Daddy Marc checks me out when I buy cereal for Mother, buttermilk and candied nuts, bags of semisweet chocolate chips. I won’t eat any of it. In the three months Selena has been missing, I’ve lost twenty pounds I didn’t have in the first place. My thinning has received many compliments, but Daddy Marc keeps his eyes on the cashier’s screen, acting like I’m not before him, like I could be anyone at all.

I squatted on the side of the house and pissed and my ankles caught a mist of backsplash. A breakfast noise, dishes shifting in the sink, came from inside and I jumped, cut off my stream and ran to the car for fear Daddy Marc had seen me with my panties around my ankles, making a wide dark circle on his side yard. I pictured what kind of scene he’d pull if he caught me as I slammed it out the driveway. He had a way of recalling our offenses when the night grew weary, as his eyes fell tired. He would make Selena sorry. I went to school alone, half-forgetting the reason I came, worried more about Daddy Marc’s eyes on where they should never be.

A few days later her picture was up on every pole, in every shop window, people lighting candles on Shaw Avenue, those skilled at prayer communicating with God through microphones on the concrete stage of the town square. Bring us our Selena, Lord, let her walk back into the arms of the community. Girls who were jealous of her and talked shit on the regular stood misty-eyed with signs that read Save Selena. We love you, girl. They posed and were interviewed for the paper, answering questions in shrill voices, arms around each other’s waists, holding hard.

The excitement still thrives, though the hunger of those first few weeks has died down. Then, even the stink-faced girl at the Mickey Ds went nice on me and gave me free fries I didn’t eat, asked me how I was holding up.

They send out fewer search teams lately—everyone was certain her body would turn up in the Kerman Canal, where at least three small kids drown every summer—but no Selena, and now it’s just the same group of die-hard community members, the ones who will march about anything. They don their Save Selena shirts and go into the fields over and over, angrier each time they return without her decomposing body. If you wear your shirt and you look field-weary, The Right and Rooster will give you a complimentary buffalo chicken salad. I have seen families in the parking lot change into their shirts before walking in, mothers forcing stiff cotton over toddlers’ heads, spanking them hard when they cry that it is too hot, too hot. Selena’s posters have faded in the sun. She remains in prayers, people claim, but I’m sure she’s not first on their lists. I picture her body contorted in the trunk of a car. She is cut up, pieces of her floating in a shallow basin. But it’s not real, can’t be, so I have prayed to the Lord and wished to dream of her, to be gifted with vision. My best friend Selena, nowhere at all, but everywhere to me.

Selena’s mother is gone a lot, working and sighing, too tired to make dinner. She looks the other way when her Virginia Slims go missing, but once she called Selena a whore. She found her making out topless with a boy from the AM/PM.

When we practice dance routines in the yard, it makes Daddy Marc happy. His eyes narrow as if frustrated, trying to solve something, but his large mouth hangs open in a soft smile and you can see the thick ridges of his tar-stained bottom teeth.

“He isn’t my daddy,” Selena said one afternoon when we were in junior high. We were sitting in the shade spraying each other with the hose, drinking Dr. Pepper. “Look at him. I’m Mexican. He has red hair and a burnt neck.”

“What does your mom say?”

“She says some shit about me taking after her Spanish heritage,” Selena said. “She was running around.”

“Does Daddy Marc know?”

“He isn’t any kind of sharp tool, Colt,” Selena said. “But come on.”

“Don’t it make him mad?”

“He likes that I ain’t his,” she said, pointing the hose at my face.

Selena didn’t look like either of them, I thought. Like she came from somewhere else entirely.

“He likes it,” she said again and got up to go inside, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Told them maybe of the time Daddy Marc had barbequed all day, in the heat of the valley sun. Sweating over the grill, searing thick burgers and dogs, white hunks of chicken. How Selena’s mother got a migraine and went inside. How the three of us ate on the lawn of their small backyard as the sun set behind rooftops, and Daddy Marc got sentimental over his high school days drinking his beers, and all the pretty girls he used to love. He told us about each one. He told us about the first time he ever tasted a girl, and I watched as Selena sucked an orange pop, tapped her foot to the country playing on the radio. He drank beer after beer and when he started saying that one of his sweethearts looked a damn sight like me, like she and I could be sisters, when he invited me onto his lap and Selena lit up one of her mother’s cigarettes, when all that happened and I felt the elastic of Selena’s bikini cut into my thighs, felt her top too snug and felt myself too big, I got up, said I had to go to the bathroom. I went instead to Selena’s room and waited. Wondered if this would be the kind of night she had told me about. The kind where Daddy Marc got ahead of himself. I took off the bikini and put on some of her soft cotton shorts. I got up three different times to go get her. Finally on the third time I stopped before the sliding glass door, and stared. I could see the glow of their cigarettes. I could hear the low push of their voices.

