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The September Sisters RB/SB

Chapter One

When I'm called out of my tenth-grade advanced English class at nine-thirty in the morning on a Thursday to come down to the office, I know immediately that something has happened. As I round the corner, I see my father standing there, and I'm suddenly afraid.

"What's the matter, Dad? Are you all right?" I whisper. There's a sinking feeling in my chest because I know he's not all right. He should be at work.

He shakes his head. And I'm not sure if I want to hear what he's about to say, but I know I need to hear it. "They've found her," he says.

His words are an ending, a relief and a heartbreak all at once, because I know that everything that happened over the last two years, everything that has led me right here, right to this moment, is finally over.

The night before Becky disappeared was amazingly normal; it could've been any night in my life, any night the summer before my thirteenth birthday. Becky and I fought, but this was nothing unusual.

It was a particularly humid night, even for July. There was a certain heaviness, an unbearable, budding sweat that refused to go away as we ate dinner in our bathing suits. The air in the house seemed to stand still, even as the paddle fans above us swung around and around.

We ate macaroni and cheese for dinner. It was my favorite meal and something my mother cooked for us often because it was easy and it was the one food Becky and I both could agree on. When we were eating, my mother disappeared into the bathroom. Becky and I chewed up the noodles and held them on our tongues, then stuck our tongues out to grosseach other out. "Ewww," Becky kept saying. "Abby, don't show me." But I laughed and did it anyway. I knew she wasn't really annoyed, only pretending, but I wanted to push her to the edge, to make her angry.

Becky and I were at each other's throats—six weeks out of school and somewhat bored. Our mother pretended we were friends and set us up with games and arts and crafts during the day, but we hated each other. Maybe hate is too strong a word; it was more like we were jealous and crazy for our mother's attention. I was two years and one day older than Becky, and I think that always drove her crazy. She didn't like being second, not in anything.

When my mother came back to the kitchen, her face was red and puffy, and we knew she'd been crying. She cried a lot then, though we didn't really know why. Ever since our grandmother had died the year before, my mother's sadness had become something we'd accepted, something we'd learned to live with, just like anything else, I guess. We usually tried to ignore it or make jokes. Becky chewed up more noodles, stuck out her tongue, and said, "Look, Mom."

"Oh, Becky, really. Behave yourself." And she went out on the back patio to have a cigarette. My mother didn't smoke inside the house. She said if she did it outside, it didn't count. And we believed her. We didn't see her cigarette as an indulgence, something sinful, but rather as an extension of her glamour, something a little dangerous that made her more than just our mother.

There was something about our mother that Becky and I idolized. She's beautiful, but I don't think that just because she's my mother. She's medium height, but she's very thin, and she has this shiny blond hair that she usually pulls back in a ponytail against her neck. She doesn't wear a lot of makeup, but she wears enough to highlight her features, her enormous green eyes, her wide, toothy smile. Her bottom front tooth is slightly crooked, but this only adds to her charm, makes her not perfect, and to me makes her seem only more beautiful.

Our father was working late, something he does often. When he was home, she didn't smoke at all, and we all ate dinner together. This usually happened one or two nights a week. Most nights were like that night.

Our father is a stern man, unyielding. I'm both in awe and afraid of him. He's very tall and burly with this thick brown mustache and bushy eyebrows. He's a strange match for my mother's beauty, but somehow they seemed to fit perfectly, the way he put his hand on her leg as we rode in the car, the way he put his arm around her as they sat on the couch; it was almost like he was always protecting her from something.

He works as a controller for Velcor, a company that makes dishes, china, and just your normal everyday stuff. That's why we always have very nice plates and little teacups and saucers and the like. That night we ate our macaroni and cheese out of these pink-flowered bowls. The bowls are white, and the pink flowers are stenciled around the edges in a little chain. It was Velcor's latest design, and Becky and I adored them. We loved pink; that was one thing we both could agree on.

After dinner I called my best friend, Jocelyn Redfern. We talked to each other at least once a day, and we usually saw each other on weekends. With Jocelyn, I was my grown-up self, the one who's interested in boys and clothes and makeup. It was an entirely different role from the one I played with Becky, chewing up noodles and displaying them as a gross-out technique.

The whole summer we'd been talking incessantly about James Harper, a boy we both had a crush on. Only we'd talk about him in secret code, so when Becky tried to listen in, she wouldn't understand what we were saying. We used names of food for people: Jam for James, Banana for Becky, Iced Tea for Jocelyn's mother, and so on.

The September Sisters RB/SB. Copyright © by Jillian Cantor. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.