“Two weeks until Christmas break,” IAN said as he handed me a red Solo cup. “I cannot wait.”
I nodded as I took the beer. School was mostly torture, because it meant staying still, and I was terrible at that. But being home would not be any better. I headed to the back of the basement and leaned against the wall, on the edge of the party but not really part of it.
Thanksgiving had been bad enough, but at least that had been only four days. Lately my mom was either at work or sitting silently on the couch, a glass of wine in her hand, staring at nothing. My dad hadn’t lived with us since the summer, when they argued about him buying presents for Jenny’s birthday. And whenever I was at home, I was hyperaware of Jenny’s room lying empty, like a rotting cavity hidden deep in a mouth.
I was the one that lived. Did my parents ever regret that? Jenny had always been the easy one. Pretty. Obedient. Smart.
Now Jenny was gone. And not gone.
My mom was sure she was dead. My dad was sure she was alive. And me? I felt like Jenny was stuck. Both living and dead, like Schrödinger’s cat.
My friend Ian, who was way smarter than me, had told me about this physicist, this Schrödinger guy, who had created something that was called a thought experiment. It imagined that you put a cat, a Geiger counter, a bottle of hydrochloric acid, and a tiny bit of radioactive material into a steel box.
Geiger counters detect radioactive emissions, and the second this imaginary Geiger counter detected even a single atom decaying, it was set to trip a hammer that would shatter the bottle of poison, which would kill the cat.
So sooner or later, in the thought experiment, the cat would die. You just didn’t know when. Some physicists believed that after a while, the cat would be simultaneously alive and dead—at least until someone opened the steel box to look. Of course once you looked, the cat could only be alive or dead, not both.
Jenny was the cat, but she was still inside the box. Unobserved. So she was both dead and alive.
All around me, kids were laughing and talking. A few people were dancing, and a few more were making out. Ian was walking around with a sprig of mistletoe over his head, trying to get girls to kiss him.
Just like Schrödinger’s cat, just like Jenny, I was here and not here.
Christmas Day would probably be a repeat of Thanksgiving, only worse, because it was Christmas. My grandma was again insisting that the whole family get together. She would make food that no one in my immediate family would do more than push around their plates. My uncle would “share” Bible verses about God’s plans and the afterlife, while my aunt laid her hand on his arm and whispered at him to stop. Their little girls would run around, high on sugar cookies, while my mom watched them, her face a mask. Looking like if you touched it, it would crack and then crumble into dust.
If we followed the pattern laid down by Thanksgiving, my dad, allowed home only for the holiday, would talk too much and drink even more than that. Then he and my mom would end up in Jenny’s room, shouting at each other before he stormed out.
My parents weren’t divorced yet, but my dad had moved to a ratty apartment building and spent all his free time searching for Jenny.
By now she would have been away at college. Probably getting straight As.
The night Jenny disappeared from Island Tan, my mom kept calling her cell after she didn’t come home, but my sister didn’t pick up. My dad’s the one who drove out there and found the place unlocked, all lit up, her car parked in front. Both the bank deposit and Jenny were gone. Later, the police checked the security footage from the bank, but the ATM camera didn’t reach far enough to show what happened to her. To show who had taken her, or if she had left with someone else.
Our whole life turned upside down. Home became where the craziness was. For weeks, our house was full of people. Cops, neighbors, my parents’ friends, reporters.
At first having cops at our house made me feel safe. But it wasn’t long before I got tired of them answering our landline, drinking out of our coffee cups, and never, ever leaving. I couldn’t walk around in my boxers anymore, because I might run into a police officer or even a reporter. Once I wandered out into the living room in my pajama bottoms and my parents were on the couch, lit up by bright lights on black metal stands, doing an interview for the evening news.
Just like with the cops, initially it was kind of cool, having people I’d only ever seen on TV in my house. They acted like they just wanted to help. They were friendly. Sympathetic. But as time went on, the reporters asked awful questions, like did I think Jenny was being sexually abused. Or they ran stories that turned out way different than I’d thought. I learned there was no such thing as “off the record.” Eventually I figured out that their real priority wasn’t finding my sister, but getting people to watch their shows.
After the first week came and went with no Jenny, my parents told me things had to get back to normal. That I had to go back to school. But things there weren’t back to normal either. Some kids acted like having a missing sister was contagious. And some acted like I was a celebrity. They even asked for my autograph.
At home, I felt like a ghost. You would have thought my parents would have been all over me, putting tracking software on my phone, insisting that I call them whenever I went someplace new. Instead, they barely seemed to notice me. After Jenny disappeared, I started eating dinner at Ian’s house and slept there most nights. Eventually, it was Ian’s parents who started getting uncomfortable with how much time I spent there, who started encouraging me to go home.
Instead, I just found other people to hang out with. All I wanted to do was drink beer and not talk about Jenny. When I was with my friends, it was easier not to think. Not to think about all the times I had yelled at Jenny, told her to get out of my room, out of my face, out of my life.
And then all of a sudden, she was.