“What are you doing?” Selena’s mother had been sitting on the couch in the dark.

“About to see if Selena is coming inside.”

“She’s happy out there,” her mother said. She sounded slow and heavy, weighed down by her migraine medication, the one she took often. “I just let them at it. I think they get along better than Marc and I.”

“You’d know it if there was,” he says, eyes on the groceries. “Everybody would.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” I say.

“I just feel it, she’s going to come back.”

Daddy Marc turns the register screen so I can see the total. He didn’t apply my usual discount. “Go on, Colt, this ain’t a good time.”

“I need to talk to you,” I say. “When are you off?” “I don’t think so,” he says.

No one is behind me in line. “I got more to say to the cops,” I whisper. “Afraid I may have to go back and tell them right.”

Daddy Marc closes the register. “Say whatever you please, just let it be true. You acting strange and sneaking around and I ain’t sure why.”

“You’re in love with her,” I said.

“You wouldn’t know the first thing about love.”

I walk off leaving the groceries. I go behind the market and scream on hands and knees into the dirt.

No one in the town forgets the scandal a few years ago when a girl from a different county wound up gutted in a college experiment crop field. Gone missing for a while, assumed runaway. Some Ag major guys found her and the town went crazy. They arrested Wiley Dansmere, a man who had recently been let out of prison. He had a history of hiding in women’s unlocked cars and jolting them with a taser gun while he raped them, usually in the evening hours in empty parking lots behind grocery stores. But no one can look to Wiley for this. He is locked up and done with.

I rejoin bible study, something Selena would laugh at, but I felt no other option. I have read that the Lord anoints some people the ability for prophecy, and I think I could be a candidate. I know her better than anyone, and I can feel the Lord growing close to giving me an answer. I recognize the need for my own forgiveness in all this, too. But it’s tricky, what needs forgiving.

“I’m the prettiest girl in school, of course he wants to go with me,” Selena had said as we walked laps around the track in matching grey gym shorts. “I didn’t have to throw myself at him. I was sending him vibes.”

“How did he do it?”

“Last night he rang my doorbell,” she said. “I had just showered so my hair was all wet.”

“How did he know where you lived?”

“I don’t know,” she laughed. “It’s no secret. We know where he lives.”

“Does he like you?”

“Is that a real question?” She did a high kick, her knee almost reaching her nose. “He said he has liked me all year.”

“You and I were going to drive to the beach and say fuck prom.”

“That was before Colin asked me,” she said. “Don’t be jealous. It makes your skin age.”

“I’m not jealous,” I said.

“You should be happy for me,” she said, lacing her fingers with mine. “I liked him just like you did.”

The night of prom I stayed in and watched movies with Mother and got sick drunk on red wine. She braided my hair into hundreds of tiny braids and strung each stock with beads that appeared from the closet. They were plastic and glittery, depositing tiny flecks of shine across my collarbones.

“It’s horrible when a man leaves you, Briley,” Mother said. “I bet you’re imagining them together, ain’t you?”

“She always gets whatever she wants,” I said, standing up in front of the entryway mirror. The braids were too many. “This makes me look even more like a horse.”

“Sit back down,” she said. “Let’s add some Sprite to that wine.”

I looked at her. She plucked all her eyebrows out again and had drawn them on in the dark, mistakenly with a red lip liner. “Why don’t you get a date?”

“No, not me,” she said. “Only one man for me.”

I sat down and drank from the bottle of red. My mother shifted in her seat and the taffeta from her dress sounded like plastic. “Just one man.”

The thing is, Selena always wanted an older boyfriend. She thought that older men would understand her in new and uncharted ways. When I set up an online dating profile for her, I didn’t tell her about it. I wanted it to be a surprise when I found Selena the perfect match. I was trying to help her, to get her away.

And he says, “No, ma’am, please don’t get up.”

“You come here to tell me you all found her?” I say, sitting at our small kitchen table in my nightshirt.

“No, see, that’s the problem, we can’t seem to find your girl anywhere,” Geary says, taking a seat across from me. “Her daddy called me up and said you might be holding back.”

“Daddy Marc has himself confused,” I say. “With him being a sex offender and all.”

“What would you say you and Selena’s biggest best friend secret was?” he asks.

“You mean, what our secret is,” I say.

“Of course. Is.”

