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comfortable Jen looked in that strange context, how seamlessly she’d merged with the others.
    “I know it’s hard,” her mother told her. “But she’s branching out and maybe you should, too.”
    That summer—the last one before the disaster—felt like it would never end. Jill was too old for camp, too young to work, and too shy to pick up the phone and call anyone. She spent way too much time on Facebook, studying pictures of Jen and her new friends, wondering if they were all as happy as they looked. They’d taken to calling themselves the Classy Bitches, and almost every photo had that nickname in the heading: Classy Bitches Chillin’; Classy Bitches Slumber Party; Hey CB what ru drinking? She kept a close eye on Jen’s status, tracking the ups and downs of her budding romance with Sam Pardo, one of the cutest guys in their class.
    Jen is holding hands with Sam and watching a movie.
    Jen is THE BEST KISS EVER!!!
    Jen is the longest two weeks of my life.
    Jen is  … WHATEVER.
    Jen is Guys Suck!
    Jen is All Is Forgiven (and then some).
    Jill tried to hate her, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. What was the point? Jen was where she wanted to be, with people she liked, doing things that made her happy. How could you hate someone for that? You just had to figure out a way to get all that for yourself.
    By the time September finally rolled around, she felt like the worst was over. High school was a clean slate, the past wiped away, the future yet to be written. Whenever she and Jen passed in the hall, they just said hi and left it at that. Every now and then, Jill would look at her and think, We’re different people now .
    The fact that they were together on October 14th was pure coincidence. Jill’s mother had bought some yarn for Mrs. Sussman—the two moms were big on knitting that fall—and Jill happened to be in the car when she decided to drop it off. Out of old habit, Jill ended up in the basement with Jen, the two of them chatting awkwardly about their new teachers, then turning on the computer when they ran out of things to say. Jen had a phone number scribbled on the back of her hand—Jill noticed it when she pressed the power switch, and wondered whose it was—and chipped pink polish on her nails. The screen saver on her laptop was a picture of the two of them, Jill and Jen, taken a couple of years earlier during a snowstorm. They were all bundled up, red-cheeked and grinning, both of them with braces on their teeth, pointing proudly at a snowman, a lovingly constructed fellow with a carrot nose and borrowed scarf. Even then, with Jen sitting right beside her, not yet an angel, it felt like ancient history, a relic from a lost civilization.
    *   *   *
    IT WASN’T until her mother joined the G.R. that Jill began to understand for herself how absence could warp the mind, make you exaggerate the virtues and minimize the defects of the missing individual. It wasn’t the same, of course: Her mother wasn’t gone gone, not like Jen, but it didn’t seem to matter.
    They’d had a complicated, slightly oppressive relationship—a little closer than was good for either of them—and Jill had often wished for a little distance between them, some room to maneuver on her own.
    Wait’ll I get to college, she used to think. It’ll be such a relief not to have her breathing down my neck all the time.
    But that was the natural order of things—you grew up, you moved out. What wasn’t natural was your mother walking out on you, moving across town to live in a group house with a bunch of religious nuts, cutting off all communication with her family.
    For a long time after she left, Jill found herself overwhelmed by a childlike hunger for her mother’s presence. She missed everything about the woman, even the stuff that used to drive her crazy—her off-key singing, her insistence that whole-wheat pasta tasted just as good as the regular kind, her inability to follow the storyline of even the simplest