The sun woke us.
The crying girl – Sarah Amallo – had gone, to where we never learned. We scanned the surrounding fields and searched the surrounding forest but found nothing. We didn’t see her around town during the remainder of the summer, nor during the school months following. There weren’t many schools in our small town but we had no idea to which – if any – she belonged. None of us ran into her in a convenience store or pool hall or at the bowling alley where all teenagers wound up on certain listless nights. I was the only one of our gang who frequented the library but I didn’t find her there either, though I looked: in the narrow book-lined aisles, among the desks and cubicles to the rear of the building, in the lobby where people waited on the wooden bench beside the water founta
