Free Steal My Sunshine by Emily Gale Page A

pictured him putting his arm around this faceless woman and kissing her. Then it morphed into the face of someone we knew, like Margot or Angie or his assistant at work who I’d always thought was really pretty. Or a guy.
    I made myself stop thinking about it and pictured Evan instead, the whole time aware of the faraway sound of Mum and Sam chatting on the sofa next to my chair. Evan on the beach, smiling at me, and me looking right into his eyes the way I never could in real life. What did it mean if you loved someone so much that you couldn’t even look at them properly?
    â€˜It’s still terrible,’ said Mum.
    â€˜What is?’ I was hardly aware I’d said it but something on the news had suddenly lifted me out of my daydream.
    â€˜It’s terrible when someone goes missing,’ she said. A girl a few years older than me didn’t make it home after a party. They’d put her Facebook photo on the screen. It was one of those selfies; I had one like it. She looked upbeat and pretty, like she went from one fun event to the next. I imagined her taking the photo when she’d just finished getting ready to go out.
    â€˜Sure,’ said Sam, ‘but I’m just saying that one person goes missing every fifteen minutes in this country.’
    â€˜That’s crazy,’ said Mum.
    â€˜Exactly. That’s why we don’t think about it – we can’t. So every so often we focus on one case.’ Sam had done Legal Studies for one term before dropping it and now thought he was an expert on every crime we heard about.
    â€˜That’s just wrong,’ I said. ‘Who decides which case to put on TV anyway?’ They were showing more photos of the missing girl now, cheek to cheek with her best friend, followed by footage of the same friend crying during a press conference, clutching hands with the missing girl’s parents, who were staring at the floor with wild eyes.
    Sam ignored my question. ‘People can’t cope with big numbers,’ he went on. ‘Like an earthquake on the other side of the world that takes out six hundred people in one go. Becomes meaningless. But look at everyone going nuts over this one girl.’
    â€˜Are you saying we shouldn’t? What are we supposed to do?’ I said, annoyed by him in ways I could never articulate well enough on the spot. ‘Do we just not care about her because of all the other people who are dying all over the place?’
    â€˜I’m just raising the topic.’ He shrugged, staring at the screen, and we all fell back into silence.
    It was true, what he’d said. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about that girl. She was becoming more familiar in my head. Not just a two-dimensional image on a screen, she was flesh and bone – a moving, laughing, feeling human being. She was Sophie.
    I thought about who would take her and why they thought they could. I imagined being her, walking back from a party and never in a million years thinking that I was in danger, because Sophie didn’t seem like the sort of person who would suspect anyone of wanting to hurt her. I imagined a man grabbing my arm and trying to pull me into a car, his strength and the way I’d struggle mixed in with the startled look on Sophie’s face as she tried to understand how something so evil could be happening to her.
    I said goodnight and went to my room. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t think about Sophie any more, as if imagining these grotesque things meant they’d really happened to her. Maybe we all just needed to have faith that she’d be found alive. She’d go to more parties and take more happy photos and people would still die all over the place but at least we’d know that Sophie was okay.
    My own problems felt so small and stupid in comparison. I swore I wouldn’t think about those either.
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    The moment I was awake, I thought of Sophie. Still