The personal ad was something I'd found when I was in middle school. Jeremy and I read the ads every Friday night while our dads played poker together. I'd always assumed we were drawn to the ads because of our common loneliness. That maybe we were both searching for something. But then one day, about a year after my father left, I found this particular ad that changed everything.

Careful of the brittle paper, I eased it open. I didn't actually need to read it. I'd memorized every word.

N-I'm here and I'm okay. I'll always be nearyou.

I love you, D.

I had no proof it was my dad. Jeremy insisted N could be anybody. But I knew this ad was mine. I knew it was from my father, without proof or probability, all the way through to my soul. My father had known about our Friday ritual, and he must have thought it was the perfect way to contact me discreetly. He'd even included the word near, a safe way to refer to my name without actually using it.

After that, I didn't want to share the ads anymore. I didn't find them funny, didn't laugh at the desperation. I was searching for something. I was desperate. Jeremy didn't really believe my dad had sent me a message, and the only thing I cared about was finding another one. Jeremy stopped bringing the Missed Connections, and I started buying my own. It wasn't our ritual anymore. It was mine.

I spent every Friday looking for another ad. Once, I'd thought for sure I'd found him.

It's been nearly a year since my last ad. I'm in town and want to see you. Meet me at our old hangout next Saturday.

I'd gone to Belle Green Park just after sunup. Spent all day watching the parking lot and the trailheads, the neighborhood parents watching me suspiciously as they pushed their kids on the swings. These are the kids you should be making friends with, my dad had said when I'd asked him why we came to this park every Saturday instead of the one at the end of our street. Their parents looked at me now the same way they had looked at me then. Like I didn't belong there. They were right. At dusk, I walked home alone. And a week later, I found the response to the ad, confirming it wasn't him.

When I was younger, searching the Missed Connections had always been about finding my father. But now? Sometimes I'd see an ad that so perfectly expressed my own loneliness that I'd clip it out and save it. Study it, searching for whatever it was that made one ad yield a reaction, and another go unanswered. I wasn't exactly sure who, or what, I was looking for anymore, but sometimes it felt like I was looking for a missing piece of myself.

I read the clipping again and carefully folded it back into the bag, slipping it deep under my mattress. Then I flipped to the ad that had haunted me all day, the one that got me busted in chem lab.

Newton was wrong. We clash with yellow.

Find me tonight under the bleachers.

Nothing like the saccharine pleas I'd come to associate with Friday mornings, this ad left an acrid taste in my mouth. Something about it was just . . . wrong. Not dirty-pervert-at-the-busstation wrong. Not even unrequited-lovesick-nerd wrong. This was something different. Something I'd never seen in the Missed Connections before.

"Nearly!" My mother banged on my door and I jumped. I cursed under my breath and leaped to my feet.

"Nearly, open the door!"

I scrubbed my hands against my shorts, leaving trails of dark smudges.

Breathing deep, I flipped the lock and cracked the door, blocking the narrow opening. Mona stood in the hall holding an empty coffee mug and a full pack of menthols. A full pack meant she hadn't checked the cookie jar yet. My shoulders relaxed, but only by a fraction. My petty larceny of her tip jar was just a necessary reallocation of household funds-I needed my newspaper fix more than she needed to smoke. But even though my addiction wouldn't kill me, I still had no intention of getting caught.

She raised a thinly tweezed eyebrow. If I didn't look at her face, I could pretend her frayed robe concealed flannel pajamas with teddy bears and hearts. If I ignored the rhinestones glued to her eyes, she could be anyone's mother. But she wasn't anyone else's mother. She was mine.

Mona lit up and exhaled a long ribbon of smoke. "I'm going to work."

I paused, torn between slamming the door in her face and locking us both safe inside.

"Jeremy says we're late with the rent again."

She was slow to answer, and for a moment I worried there really might not be enough money this time. Jeremy had bought us a day with his dad's poker money, but I knew I had to pay him back. Where would we go if his parents evicted us? I looked at her, the what-ifs written all over my face. Her brows drew together, scrunching up the rhinestones and deepening the lines around her eyes.

"Jim hired a new girl and my shifts got cut back," she said. "I'll have the money tonight. You can take a check to school on Monday." Mona looked past me to the personal ads spread across my floor. Her laugh was derisive like she was coughing up bad memories. The same cutting laughter that made me want to keep the loneliest parts of myself hidden. I pulled the door tighter around me, blocking her view of my room.

"They're not worth it," she said. "I don't know what it is you think you'll find in those papers, but there's not a man in this world you can count on to fix your life."

I wanted to tell her the same thing. That the money they threw at her wasn't worth it. That taking her clothes off for strangers hadn't fixed anything. But we both knew this argument wasn't about just any man. It was about the one who'd left us overextended on credit, without money for bills. About how he was the reason their only car was repossessed and Mona would never be able to leave her job at Gentleman Jim's, the only job she could walk to that paid enough to hold on to the lease on our trailer.

