The alarm on her cell phone was screaming from the cupboard in the hall. I hadn't raised my blood caffeine levels yet so my brain was still in sleep mode. I pounded on her door fiver six times before I realized where the cacophony resided. The phone was broken. She'd put it in her back pocket and sat on it. It was essentially fine; however, the miniscule display screen had shattered. It now resembled a psychiatrist’s ink blot on acid, making it impossible to disable the screaming alarm. I turned the phone off and chucked it back into the cupboard. We'd swapped out phones the morning before. My husband had insisted that I get a PDA and I'd given her my old phone so she could text her friends again and save our cell phone bill. The phone in the cupboard was just a spare. I made a mental note to finish transferring the contacts from my old phone when Olivia woke up. Jeebus only knows who she was talking to this week. I tried to keep all of her current "BFF's" numbers in my phone but the list was ever changing. It had gotten to the point that I had twice as many of Olivia's contacts as I did my own. I headed into the bathroom to hunt for a ponytail holder. My searched took me to her "makeup drawer". I dug through the hairpins, assorted neon eye shadows and discarded eyeliner pencil nubs. Buried deep in the aesthetic wreckage I found the nearly empty, broken and quite sticky remains of the raspberry espresso lip gloss that had disappeared from the makeup bag in my car, one day after its purchase. My jaw clenched. I'd found my only tube of mascara hiding in the back of the drawer the prior morning. This had to stop. She had been wandering out to my car, where I normally do my makeup and kifing whatever caught her eye, in addition to whatever she was originally looking for. I stormed back into the hall and began an enthusiastic battery of her bedroom door. The sharp edge of the sticky container dug into my palm with every blow. Silence. I tried the knob. It resisted. I pressed my ear to the cold plywood and heard only the hollow space in between the thin layers of pressed wood pulp. I twisted the knob until I felt it give. The lock had broken during a raucous teenage giggle chase between the kids some months ago. I pushed the door through the pile of junk that had accumulated behind it. I nudged my way into the room. Week’s worth of discarded cereal bowls and fruit rinds snuggled between the piles of papers, books and discarded clothing. Grounding her had had no effect on the state of her room. The TV would be the next thing to go. It had become a health hazard. The couch she had insisted we let her sleep on was empty. The exasperated sigh slowly curled from my mouth and formed a puffy cloud of condensation in front of my face. She'd left the window open. She must have gone to the guest house in the backyard to see my nephew. He shares 900 square feet with my sister. I heard something pop under foot. Why was it so difficult to keep things clean? There was light at the end of the tunnel. Five or six years and it would just be me and T sitting around lookin' ugly at each other. No kid messes anywhere. I navigated my way to the window on a sea of junk. Fuck, my gas bill was going to be monster. The swish and slam of the window closing jarred the thoughts train free from the tracks of my brain. As I set foot on the hallowed, debris free hallway floor, the realization dawned that sent the train over the cliffside. If the door was locked and she was not in the room, the only way out was the window. No, the cool voice of reason interrupted, she must have been talking to him out the window and in her excitement to see whatever new video he'd made for YouTube, she simply left the window open and shut the door on her way out. Occam's Razor prevails. The simplest explanation is the most likely. "Why did you touch the window!" one might scream at their HD plasma TV while watching any of the pantheon of criminal forensics shows, all comfy and warm in your big chair, snacks and remote within easy reach. People entirely take for granted how much information that each and every one of us takes in and discards every day. Additionally, the brain will try to find order and sense in anything. During those first moments of the day that would shake the perceptions of everyone involved, my sleep and caffeine deprived brain had not creaked to life yet. In fact, I don't feel like I ever woke up at all. There wasn't the hint of a wisp of the thought that Liv was anywhere other than the house or the backyard. I was operating completely in the default programming. Olivia wasn't allowed to wander freely. All of her friends were in school and her shoes were downstairs on the couch. Who in their right mind would immediately make the jump to the best ideas for preserving a crime scene? Trying to retrace the thought processes behind every action you unconsciously took, while the thought that your child is missing is slowly chewing through every neural pathway in the fist full of grey matter tucked upstairs. I bumbled around the house making a feeble attempt at getting dressed before I called Mimi for our daily coffee run to 7-11. Not considering for one moment, that every reported thought, decision and resulting action that I took would be dissected analyzed and often criticized by the hoards of detectives that in one short hour, would descend upon my house and car, amplifying the smallest action and assigning importance that would not exist otherwise. I stopped myself before I let my mind wander down the dark and twisted path of my mind. The path littered with pieces of my baby girl's violated preteen body. No, I would call Mimi and if she wasn't there, I would drive to the church and library. She wasn't allowed to walk the six blocks to the mall and she was fully aware that she was grounded. She had to be at Mimi’s.