So this one time, near the end of the summer, the ice cream truck drove off without giving me my change. I had paid five dollars and needed three twenty-five back. I told Amir to go chasing after it—he was a much faster runner than I was, and I had hurt my ankle in the pool that summer—but he didn’t. He said, “Don’t worry. It’s not worth it. I’ll just give you the money.” But then one of the neighborhood kids, Junior, went after it instead. He sprinted and banged on the white van, and the driver stopped and gave him my change. I was so angry at Amir. I didn’t get it. Usually I liked that he wasn’t like Junior; Junior was always beating people up or talking about beating people up. Boys can be really dumb about proving their manhood. But in this moment, I just wanted my brother to stand up for me and fight. And he just wasn’t willing to fight.

Amir doesn’t like conflict. I’ve always been the fighter in the family; I think that’s why my parents always liked Amir better. Don’t make that face, Mom, he has always been your favorite. He was the polite, well-behaved child. I was the stubborn one. But that’s also why I was so determined to find him.

You probably know a thing or two about investigations. Your job is to take clues and find answers, isn’t it? That was the job I assigned to myself after Amir went missing, and so before I could go off and interview the people who knew him, I had to hunt for clues in our own home. That meant looking around his room.

Amir had cleaned his room before he left. Made his bed. There wasn’t a single dirty sock in his hamper. It was like the whole time he lived with us, he had been a houseguest and not my annoying older brother who kept his boxers in four different piles, one for each corner of his bed. My parents and I messed it up a little bit that first day when we went searching through his room . . . but no one had touched it since.

I went back in one afternoon when my dad was at work and my mom had run to Costco. Yes, Mom, you still went to Costco while Amir was missing. Come on, that doesn’t make you look like a bad mother. Life still had to go on. You still had to buy basmati rice in bulk.

Anyway, I was pretty much a detective that whole afternoon. I slipped into Amir’s room, careful not to leave a trace, and poked around.

I checked around his desk, under his bed. I went through his drawers full of college junk mail and chargers. I saved everything that might have been a clue. I found a movie stub for Jumanji, which was weird because Amir and I saw that the weekend it came out, and this ticket was for a different date. Plus, it was for a movie theater in another town.