The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,12

n.

When he calls late at night and feigns that there was something he was supposed to tell me but can’t remember just now, I pretend, for his sake. For mine, too.

The fall that followed the circus, the kidnapped girl from around the corner came to me in dreams on a yellow bicycle with a banana seat and streamers of thousands of colors. I was always waiting on the porch for her, feeling the cool stone against the part of my thighs my shorts didn’t cover, but when she came she was anxious and I’d always forgotten to get my bicycle from behind the house where I kept it, or my father began calling me from somewhere inside only to deny it once I’d found him. By the time I was on my bicycle, she was at least a block away, looking back at me with the half smile in the picture on all the missing posters. But in the dreams my calves strained, as if I were riding up a steep incline; there was grit in the air that caught in my throat and settled on my skin, adding pounds. The streets I knew had different names or didn’t intersect like they should, and while I struggled to keep up she weaved effortlessly, waving at the people I didn’t recognize, riding with no hands, showing off.

Within two full days of her disappearance, the case attracted national publicity. I was eye level with the magazine rack in the grocery store, and her face looked back at me from all the magazines; it was hard to understand that these were glossy pages being sold across the country, that any pain or person could exist past the limits of the park at the corner or even the diner on the boulevard with high, spinning seats that took an eternity to drive to. I wondered what it felt like to be a girl everywhere; I thought that if I was in her place, I might feel lucky.

When I told my dad this on the way home from the market, he grew very quiet and turned off the radio. He didn’t even respond when I saw a red Volkswagen pass and punched him in the shoulder. At home he sat me on the couch without even unloading the groceries, and I tried hard to listen and not think of the milk sitting in the trunk growing warmer. Dear heart, my father said, Anna is not lucky.

Did I understand what kidnapping was? A very bad person had taken Anna. He had come into her bedroom with a knife during a slumber party. He had tied her two friends up and put pillowcases over their heads. He had told them to count to a very high number and carried Anna out of the bedroom. Was that lucky? His throat caught and he put his face in his hands.

They weren’t sure where she was now, my father explained. Her mom and dad and the police were looking very, very hard, and so were many other people. There was a candle lit in the window of her house that would stay lit until she returned. We could walk by and see it anytime I wanted. Would I like to bring flowers?

In the days and weeks that followed, I as well as the rest of the children in the neighborhood lost that sense of ownership we’d felt over the summer. FBI agents came knocking at the door, searching for information, holding up the flyer that was everywhere already. We were not allowed to walk home from school alone; I was not to walk to James and Jackson’s without an escort; my bedroom window was to remain closed and locked at absolutely all times; my door was to be left open. We were taught the term “stranger danger.” All vans white or even close to white in color were viewed as ominous—they being the official vehicle of Kidnappers and Bad Men everywhere—and fictional reports of seeing them echoed excitedly before the bell that signaled the start of class.

Anna was four years older and had just begun junior high. Though she was too old to join in on our games, she would sometimes smile encouragingly when she walked or rode past. She was thin and lanky like I was, with unruly brown hair she always wore in unkempt waves and wide red lips that curved over the gap in her slight front teeth. She wore baseball shirts with three-quarter length sleeves; on