The Disappearance of Emily H.

Chapter 1

For once I’d like to go to a school with a really unique mascot. Like a garden gnome. Or a three-toed sloth. Or a geoduck.

Instead, I’m going to Yielding Middle. 

From across the street I stare at its boring red bricks and horizontal stripes of windows. But mostly I notice the faded mural above the front doors. It’s of a scruffy cougar pouncing on a football. This is my fourth cat school.

Eighth grade officially starts next week, but today is registration. My stomach is heavy, like I ate stones for lunch instead of strawberry Pop-Tarts.

A couple of guys are on the front lawn, winging a Frisbee back and forth past the flagpole. One guy has spiked red hair and looks like the flagpole’s twin: tall and freakishly thin. The other guy’s closer to average height and weight, with wild brown hair and a baggy T-shirt and jeans. He might even be cute, but I’m not close enough to tell. Students passing by heckle them about their lousy throws and yell at them to come in and get their pictures taken.

Everyone’s in groups or at least pairs, laughing and joking as they disappear around the corner to where registration’s happening. It’s only new kids like me who arrive solo and silent.

I reach into my front pocket for the small, scratched-up silver heart with a dent in the side where I once dropped it on the sidewalk. I balance the heart in my palm and watch as tiny sparkles dance across it, sparkles only I can see.

I need a memory from my first day of kindergarten. A shot of courage for facing Yielding Middle and all the yuck that goes along with being the new girl.

I close my hand to trap the sparkles, then shut my eyes, drifting into the memory.

The small kitchen smells of coffee and maple syrup. My grandmother sits on a wooden chair while I stand in front of her, close enough that she can reach my head with the brush.

“Kindergarten.” She divides my hair into three sections and begins braiding from high on my crown.

“I can handle it,” I say, chewing a bite of pancake.

“Of course you can.” She tugs, getting the braid tight and perfect. “You can already read.” Tug. “You can count to one hundred.” Tug. “You can print your whole name.” Tug.

I gulp some milk.

“And look.” She pulls a deep blue ribbon from her apron pocket and lays it on the table in front of me. “Brand-new.”

My eyes grow big. More new stuff to go along with the school supplies and the lunch box and the shoes? Starting school is better than Christmas.

My grandmother turns me around. Because she’s still seated, we’re at the same height, and looking into her clear gray eyes is like looking into a mirror.

“Raine,” she says, “don’t pick up any sparkles at school.”

“Not even the really bright ones?”

“Don’t touch any of them. People don’t understand how we read their memories.”

“They don’t want to share?”

“You’ll fit in better if you leave the sparkles alone.” She places her hands on my shoulders and stares at me, unblinking. “Promise me.”

I hesitate, biting my bottom lip. “I promise.”

“Good girl.” She reaches into her apron pocket again, this time pulling out a thin chain with a small, shiny silver heart glimmering with sparkles. She places it in my hand, then gently folds my fingers over it. “Whenever you need to, Raine, you can always look at these.”

I close my eyes. My grandmother must’ve been carrying around the heart for a while. It’s jam-packed with memories of us together: playing Go Fish, swinging in the park, baking cupcakes, making Play-Doh snakes.

“Are you okay?” A voice jolts me out of the vision.

I open my eyes, still flooded with a warm, happy feeling, the kind you wish you could hold onto forever, the kind of feeling that makes you think you can take on the world and win.

Standing next to me is a very bright girl. She’s wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt dress with swirls of red, orange, and lime-green. Put her in a cone and she’d look like rainbow sherbet. Her dirty-blond hair is obscenely long, past her butt, and as straight as a stick.

“I’m good,” I say, sliding the heart back into my pocket.

“I was getting worried. One of my cousins has seizures, and I thought maybe that’s what was happening with you. I’m Shirlee, by the way. With two e’s.” She talks fast. Anxiety is rolling off her in waves. I can practically smell it.

“My name’s Raine.”

“Raine? That’s different.”

“It’s basically a weather reference. A huge storm was going on the night I was born.” So huge, my mother never made it to the hospital, and I was born in a car.

“So you could’ve been called Thunder or Lightning or Cloud?”

“I got lucky with Raine.” Believe me, I’ve thought of all the possibilities: Pontiac, Backseat, Vinyl.

She squints in the sunlight. “Where do we go to pick up our schedules? And get our pictures taken?”

She must be new, too, which explains why she’s so nervous. “The gym?” I say. “I just moved here yesterday.” I step off the curb, and she follows, like a puppy in search of a new friend.

“Welcome to Yielding, New York,” she says, pushing her hair behind her ear to reveal a dangly metal sun earring with sixteen rays and a wide smile. “Did you hear the sirens last night?”

“Yeah,” I say. “What happened?”

“A hay field outside town caught fire. It burned for a while before anyone realized it. On the news this morning, they said it was arson. Second fire like that this summer.”

Shirlee chats about Yielding She’s one of those people who can handle both sides of a conversation. Works for me.

“This is my first time going to regular school. I’ve been homeschooled my entire life,” she tells me. “What about you?”

