I told her about the questions and what I had told them.
“I think Uncle Biggi wanted us to move,” I said.
“Really. What did Daddy say?”
“He was adamant that we wouldn’t.”
“Good. Uncle Biggi is a wimp. Brianna never liked him, either.” She looked at me harder for a moment, and then her eyes softened. “I’ve got to spend more time with you now, and you with me, Lorelei. Some of this is my fault.”
I didn’t say anything. Lately, I thought we were becoming more and more estranged and I thought that she resented me. I was happy to hear that she wanted us to spend more time together.
“We’ll do something together this weekend. Just something sisterly,” she quickly added.
“Okay. I’d like that.”
“I’m taking you two to school and picking you up on Monday. It might be a strange day there.”
“How do you mean?”
“How do I mean?” She rolled her eyes. “Mark Daniels won’t be there, Lorelei. He doesn’t come back.”
“Oh. Right. I wasn’t thinking of that.”
She shook her head. “I’m not criticizing you,” she said, “and I’m not speaking like some jealous sister, but you either are ignoring your powers of foresight or you don’t have them. Later,” she said before I could respond, and left.
What she said brought back a fear I’d had ever since I could remember. I didn’t have the same confidence she had and, from what I could remember of Brianna, she had as well. Even Marla had more confidence than I had. They were all secure in their faith in themselves, in their belief that they would please and satisfy Daddy. They would live up to his expectations. I looked for some self-doubt in Ava but never found it. I was simply more afraid than they ever were that I would not be the daughter Daddy expected.
Nothing more was said about Daddy’s meeting with the elders or what had happened the night before. We all went about our business as if nothing unusual had happened. Only I seemed to be thinking about it, but perhaps that wasn’t unusual. I was the one he had come after, and I was the one who was almost lost. A few times, I approached Daddy with the intention of apologizing, but I didn’t know for what. I wanted to thank him as well, but he didn’t look as if he wanted to hear any more about it, so I retreated from that idea.
On Monday morning, as she had promised, Ava drove Marla and me to school.
“What you do now,” she told me as we drove, “is be just as surprised as anyone else that Mark Daniels isn’t there. If asked, you just say that you don’t know anything. He never called you, nor did you ever see him anywhere but in the building. Don’t say anything else or encourage any further discussion, understand?”
“Yes, Ava.”
“However, if you overhear anyone else speak about him, especially his family, you listen carefully. Daddy would want to hear about that.”
Mark’s absence wasn’t really noticed until the third day. Chatter had begun lightly but really broke out into full interest by then. From what I overheard, no one really knew that much about his family. Curtis Simon, an African American who was probably going to be the class valedictorian, seemed to know the most about Mark and his family. I sat close enough to him and his friends at lunch one day to overhear him say that while he had never met anyone else in Mark Daniels’s family, he had once been at his home in Westwood.
“Actually,” he told the others, “it looked like no one else lived there. He never talked about his parents much at all.”
I saw him look my way.
And then, in a loud voice, he added, “He was probably so brokenhearted he couldn’t go on attending school here.”
Everyone laughed.
Later that afternoon, Curtis approached me in the hallway and asked me if I knew anything about Mark’s disappearance.
“Did he call you or anything and tell you he would be leaving?”
“Mark never called me,” I said. “I never gave him my phone number. Maybe his father lost his job or something. I couldn’t care less,” I added, and walked away.
“Well, pardon me, Miss Hot Ass!” he shouted after me.
If anything, all this did was alienate me more from the rest of the student body. The only one who seemed to notice, however, was Mr. Burns. He asked me if there was anything wrong, anything he could help me with.
“I’m fine,” I told him.