John Brandon - Citrus County

She looked into his deadpan brown eyes and they seemed to know everything. Neither of them spoke. Toby’s face was waffled with the fence’s shadow. For a moment Shelby forgot to think about herself — about her father, her sister, how she’d left the sliding door open, how she’d let her mother down, how she had to return to school and all of it seemed absurd now. The idea of being graded was farcical. The teachers. The clubs. The buildings themselves, crouched and faded.

The PE coach sounded his whistle. Sixth period was ending. Shelby and Toby knew they had to speak. They had to finish the moment.

“I’m still coming after you,” Shelby told him. “I’m going to pick up where I left off.”

“I’ll be all the places I normally am,” Toby said.

Shelby’s dad sat at the kitchen table with an open expression on his face, grasping a fork. He wanted coffee but Shelby refused to give him any. She wanted him to sleep.

“The Boy Scouts are the best searchers,” Shelby’s dad said. “When a Boy Scout searches for something, he falls in love with it.”

“That sounds true,” Shelby said. Her dad’s statements had taken on a philosophical tang.

Shelby had her back to her father. She was picking chicken pieces out of some Cracker Barrel chicken and dumplings, filling a bowl. She would heavy her dad’s stomach and give him a shot of whisky.

“This old man from the nondenominational church.” Shelby’s dad paused. She turned and saw him blinking, something in his eye. He tried to fish it out with his pinkie.

“The old man?” Shelby said.

“He’s got this grabber thing and then he brakes the snakes’ necks with his bare hands. He collects them in a sack and takes them home and burns them to the heavens.”

“You’ve slept eleven hours in six days.”

“I don’t feel that tired.”

Shelby opened the fridge and shoved aside a mess of boxes, making room to put the dumplings back. She felt a diffuse pain in her midsection. Since her sister had disappeared, all physical pain was diffuse. She placed the bowl of chicken in front of her father. He ate three hunks, then coughed and set down his fork. Shelby went into the next room and put on quiet music. She closed all the blinds. When she returned to the kitchen, her dad had eaten no more of the chicken. He had a hunk on his fork and it was dripping gravy on the table.

“My sister’s putting up fifty grand,” he said. “A reward for information leading to recovery.”

“Her idea?”

“She called yesterday. She’d been in Scotland.”

Shelby nudged her dad’s hand toward his mouth and he ate the piece of chicken from his fork.

Shelby’s aunt, her dad’s sister, lived in Iceland. She had a website, popular in certain circles, on which she reviewed books and restaurants and music and entire cities from the perspective of a space alien. The site was called whatwouldtheythink . Aunt Dale. She’d been with the same guy for fifteen years but hadn’t married him. There was a picture of her in the hallway that led to Shelby’s room. Aunt Dale had splotchy freckles and tight braids that stuck out stiffly from her head. She’d been friendly whenever Shelby had spoken to her on the phone, but Shelby hadn’t been in the same room with her in years. Shelby had looked at the website before, and it had made her feel lonely. The goings-on of these other people on these other continents were exciting and withering. Shelby had harbored a secret wish, after her mother passed away, that her Aunt Dale would make an effort to be closer to Shelby and Kaley, but that hadn’t happened. Aunt Dale was excused from doing a lot of things other people were expected to do. She was an artist, Shelby supposed. Shelby had no idea if she herself was an artist, if she would ever be excused from things for a reason other than that she’d been struck with misfortune.

Shelby’s dad looked stymied. He was leaning forward against the table.

“That’s good enough,” she told him. She removed his chicken and threw it in the trash, bowl and all. She poured a big shot and rubbed her father’s shoulders. He took the whisky down in subdued sips, like it was hot tea, then slid the shot glass to the middle of the table. Shelby wanted to sing her father a lullaby. She wanted to make a soothing sound. She rubbed her father’s shoulders more softly, found herself humming. It was a pretty sound. And it was working; her father was falling off.

Shelby went across the house and pulled the mattress off her bed. She didn’t want to have to wake her father and make him stumble to his bedroom. If he took too many steps, he’d come to and head right out the front door. She stood the mattress on its side and tugged it down the hall. It got stuck turning the corner to the living room and Shelby had to bounce it free. When she reached the kitchen she leaned in the door frame and her father was not in his chair. She checked the bathroom, the utility room. She dashed to the front windows and threw aside a curtain. Her father was at the end of the walk. A couple of the reporters spoke and he spoke back. When he was almost past them, a lady reporter wearing a bright scarf, Sandra Denton, stepped from behind a van and stood in his path. The angle at which she held her head was meant to be conspiratorial. Sandra Denton fondled her earrings. She touched Shelby’s dad’s sleeve. He walked on, into the brush, and she had to watch him go.

Shelby let the curtain drop. She explored the house, looking for something to break. She was going to crumble if she didn’t attack; those were her choices. She stomped over the mattress, which was lying on the living room floor, then stopped short in front of the TV. It would make a resounding crunch, the TV against the wall, but she’d regret it. It was good to have in the nighttime. She made a pass through the bedrooms — nothing large enough, delicate enough, nothing calling out to be smashed. She had an urge to trash Kaley’s room, to toss the toys everywhere and fling the clothes out of the dresser and flip the little bed over. She couldn’t do that.

Shelby rushed back to the window. She brushed the hair from her eyes and went out the front door. Nobody noticed her until she was to the road, then in a blink everyone was staring. She felt like she was on stage, the audience starved. She stepped underneath Sandra Denton’s team’s camera, which was propped on a tripod, and hoisted it onto her shoulder. It had plenty of weight to it. The tripod didn’t fully detach, but hung ungainly, pressing on Shelby’s back. The faces surrounding her beamed. Shelby flexed her knees, flung the camera upward with all she had, and shuffled to the side. There was the crunch. The camera, though it remained in one piece, was smashed on the front end. It made garbled noises.

Shelby went back inside and the phone was ringing. Shelby listened to the ringing and then she listened to the machine pick up and then to the crisp, disgruntled voice of the pixie-cut FBI agent. The woman told Shelby she was sorry if she hadn’t been professional when she’d interviewed Shelby. She said she usually did not behave like that. Her partner maybe, but not her. They saw cases like Kaley’s all the time, and it was hell on the nerves. The agent told Shelby she was a civil servant. She had good days and bad. She coped, like everyone. It sounded to Shelby like the agent was calling from a cafeteria, lots of clinking in the background. She stopped talking just as the machine was about to cut her off.

Mr. Hibma sat through detention, looking over his basketball binders for the sixth or seventh time. That was the thing about detention — when you gave it to a student, you gave it to yourself too. The offender was someone other than Toby this time. Shelby, her second day back, had told her latest trivia partner that he was one of the planet’s useless people, that his brain ought to be donated for research. She had done this, it seemed, because the boy was being so polite to her. His parents had likely told him to be extra nice to Shelby Register, and this turned out to be bad advice. Though Mr. Hibma agreed with the assertion that this particular boy’s brain wasn’t doing him a lot of good, and though the boy hadn’t seemed too offended, Mr. Hibma couldn’t let Shelby get away with calling someone stupid in front of the class. And he thought she might appreciate being treated like a regular student, might appreciate not being tiptoed around, might like to receive a detention just like anybody else.