “Reading words” is how I think of all the words I read that no one ever says out loud. No one uses scamper in real conversation. Or hearth. It wasn’t until last year that I learned it didn’t rhyme with mirth. That it really rhymed with Darth, as in Vader.
    I don’t want to leave my room. It’s rare for my parents both to be home. And even rarer for me to bring a boy home. Scratch that—I’ve never done it before. They’re going to want to talk about it, ask me questions. I probably can’t avoid that, because they insist we eat dinner together anytime the three of us are all home. Which is about twice a month.
    But until dinnertime, I want to stay away from them and their questions and the looks they’ll give each other.
    I could read or do homework (although there’s less and less homework as we get closer to graduation). Instead, I turn on my computer.
    I need to keep away from the Internet. But after I push Drew away, push away the one person who might be my friend, I Google a certain term. There are more than three million results. These are parts of the headlines I find under the News tab for “body found”:
     
     
in suitcase
ablaze in bin
in farm field
on roof of apartment building
by side of road
burned, beheaded
in car that had been towed
in wooded area
floating in pond
behind Dumpster
in burned car
wrapped in carpet
wrapped in plastic
in vacant lot
in some bushes
in lake
buried in snow
at entrance to golf course
     
    And this is what I read when I click on “in suitcase”:
    Body of Teen Found in Landfill Stuffed in Suitcase
     
    It all started when police found the body of 16-year-old Marissa Johns stuffed in a brand-new suitcase in the Houston city landfill. Inside the