It had been in the spring, and we’d had a cold snap. The night before, the temperature had dropped below forty. That afternoon, it was only in the sixties. Cameron had been wearing black tights and a black and white plaid skirt and a white turtleneck. She looked great. No one would have guessed she’d pieced the outfit together at the thrift store. Her blond hair was long and shiny. My sister Cameron had freckles. She hated them. She made all As.

While Mark and Tolliver made conversation, I tried to imagine what Cameron would look like now. Would she still be blond? Would she have gained weight? She’d been small, shorter than me, with thin arms and legs and a will of iron. She’d run track with some success, though when the paper had called her a “track star” after she’d vanished, we’d all looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

My sister hadn’t been a saint. I’d known Cameron better than anyone else. She was proud. She could keep a secret till it screamed. She was smart. She studied hard. Sometimes she resented our situation, our fall from affluence, with such anger that she screamed out loud. She hated our mother, Laurel, hated her passionately, for dragging us down with her. But Cameron loved our mother, too.

She couldn’t stand Matthew, who was Mother’s second husband but her hundredth “boyfriend.” Cameron had had this persistent delusion that our father would return to his pre-drug self, and that he would show up at the dismal trailer someday and take us off with him. We would go back to living in a clean house, and someone else would wash our clothes and cook our meals. Our father would show up at the school for PTA meetings, and he’d talk to us over the supper table about where we might want to go to college.

This was Cameron’s fantasy, her happy one. She had some that were darker, much darker. She told me, one morning on our walk to school, that she also dreamed one of our mother’s dealers would show up at the trailer while we were gone and kill our mother and stepfather. After they were dead, we’d be put in a nice foster home. Then, when we’d graduated from high school, we’d get jobs and rent an apartment and work our way through college.

That was as far as Cameron’s dream had gone. I wondered what she’d imagined would happen after that. Would we each have found a good and prosperous man, and lived happily ever after? Or maybe instead we’d have continued living together (in our modest but clean apartment), wearing our new clothes (a very important part of Cameron’s tale), and eating our good food that we’d learned how to cook.