Nobody Is Ever Missing Read Free

little luxury items planted in her skull. The bones in her face were more pronounced than you’d expect on a girl her age—either underfed or a natural look of vulnerability.
    Can I tell you a secret? she whispered. We’re runaways. We all ran away from our homes. He’s taking us to the police.
    I peeked over my shoulder at the other girls. A few leaned their swan necks into the aisle looking toward me. I could hear some high voices dipping low to whisper.
    What’s your name?
    Elyria. What’s yours?
    Alison. Where are you from?
    New York. Where are you from?
    A different planet. I ran away from outer space. Nebulas don’t interest me. She smiled with all her tiny teeth. You want to know another secret?
    Sure.
    I have two hearts. A regular one and a little baby one underneath it. And you know what else? I have a third eyeball stuck in my brain but it can’t see anything because it’s too dark in there. That’s what the doctor told me. He showed me a picture of it they took in a big white room with a robot. Have you ever seen a robot? Because I have.
    Her face had pinched into something serious, and I didn’t know what to say and I couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth about the robot, the doctor, the extra eye, the extra heart—what a terrible thing to have too many of—but the bus stopped and the bus driver put his arm up and waved me forward.
    Bye , I said.
    See you later , Alison said.
    When I got to the front of the bus the driver was just staring forward, and I looked at his gnarled hands ten-and-two-ing and I saw how the flesh hung on his face like it was clay pressed on in a rush, all uneven and loose, and something in his jaw clench and nostril flare made me worry he was doing something with his life that was bloody, something that involved heads pressed against concrete or mouths filled with something that shouldn’t be there and I wondered if this was true and if it was true I knew he would continue to plow over life, continue to chop lives like a tractor, and he would keep doing that forever unless I killed him right here with my bare hands in front of all the girls, then threw his corpse out the door and drove these girls straight to the hospital for post-traumatic stress treatment, and though I knew I had the potential to do this locked in me like a poisonous pet snake, I knew I didn’t have the part of a person you must have to turn that potential kinetic, to be the kind of person who can let their awful plow.
    Thanks , I said to the bus driver, to cover up what I was thinking, and one of the girls in the back shouted, Takes one to know one , and it made me gasp even though I knew she wasn’t talking to me and I worried that what I had seen in the driver was something I’d seen in myself, that it took me to know me.
    The bus driver said, You’re welcome , and I wondered if he knew what else I was.

 
    4
    I walked roadside for a few hours, wondering if it was possible that Alison really did have an extra eye, an extra heart, if a person could ever live with that kind of surplus, and something about the way Alison spoke reminded me of how Ruby spoke, or how Ruby said something once about having two hearts. Or maybe I was misremembering some more complicated thing Ruby said, something that made it clear we didn’t speak the same language, that we couldn’t fully translate ourselves to each other. There was a night I realized this, how we could no longer or perhaps had never quite been able to hear each other—
    Who lets a sixteen-year-old move to New York alone?
    We were smoking cigarettes in the backyard after a late Thanksgiving dinner (Mom’s cigarettes, of course, the who to her question) and I didn’t know whether I should ask her about college life as a child prodigy—Was she lonely? Had she made friends? Were her classes, finally, challenging enough? I knew I wouldn’t understand her answers to those questions, that she’d allude to philosophical concepts I’d never heard of,