I didn't fit the profile. I wasn't an outcast, crazy smart, super chaste, or alternative. I wasn't one of the kids that partied every school night, though several weekends in my memory had been blurred into obscurity by clandestine, typical, teenage parties. I wasn't gunning for valedictorian. I was smart enough, but my stubborn streak prevented me from jumping through every hoop my teachers threw at me and stopped me from achieving the kind of grades that became defining. I'd had boyfriends. The 'we'll be together forever' kind, the 'this is awkward, we barely talk' kind, and the 'no, no, you're cuter when you don't speak' kind. Not a peppy cheerleader or a hippie vegan or a debate team over-achiever or an over-enthusiastic theatre geek, I was very average, and happily so.
My parents were both alive and still married. I had a sister, Bette, who was three years younger than me, in 8th grade. We got along better than most siblings, though we fought often enough. Our disagreements usually centered around one of us noticing a shirt, eyeliner, or hair tie that had migrated a few centimeters from "where I deliberately put it because I knew you were going to take it!"
We didn't live in an incestuous small town or an immoral big city. We lived in the suburbs of New Jersey. There wasn't anywhere more PB&J on the planet. So it was a big deal when our local librarian Ms. Grassle's grandson went missing. I was concerned, in a kind of detached way, more uneasy because I feared for myself than worried for Antony Grassle, who had been visiting his grandmother with his family from out of town and whom I had never met.
The whole town had the same reaction. We were up in arms, not over the disappearance of Antony, over the disappearance of our sense of security. So the parents of Greenwich, NJ, pronounced 'green witch', plastered Antony's photo alongside the neighborhood watch signs in the hopes that his safe return would herald the return to placid normalcy that people submit to the suburbs for.
After four months or so, everyone but the most ardent Law & Order fans had tired of the energy being a conspiracy theorist required. We returned to routine; school started in September without a hitch. I think the Grassles returned to Vermont, or wherever they lived, and waited for news there, though no one thinking clearly expected any. My uneasiness had slipped away as easily as the 'Missing' posters; every once in a while a lone poster would spring up, but they didn't have the same overwhelming quality. They were interesting to observe, isolated and removed from the incident itself. Eventually the last of the flyers succumbed to rain or wind. It wasn't till the third week of school that Antony crossed my mind again.
And that's only because I saw him running naked through my backyard.