We had the same argument every Friday-about how men can't be trusted and if you depend on them, you'll be left alone with more problems than you started with. It was the same argument that drove me to buy a train ticket to California two years ago, because I'd started to believe her. "Even if he did come back, it would only make things worse," she said.

"Look around, Mona. Could it really get any worse?"

She sucked in a thoughtful drag. "Be careful who you put your faith in," she said in the sultry deep rasp that sounded ancient and sad, but had everyone else fooled. "You're lucky. Born with a head full of brains. Don't make the same mistake I did." She pointed her cigarette at me. "Your education is the only thing you can count on to get you out of this trailer. If I'd spent more time on mine instead of chasing after a boy, neither of us would be here."

Lucky . . . she thought I was lucky. Of course she couldn't accept the possibility of my father's genetic contribution to my intelligence. He was dead to her. And some days, her grief and anger hurt me more than his absence.

Ash balanced precariously from the tip of her cigarette. She looked tired, and so much older than her thirty-five years. "A diploma. A college degree. That's the only thing that's going to get you out of here." She shook her head and exhaled a long smoky sigh, the ash falling to my floor.

I sighed and pointed at the sign I'd tacked to my door. "Do you mind? This is a non-smoking room."

Mona raised a brow, and amusement tugged at the corner of her mouth. Her smile was painted on and clung outside the natural line of her lip, making it look fuller than it was. But I knew better. Beneath the gloss, she had forgotten how to smile when my father left.

"Don't you ever wonder where he is?" I asked, tossing my own hope at her as though it were a life raft. "If maybe he's thinking of us?"

She leaned against the door. "He's never coming home, Nearly. That much I know." She stubbed out her cigarette in her empty mug, the life raft abandoned and drifting in the murky waters between us. "Get your studying done."

4.

I pushed open the door of my trailer, pausing to look up and down the street before dragging the full trash bag onto the front porch and down the rickety wooden steps. Sunny View Mobile Home Village was shaped like a fish. Or at least the decaying remains of one. Run-down trailers lay in parallel rows alongside short alleys protruding like ribs off Sunny View Drive. The crooked backbone of my neighborhood began as a dead-end street, a rutted narrow blacktop that hadn't been tar-coated since the 1960s. Almost as old was the playground, a skeletal collection of rusted metal wrapped in remnants of yellow police tape where the fish's tail would have been. On the other end, Sunny View Drive spit into an intersection of a sixlane highway, and beyond that, the parking lot of a run-down strip mall: Anh's parents' store, a coin Laundromat, Ink & Angst Tattoos, Gentleman Jim's, and a video store that would have been obsolete had it not been for the red curtain room at the back. A half-dozen small businesses feeding the addictions of the chewed-up residents of Sunny View.

Our trailer sat on a corner lot, right in the middle of Sunny View Drive. The trailers across the alley were staggered, set back from the street, and from my front porch, I could see all the way to the traffic light at Route 1. Mona had almost reached the end of the street, the sashes of her long coat dangling beside her heels. I slung the trash bag a little too hard and the dented metal cans rattled together before toppling over. The echo bounced off wall after wall of rusting aluminum. My neighbor's window blinds were drawn shut, her cautious hands prying them back to check the noise.

Mona turned her head, wary eyes checking over her shoulder, heels purposeful over the ruts and loose gravel. I watched until she reached the brighter streetlights at the intersection.

She'd worked nights at Gentleman Jim's as long as I could remember. When I was younger, I'd slept on Jim's couch in the back while she waited tables. Now Jim's phone number was on a yellow sticky note, taped to the phone in the kitchen. I'd called her once when we'd run out of peanut butter for sandwiches. Jim said he'd leave a note in her dressing room, that she was on stage-not waiting tables-and he'd have her call me back between sets. He never gave her the message. And I never called again.

A car turned onto Sunny View Drive, the blue-white halogen beams blinding me. I shielded my eyes until the lights swung back onto the road, and when I looked up, Mona was gone. The car continued its approach, a lean black oldermodel Mercedes with diplomatic tags that was obviously lost. It drifted down the street, and I waited for it to make a clumsy three-point turn in the alley beside our trailer. It didn't. I stared at the driver's window, surprised to see Oleksa Petrenko slouched coolly behind the wheel. Our eyes met for a brief second as the Mercedes ghosted by, barely crunching the gravel as it eased into a parking space a few doors down beside Lonny Johnson's Lexus.

Lonny was a second-year senior, not that he cared. He was a businessman, not a student, home again after consecutive stints in juvie. He'd been gone longer than usual this time and when we passed each other at the mailbox earlier that week, he was taller. Thinner. Eyes deep set and dark. He had new tattoos that climbed up his neck and met the shadow of a beard that hadn't been there before. A silver bullring hung beneath his nostrils. It matched the barbell under his lip.

A screen door slammed and a security bulb snapped on, illuminating him in a wide halo.