Afterward Read Free

headline. It was taken the day he was rescued. I stare at the picture of him standing between me and my parents, clutching my mother’s arm, and I can’t believe it’s been just over three months since Dylan came home and we were on the front page of almost every major paper in Texas.
    I mean, never once in my soul-sucking, mind-numbing, small-town Texas life did I think that one day I would be standing in front of CNN anchor Gloria Conway in all her hair sprayed, stiletto-wearing glory as she asked me what any rational person would qualify as The Stupidest Questions in the World.
    How does it feel to have your little brother back?
    How did you keep it together these last few days?
    Have you felt like a support for your parents as they’ve dealt with this unimaginable situation?
    Gloria fired questions at me while I was standing in the Dove Lake High School gymnasium, the only place the local police could think to put all the reporters and cameras because it was the one space in town that would hold all of them. Blinking as the camera flashes went off. Stuck in the very same spot where my best friend Emma Saunders and I regularly lied to that rat-faced Coach Underhill about having cramps so we wouldn’t have to complete the volleyball unit. There I stood, clutching my baby brother’s hand as he rocked back and forth and pushed his face into my mom’s armpit. My parents cried, and I thanked the God I wasn’t sure I believed in for bringing Dylan home to us. I even answered all of Gloria Conway’s stupid questions as a sign of thanks to some higher power.
    And I said a silent prayer, too, that she didn’t ask the questions that I didn’t want to answer.
    Why was Dylan outside unsupervised?
    Who normally would have been keeping an eye on Dylan at that time?
    How are you planning to help Dylan recover from this traumatic event, given his special needs?
    The reporters, some of them from as far away as England, were pretty interested in us, but Ethan Jorgenson got most of the attention. To be gone four years and found just over an hour away? And to have apparently had the chance to leave and not have left? That’s what everyone was talking about under their breaths.
    The police kept our two families mostly separated in the aftermath. I didn’t see Ethan during the interviews at the police station. Or the examinations at the hospital. I’m not sure why. But we were all hustled into the gym together for the news conferences, and I caught a glimpse of him through the crowd of reporters. Tall. Dark hair. A bunch of piercings in his left ear. Not bad looking, to tell you the truth, but skinnier than I remembered him. Maybe that bastard who took him and Dylan didn’t feed him much, I don’t know. He looked so different, but of course that makes sense since he’d been gone for so long, and a lot happens to you between eleven and fifteen. I mean, at eleven I could wear clothes from the boy’s department, but by fifteen my boobs were as big as my mother’s.
    Ethan had been a year behind me in school, but Dove Lake is tiny enough that it was easy to recall how he always played basketball at recess during elementary school and whacked away at the drums in the school band. I still remember his lopsided smile staring out at us from the MISSING posters taped to the front doors of the Tom Thumb and the Walgreens and the Wal-Mart and the Dairy Queen and the waiting room at his dad’s office. Dr. Jorgenson is my dentist just like he’s the dentist for every kid in town because he’s the only dentist in town, and for years, even after everyone was pretty much sure that Ethan Jorgenson was a skeleton at the bottom of a lake somewhere, even after all the other flyers had been taken down because it was just too sad to keep them up, Ethan’s smile stared at me from the bulletin board in the waiting room when I went in for a cleaning every six months. And when Dr.