Carefully, Jonah began bouncing the ball again.
“If you think me and Katherine don’t look alike, you should see my cousin Mia,” he said.
“Why?” Chip asked. “Is she even cuter than Katherine?”
Jonah made a face.
“She’s only four years old!” he said. “And she’s Chinese. My aunt and uncle had to go to Beijing to adopt her.”
He could remember, the whole time Aunt Joan and Uncle Brad were arranging to adopt Mia—filling out the paperwork, sending away for the visas, crossing dates off calendars, and then buying new calendars to cross off new dates—his own mom and dad had spent a lot of time hugging him and exclaiming, “We were so lucky, getting you! Such a miracle!”
Katherine had been jealous.
Jonah could just picture her standing in the kitchen at age five or six, wispy blond pigtails sticking out on both sides of her head, a scowl on her face, complaining, “Weren’t you lucky to get me, too? Aren’tI a miracle?”
Mom had bent down and kissed her.
“Of course you’re a miracle too,” she said. “A big miracle. But we had nine months to know you were coming. With Jonah, we thought it would be years and years and years before we’d get a baby, and then that call came out of the blue—”
“The week before Christmas—” Dad added.
“And they said we could have him right away, and he was so cute, with his big eyes and his dimples and all that brown hair—”
“And then a year later, lovely Katherine came along—” Dad reached over and put his arm around her waist, pulling her close, until she giggled. “And we had a boy and a girl, and we were so happy because we had everything we wanted.”
Jonah’s parents could be so sappy. He didn’t have too many gripes about them—as parents went, they were pretty decent. But they told that story way too often about how excited they’d been, getting that call out of the blue, getting Jonah.
Also, if he was listing grievances, he often wished that they’d had the sensenot to name him after a guy who got swallowed up by a whale. But that was kind of a minor thing.
Now he aimed carefully and sent the ball whooshing through the net. It went through cleanly—the perfect shot.
Chip flopped down onto the grass beside the driveway.
“Man,” he said. “You’re going to make the basketball team for sure.”
Jonah caught the ball as it fell through the net.
“Who says I’m trying out?”
Chip leaned forward.
“Well, aren’t you?” he asked. “You’ve got to! That’s, like, what everyone wants! The basketball players get all the chicks!”
This sounded so ridiculous coming out of Chip’s mouth that Jonah fell into the grass laughing. After a moment, Chip started laughing too. It was like being a little kid again, rolling around in the grass laughing, not caring at all about who might see you.
Jonah stopped laughing and sat up. He peered up and down the street—fortunately, nobody was around to see them. He whacked Chip on the arm.
“So,” he said. “Do you have a crush on my sister?”
Chip shrugged, which might mean, “Yes,” or “Would I tell you if I did?” or “I haven’t decided yet.” Jonah wasn’t sure he wanted to know anyway. He and Chip weren’t really good friends yet, but Chip having a crush on Katherine could make everything very weird.
Chip lay back in the grass, staring up at the back of the basketball hoop.
“Do you ever wonder what’s going to happen?” he asked. “I mean, I really, really want to make the basketball team. But even if I make it in seventh and eighth grades, then there’s high school to deal with. Whoa. And then there’s college, and being a grown-up…. It’s all pretty scary, don’t you think?”
“You forgot about planning your funeral,” Jonah said.
“What?”
“You know. If you’re going to get all worried about being a grown-up, you might as well figure out what’s going to happen when you’re ninety years old and you die,” Jonah said. Personally, Jonah didn’t like to plan anything. Sometimes, at the breakfast table, his mom would ask the whole family what they wanted for dinner. Even that was way too much planning for Jonah.
Chip opened his mouth to answer, then shut it abruptly and stared hard at the front door of Jonah’s house. The door was opening slowly. Then Katherine stuck her head out.
“Hey, Jo-No,” she called, using the nickname she knew would annoy him. “Mom says to get the mail.”
