Aida

The detective wanted to know if Aida was the sort of girl who would run away from home. He'd asked to talk to me alone in the living room. My parents stood around the kitchen with the lady cop and the other detective, an old man who looked to be on his last days of the job. They were telling my parents Aida would walk through that front door any minute now. She probably just got distracted, wandered off with some friends. Our mother wasn't crying yet but she was close. I sat in the middle of the sofa, my thighs parting the cushions. The detective sat on the armchair our mother recently had reupholstered with a fleur-de-lis print because the cat had clawed through the previous paisley.

He looked young to be a detective. He wore jeans with a flannel shirt under a tweed blazer even though it was August. He wanted to know if Aida ever talked about leaving, like she had plans beyond this place, something else waiting for her somewhere.

I shook my head. I didn't tell him that since we were eleven, Aida and I had kept a shoebox in the back of our closet that we called our Runaway Fund. The first year or two, we added every extra dollar we came across and when our piles of bills became thick and messy we took them to the bank and traded them for twenties. We planned to run away and join a group of travelers, sleep under bridges beside other refugee kids and form orphan families like you see in movies and Friday night TV specials. Those were the days before we understood how much our parents needed us. Aida insisted on taking the cat with us. Andromeda was fat but could fit in her backpack. Aida had lied to our parents and said she found the cat alone one day by the river behind the soccer field but she'd really bought her at the pet shop with some of our runaway savings. I didn't mind. The cat always loved her more than me though.

"Does she have a boyfriend? Somebody special?"

She didn't. Neither did I. Our parents told us boys were a big waste of time and...