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“Kinky?” I exclaimed, as the MBTA trolley screeched to a halt on the tracks in front of me. “I doubt it. I think Chloe was just itching to leave, and when I refused to go at the exact moment she wanted to, she decided to bum whatever ride she could find.”
Arriving back at the apartment, I found a note from my two roommates, Adam and Colton—a couple who shared the larger of the two bedrooms—saying that they’d decided to host an impromptu prefinals dinner party, had gone out to buy food, and would love to have me join them tonight. I let out a groan. I really liked my roommates, and Adam was a phenomenal cook, but after last night, I was in the mood for a quiet evening in. Since I didn’t have plans outside the apartment, though, there didn’t seem to be an easy way to extricate myself from the dinner.
After making myself a quick lunch, I tried Chloe again. It annoyed me to still be wondering about her whereabouts, but I wanted to be sure everything was okay. Maybe she’d ended up having too much to drink and had hitched a ride because she felt sick or tipsy. Sometimes my mother checked in with me on Saturdays, unless she was doing a weekend shift at the eye doctor’s office where she worked as an optometrist, and she’d be less than pleased if I told her I had no clue where Chloe was.
But once again, my call went straight to voice mail.
A small swell of unease that I’d done my best to tamp down began to rise again. There was nothing incredibly out of the ordinary about Chloe going off without telling me and not bothering to follow up. After all, we’d had years of her borrowing my clotheswithout permission, breaking promises, being late to meet somewhere, and once not even showing at all. But since Chloe lived on her smartphone, it seemed odd she wasn’t answering it. I scrolled through my addresses until I found the number for her roommate, Kim, which I’d acquired once for some reason I couldn’t remember.
“Hey, Kim, it’s Skyler. I’m looking for my sister,” I said as soon as she picked up. “Is she around, do you know?”
“No, she’s gone out already,” Kim told me.
So Chloe was up and about but hadn’t had the basic decency to check in with me. I felt the urge to throttle her with my bare hands.
“Do you know where?”
“No, sorry,” Kim said. “I didn’t get up till nine thirty and she was already gone, and then I went out myself.”
“Are you positive she was there earlier? I mean, did you see her come in last night?”
“I didn’t actually. Her door was closed when I got back after midnight, so I just assumed she’d gone to bed. Uh...” I sensed Kim hauling herself up from a chair or couch and starting to move with the phone pressed to her ear. “That’s funny. I realize now that there’s no sign of her in the kitchen. She usually makes a green juice and leaves the blender in the sink.”
Hmm. “So she might not have come home last night?”
“Give me a second.” I heard her footsteps again, followed by the creak of a door. “It’s hard to tell. Her bed isn’t made and there are clothes everywhere, but I’m thinking it looked this way when she left last night.”
There was a chance, of course, that Chloe had arrived home from the party around eleven, crashed, and gone out this morning before Kim was up, but not a big one. The last time my sister had risen super early on a Saturday morning was probably when she took the SATs.
No, it seemed more likely that she hadn’t been back to the apartment at all.
“Do you think something’s the matter?” Kim asked, breaking the silence.
“No, no,” I said. “We were at a party together last night, but she left with someone else.” I wondered suddenly if Chloe had split abruptly because she’d made plans to hook up with some guy back in Boston. That might even explain why she’d been pressuring me to leave. “Do you think she could be with Taylor?”
I was referring to a ruggedly handsome BU hockey player Chloe had been dating earlier in the year, though according to our mother, she’d recently grown bored with him.
“It’s possible. But I don’t think she’s been seeing him that much.”
“Do you have a number for him?”
“Sorry, no,” Kim said with a small chuckle. “She doesn’t release that information toanyone.”
“No worries,” I reassured her. “I’m sure she’ll turn up soon enough.”
“I’ll check in with a few of her squad if you want, though she hasn’t been hanging with them so much these days. If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”
Despite what I’d told Kim, I felt my anxiety mushroom as soon as we hung up. Chloe had left the party without telling me, hadn’t returned my calls, and apparently hadn’t gone back to her apartment last night. Something didn’t feel right. And suddenly I didn’t care about all the times she’d borrowed my clothes without asking or made me circle the block in my car. All I wanted was to know she was all right.
The surest way to put my mind at ease, I decided, was to track down the couple who’d driven Chloe back to the city and find out where they’d dropped her off. I wandered out to the kitchen, chugged a glass of tap water, and then called Jamie.
“Hello?” she croaked out, and I could practically hear her hangover pulsing through the phone. I quickly explained that I couldn’t locate my sister, that she had left last night with a couple, and I needed to get a phone number for one of them so I could check on her. I added that the shaggy-haired guy she’d been smoking a joint with would know who they were.
Jamie seemed to have no clue whom I was talking about. Trying not to sound irritated, I slowly described the guy in the black T-shirt.
“Oh, that was Ryan,” she finally said. “Let me track him down, and then I’ll call you back after I figure out who those people were.”
I felt myself relax a little. Even with a hangover, Jamie was a responsible pal, and I knew she’d get back to me before too long. I spent the next thirty minutes tidying up, changing my sheets, and folding the clothes that had piled up around my bedroom. As I was dumping the contents of my wastebasket into a black trash bag in the kitchen, my phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize and I quickly picked up.
