A local woman missing- Mary Kubica

that I shared with Delilah. My mom made me toss my half in the
trash. She was all, like, ‘It doesn’t mean anything without the other
half.’ I cried over it. So she went and bought me a new best-friends
necklace and told me I could give it to anyone I wanted. I might have
been six but you don’t just, like, forget your best friend.”
“Who’d you give it to?”
“Lily Morris. Do you remember her? She doesn’t even live here
anymore. She moved to, like, North Carolina when we were twelve.”
I shake my head. I don’t remember her.
“Doesn’t matter. Lily was never a good friend, anyway. In fourth
grade she started a rumor that I, like, peed my pants when I
laughed.”
I want to ask her if it’s true. If it is, I’d find it endearing.
“Anyway, my mom let me keep one picture of Delilah, though.”
“That’s cool,” I say, though it was a dick move for Mrs. Hanaka to
make her get rid of everything that reminded her of you. Dad, on the
other hand, kept everything. Your rainbow glitter shoes are still by
the door and have been for eleven years. You’ve probably noticed.
Piper shows me the picture. You’re a little kid in it. It’s a close-up of
yours and Piper’s faces smashed side by side together. You’re
smiling. Half your teeth are missing. You’re all red hair and freckles,
happy like the kid I saw dancing around on Dad’s home videos, not
scared like the person you now are.
“It’s just that, I was, like, digging around on the internet, trying to
figure out if cleft chins are one of those things that just goes away,
you know? And they’re not.”
No matter what kids like Adam Beltner say, I’m no idiot. I know
what Piper means by this. What I don’t know is how to feel about it.
Piper cut out the picture of you in the newspaper. The Hanakas
might be the only people in the world who still get the actual,
physical newspaper. She sets both pictures side by side, the one
some asshole photographer shot yesterday, and the one of you
when you were six. They’re mostly similar—red hair, green eyes—
except for that cleft chin. I never noticed before that you had a cleft
chin. It’s not something that’s super obvious. It’s on the small side as
cleft chins go, the kind of thing you might not notice unless someone
else pointed it out for you. But now that I know it’s there, it sticks out