Free Alpha Alpha Gamma by Nancy Springer

Alpha Alpha Gamma
    By Nancy Springer
    I can’t handle this.
    But Kerri Ellen did not say the words aloud. Jammed into a MINI Cooper with four other community college kids, she wouldn’t let them know how shaky she felt as they pulled into the church parking lot where the search-and-rescue command center was set up. To her friends it was all new, the muddle of cop cars and ambulances and TV vans and tables and tents, the swarms of state troopers and sheriffs and borough officials and firefighters and volunteers, the blare of megaphones and the yammering of a helicopter overhead. But to Kerri Ellen it was entirely too familiar, even though this was not a ragged stretch of highway amid used car lots, storage lockers, furniture outlets and fast food eateries—such as the Burger King her sister had been walking to.
    This was a rich neighborhood. Here, Kerri Ellen looked around at McMansions bigger than barns, each with its own vast Chem-Green lawn beneath forested hills. Kinda different than the trailer park where she lived, out along Route 109.
    Yet here were the search dogs in their orange capelets, and the feeling here was just the same as—then.
    “Deja fu,” she murmured.
    “I beg your pardon” asked a skinny boy with fat glasses, an archetypical nerd, squashed against her in the MINI Cooper back seat.
    “Nothing.” I’ve been kicked in the head like this before. It’s been two years. Get over it.
    The girl who was driving parked in the only available space, on the grass, and killed the motor. “Geez, I didn’t think there’d be so many people here.”
    “I thought they would have found her by now,” said another sorority girl. “She’s, what, three years old? How far can she have gone?”
    “Unless somebody abducted her,” said the nerd.
    Don’t! Don’t even think that word . It was way less painful to think what the cops had suggested at first, that Kimmi Sue was a runaway, even though anybody with the brain of a garden slug knew Kimmi would never run away, especially not when she was walking to work in her Burger King uniform. No, it didn’t matter what anybody said, they all knew Kimmi Sue, like so many others, had been snatched—but Kerri tried to tell herself it had happened differently, that her sister had been “kidnapped.” Kidnappers kept people alive. Didn’t they?
    “But say she just wandered out of the house,” gabbed the driver as she got out of the MINI Cooper.
    With difficulty Kerri Ellen shifted her thoughts back to the latest lost girl, not a teen but a toddler.
    “Say she was out in the woods last night. It got down almost to freezing. They think if they don’t find her today, she might not—”
    “So let’s get moving,” Kerri Ellen heard her own voice as if startled by a stranger.
    Once out of the car, they strode a serpentine between parked pickup trucks, incoming traffic and the women directing it. Kerri stared numbly at dog handlers arriving with bloodhounds, church ladies bringing bags of hamburger buns and crock-pots of barbecue, people carrying boxes of freshly printed flyers, Red Cross workers handing out coffee. Scanning the crowd, she realized she was looking for Kimmi, the way she always did wherever she went, like she might someday glimpse her sister at a shopping mall or a Renaissance fair.
    Stop it.
    Redirected, her attention caught on a young man in a college basketball jacket, a gawky young man jutting like a tall dead pine over the flood-water rush of activity.
    “Burke!” called one of the three sorority girls. “Have they found anything?”
    He focused stunned eyes on the approaching group as if he didn’t recognize them, even though he went to their post-game parties, and he knew other commuters like Kerri from hanging out on campus between classes. She saw Burke’s throat shudder as he swallowed. It was his little sister, Bethany, who was lost.
    “Anything?” the girl asked again.
    He shook his head. His wooden gaze drifted down a stream of