“This is my third middle school, my fifth school altogether,” I say. “I’m hoping this time’s the charm, and I make it the whole way through twelfth grade here.” Although I’m not sure I see my mom totally changing her pattern, which goes like this: find a deadbeat guy, get involved, have an ugly breakup, drag daughter off to a new town for a fresh start.

“Five schools?” Shirlee looks shocked, as if I told her I’m from Mars.

My fingers begin to tingle with pins and needles, like I’ve been sitting on them. There must be a sparkle on her somewhere, but I can’t see it. I lift my arms, just a little, reaching toward Shirlee, trying to sense where the sparkle is.

She glances at me.

I drop my arms to my side. I miss the days when the whole world was brilliant with sparkles, when I could spot them and scoop up people’s memories as easily as breathing. That all changed when I was twelve. I woke up one morning and the world was duller, with way fewer sparkles. I have no idea why and no one to ask.

Once Shirlee and I hit school property, we follow the sound of voices and make our way to the gym. Immediately inside the double doors, a couple of overweight women wearing Cougars T-shirts sit behind a table.

The woman on the left takes care of me, getting my name and handing me my schedule. The woman on the right does the same for Shirlee.

“You girls done your photo for your student card yet?” my woman asks.

When we say no, she directs us to room five.

“Come back here after and buy your PE clothes.” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the far basketball hoop.

“Let’s see what classes we have together.” Shirlee reads from her schedule as we walk along the hall.

My fingers are still tingling, but I’ve given up trying to find the sparkle on her. “Film,” I say when Shirlee finishes. “Last period.” Only school I’ve ever gone to with a film class. For the first time since I walked through the double doors with the cougar mascot, a little bit of interest pierces through the general annoyance I feel at my mother for forcing me to change schools again.

“Film? That’s it? But we’re both in eighth grade.” She’s incredulous.

“There must be a lot of eighth graders.”

We wander the halls, looking for room five.

Eventually, Shirlee flips over her schedule and examines the map on the back.

“We took a wrong turn at the restrooms,” she says.

“I was expecting to meet you, you know,” she says as we retrace our steps.

“What?”

“My horoscope said I was destined to meet a new friend today.”

“You’re coming to a big public school. You’ll meet loads of new people,” I say. I don’t comment on the word friend. With all the moving we’ve done, I’m not much of a friend maker.

“True,” Shirlee says. “But there was also something about height, which I didn’t understand at the time. Now I know it was referring to your”—she looks at my head and then my feet—“shortness.”

I blink. At five foot one, I’m small, but I won’t be the shortest student here. Shirlee’s obviously working at making the horoscope thing fit.

Room five’s a mob scene, with students in a noisy, messy, zigzaggy line. My fingers tingle so bad it’s like they’re on fire. I shove my hands in my pockets. Feeling for memories here would be social suicide. Nothing screams different louder than reaching for people’s backpacks, necklaces, clothes, whatever.

“Next,” the photographer announces in a robotic voice. He waits a few seconds, then calls again. “Next.”

“Next.” In a low, gravelly voice, a girl mimics him to her friend.

“Go in front of me?” Shirlee pulls out a tube of gloss. “I’m the opposite of photogenic. I’m probably related to Medusa.” She uncaps the gloss, and a scent of thyme or oregano or some other pizza herb is released into the air. “I bet you never take a bad picture.”

“Not true,” I say, thinking back to last fall and my zombie-ish seventh-grade photo ID.

“I don’t believe it.” She studies me as if I’m a bug under a microscope. “You’re really pretty. Your hair is full of body. And you’ve got very unusual eyes.” She peers at me. “Gray.” She steps back. “I bet you could be a model.”

“Next.”

A blonde with perfectly styled chin-length hair and a short clingy dress glances over her shoulder at us. She looks me up and down, then stares at Shirlee and slaps her hands over her eyes. “Help. Someone get me sunglasses. That dress is burning into my eyeballs.”

The mean girl. Every school has one.

“Eww,” several girls mock-scream, also covering their eyes.

The mean girl’s accessories. Every school has them, too.

Shirlee freezes, like maybe that’ll turn her invisible. Homeschooling didn’t prepare her for mean girls.

“Next.”

My fingers itch like crazy. A huge sparkle glitters from the blonde’s purse. I inch closer to her. Just as I begin to stretch out my arm, a laugh comes from the front of the room.

Like a wave, everyone in line surges forward, craning their neck to see what’s going on. The sparkle moves out of reach.

There’s another laugh.

It’s the two Frisbee guys from the lawn. The brown-haired guy’s hanging on to a video controller, making faces and noises, and basically hamming it up for the redheaded guy getting his picture taken.

“He’s cute,” Shirlee says, her eyes on the brown-haired guy. “That’s something you don’t to see with homeschooling.”

Homeschooling would kill me, but not because of the lack of boys. My mom and I could never handle that much together time. Not and be nice to each other.

There’s another burst of laughter as the cute guy pulls Ping-Pong balls from his backpack and bounces them off his friend’s spiky hair.

While everyone’s eyes are glued on the two boys, I slip between people until I’m behind the mean blonde. Three. Two. One. Fast as lightning, I shoot out my arm and grab the sparkle off her purse.