Without Paige

Chapter One

Chapter One

It'd been nearly six months since Paige had packed her things and disappeared in the dead of night, and still she was all anyone ever talked about. No one knew where she was, or why she'd left. All anyone knew was that one day, she was there, and the next she was gone.

My parents had all but turned over houses for the weeks afterwards. They'd been frantic, stapling posters to telephone poles and dropping by the houses of everyone who knew her. Even now, my mom had yet to give up the search. I knew Paige was long gone, probably soaking up the sun somewhere on the coast of California, but my mother was relentless. Paige was miles away, and still, she came first. She always had, and probably always would.

The clearest memories I had of the morning after Paige left were of the little things. Dad and I had been watching TV, and Rebecca Desnaris, the Sunday afternoon news anchor, was talking about the rise of drug addiction in big cities. She'd just finished talking about the recent deaths in Chicago when my mother came down the stairs, still dressed in her pajamas, though she'd been up for hours. It was nearly one, and none of us had seen Paige at all that day. Of course, we didn't know why that was. Not then, anyway.

My mom's first words to me had been, "Is your sister still asleep?"

And to that, I said, "I don't know. I haven't seen her."

Dad laughed from beside me on the couch, a sound that seemed to bounce around the room. "That kid would sleep all week if we let her."

He wasn't wrong, though. Some days, Paige wouldn't wake up until dinner time, or even later. Really, that was only because most nights she didn't even get home until the sun was rising. One morning, I remember sitting on the couch with Dad, well passed ten a.m., and watching her tiptoe down the hallway behind us, still wearing the dress she'd gone out in the evening before.

She was the kind of person who liked to party, and more often than not, my sister was the party. Videos had gotten around of her dancing on counters and shotgunning drinks, and even once back when I was a freshman, I'd seen her disappear behind the school to smoke with her friends during first period

. But I hadn't known until later, when I'd walked past her in the hall and seen the redness of her eyes and the slowness of her steps, exactly what she'd been smoking.

Even so, she wasn't prone to getting herself in trouble. She took calculated risks, she'd always said, thinking them through just enough.

I remembered my mom looking down the hallway towards Paige's closed door, as though it would swing open and Paige would emerge at any second. The look of worry on her face, as though she was afraid of what she'd find if she opened the door. My parents knew about Paige's lifestyle. They never let her leave the house without knowing where she was going, even though she usually lied. And so, more often than not, they worried. But they never told her no.

"Maybe I should go wake her up," my mom said, still standing next to the couch dad and I were sitting on. She turned back to the kitchen behind her, where the scent of bacon and brewed coffee glided through the house, making my stomach growl. "Breakfast is almost ready."

"Good luck," Dad called after her, laughing again. I watched her take only two steps before I turned back to the TV, and in the background, behind Rebecca Desnaris' voice, I could hear the light tapping of my mother knocking, and then the hinges of Paige's door creak.

Things moved quickly after that, almost too quickly for me to believe everything had happened. Mom texted Sharon, Paige's best friend, and the girl who she said she'd been with for most of the night. Sharon said she hadn't seen her since Friday. That was when my mom phoned the police, and six months later, I could still remember the flashing lights that flooded in through the window, painting the living room red and blue.

Three policemen filed into Paige's room, and it took them all of ten minutes to figure out what had happened. Her bed was made, her closet half emptied, and sitting on her desk, her cell phone was blinking with a stream of missed phone calls and texts.

The police chief, Officer Rowly, had emerged from Paige's room and walked over to where my parents and I sat in the living room, his boots clinking against the floorboards. He was looking at my mom as he spoke, as though he'd known she would be the one who would take this the hardest. His words were what I remembered the most vividly about the whole day.

"We can't be sure just yet," he'd said, as if that would take some of the edge off. "But it looks like she probably ran away."

The words had been strange to hear. I hadn't really considered them, not before he said it out loud. But the evidence had been there, right under our noses, and we'd refused to see it.

At the time, I'd thought of a conversation Paige and I had had sometime in the weeks before she'd left. It'd been rare for her and I to get along; my sister and I hadn't been close for years. When we were kids, we'd been each other's best friends, and the year between us had been nothing to the five and six-year-old girls that used to play soccer in the backyard. But that had quickly faded as we grew up. Paige had become a different person from the sister I'd once known. She made new friends and gave up soccer, and suddenly she was never at home.

But one night, when there was still fresh snow on the ground, and our parents were fast asleep, Paige had tapped her fingers on my door and asked me to take a walk with her. It'd been a strange request, not only because it was one in the morning but because Paige and I didn't do things together. We coexisted, and usually, that was about it. But curious as I was, I said yes, and I grabbed my jacket from the back of my bedroom door and I followed her outside.

It'd been cold and dark, and aside from the two of us, the entire street seemed to be asleep. Wind whistled past my ears, and old snow crunched under our feet. For the longest time, neither of us said anything. But then Paige said something.

"I'm bored," she said, sighing.

"You're the one who wanted to go for a walk," I shot back with a frown. My hands were buried deep in my pocket, but I could still feel the chill of the air against my fingertips.

She groaned, "No, that's not what I mean. I meant I'm bored of everything. Nothing ever happens here."

"I still don't know what you mean."

"Yeah, you do," Paige said, looking over at me. She stopped walking, and though the fur that lined hood of her coat was blocking the bottom of her face, I could still make out the expression she wore. She didn't look annoyed, that was a look of hers that I had come to be very familiar with over the years. Instead, she looked disappointed. Maybe even a little bit pleading. "There's bigger things out there, you know? Bigger places, more people..."

"You'll be done school soon," I said. "And then you're off to university. Bigger place, more people."

Paige snorted, "Yeah, and more boring school."

"What are you saying?" I asked. "Are you saying you don't want to go? Because Mom and Dad already paid your tuition deposit, and they're probably going to be pretty pissed when--"

"I don't know what I'm saying, Wrenny," she sounded sad, in a way I'd never heard Paige sound before.

It should have been my first clue, but it wasn't. We walked in silence for a while after that, and then we went back to the house and disappeared behind our bedroom doors, and the next time I saw her, she was yelling at me for using all her face wash. Everything was back to normal, and then two months later she was gone. The snow had faded and there was barely any cold lingering in the air, and my sister left.