Sasha Hathaway, 2

I didn’t expect to hear from Sasha ever again in my entire life. But she showed up knocking at my door the very next night. My mom answered the door and called me down and there was Sasha, her cheeks pale and her eyes outlined in red.

“My Dad is missing,” she said. Her father had looked worse and worse as the days passed and the tests mounted—rings growing dark around his eyes, mouth sagging into a worried frown. Since being laid-off, he mostly sat around the house in plaid shirts and read conspiracy theories on the Internet—so his being gone from the house for hours was strange.

“The phone rang,” Sasha said. “He looked like he was about to crumple into a ball. Then he hung up and left and he hasn’t been back since.” I looked across the street. The car was missing from the driveway. “He ran away. Just like mom.”

I told my mom we were going out for a bit. The streetlights were just coming on as we grabbed our bikes and set off. I tried to question Sasha about the phone call but she knew nothing. We stopped at all his favorite hangouts: the coffehouses and parks of our neighborhood, the pool halls, arcades, and bars around the docks. The sky grew darker with each stop, the air grew colder. No one had seen him.

We walked our bikes along the docks, our breath steaming into the air, the city lights pooling together on the surface of the bay.

“I give up,” she said. “I’ll live as an orphan.”

“You can live with us,” I said. “In the basement.”

“The basement? Yuck.”

“Ok, you can stay in my room.”

“Where will you stay, Andy?”

“The basement.”

“Yuck! No, we can share your room.”

I smiled. We were walking by the place where her dad used to work in better times, when he still managed the stevedores and smoked cigars as he watched the ships come in from far-off foreign ports—riding low in the water because of the weight of exotic goods—and watched them leave again for those same ports almost empty. Back when he came home every night to a wife and a healthy baby girl.

“Is that our car?” said Sasha, pointing into the gloom of an open warehouse. Sticking out of the shadows was the beige nose of the car I’d seen parked in Sasha’s driveway day after day. The engine was running. We checked the car and the dark warehouse and found that they were both empty. We heard a noise coming from the outside. The city lights reflected off the water like spirits, and we could see a man outlined in that dazzling light. He was sitting at the end of the pier, hunched over with his head in his hands.

We crept closer, careful not to let the boards of the pier creak. When we got close enough, we could see it was Mr. Hathaway.

“Sasha,” I whispered, pulling her sleeve. “Let’s go.”

She moved closer, looked she like she was about to speak to him but stopped. The noise we’d heard was clearer now, but still distant. It was sobbing. He wiped his eyes on the back of his hands, looked up at the moon, and told it he was sorry.

Sasha Hathaway, 1

On the morning of September 10, Sasha Hathaway woke up with blood in her mouth.

She was thirteen years and three months old and, even though she lived across the street from me, there was a lot I didn’t know about her. I did not know what she wanted to be when she grew up. I did not know which boy had kissed her at the last church youth party. I did not know what she thought of me or why I couldn’t keep my eyes off her or why she smelled like a vanilla cake all day—even after gym class. Her powers were immense.

Here is what I did know: The boy she kissed was not Billy Costers—who she had a crush on. Her favorite game was Uno and her favorite night was taco night. Her mother had left six months ago, without a goodbye. She said 'my life is over' all the time, whenever something went wrong, whenever she got a C. And I know for certain that when she woke up that morning with her mouth full of blood she didn't realize her life really might be over soon.

"I tasted something funny," she said, wrinkling her nose that morning on the way to school. "Kinda bitter. I thought I was still dreaming. But then I sat up. It spilled out of my mouth all over my pajamas and my sheets."

I wasn’t paying that much attention, I was thinking about her lips, how they seemed like they were made out of cotton and down, the stuff of bonnets and blankets, how they seemed like the softest, most delicate things imaginable, how if I could just find the nerve, just reach out and…

She spit on the sidewalk and wiped her chin with the back of hand.

I’d never seen her do anything so rude and it surprised me. "Totally gross," she said and I nodded at her. "No," she said, seeing my shocked face. She pointed at a wet red stain on the pavement. "Andy, it's still happening."

I spent the day at my desk, staring at her back—thinking about her hair, pulled back behind a headband, still the longest, prettiest hair of anyone in school, like a waterfall of ink spilling from her scalp—while she stared at Billy Costers. She seemed uncomfortable in class all day, holding a napkin to her mouth and taking frequent trips to the bathroom, but she didn’t mention the blood again.

We walked home silently after school. Her dad was waiting for her at the front door when we got home, holding the bloody pajamas in his hand. He had a worried look on his face, under the scruffy beard he started growing after Sasha’s mom left but before he was laid-off from the factory. He mostly sat around the house in plaid shirts and read conspiracy theories on the internet.

“Go home, Andy,” he said to me. He turned to Sasha, clutching the blood-stained cloth in his fist. “Is it woman problems?”

“Oh god,” said Sasha, turning bright red. “My life is over.”

“You can tell me if it is. Maybe it’s time we talking about … you know, birds. Things adults do. We can go to the lady doctor.”

“Andy,” said Sasha, without turning to me. “Go home.”