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She was fearless in the way people are when they’re young enough to mistake surviving something for proof that it wasn’t dangerous. She jumped off cliffs into the river. Climbed things better left unclimbed. Went tubing when the water was too high, hiking when the weather was turning, and once tried to convince me that the fastest way down a mountain was to sit on a piece of cardboard and slide.

There were injuries.

I was generally the person standing at the bottom explaining why whatever she was about to do violated several basic principles of physics. Casey considered this useful information but rarely a compelling argument.

She was loud. She laughed with her entire body. Head back, mouth open, absolutely no concern for whether anyone was looking at her. She sang badly and with confidence. She knew everyone. Not in the superficial way people sometimes mean when they say that about someone from a small town. Casey actually knew them. She knew who had a sick parent and whose dog had died and which teachers were getting divorced even when the teachers themselves seemed to believe this information remained confidential.

She remembered my birthday. Everyone’s birthday.

I have always considered this an unreasonable expectation to place on the human brain.

She also remembered that I hated chocolate cake, that I preferred orange soda to cola, and that if she wanted me to attend anything involving more than six people, she needed to tell me about it several days in advance so I could become progressively irritated about it in private.

She understood me before either of us had the vocabulary for why I needed some of the things I needed.

If I checked the front door again after we’d already left, she waited.

If I needed to walk back to make sure I hadn’t dropped something even though we both knew I hadn’t, she walked back with me.

She never told me I was being ridiculous.

Well.

She told me I was being ridiculous constantly. Just never about that.

[pause]

There’s a difference.

I think people tend to flatten missing girls into the circumstances of their disappearance. Eventually, every photograph becomes the photograph. Every story becomes evidence. Every personality trait gets examined for some retrospective indication that this was always going to happen to them.

Casey was adventurous, so people said she was reckless.

She knew a lot of people, so everyone she knew became part of some theoretical secret life none of us had noticed.

And after enough time passes, the disappearance consumes everything that came before it. You stop hearing that Casey loved terrible horror movies but covered her eyes during anything involving ventriloquist dummies. You hear that she was last seen on August fourteenth. You stop hearing that she could eat an entire bag of sour candy until her tongue bled and then complain that the candy had somehow betrayed her. You hear what she was wearing. Where she was seen. Who saw her. What time she left.

She stops being a girl.

She becomes a timeline.

And I hate that.

[pause]

I think that might be part of why I became so obsessed with finding answers after she disappeared. I wanted facts because facts felt like something I could do something with. Grief was useless to me. There was no methodology for it. No established protocol. No measurable endpoint where someone could look at me and say, congratulations, you have successfully completed missing your best friend.

There was just this absence.

And everyone kept expecting me to live around it.

So I started collecting information.

I wrote down dates. Times. Names. Things people remembered saying. Things Casey had said. Places she’d been. I went back through conversations and tried to identify the moment I should have noticed something was wrong, which is an extraordinarily efficient way to make yourself miserable because hindsight can make anything look like evidence.

On several occasions, I took what I found to the police.

I thought if I gave them enough information, they could turn it into an answer.