The Girl Missing from the Records

I eased my bedroom door shut and turned the lock. Then I dug my tablet out of my backpack. I ignored the school’s yearbook program and brought up a regular browser instead.

At last winter’s bake sale, Mom had talked with Chloe’s mother. I’d heard them laughing about a camping disaster from their high-school days.

“That’s why Vance girls stay out of the woods, Sarah,” Chloe’s mother had joked. The name had stuck with me.

Chloe’s mother had once been a Vance.

I went to Mom’s public Facebook page. I passed the district announcements and the family snapshots, then searched through the friends list for Vance.

One person appeared: Eleanor Vance Miller.

Her account was mostly closed to strangers, but I could see the profile picture. A woman with Chloe’s eyes stood beside Mom, both of them in terrible-looking nineties dresses.

They seemed about eighteen. Their arms were linked, and they were laughing so hard neither could stand straight.

Eleanor hadn’t been some woman Mom once chatted with at a school event. She’d been Mom’s closest friend when they were young.

So why had Mom helped make Eleanor’s daughter disappear?

I opened another search page and entered Eleanor Vance Miller, Oakridge, and legal action.

I wasn’t expecting the district’s secrets to be sitting in plain view. Their lawyers could bury complaints with private settlements. I only needed something small to follow.

The results gave me almost nothing at first: district notices and business listings. Then, low on the page, I spotted a cached preview from a local parents’ forum.

The original discussion had been removed. Its little snippet said someone was furious the school let him remain after what he’d done to the Miller girl, and that the administration was protecting him because...

The link led nowhere. The post itself was gone.

Him.

Mom had told me Lexi wasn’t responsible. That part, at least, made sense now. Lexi hadn’t erased Chloe. She’d been a distraction, a moving cloud of noise.

An adult had wiped Chloe Miller from the records. And Mom was helping keep that person safe.

I stared at the empty page until the tablet warned me its power was almost gone. The low battery symbol glowed red in my dim room.

The word stayed in my thoughts, heavy and impossible to ignore: him.

Mom had been right about another detail, too. Lexi Montgomery was twelve. She couldn’t enter the district’s main system and quietly alter an official yearbook page.

Someone in the administration was shielding an adult man. Mom’s fear downstairs suggested she was helping hold that protection in place.

The following morning, the kitchen felt like a room where something awful had happened and everyone had agreed not to mention it.

Mom wore her neat navy blazer, the one she used at the district office. She scrubbed the island even though it was already clean.

The bottom drawer stood a little open. The physical library yearbook wasn’t inside anymore. Mom had taken it.

“Good morning, honey,” she said. Her cheerful voice sounded thin and wrong. She kept rubbing the stone with a sponge that squeaked beneath her hand.

“I made oatmeal. Mia’s at the table.”

I said nothing and went to find her.

Mia sat with her spoon beside a bowl she hadn’t touched. The oatmeal had cooled into a dull, firm layer. She looked tiny, shoulders drawn inward, her phone face down beside her.

“Mia?” I asked, settling into the chair next to her.

She jerked at my voice and kept her eyes lowered. “I can’t go to school.”

“I’ll stay beside you. I can walk you right to your locker.”

“That won’t fix it,” she murmured. From the kitchen came the steady buzz of the refrigerator. “Lexi said if I tell anyone about the messages, she’ll get the whole grade to shut me out. She’ll say I have some disease. She can do it, Ava. Yesterday, all the girls on the soccer team stopped passing to me. Even Coach didn’t care.”

Anger chilled my chest. Beneath it, my thoughts began to line up. Lexi wasn’t bullying carelessly. She seemed to plan each social punishment in advance.

And no one stopped her. Vice Principal Davis had brushed me off when I reported what was happening, without even writing it down.

I leaned toward Mia, keeping my voice low enough that Mom wouldn’t hear from the kitchen. “Try to remember the days before this began. Did you say something to Lexi? Did anything happen between you?”

Mia shook her head hard. “No. I hardly even know her. She’s in eighth grade.”

“Then think carefully,” I pressed, watching her face. “What happened right before the bullying started?”