Jonah tried to remember if he’d seen the mail truck gliding through the neighborhood. Maybe when he and Chip were concentrating on shooting hoops? He hoped it wasn’t when they were rolling around in the grass laughing and making fools of themselves. But he obediently jumped up and went over to the mailbox, pulling out a small stack of letters and ads. He carried the mail up to Katherine.
“You can take it on in to Mom, can’t you?” he asked mockingly. “Or is that too much work for Princess Katherine?”
After what he and Chip had been talking about, it was a little hard to look her in the eye. When he thought about the name Katherine, he still pictured her as she’d been a few years ago, with pudgy cheeks and those goofy-looking pigtails. Now that she was in sixth grade, she’d…changed. She’d slimmed down and shot up and started worrying about clothes. Her hair had gotten thicker and turned more of a golden color, and she spent a lot of time in her room with the door shut, straightening her hair or curling it or something. Right now she was even wearing makeup: a tiny smear of brown over her eyes, black on her eyelashes, a smudge of red on her cheeks.
Weird, weird, weird.
“Hey, Jo-no-brain, can’t you read?” Katherine asked, as annoying as ever. “This one’s for you.”
She pulled a white envelope off the top of the stack of mail and shoved it back into his hands. It did indeed sayJonah Skidmore on the address label, but it wasn’t the type of mail he usually got. Usually if he got mail, it was just postcards or brochures, reminding him about school events or basketball leagues or Boy Scout camp-outs. This envelope looked very formal and official, like an important notice.
“Who’s it from?” Katherine asked.
“It doesn’t say.” That was strange too. He flipped the envelope over and ripped open the flap. He pulled out one thin sheet of paper.
“Let me see,” Katherine said, jostling against him and knocking the letter out of his hand.
The letter fluttered slowly down toward the threshold of the door, but Jonah had already read every single word on the page.
There were only six:
YOU ARE ONE OF THE MISSING.
TWO
Katherine snorted.
“Missing link, maybe,” she said.
Jonah reached down and picked up the letter. By the time he’d straightened up again, Chip had joined him on the porch, either because he was curious about the letter too, or because he really did have a crush on Katherine.
“What’s that?” Chip asked.
Jonah shrugged.
“Just a prank, I guess,” he said. Seventh grade was all about pranks. You could always tell when someone in the neighborhood was having a sleepover, because then the kids who weren’t invited suddenly had gobs of toilet paper in all the trees in their yards. Or their cell phones rang at midnight: “I’m watching you….” followed by gales of laughter.
“Pranks are supposed to be funny,” Katherine objected. “What’s funny about that?”
“Nothing,” Chip said. Jonah noticed that Chip was smiling at Katherine, not looking at the letter.
“Now, maybe if it said, ‘It’s ten o’clock—do you know where your brain is?’ or ‘Missing: one brain cell. Please return to Jonah Skidmore. It’s all I’ve got’—maybethat would be funny,” Katherine said. She yanked the letter out of Jonah’s hand. “Give me a few minutes. I could turn this into a really good prank.”
Jonah snatched the letter back.
“That’s okay,” he said,
and crammed the letter into his jeans pocket.
He knew it was just a prank—it had to be—but for just a second, staring at those words,You are one of the missing, he’d almost believed them. Especially since he’d just been telling Chip about being adopted…. What if somebody reallywas missing him? He didn’t know anything about his birth parents; all the adoption records had been sealed. He’d had such trouble understanding that when he was a little kid. He’d been a little obsessed with animals back then, so first he’d pictured elephant seals waddling on top of official-looking papers. Then, when his parents explained it a little better, he pictured crates in locked rooms, the doors covered with Easter Seals.
He’d been a pretty strange little kid.
In fact—his face burned a little at the memory—he’d even given a report in second grade on all the different uses of the wordseal , from Arctic ice seals to Navy Seals to sealed adoption records. The report had included the line, “And so, that’s why it’s interesting that I’m adopted, because it makes me unique.” His parents had helped him with that one.
