On Saturday, we eat breakfast in silence. I’m not hungry, but I get cereal served again anyway, Cinnamon Toast Crunch this time. I swear Damon only buys cereal so he can get the free toys. A grown man, and he collects shit from cardboard boxes and fast-food meals. They’re like trophies for him, lined up on top of the refrigerator, above the fireplace, on the windowsill that looks out from the kitchen into the yard.

Damon’s been gone all night. Missing girls tend to demand the presence of the town sheriffs, especially when her family is high-profile like Jennifer’s. He looks exhausted, his blue eyes rimmed with red, his clothes creased. He’s only here to change his shirt and take me to the diner, fifteen minutes of calm in a case that could last days. Weeks. Months. Maybe they’ll find her today. Maybe she ran away. Maybe she’s dead in a well. Maybe she’s gone forever.

“I’m not leaving Rox out there all day,” I say, my words level and clear despite the panic bubbling up inside my stomach. I can’t face her body. I can’t face my fucking life anymore. I can’t face the shit show I know I’ll be walking into at the diner. I need a shot of vodka or a handful of pills, or both.

Damon turns his bleary eyes to me. “Well then, you’ve got about three minutes to go and bury her,” he snaps.

A small portable television sits on the kitchen counter, switched on to the local news filling the room with static-edged chatter. I hear the words missing girl and my ears prick up, something to take my attention away from this kitchen and the unbearable tension that fills it. I pick dry squares of cereal out of my bowl and crunch them between my teeth slowly, at least giving off the appearance of trying to eat something.

The news. It draws me in, greedy moth to overhead light. MISSING GIRL. A picture of Jennifer flashes up, her bleached-white smile dazzling, dressed in her cheerleading uniform. I have a matching outfit upstairs, though I haven’t worn it in years. The reporter keeps talking about Jennifer, how she vanished after her shift at Dana’s Grill on Thursday evening, how there are no suspects. The police aren’t sure if it’s a kidnapping or a runaway teen. She’d been fighting with her parents on Thanksgiving morning, took herself off to work in the afternoon, and then she was just gone.

“They used to put missing kids on milk cartons,” Damon says, gesturing at the television. “Now everybody’s got a TV and a cell phone.”

He’s right. I imagine everyone in Gun Creek will be glued to their phones today, refreshing the local news websites, sending frantic messages. Did you see Jennifer on Friday? She will be revered, her cheerleading photo plastered across town. I already know this — I’ve lived it once before when Karen went missing.

There are so many people passing through our tiny town each day that Karen’s death was blamed on a passerby, a trucker, probably. It made everyone in our town feel safer when all we had to do was watch out for the people we didn’t know. Nobody wanted to believe that one of our own was capable of such a horrific crime. But now, nine years later, it’s happening again.

Predictably, the reporter shifts to talking about Karen’s case — Karen Brainard, seventeen years old, dead before she’d ever lived.

They gloss over the real Karen. The deeply flawed Karen.

She fucked anything that moved, including the entire football team.

She got high more days than not.

Karen Brainard wasn’t a very nice person, truth be told. She was kind of an asshole.

But she had a pretty face, a newsworthy face, and so in death, she is a hero, she is tragic, she is perfection.

People will be talking about Karen Brainard today.

The report switches back to Jennifer, urging the public to call a special hotline if anyone knows anything. 1800-JENNIFER. I feel sorry for the operators. I feel sorry for Karen. Karen didn’t come from a rich family. Karen didn’t get a hotline. Karen didn’t even get a poster with her face on it until she’d already been missing for days, and by then it was too late.

“Are you looking for her?” I ask Damon. He scowls at me. “What do you think? I’m the Sheriff. Of course I’m looking for her. Whole town’s looking for her. Where have you been?”

He looks me up and down. “You keep doing you, darlin’. The rest of us’ll look for your friend Jennifer.” He reaches across and snaps the dial on the TV to off, the screen going black as a familiar silence settles around us once more.

She’s not my friend, I want to say, but I don’t, biting down on the tip of my tongue instead.

I lick my chapped lips and drink more coffee.

“Do you think she’s dead?” I ask.

Damon gets up, deposits his empty bowl in the sink, and turns to me as he collects his keys from the counter.

“We’ll be late,” he says. “Get your things.”

I make the mistake of using the back door to leave the house, and that’s where my worst nightmare springs back to life. My dog is still dead. It wasn’t a dream, it really happened, but I can’t bury her myself and I’ve got nobody to help me. I stop beside her stiff body, kneeling to pat her snow-dusted fur.

“Hey,” Damon calls out, already in the car.

I have to swallow down a sob and walk away from her, to the car.

In the passenger seat of Damon’s police car sits a stack of colored posters. Jennifer beams from her yearbook photo, high-definition and full of pep.

I pick up the stack of posters and balance them across my thighs as Damon drives through the snow littering our driveway, my eyes only for Jennifer, the worst parts of me imagining how she died, what they did to her first, and by whose hand. I do not look up again. I don’t want to see the outline of my dog, dusted in snow, her blood frozen in patches around her, a hole in her skull the size of a nickel.