“We once hid scissors in our purses and cut the security tags out of the nice jeans at Macy’s,” I say. “Will that help you find her?”

Geary smiled. “You never know what could help.”

“She’s probably off with some man,” I say. “Did you think of that? They all love Selena.”

“Any man in particular?”

I thought of the man from the dating site who called himself Angel. Lots of men messaged her profile, saying how pretty she was, but he was persistent and the one I replied to the most. He sent Selena’s inbox at least five messages a day. In one message, a photo of his naked body, face cut off. Tattooed over his dark patch of hair were the letters MOB. His penis was hard in the photo and he gripped it and pulled it sideways a bit. Not big, but I guess not small. I had looked at the picture until my eyes were dry. He wanted her address so he could leave her roses by her window.

“All men loved Selena,” I say again. “She could have had anyone.”

“You’re a nice looking girl, too,” Officer Geary says, standing up. “Do the boys ask you out?”

“Not really,” I say. “I’m shy.”

“You don’t strike me as shy,” he says. “You strike me as coy.”

“What’s coy?”

“Ain’t the same thing as shy,” he says. “Look it up.”

“Need something?” Mother croaks from the couch. “I got some of them Ore-Os in the cupboard. Briley, get the man one of them OreOs and a glass a milk.”

“He’s leaving,” I say.

Geary pauses before the hall like he is going to step in my room and my heart falls from my chest to the floor. But he walks out the front door, tipping his felt hat to Mother.

“What’s about it?” Mother asks without looking at me.

“More Selena stuff,” I say.

“Why don’t you tell them what you all were up to?”

From the window I watch Geary pull away from the curb. Our neighbor Trish walks by, bends down and picks up a cigarette butt and pops it between her lips.

“He gonna keep coming around,” she says. “If you just tell him, he ain’t gonna think nothing of it. Just two little girls having some fun.”

Mother had used my computer one day to research how much her Beanie Babies were worth, and saw Selena’s profile. She had been angry with me at first, saying we were too young for something like that, and where did Selena take such slutty pictures? She grounded me for a day and then forgot about it.

“Selena used to call you a funt,” I say.

“What’s that?”

“Fat cunt.”

“I feel like I don’t know you much these days, Briley,” Mother says. “If you ain’t careful, I’ll show that old man into your room. Let him figure all that out.”

“There’s nothing to see,” I say.

“Let’s hope for it.”

“Colt, let me take one of you,” she had said.

“Okay, but tell me how to pose. I want it to be good.”

“Take off your top and, like, hold your tits together,” she said.

“Like this?”

“Wait, take your hands away,” she said.

“What?”

“Kind of saggy,” she said. “Ski jump boobs.”

I put my top back on.

“No, girl, I was messing you.” She laughed. “I want to take the picture. Hold still.”

The picture is weird to look at now. When it was taken, I never thought I was fat, but now being so skinny, it’s a body I don’t recognize. It’s the only one of me, and my hand is moving over my breasts and they are blurred and my face is sad. I don’t know why I’ve never thrown it away.

I saved the hair-ties she threw to the floor, a pair of panties she let me borrow, a container of wax she used to carry when she had braces. I used the bikini pics for her online profile. I used a fake name, too, which is the only reason Geary hasn’t discovered it yet. I named her Belinda. It seemed good at the time.

I take the box and drive to the dump miles outside the city and bury it there. A few tents are set up where homeless people sleep. There are used needles on the ground and I am glad I wore close-toed shoes.

I didn’t do anything wrong, but I can see how someone might wonder about the box. How could they understand our bond? She told me everything. Told me Daddy Marc sleepwalked into her room some nights, curled his body around her in the twin bed and breathed hard, pressed to her back.

“Prayer requests?” Denay asks us girls, four of us sitting in a circle.

“Me,” I say. “I need a vision of Selena.”

Denay looks at Amber and raises her eyebrows. “Why you need a vision? You don’t think the Lord is big enough to handle Miss Selena without your asking for visions?”

“She needs to be found,” I say.

Amber puts a hand on my shoulder. “Maybe Jesus has her out there to learn her something. Think of that?”

“And if He already took her home,” says Ramey, “Then it ain’t no business of ours.”

“I feel called to know where she is,” I say. “Please.”

“I have a prophecy.” Denay stretches her arms upward and closes her eyes. “The Lord says to look within yourself, Briley.”

“What else,” I say, eyes closed.

“And that she’s dead already.”

Ramey gasps. “Oh, fuck.”