Wait a minute—Tony McGilicuddy had been in his second-grade class, and so had Jacob Hanes and Dustin Cravers…. What if they remembered too? What if they’d sent this letter because of that?
Jonah narrowed his eyes at Katherine, who took a step back under the intensity of his gaze.
“You know what?” he said, glaring at her. “You’re right. This isn’t funny at all.” He pulled the letter back out of his pocket and ripped it into shreds. He dropped the shreds into Katherine’s hand. “Throw that away for me, okay?”
“Um…okay,” she said, apparently too surprised to think of a smart-alecky comeback.
“Want to come out and play basketball with us when you’re done?” Chip asked, as she started to close the door.
Katherine tilted her head to the side, considering. Jonah figured she was adding up all the possibilities:seventh grader acting interested plus a chance to tick off older brother plus a chance to show off . (For a girl, Katherine was pretty good at basketball.) It seemed like a no-brainer to Jonah. But Katherine shook her head.
“No, thanks. I just did my nails,” she said, and pulled the door all the way shut.
Chip groaned.
“She’s your sister,” he said. “Tell me—is she playing hard to get?”
“Who knows?” Jonah said, but he wasn’t thinking about Katherine.
By dinnertime Jonah had convinced himself that Tony McGilicuddy and Jacob Hanes and Dustin Cravers were a bunch of idiots, and he didn’t really care what they thought or did. They could send him stupid letters all they wanted; it didn’t matter to him. He stabbed his fork into his mashed potatoes and savored the sound of the metal tines hitting the plate. He didn’t pay much attention to what Mom and Dad and Katherine were talking about—something about some brand of jeans that all the popular girls in sixth grade owned.
“But, honey, you’re popular, and you don’t have those jeans, so you can’t be right about all the popular girls having them,” Mom argued.
“Mo-om,” Katherine said.
Then the doorbell rang.
For a moment, everybody froze, Dad and Jonah with forkfuls of food halfway to their mouths, Mom and Katherine in mid-argument. The doorbell rang again, one urgent peal after another.
“I’ll get it,” Jonah said, standing up.
“Whoever it is, tell them to come back later. It’s dinnertime,” Mom said. Mom always made a big deal about family dinners. The way that certain other parents made their kids go to church, Jonah’s parents made him and Katherine sit down at the dinner table with them just about every night. (Andthey usually had to go to church, too.)
Jonah realized he was still holding his fork, so he stuck it into his mouth as he walked to the door—no point in wasting perfectly good mashed potatoes. It didn’t take him long to gulp them down, lick the fork one last time, and then transfer the fork to his other hand so he could grab the doorknob. But the doorbell rang three more times before he yanked the door back.
It was Chip standing on the porch. At first he didn’t even seem to notice that the door was open, he was so focused on pounding his hand against the doorbell.
“Hey,” Jonah said.
Finally Chip stopped hitting the doorbell. The chimes kept ringing behind Jonah for a few extra seconds.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” Chip said.
He was breathing hard, like he’d run all the way from his house, six driveways down the street. He shoved his hands through his curly blond hair—maybe trying to wipe away sweat, maybe trying to restore some order to the mess. It didn’t help. The curls stuck out in all directions. And Chip kept darting his eyes around, like he couldn’t keep them trained on any one thing for more than an instant.
“Okay,” Jonah said. “We’re eating right now, but later on—”
Chip clutched Jonah’s T-shirt.
“I can’t wait,” he said. “You’ve got to help me. Please.”
Jonah peeled Chip’s fingers off the shirt.
“Um, sure,” Jonah said. “Calm down. What do you want to talk about?”
Chip’s darting eyes took in the houses on either side of Jonah’s. He peered down the long hallway to the kitchen, where he could probably see just the edge of the dinner table.
“Not here,” Chip said, lowering his voice. “We’ve got to talkprivately . Somewhere no one will hear us.”
Jonah glanced back over his shoulder. He could see the perfectly crisped fried chicken leg lying on his plate beside his half-eaten potatoes. He could also see Katherine, peering curiously around the corner at him.
