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look beautiful to me. But now, in the early white light of a winter morning as she balanced her cup on her kneecap, she looked worn out and sad.
    “I will,” I said, meaning it now. “I’ll wear the coat when it’s freezing.”

    Two weeks before the start of Christmas vacation, Amanda wasn’t in school. When I saw her empty chair, I felt a flicker of dread. I came inside the classroom and sat at my desk, but without Amanda to hook my attention to, the room felt baggy. I worried, before the teacher had even called her absent, that she would not be back.
    A special assembly was called. Our headmistress, Sister Brennan, announced to the school that Amanda had run away from home with her brother, a high school dropout who worked at Marshall Field’s, and several stolen credit cards. As Sister Brennan spoke, there was a vast stirring around me, like on the day when we learned that Melissa Shay, two years below me with long gold braids, had died of leukemia during summer vacation. This stir was laced with delight, a jittery pleasure at news so shocking that it briefly banished all traces of normal life. I twisted around with the other girls, exchanging pantomimed amazement. It comforted me to feel like one of them, to pretend this news of Amanda meant no more to me than a shorter math class.
    After that, I couldn’t concentrate. I felt physical pain in my stomach and arms as I walked through the doors of Sacred Heart, this place Amanda had discarded. She’d left me behind with the rest: Father Damian in his robes, the old chalkboards and desks, the solemn chapel with its stink of damp stone and old lint, its stale echoes of the same words endlessly repeated. As Father Damian lectured to us on Amanda’s sin, I noticed how the clerical collar squashed and wrinkled his neck, so it looked like a turkey’s, how his eyes were thick and clouded as fingernails. I looked at Jesus and saw, where His crossed ankles should have been, the neatly folded drumsticks on a roasting chicken. I stopped looking at Him.
    What compelled me instead was her desk. For weeks and weeks—who knew how long?—Amanda had sat there, twirling her pen against her cheek and planning her escape. After school sometimes, when the shadowy halls had emptied, I would sit in her chair and feel the ring of her absence around me. I opened the desk and fingered her chewed pencils, the grimy stub of her eraser, a few haphazard notes she had taken in class. One by one I took these items home with me, lined them carefully along my windowsill, and watched them as I went to sleep. I imagined Amanda and her brother padding over thick dunes of sand, climbing the turrets of castles. In my thoughts this brother bore a striking resemblance to Jesus. As for Amanda, she grew more unearthly with each day, until what amazed me was less the fact that she had vanished than that I had ever been able to see her—touch her—in the first place.
    One night, when my mother had gone to a meeting and Julius was reading in the den, I took a razor blade from the pack he kept in the medicine cabinet. I held it between my fingers and carried it to my bedroom, where I sat on the edge of my bed and took off my sweater. I was still wearing my school jumper with the short-sleeved blouse underneath, and I placed a pillow across my lap and lay my bare arm over it. My forearm was white as milk, smooth, and full of pale blue snaking veins. I touched it with the blade and found that I was terrified. I looked around at my childhood bears, my bubbling aquarium, and my ballerina posters. They were someone else’s—a girl whose idea of mischief had been chasing those fish through their tank with her wet arm, trying to snatch their slippery tails. For a moment I felt her horror at what I was about to do, and it made me pause. But I had to do something. This was all I could think of.
    Gently but steadily, I sank one corner of the blade into the skin halfway between my elbow and wrist. The pain made