“I can’t imagine what I would do if Lisa went missing.” His voice was somber as he stepped forward and stood right next to me. Shoulder to shoulder we looked at the small poster together. A sense of gravity filled the air around us, so heavy and oppressive that it pushed against me, forcing my feet into the ground. I felt stuck. Unable to move and look away.

“Her family must be going crazy,” I offered up. “I would be going crazy.”

“Maybe she’s been found . . .” Jake took his phone out and started googling. It was darker now, and the light from his phone cast a glow across his face.

“And . . . ?” I asked.

“Why is it so hard to get information on missing kids?” He held his phone up. “I can’t find any updates on her, just a tiny article about her going missing. That’s all.”

“How have we not heard about this girl on the news?” I asked.

“Did you know,” he exclaimed, “that a child goes missing every five hours in South Africa?” He held his phone up and a screen of little smiling faces stared back at me from it. All of them lost now. No longer smiling.

“No wonder we haven’t heard of this girl.” I looked back at her poster thoughtfully, this small, pixelated black and white photocopy of a once-happy child, clinging to the wall, held in place by one dirty piece of tape. The other side had come loose and when the breeze blew, the paper flapped in the wind like a butterfly trapped in a jar.

“It pisses me off.” Jake’s tone changed and I turned around and looked at him. “If Lisa went missing, I would want the whole country to know about it. I wouldn’t want her to just be a piece of paper on a wall somewhere.” He started walking again and I followed him.

“Me too. Especially here, in a country that has such a problem with violence toward women and girls.” I looked back at the small letter-sized poster on the massive wall. The wall dwarfed it, spread out around it until the paper was a mere speck on the face of this massive thing. Like a barnacle on the side of a blue whale, it was almost invisible. This girl should not be invisible. Like Rose, she deserved to be seen. She deserved to scream loudly from this wall to be found.

“I wish there was something I could do,” he said quietly, almost to himself this time.

“Me too.” But there was something I could do. My paints were at home, though, and it was too early to start. But I was going to do something.

We walked a little more; the mood had changed between us.

“You want to have some coffee, or something?” Jake pointed to a coffee shop across the street.

“Sure, if you’re cool with that?” I tried to sound unfazed.