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floor under and around the table. Bored, I pressed on, over by the wall, over toward the door. Something jammed in the bottom and rattled, vibrating against all that suction. Irritated, I kept going, but the rattling continued.
    “Okay, okay,” I muttered, and switched off the vacuum.
    It was a small scrap of paper stuck against the turning belt. I yanked it out. I don’t know what made me bother looking at it. But once I looked, I stared.
    On the paper, in such a messy scrawl that I barely recognized it as Mom’s writing, were the words,
Take the car. Go to Lynne’s
.

Eight
    I DIDN’T DO IT . I DISOBEYED .
    I mean, really. I’m only fifteen. I don’t have a license. I’m not sure I’ve ever even touched a steering wheel. And Lynne lives way over on the other side of town, practically out in the country.
    Besides, after a decade, who’s to say the car would even start?
    I could have called Lynne and asked her parents to pick me up. They would have come immediately.
    But this was too weird. If Mom wanted me to go to Lynne’s, why hadn’t she told me in person? Why hadn’t she left a clear note where I was sure to see it? Why hadn’t she told me she was taking a leave of absence from work? Why hadn’t she explained my memory to me? Why wasn’t she here?
    I brooded. At seven o’clock I finally got up and made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, because I was going light-headed with hunger. (I wanted to blame hunger.)
    By seven thirty I was staring out the window at the dusk … and then the darkness. My brain didn’t seem to be working verywell. I’d think,
I should call someone
, but I wouldn’t move. It was too hard figuring out whom to call, what to say. I was fifteen, not some little kid. I didn’t need my mother waiting for me every day after school. Let’s say I called the cops and reported my mom as a missing person. They’d laugh me off the phone.
She’s only been gone a couple hours?
they’d say.
And you’re worried? Are you sure she didn’t tell you she was going someplace, and you just weren’t paying attention?
(Had she told me she was going someplace, and I just hadn’t paid attention?)
    My mother never went anywhere.
    My mother also never took leaves of absence from work. She barely even took vacations.
    Something was really, really wrong. And I couldn’t begin to figure out what, based on the scanty clues I had: the note, the key, the overturned chair. (
Had
it been overturned before I walked in?)
    The phone rang, and I jumped three inches, panic coursing throughout my body. I grabbed the receiver.
    “Hello?”
    “Hey, Kira. Are the science fair entry forms due this Friday or next Friday?”
    It was Lynne.
    “Um, I don’t know. I left that folder at school,” I managed to say.
    “You okay?” Lynne asked. “You sound kind of strange.”
    That was my opening, my chance. I could spill all to Lynne, and she—or her parents—could reassure me, comfort me. Find my mom.
    “I’m fine,” I said.
    Suddenly I remembered reading about how little kidstrapped in house fires tend to do everything wrong: Rather than rushing to a door or a window, their natural instincts tell them to hide in the closet or under the bed. Hide where you can’t see the fire, and maybe it won’t be there.
    I was doing the same thing. As long as I didn’t tell Lynne that something was really, really wrong, it was all in my head. Paranoia.
    “… get my dad to drive me over to the library, then,” Lynne was saying. “Want to meet me there?”
    “Huh?” I struggled to make sense of Lynne’s words. It was like my brain wasn’t capable of understanding. “No, thanks. Not tonight,” I finally said.
    I hung up the phone and just stood there staring at it for a long time. When I turned around, a strange woman was standing in the doorway of the kitchen.
    “Who are you? What are you doing here? Where’s my mother?” I asked, my questions tumbling out rapid-fire. I wasn’t scared—that is, no