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my sister’s life into focus. And I knew that the only way to find her was to try to see things as she did.
    So when my parents went out on their ritual, Joshua and I walked to an abandoned house on St. Paul and smoked in the backyard among weeds that towered over our heads. Sometimes Joshua would throw a handful of change just to see the rats scatter about our feet. We’d sit on the soft, wooden steps of the back porch, and I’d replay Tara’s walk from the bathroom that day. Shoes, brown and black and blue, an occasional white. Not Mom. Not Mom. Not Mom. Then, a pair of yellow shoes—perhaps not the correct shoes, but something similar. Perhaps Mom got a new pair today. Or maybe Tara didn’t make it from the bathroom. Or maybe she got lost going to the bathroom. Or maybe, just once, she wanted to go somewhere without Ms. Wilson, who lost her job as a result of Tara’s disappearance, maybe Tara really had to take a shit that day and wanted to be all alone in the big, cold bathroom with the shiny, industrial stalls and leaky faucet. Or maybe she ran ahead, telling Mrs. Wilson her mother was right there, right at the end of the hall, when really those red shoes were someone else’s.
    Most likely, someone met her. But who? How did Tara slip beyond Ms Wilson—perhaps not so difficult, considering how many kids were in her class—and into a stranger’s arms? Or was Tara wandering through the school as I sat staring at the stars, taking one wrong turn and finding herself in the boiler room, forced to eat rat feces to survive?
    Nothing made sense, but something about being stoned appealed to me. I felt as if I could communicate with Tara’s essence, even if I could not see her, and I assured her I would find her. I would just have to go deeper into her world, into her visual space, and everything would melt away except for me and her. The city would ooze into lava, and she would appear across town, an effervescent light of red and yellow.
    Everything did seem to be melting away. My grades, my parents’ relationship, my relationship with them. It’d been a year, and we’d all presumed Tara dead. But presuming something and proving it are much different, and because no body was found, we could not bury our brief glimmers of hope. Glimmers that would come up as regret or blame during dinner or while playing board games, something my father had instituted to keep a familiar routine. An algorithm that moved toward an unprovable theorem.
    â€œI bet if we had made the police question suspects earlier…” my father began and trailed off as my mother pushed herself away from the table and went outside, presumably for a cigarette. “They never did their job. We had to do everything. We still have to do everything.”
    â€œDavid Sarna got expelled from school for bringing in his father’s hunting rifle,” I said, patting the scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream with my spoon. I liked to eat ice cream when it was very soft, almost melted.
    â€œWe pay their salaries, and they were content to let us do all that work.”
    We still wore red and yellow. I don’t know whether it was because we were used to it or that we hoped, beyond reason, that Tara would be roaming the streets somewhere, looking for the red or yellow shoes that would lead her home.
    Me, I took to wearing entire ensembles of red and yellow and skipping school, heading over to the Northeast neighborhoods via the subway, eating fried chicken and cheesesteaks for lunch, smoking dope or popping the Xanax Joshua skimmed from his mother. I would walk through the streets in a daze, the images of passersby blurring, forms of flesh that moved and talked around me. The only things that captured my attention were young blonde-haired girls (scarce in the area), and the slow-moving canary yellow looney bird that sometimes came looking for me. I’d jump behind abandoned sofas in empty lots while