Free Missing Sisters -SA by Gregory Maguire

had entered herself as a separate act. She had played “Malaguea,” all eight pages of it, in just under ninety seconds, even the slow part. The traitor.

    But Alice hadn’t ever expected to have as much as twenty bucks, so it wasn’t too big a disappointment to pocket ten. Naomi was so thrilled with cleaning up what she called the popular support of Camp Saint Theresa that she didn’t even mind Alice trailing along afterward when she met her glitzier friends. “You know you have a good voice,” said Naomi, not too grudgingly. “I mean you can’t understand much, but it has a pretty sound.”

    “You’ve got a great voice, Naomi,” said one of the other girls in an enthusiastic tizzy, bouncing and beaming fatuously at Alice.

    “I’m not Naomi,” said Alice.

    “She didn’t say Naomi,” said Naomi. “She said Naomi.”

    From time to time, Alice found herself in a hearing dead end. Usually she just shrugged and accepted the fact that she couldn’t figure out what was going on. But Ruth Peters was still clutching Alice’s left hand. With her higher voice she clarified for Alice what was being said.
    “She’s calling you Miami, Alice,” said Ruth. “Not Naomi.”

    “Miami?” said Alice.

    “That’s what they were all shouting when you finished,” said Naomi. “I didn’t get it, either. What’s Miami got to do with the price of beans?”

    “Isn’t that her name?” said Pam, one of the glitzier girls.

    “It’s Alice ,” said Naomi. “Everybody knows that.”

    “No,” said Pam. “Why’d you tell everybody it was Miami?”

    “I never did,” said Alice.

    “You did too.”

    “Nobody don’t talk to me,” said Alice. “So, like, when?”

    “When you won the basketball competition, most dunks from a standing start,” said the girl in an aggrieved voice. “Stop pulling our legs, Miami. Just because you can sing.”

    “ What basketball thing?”

    “Last session, the basketball thing.”

    “I wasn’t here last session,” said Alice.

    “She wasn’t here last session,” said Naomi. “You’ve got a screw loose, Pam.”

    “You were too,” said Pam. A couple of the other girls nodded and shrugged in a single motion. “Don’t give me that.”

    “I was not,” said Alice. “I was home.”

    There were marshmallows over an open fire. Most of the camp had flocked there after the talent show. Alice, Naomi, Ruth, and the older girls stood aside, mired in their misunderstandings. Tiny red sparks went zigging up, burning out before they got even eight or ten feet high. Above, the stars were salty white, and the wind rushed through the trees with the sound of water. “All I know,” said the challenged Pam, who could be as energetically offended as she could be delighted, “is that I was here for both sessions, and Miami won the basketball jump award. And there were enough girls there then who can back me up on this now. That’s why people were chanting Mi-am-i! when you were finished singing.”

    “I thought they were saying Na-o-mi ,” said Alice.

    “They said that later,” said Pam. The other girls were drifting toward the fire.

    “How’d she speak?” said Naomi suddenly.

    “Regular,” said Pam. “Why?”

    “Alice can’t speak regular,” said Naomi. “She’s got a defect. Her tongue is too big or something, and she’s deaf.”

    “Only partly,” said Alice sharply.

    “You mean that’s not an act?” said Pam. “I thought she was just being silly.”

    “Ha-ha,” said Alice coldly, and turned toward the fire.

    “Sorry,” called Pam. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

    The fire wasn’t any fun. It brought back too many memories of the retreat house burning down and Sister Vincent de Paul getting scorched. Alice wandered out onto the dock. The lake was a dark mirror. Above it, the stars were tiny as grains of sand, yet they seemed to light up the whole sky. The lake surface, though bright in its own way, was too active to reflect the