The second girl went missing a few weeks later. Saffy watched the news from the couch in Travis’s trailer, surrounded by burrito wrappers and overflowing ashtrays. Angela Meyer. Also sixteen years old—she’d worked the closing shift at the diner a few miles away. Saffy hugged her legs to her chest, sweaty on the fraying couch, a humid breeze wheezing from the box fan in the window. Travis was already passed out on the folding bed, the tracks up his arms like veins in the half-light.
Saffy did not have a high school diploma. She did not have friends, not really—the girls from the field hockey team had long abandoned her, and the only person who kept in touch was Kristen. Kristen had been transferred south after Miss Gemma’s. She’d attended a much better high school, emancipated a year early, and now rented her own dingy apartment near a strip mall half an hour away. Kristen was bound for community college, a success story that made those same social workers proud. Kristen made an effort to call every few weeks, just to say hi. Most nights, Saffy sat alone after Travis descended into the ether, dropping ice cubes down her sports bra and trying not to think about the black hole of her future—when she heard about Angela, that hole seemed to expand, a supernova.
Then, the third girl went missing.
The third girl had been attending her boyfriend’s punk show at a dive bar near Port Douglass. She’d stepped outside for a cigarette. Gone. The panic was escalating—number three, officially an epidemic—though that girl had the least public appeal. There was no crying mother on the news, no tragically normal home. The third girl was a high school dropout like Saffy, no family available for interviews. But she was third, so her name blared across the television.
Lila Maroney.
When Saffy heard about Lila, she remembered their old bedroom. Lila on the bottom bunk, the skin on her knees nicked and scabbed from an attempt at shaving with Bailey’s razor. Over the years, she and Kristen spotted Lila occasionally, updating each other over the phone. Lila’s got blue hair now. Lila’s got a nose ring, the kind like a bull. Lila dropped out, heard she’s working at the Goodwill. By the time Lila went missing, she and Saffy traveled in overlapping circles, sometimes appearing at the same parties, rarely speaking about anything substantial. So when Saffy saw the news, she thought of that little girl in an oversized T-shirt, her face lit up in the ghostly glow of a flashlight, breath whistling through a retainer that never seemed to fit her teeth.
“Yo,” Travis said, dumb on the couch, the tip of his joint glowing orange. “What the fuck, Saff?”
Saffy realized she was crying—big, gulping sobs. The trailer pulsed, dizzy. She tugged on a pair of jeans and left, slamming the screen door shut behind her. Travis’s Camry had a dented bumper and a quarter tank of gas, but Saffy wound up toward Plattsburgh, watching as the needle drifted toward empty.
The police station was mayhem, all news cameras and panicked parents, troopers scrawling statements in notepads. The lights in the parking lot blasted, a flood—the early-evening lines of coke still rippled through Saffy’s system, brightening obnoxious. She swiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand.
It was pure luck. It was chance, or maybe it was fate. As Saffy entered the police station, tentative and self-conscious, the person she found was Emilia Moretti.
Moretti was a brand of woman Saffy hadn’t previously known you could be. She surveilled the scene with sharp hawk eyes, glossy and firm, rigid, brilliant. Back then, Moretti had been in her early thirties, and her wedding ring glinted in the bright overheads, casting laser beams. She looked like the kind of woman who drank a single glass of tasteful white wine with dinner and used expensive skin creams that made the lines on her face look like streams cutting through soft soil. Approaching, Saffy felt shriveled and unkempt. Used up.
“Excuse me,” Saffy had croaked. “I want to help.”
Moretti had seen the bags under Saffy’s eyes, the flaking skin beneath her nose, the crop top she’d cut with a blunt pair of kiddie scissors. And still, she had listened to Saffy’s stories about Lila. When Saffy finished talking, Moretti handed her a business card. Call me if you hear anything. Saffy didn’t hear anything, but she called Moretti the next morning anyway and volunteered for the citizen search effort.
And that was how Saffy found it: police work. She loved the brisk, efficient instructions, the lack of sentimentality, the stern tenderness of Moretti’s gaze as they combed the grassy foothills.
There were so many ways her life could have turned. She could have lived one long basement party. She could have died alongside Travis in his overdose three years ago. She could very well have cleaned up some other way. Saffy did not like to question the forces that drove her to Moretti, to her GED, to community college and then to Candidate Processing Weekend with the New York State Police. When Saffy questioned these forces, she only became more aware of how precarious they really were.