The September Sisters by Jillian Cantor

direction and started laughing again, and Iquickly averted my eyes.
    “She looks like a snob,” Tommy said.
    “She’s not.” My old instinct to defend her kicked in. “Well, I don’t really know.” I finished off my last nugget, while Tommy stared at me intensely, as if he were scrutinizing me, squinting his eyes a little, turning his head to the side. It made me feel uncomfortable, the same way I felt when older boys would stare at my chest, and I knew I was blushing.
    “What’s it like?” Tommy asked.
    “What?” I pretended not to understand him, but of course I knew that Mrs. Ramirez had told him everything about me.
    “You know.”
    I shook my head, but I suddenly felt myself blinking back tears. I bit my lip. The last thing I wanted to do was cry in front of him. “I have to go.” I stood up and threw my book on my tray. “I don’t want to be late for class.”
     
    Later that day, in English class, we talked about Hamlet’s need for revenge. Mr. Fiedler asked us why we thought Hamlet went to the lengths he did to try to avenge his father’s death.
    We were quiet for a few minutes. I think none of us were sure what he wanted to hear. I thought about my mother’s idea of my grandmother’s spirit. I wondered, if she were to come to me and tell me where Becky was and how she’d gotten there, what I would do, how I would feel. Then I thought that Hamlet wasn’t really trying to get revenge; he wanted justice, wanted things to be set right, and they weren’t really the same things. I didn’t want to say it out loud, though. I didn’t talk much in school anymore; I didn’t want to feel everyone’s eyes on me, everyone’s stares or giggles, so I kept the thought to myself.
    I began to think about Becky and the lengths I could go to to find her. I thought about how Hamlet was going to put on a play to catch his father’s murderer. What a joke! If only it were that simple. I tried to imagine us putting on a play, me and my father, Mrs. Ramirez, the detectives, my crazy mother as the star.
     
    When Mrs. Ramirez picked Tommy and me up after school, we pretended that our lunch had never happened. “How you day?” Mrs. Ramirez asked. Neither one of us said anything. Mrs. Ramirez was used to my being quiet, but I’m not sure what she was used to with Tommy. “Youmeet all Ah-bee-hail’s friends?” Nothing. “So quiet.” She shook her head.
     
    I was surprised to find both my parents at home when I got there. It was another moment that sent off a warning signal in my brain. Something about Becky. Only the reason they both were there was that my mother had been released from the hospital and my father had taken the afternoon off work to bring her home.
    My mother looked surprisingly with it, seminormal even, except for the large bruise on the left arch of her forehead that was this purplish yellow color. “That looks painful,” I said, and reached my hand up as if to touch it; only I was afraid to, so I left my hand suspended in midair.
    “I’m okay,” she said. “Come here.” She held out her arms to hug me, and I went to her, relieved. I’d been needing comfort from my mother for weeks, been needing her in a way that I couldn’t even begin to need my father or Becky or Jocelyn, for that matter. She kissed the top of my head and stroked my hair.
    “Are you really okay?” I asked. I had this sudden surge of hope that the doctors had cured her. Three days in the hospital and she was a new, fabulous woman, themother I’d known years ago.
    “Sure I am, sweetie. I’m just a little depressed, that’s all.” I understood her depression to mean a sadness for Becky, an empty hole, and I understood it completely. But I was hopeful that she had come back a new person, that the old person, the woman who’d stayed mostly in her bedroom since Becky’s disappearance, had been left at the hospital.
     
    After dinner I sat up in my room staring at a blank piece of paper that was supposed to be an