The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates

bedroom, Sybilla’s closet-sized bedroom with picture-posters on the wall—Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Prince, LL Cool J, Public Enemy. The fact was, Sybilla wasn’t there.

Girl-Cousins
    W here’s S’b’lla?”
    “They sayin S’b’lla in some hospital.”
    “They sayin S’b’lla in ‘custody.’”
    “S’b’lla in Juvie.”
    “Nah S’b’lla ain’t in Juvie— she the one got hurt.”
    Sybilla’s girl-cousin Martine and several of her friends from the neighborhood went to her house looking for her and each time Mrs. Frye sent them away— S’b’lla ain’t here. Y’all get on home.
    Martine was Sybilla’s age and in Sybilla’s class at Pascayne South. Some of the rumors she’d been hearing about her cousin were so nasty, she’d had to press the palms of her hands over her ears and run away.
    Through back-alleys she came to the rear of the brownstone row house in which her aunt Ednetta Frye lived with that man Anis Schutt. Thinking she would peek in the windows and see if she could see Sybilla inside, but Ednetta had drawn all the blinds down to the sills.
    Martine thought, if her cousin Sybilla was dead, she would know it. That shuddery sensation like when someone walks over your grave-to-be.
    All of Sybilla’s girlfriends were talking about her, wondering where she was. Sybilla was starting to hang out with older guys but it had to be in secret—Ednetta couldn’t know. (For sure, the stepfather Anis couldn’t know. That man would whip her hard with his belt and give Ednetta a few swipes, too.) Her friends wondered if this disappearance, all these rumors, had to do with that.
    Or maybe there was no connection. Sybilla was just grabbed in some alley, dragged into a car or a van and driven away, kept for three days and three nights and God knows what done to her.
    “They sayin she in the hospital now, in some ‘special care’ ward. She on ‘life support.’”
    “Nah. They sayin she run away with that Jaycee.”
    It wasn’t uncommon for a girl like Sybilla who didn’t get along well with her mother to be sent away —somewhere. Martine wondered if this was the explanation.
    Where’s S’b’lla? —Martine nagged her mother who’d told her a dozen times she didn’t know. There was something evasive in her mother’s voice that suggested to Martine that she did know. (Martine’s mother Cheryl was Ednetta’s younger sister. Bullshit Ednetta hadn’t confided in her.)
    The last time Martine went to Third Street to knock on her aunt’s door Ednetta cursed her with a choking sob God damn girl ain’t I told you! S’b’lla not here! Just go.
    For sure something had happened to Sybilla, you could tell by Ednetta’s behavior. That guilty-ravaged look in Ednetta’s face. How quick Ednetta flared up in a nasty temper.
    Whatever it was, Ednetta knew. She just wasn’t telling.
    Martine hated it when people’s mothers changed from who they were to somebody else, the look in their faces and in their eyes like they were strangers and didn’t care for you like they’d always done. A man was different, it was never surprising a man might change, and a man might change back to who he’d been, or a man might just depart and you’d never see him again. But a woman like Ednetta who was Martine’s aunt, her mother’s older sister, who’d taken care of Martine a thousand times, and had always babied and kissed her like Martine was her own daughter, and (maybe) nicer than Sybilla in fact—if a mother like Ednetta could change, that made Martine want to cry.

    “S’ B’LLA?”—SOFTLY M ARTINE CALLED CUPPING HER HANDS TO her mouth.
    Standing on tiptoe in the alley outside her great-grandmother’s ground-floor apartment on Eleventh Street. It was a wild chance Martine was taking but you had to figure if Sybilla had been sent away , likely it was here. Martine had been sent away to Grandma Tice’s place herself more than once, when her mother didn’t have time for her or