Chapter 2

I could feel myself losing my grip on it, so I bolted into the bathroom.

Once I was inside, I remembered what my roommate had said. I pulled out my phone and searched for the account, My Little Maxi Growing Up.

I figured that somewhere in here, I'd find the truth about why my parents had been missing all these years.

The moment I opened the page, the front feed was nothing but Maxine, from a baby all the way up.

I tapped the pinned video. It ran through a photo shoot they'd done of her every single year, from age one to eighteen.

Maxine was born in '05.

A year younger than me.

Which meant that not long after Mom and Dad left home, they'd had Maxine.

So my parents hadn't gone missing.

They'd abandoned me.

They'd had another daughter out there, and they'd thrown me away.

Once the truth sank in, something inside me went raw and aching.

I opened every video on my parents' page and watched them, one after another.

The more I watched, the harder I cried.

When Maxine was in preschool, Mom and Dad took her around the world to show her how big it was.

Back then, I was picking up bottles on the side of the road with Grandma Mason just to get by.

Grandma used to tell me,

"Gail, honey, I don't know when your mom and dad are coming back. It's been a long time since they last sent me any money."

"You'll be starting grade school soon, and I need to save up your tuition ahead of time."

"Every one of these bottles is a chance for you to go to school."

Back then I didn't understand how a bottle could be a chance at anything.

All I knew was that I was with Grandma, waiting for Mom and Dad to come home.

After Maxine started grade school, Mom and Dad signed her up for all kinds of classes.

Piano, dance, skateboarding, all of them things she'd picked herself.

They said to the camera,

"We don't ask anything of Maxi. We just want her to be happy."

Maxine rode past on her skateboard behind them and shouted,

"Mom, Dad, I love you!"

By then I'd only just started school.

Grandma had scraped together money for a long time before she could cover my tuition.

After class, I'd go home and cook, carry the food out to Grandma in the fields, then help her pack up and head home together.

By the time Maxine was in high school, Mom and Dad cared even more about her inner world, afraid she'd pull away from them during her rebellious phase.

Every day they walked her to and from school, and on their days off they took her to concerts and musicals to unwind.

That whole stretch, I was living through the lowest point of my life.

Grandma was sick and in the hospital, and I couldn't come up with the money for her surgery.

The school took up a collection, my teacher put out an appeal, but it still wasn't enough.

Watching Grandma get worse by the day, I finally decided to drop out and earn money for her treatment.

I gave up the SATs that year, but in return I got to keep Grandma alive.

That was when I learned just how much money mattered.

One musical for Mom, Dad, and Maxine cost thirty thousand dollars. That thirty thousand, to me, was Grandma's life.

I threw myself into studying, wanting to earn more so Grandma wouldn't have to work so hard.

My effort paid off.

This year I was the state's top SAT scorer, with the scores to get into any college in the country.

The only reason I chose this school was that they'd given me a two-hundred-thousand-dollar scholarship and promised to cover all my living expenses for four years. That was why I came here.

I never imagined that here, of all places, I'd run into the parents who'd been missing all these years.

By the time I finished my parents' videos, I had no tears left.

In my heart, I'd always believed they were missing, maybe even dead.

I never imagined it would turn out like this.

They weren't dead. They were living better than most people.

So why, in all these years, had they never once come home to see me?