Chapter 2
I was a person once. I had friends and hobbies and a boyfriend, crowned homecoming king, who liked me enough to text me every morning and night.
Back then, I was on the track team, and my coach thought I was good enough to get a scholarship at the kind of college that would maybe make my parents want to brag to their friends.
I posted online semiregularly: selfies with the camera blurred out of focus, the smears of sunsets, my sister’s face behind a rain-streaked window, a black squirrel rummaging through the contents of a dumpster.
I’d write these long captions because I liked the thrill of stashing little pieces of myself in those posts.
I guess some part of me believed that my life as I lived it was worth witnessing through a screen.
But even back then, when I was still a person, Adeline was something else.
Something more. I was fairly well liked, approaching popular, even.
But Adeline, one year my senior, was adored.
Not just by her friends and our family, but by people she had never even spoken to.
Everything that made me different and weird in the eyes of my classmates—like the fact that we were the only two biracial students at our small-town private school (our dad white and our mom Black)—just made Adeline all the more alluring.
It helped that she was beautiful, and not in a pedestrian way.
She was tall and bronze skinned like our mom but with our dad’s blond hair and hazel eyes.
Heads swiveled when she came down the hall at school, people turning to look no matter how many times they’d seen her before.
She didn’t need an algorithm forcing her to the tops of people’s feeds to get attention. Wherever she went, people watched and listened, and she never once had to ask for it.
But it wasn’t just beauty that drew people to Adeline, it was something more.
Adeline was capricious in a way that kept people on their toes.
Her emotions were sharp and intense. Her happiness, at its height, was like the sun glaring sharply off a blanket of freshly fallen snow, and I’d find myself squinting at the sight of her smile.
But when Adeline was sad—and she was often sad—the storms of her deep depressions swallowed her up, and me along with her.
I told myself that this was because we were so close, but my emotions never affected Adeline the way hers did me.
When Adeline was happy, I was happy. When she was sad, I was sad.
And when she died, I became nothing at all.
Maybe I was nothing to begin with.
Adeline disappeared on a Thursday morning in late September, when I was preparing for school.
She was in our shared bathroom with the door locked.
She always woke earlier than I did, and I was used to waiting for her to finish her morning routine, but on that day, she was taking a lot longer than usual.
I stood in the hall, with my towel and school uniform folded in a tight bundle against my chest, listening with an ear pressed to the door.
I could hear the faucet running on the other side, but nothing more than that. “Addie?”
No answer.
I knocked twice. I needed to shave my legs and shower, brush my teeth and fix my hair, comb mascara through my lashes (which I always took pains to do in those early weeks of the semester, before the stress beat the intent to make a good impression right out of me).
I banged on the door, open handed, until my palms stung. “Adeline, hurry the hell up.”
Nothing.
I began to worry then, less because I was certain there was something wrong and more because Adeline was the sort of girl one worried about.
She liked to disappear. She’d run away from home several times and, on weekends, made a sport of wriggling out of basement windows to attend college parties in the next town over.
She’d kept a roster of secret boyfriends and, in the eighth grade, had snuck out to meet one under the guise of a weekend field trip (the man, a twenty-year-old, was later arrested).
Adeline was so good at disappearances that sometimes she did it while still present, escaping the cage of her own body and drifting someplace else.
I’d seen her do it sitting right in front of me.
She’d just empty herself of all thought and sensibility, her eyes like those of someone who’d fallen asleep without shutting them.
I’d envied that talent, her innate ability to escape herself at will.
Exasperated, I’d pushed into the bathroom.
The faucet was on, the sink flooded almost up to the top, like it had been on for hours.
As if she’d left in a hurry without bothering to shut it off.
There was an open container of whipped moisturizer on the countertop, the same cream she applied every night, working it into the bags beneath her eyes.
As I edged up to the counter, I suppressed the compulsion to dip my index finger into the soft peaks of the cream and lick it clean.
The window above the toilet was just ajar. There was no sign of Adeline.
We looked for her, of course. First, just my parents and me.
And then, twelve hours into a fruitless search, we got the police involved.
Search parties were organized by local churches and the high school, and they combed through the woods around the town.
Police dogs paced the fields of nearby farms with their noses to the ground.
They dusted our shared bathroom for fingerprints but found only mine and Adeline’s.
Everyone who knew Adeline—family, friends, ex-boyfriends and flings—were questioned.
Then questioned again. They dredged the pond behind our house down to the muck of its bottom, looking for a body.
Helicopters circled the sky, trying to find what the search parties might’ve missed.
Fundraisers cropped up online (I don’t know what they were funding, exactly, as we never saw any of the pledged donations).
My parents promised reward money they didn’t have to spare, planning to draw from our college funds if anyone turned up with answers.
When Adeline was finally discovered, some eight weeks had passed.
They found her body folded into one of those pastel plastic playhouses—half-overgrown with black mold and ivy—in the middle of the woods, four miles from the nearest road, nine from our house.
No one understood how all those search parties and police dogs had neglected to find it, or why there was a random playhouse in the middle of the woods at all.
It defied all logic, as if someone had hidden her away in the pocket of another reality, out of space and time.
Like her body and the house that contained it had just spawned at random.
Why Adeline died there was another question unanswered. There was nothing sentimental about the place, and it had nothing to recommend it except, perhaps, that it was rather remote and quiet, and Adeline liked quiet places.
A hiker found her there, rotting but otherwise undisturbed, as if she’d simply fallen asleep and hadn’t bothered to wake up again.
That same day, I found a short letter in the drafts of her email, something I’d missed when I’d searched her computer before because, amid the chaos of the search for her, I’d never thought to comb through what she hadn’t sent or received.
The email had been written a few weeks before she went missing.
Not a suicide letter, per se, but something like one.
As if she somehow knew what was coming and wanted to get ahead of it, have her say.
The letter was brief and confessional, the shorthand of an excuse (as if one’s own death were a thing that could be excused away).
Things didn’t taste the same, she’d said.
The sky was a duller blue. The air was thinner and drier than she remembered.
Fall, her favorite season, was shorter than it used to be, the winters were longer, and she swore the snow fell gray instead of white, tainted before it ever even touched the ground, and she couldn’t bear it.
They removed her body from the playhouse, ferried her to the coroner’s office, where they ran toxicology reports and opened her up like the rats we’d dissected in biology class.
I pondered over these gruesome details and had harbored some thin hope that, upon slitting open her stomach, the mortician might find a second letter, the paper soaked through with bile and acid, addressed to me in her cramped and messy handwriting.
In this one, Adeline would apologize to me properly and assure me that I meant something to her, that she loved me, and that even death couldn’t change that.
But, of course, there was no letter. The contents of her stomach, as outlined by the autopsy, consisted of gin and the remnants of her dinner the night before she disappeared, confirming that she died just hours later.
Because there was nothing in her blood or belly that could’ve caused her death and no wounds or signs of struggle, her official cause of death was deemed inconclusive.
Adeline’s death remade me into something I never chose to be.
Every hope I’d had for a future, every dream, had gone with her.
I withdrew. Eventually, my friends stopped calling.
I had a boyfriend at the time, and I broke up with him in a two-line text.
We had a fight, in person, where he cried a lot (I found that strange, given that I’d caught him texting other girls behind my back the day before Adeline went missing), and I said very little at all, apart from the fact that I was sorry and tired and that my mom would be concerned if I didn’t get home soon.
I deleted all my social media, made myself disappear.