All the Missing Girls

by Megan Miranda

“Time isn’t running out. It’s not even real,” he said, and I knew I had lost him—he was lost, circling in his own mind. “It’s just a measure of distance we made up to understand things. Like an inch. Or a mile.” He moved his hands as he spoke, to accentuate the point. “That clock,” he said, pointing behind him. “It’s not measuring time. It’s creating it. You see the difference?”

People were like Russian nesting dolls—versions stacked inside the latest edition. But they all still lived inside, unchanged, just out of sight.

GOSSIP. THE MOST DANGEROUS part of an investigation. Infectious and inescapable. This was something I was all too familiar with, even before my job as school counselor. There’s a danger to it, because it grows out of something real, a seed in the earth, giving life on its own. It’s all tangled together—the truth, the fiction—and sometimes it’s hard to pick apart. Sometimes it’s hard to remember which parts truly exist.

The facts. The facts were difficult to see clearly. The facts were like the view from our porch—shadows in darkness and shapes you could conjure up from fear itself.

Because the thing about standing here in the middle of the mountains with the rain coming down, in a house your grandfather built, is that it’s too easy to notice how insignificant you are.

Tomorrow I’d pick myself up. Tomorrow there would be no more crying. Tomorrow I’d remember that I had kept going.

But maybe there was nothing more intimate than someone knowing all your secrets, every one of them, and sitting beside you anyway, buying your favorite food, running his fingers absently through your hair so you can sleep.

How many people out there are responsible for some tragedy and don’t even know it?

The truth is, I’m terrified of all I have to lose and how close I will always be to losing it. But it happened before. And I survived it.

That I survive. It’s only one thing. But it’s also everything.