“Lay hands,” Denay commands. She walks over to me and forms a chokehold around my neck and the other girls entwine themselves around me, around each other. Amber kneels before me and hugs my shins.

“Lord, let Briley feel Selena’s death. Let her process what it means. Where is the body? Where is the body?”

They begin to chant “Where is the body” over and over and it is Ramey who jerks on the floor and coughs and coughs. I close my eyes and listen deeply and I hear a heartbeat, thump, thump, and I think live, live, live, and I think, live, Selena, come out of the dark. I start to tremble and it feels like an earthquake until I realize that Ramey has braced herself against my chair and is rocking me back and forth, shrieking like an animal. When they stop we all sit in silence.

“Yes,” Denay says finally. “Dead.”

“I saw fields,” says Ramey.

“I saw sex,” says Amber.

I am the only one who didn’t see a thing.

“Just tell me the surprise,” she said, mouth full of vanilla.

“I can’t,” I said. “But you’ll know it when you see it.”

“I hate surprises.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “Come on, what’s the matter?”

“I need to move out my house,” she said. “Out the valley.”

“Let’s get an apartment,” I said.

“I want to get me some man with a job,” she said. “Daddy Marc and my bitch mom aren’t paying for college.”

“Live with me and my mom,” I said. “Or wait for prince charming.”

“Rather kill myself than live with your mom,” she said.

“Well, maybe something will happen soon,” I said. “Maybe you have a secret admirer.”

“Who?”

“Have to wait and see.”

I dropped her off at home, and that night I logged into the profile. She was so unhappy. I wanted to make her happy, and Angel loved all the things she did. And he was funny like her, and sarcastic, and he wanted to have sex. Selena had done it plenty of times before, and so I would write back that of course she was interested. This time there was a new message from Angel saying it was time to finally meet. What’s your address baby girl, where you stay? I leave you a present.

“Geary called me up,” she says. “While you was in school.”

“And what?”

“Wanted to know what I knew.”

“He tell you Selena is dead?”

“He wanted to know about you,” she says. “Says they pulled a man over up the I-5 for speeding and in his car they found Selena’s purse. Empty.”

“Her purse,” I repeat.

“He just figuring you know more than you’re saying,” she says. “And I tell him, ‘Geary, my girl and that Selena, they speak their own language.’”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m telling you because I know about your online Selena stuff, and all your flirting with them tattooed men, and I thought nothings to it, but then Geary said that, and I can put together two and two, Briley. That man from the Internet took her.”

“What did you tell him?” I stand up, pace around.

“I told him it’s a damn shame one of them gang-bangers stoled another kid. That is the truth.”

“What was the man’s name?”

“Angel-edo,” she says. “Something like that. They threw him in jail. Figured you heard already on the news.”

“No,” I say. “Get out.”

“Geary coming by. Best be ready.”

No, no, no, no, no, no. No, I told them. No, I did not know.

“You girls shared everything, right?” Geary asks me again. We are in the station. They have announced to our town they know who took Selena.

“I have nothing else,” I say. “I didn’t know about him. Why can’t she just have been kidnapped by him, and now you go find her?”

“When are you going to tell us that you created and operated the profile?” Geary smiles.

I say nothing.

“Not sure why you’re keeping it secret,” he says. “Unless for some reason you’re feeling guilty about it.”

“She wanted me to do it,” I say.

“Why did you dump that nice box with all them pictures of her?” Geary smiles wider.

“Have you been following me?”

“Course we have,” he says. “Figured if you all were as close as you’ve said, you’d lead us there eventually.”

“I never meant for this.”

“We doubt you did,” Geary says. “Just a one-thing-led-to-another kind of thing, am I right?”

“You messed with her, don’t think I don’t know.”

“Don’t you call here,” he says.

“I was trying to help her get away from you,” I shout. “She told me everything.”

“Listen close,” he says. “They gonna put you away for what you done.”

I start crying and realize the line is dead.

I set out the gold eyeshadow she loved, the bronzer we stole from the expensive counter at the Macy’s. I can see her in the mirror. There’s glitter in a line above her dark lashes, perfect. Hair parted down the middle, cowlick-free. There’s the way she would bump her hip against mine without saying a word and it meant everything to me and nothing to her, I think. How she would turn to me and say, Here, let me fix you. Try her best to line my eyes cat-like. But it never worked on me, and my round lids would end up smeared and bruised-looking at best.

Yes, I see her next to me now. I see her visions all the time. She has called me Colt since the second grade. I reminded her of a little horse crouched under there, my boney legs folded in. My underpants had tiny horses all over, but Selena never told that part. No. She always wanted the story different.