Page 47 of Did You See Evie

“I don’t know him,” she says, sitting back, resting her hand on her forehead. “I know Crystal. She dated my brother years ago.”

Nadia had three older brothers, but I hardly remember them. Whenever we’d hang out with each other, we were trying to avoid our families, and her brothers had no interest in hanging around their kid sister. As we got older, her siblings were in and out of trouble, like us, but it always seemed more severe. I know one was sent away to a juvenile detention center. I’d never stopped to think about where they’d be now, as adults.

“If they used to date, why were you at her house last week?” I ask. “And why doesn’t she want you there now?”

Nadia exhales, fiddling with the hem of her jacket.

“I just now got on good terms with my brother again. He’d been in prison for a while, but now that he’s out, we’re trying to rekindle a relationship. Make things right.” She pauses, as though she doesn’t want to continue. “Turns out I’d missed out on a lot in the years we were estranged. I never even knew he and Crystal had a child together.”

That last sentence shakes me to my core. I struggle to keep control of the wheel as the sheer enormity of the information crashes into me.

“Your brother is Evie’s father?”

She looks at me and nods. “Evie is my niece.”

I’m tempted to pull the car over, just to get my mind right. When Nadia came back into my life, I was convinced she only needed help with the burglary. Now, I’m questioning her other motives. Did she know Evie was her niece this entire time, and that she was on my basketball team?

“You’ve been lying to me from the beginning,” I say. “You were using me to get closer to Evie.”

“I swear that’s not what happened,” she says. “I know how bad everything looks. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you the truth. If you knew that Evie was my niece, you’d think I was involved.”

“Her mother must think that, too,” I say. “That’s why she doesn’t want you around.”

“She doesn’t want me around because my brother has been a deadbeat dad for the past decade,” she says. “When I approached Crystal and told her who I was, she told me she didn’t want me anywhere near Evie. She didn’t want us to have a relationship.”

As reluctant as I am to admit it, I agree with her. Crystal isn’t the best role model, and appears to be a neglectful parent, but she has every reason to be cautious of Nadia, or anyone else, entering her daughter’s life. Then I think of Josh, the new boyfriend. Clearly, she isn’t putting up the same safeguards when it comes to him.

I look ahead at the road. “How did you and Josh start fighting?”

“Josh was sitting on the porch with those other guys. They must have spotted us pull up. After about ten minutes, he came over to the car and started asking questions. You saw how aggressive he was.”

“You weren’t really trying your best to de-escalate the situation.”

“I hadn’t done anything wrong,” she says. “He had no business talking to me like that.”

Nadia has always been a loose cannon. In school, it was something I was grateful for. Never again did I have to worry about people messing with me on the school bus or bullying me in between classes. Nadia soon earned a reputation as my crazy best friend, and no one wanted to get in the middle of that.

Her chaos rubbed off on me, too. I used to watch Nadia fight with people and it was exhilarating. The way no man or woman could intimidate her. I wanted to bottle that same confidence for myself.

My attitude was one of the first things Coach Phillips wanted to tackle after I started living with him. He noticed how the smallest thing—a car cutting us off, a teammate refusing to pass me the ball when I was wide open—made me angry. I was always on the hunt for retaliation, ready for an excuse to express my stifled emotions.

“You get more flies with honey,” he told me, after a heated disagreement with one of the other girls on the team.

“She was in the wrong,” I whined back to him.

“She was,” he said to me. “But you aren’t able to get your point across when you’re yelling at someone. You have to lower your voice. Whisper if you have to. Make them hear you.”

In college, I took Psych 101 and learned as much. When people grow up in a household surrounded by yelling, they’re ready to fight back. Raised voices and slurs and threats. If someone is shouting at you, and you respond with a soft voice, it catches them off guard. They don’t know how to react, and they almost have no choice but to listen. De-escalate. I remember my classmates, most of whom I’m guessing grew up in households where there wasn’t much yelling, were surprised by this tactic.

I’d already learned it from Coach Phillips.

“Fighting isn’t going to get us any closer to figuring out what happened to Evie,” I say. “And neither will keeping secrets.”

“I wasn’t trying to keep secrets,” she says. “Since I’ve been back, everything happened so fast. I only learned I had a niece a few weeks ago. I’d hoped Crystal would be open to the two of us having a relationship, but she shot that down without even giving me a chance. I was afraid if I told you I was related to Evie, you’d do the same thing. You wouldn’t trust me.”

“Have you met Evie?”

“No. I saw her walking home from practice one day, but that was it. I wasn’t going to approach her without talking to Crystal first, and since that conversation went south, I figured I lost my chance.” She pauses. “Then you told me she was missing. I don’t even know how to feel.”

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