The Stranger Game by Cylin Busby
DEDICATION
For Nanci, my partner in crime
PROLOGUE
I KNEW MY SISTER was dead. I felt it in my body, as if my bones could tell me the truth. They were, after all, her bones too. The same parents had created us, we carried the same DNA, the stuff that makes us who we are. I even looked like her: a little twin, a few years younger. And both of us were images of Mom, or how she was in her high school yearbook, with long blond hair and hazel eyes.
When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t just see my own face but my sister’s too, the one from the Missing posters we had put up all over Mapleview four years ago—the one on the news, in newspapers across the country. Now that my braces were off I could even smile like her, the way she had in our last family photo. The smile of a girl who was head cheerleader. Who had an older boyfriend. Who had secrets.
I wanted so much to believe she was alive, to cling to hope like Mom. I tried. I let myself imagine that Sarah might walk through the door any day. At night, that hope failed me. In my nightmares I saw all the terrible things that happen to girls like Sarah. When I woke, the vivid images still in my mind, my heart racing, I would lie in bed and watch the lights from the occasional car move over my ceiling and walls and think about the people in those cars. Where were they going? Where had they been, out so late? What were their lives like, lives without the giant gaping hole that is left when someone in your family goes missing?
I tried to picture Sarah now, how she might look: older, her hair longer or shorter, her skin tanned golden like it had been the last time I saw her. As the days ticked by, the volume of her absence increased. Weeks turned into months and then into years. I knew the truth, even if I could never speak of it to anyone. I knew the darkened bedroom next to mine would always be empty, the door always shut, because this time Sarah wasn’t coming back.
CHAPTER 1
THE PHONE NEVER REALLY rang at the help line. Instead, a red light lit up on the keypad, and then the incoming number slowly scrolled onto the screen with the approximate location of the caller. All you had to do was push the button next to the red light to accept the call and speak into the headset: “Teen Help Line. Hi, this is Nico, what’s your name?”
We had a script we were supposed to follow, and hours of training before we were allowed to answer incoming calls. Even then, Marcia, the supervisor, paced the room, watching over us and clicking on to calls with her own master headset. She would come and stand behind you and write notes if she had something she thought you should say. If a call got totally out of control, she was there to switch lines and take over.
When I showed up to volunteer, usually one afternoon a week, there was always a volunteer older than me, with more experience. They would take most of the calls and I would just sit and listen. “No better training than this, watching what the other volunteers do, how they react,” Marcia said, probably thinking that I was bummed I didn’t get to take more calls. That wasn’t the case, though—far from it. I was actually relieved. For months, I had been terrified I would take a call and say or do the wrong thing. We had people’s lives in our hands here; so many of them called in ready to do something serious: hurting themselves or someone else. I was happy to sit and listen in, with no responsibility of my own. But sometimes, like tonight, Marcia would ask me to take a call.
“That’s you, Nico, line two,” she said. The two other volunteers, Amber and Kerri, were already on calls, and for some reason, our fourth person hadn’t shown up.
I put down the slice of pizza I was eating and wiped my hands quickly before pressing the button next to the red light. “Teen Help Line.” I barely got the words out before I heard her on the other side. Crying.
“Oh, there’s really someone there?” A small voice sniffled. “A real person?”