“All right,” Jonah said. “Wait here for just a second.”
He went back to the table.
“Mom, Dad, may I be excused?” he asked.
“No clean plate club for you,” Katherine taunted, which was really stupid. Mom and Dad had stopped making a big deal about clean plates years ago, after Mom read some article about childhood obesity.
“I’ll put everything in the refrigerator and eat it later,” Jonah said, picking up his plate.
“I’ll take care of that,” Mom said quietly, taking the plate and fork from him. “Go on and help Chip.”
Jonah cast one last longing glance at the chicken and went back to the front door. He’d kind of wanted Mom and Dad to say no, he wasn’t allowed to leave the table. He didn’t know what anyone thought he could do to help Chip. The way Chip was acting, it was like he was going to confess a murder. Or maybe it was something like, he just found out that his parents were splitting up and he had to decide which one to live with. Jonah knew a kid that had happened to. It was awful. But Jonah couldn’t give advice about anything like that.
Chip practically had his face pressed against the glass of the front door, watching Jonah come back.
“Come on,” Jonah said. “Let’s go to my room.”
This was strange too because Chip had never been in Jonah’s room before. They were play-basketball-in-the-driveway-and-maybe-come-into-the-kitchen-for-a-drink-of-water friends, not let’s-go-hang-out-in-my-room friends. Jonah held the front door open for Chip, and then Chip followed him up the stairs. Chip didn’t even glance around when they got to Jonah’s room. Which was good—maybe he wouldn’t notice that along with his sports posters, Jonah still had one up from third grade that showed a LEGO roller coaster.
Jonah shut the door and sat down on the bed. Chip sank into the desk chair.
“I got one, too,” Chip said. He was clutching his face now, almost like that kid in theHome Alone movie.
“One what?” Jonah asked.
“One of those letters. About being missing.”
Chip pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. Jonah could tell that Chip had already folded and unfolded it many times: the creases were beginning to fray. Chip unfolded it once more, and Jonah could see that it was just like the letter he’d gotten, six typewritten words on an otherwise blank sheet of paper:
YOU ARE ONE OF THE MISSING.
“Chip, it’s aprank ,” Jonah said. “A joke that’s not even funny.” But he was thinking,Chip wasn’t in that second grade class with Dustin and Jacob and Tony. He’s not adopted, I don’t think. So this is reallystupid . Jonah leaned back against the wall, more relaxed than he’d been in hours. “It’snothing ,” he told Chip.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Chip said. “You know what the worst thing is? I was even kind of happy when I pulled this out of the mailbox. Like, ‘Hey, I’m not just the new kid anymore. Somebody’s actually noticed me enough to try to play a prank on me. A stupid prank, but still.’”
Jonah shrugged.
“So, stay happy,” he said. “Congratulations. You got a prank letter.”
Chip bolted forward, his face suddenly hard.
“No,” he said. “No. ‘Cause, see, then I went inside. And my dad was standing there, and I was like, ‘Look, Dad, I got this prank letter.’ And then I’m telling him all about it, about how you got the same letter, and you’d just told me about being adopted, and I could tell you were kind of mad about this letter, and I thought it might be because you’re sensitive about the whole adoption thing—”
“No, I’m not!” Jonah said.
Chip ignored him.
“And you ripped up the letter and threw the pieces in your sister’s face—”
“I did not! Not in herface! ”
Chip kept talking, as if Jonah hadn’t said a word.
“And I’m just going on and on, about how obviously the letter had nothing to do with you being adopted becauseI got the same letter andI’m not adopted and—and—I don’t know what I was thinking, because then I said, ‘Right, Dad? I’m not adopted, am I, Dad?’ And then my dad said…my dad said…”
Chip’s mouth kept moving, but no sound came out. It was like he’d run out of words. Or at least run out of words he wanted to say.
Jonah froze, sitting very precisely in the center of his bed.
“What did your dad say?” he asked very carefully.
Chip was staring straight ahead, his eyes vacant.
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