(published 13 February 2026)
It was January 10th the first time we saw them. Those billboards had stood by the side of the highway for nearly two decades, marking the halfway point of our drive home from school. Hell, we hardly noticed them anymore. But on Wednesday, January 10th, my own sister’s face stared down at us from those billboards, grinning through the rain under a bright red word in all caps: MISSING.
My sister sat right beside me in the passenger seat.
“Wait, Jessa, did you just fucking see that?” she exclaimed, whipping her head towards me. “Was that me?”
It’s funny, the things your brain will deny. How many days of my life had I looked right into that same face? Almost all of them.
“No. No, it can’t be,” I said, shaking my head.
But then we saw the second one. That same toothy grin smiling down on us.
MISSING.
“Oh my god, what the fuck? Hang on, wait,” I said, pulling off on the shoulder a little too quickly, slamming my flashers on.
“Jesus Jessa, don’t kill us.”
Our eyes fixed on the second billboard. Beside the picture was her name. Underneath that, stats about her. Correct stats. 5’1 dark hair, brown eyes, 110lbs.
“One ten?” she said, offended.
“Fuck off, Mia.” I rolled my eyes. “I haven’t been one ten since, like, sixth grade.”
She got out of the car and snapped a picture of the billboard, rain be damned. I jumped out and followed her, pulling my coat around me tighter. I’m not sure what we were hoping to find by walking closer. There was nothing at the base but the gravel Mia’s combat boots crunched through. Nothing on the other side. We backtracked along the side of the highway, rain cutting through our Goodwill coats, to inspect the other one. It was identical in every way. The rain slowed to a fine mist, but we were soaked and shivering.
“What are we supposed to do? What does this even mean?” she said, putting her hands on her head. She suddenly looked very young to me. Short, but somehow all legs, braces we can barely afford stretching across her grimace. She simply cannot be fifteen.
“I’m calling Mom,” I told her.
Our mother was incredulous at first, because of course she is, who wouldn’t be? We sent her the picture, and it’s like I can feel her blood freeze through the phone.
“Go straight home and lock the door,” she ordered. “I’m coming home early.”
We drove home in total, frigid silence.
When we pulled into our drive way, we count down from three, and dart into the house as fast as possible. While we do technically live in a neighborhood, the houses are spread out and surrounded by woods. Anyone could be in those trees. I walked from room to room, throwing open closets. What I looked for, I do not know.
Our mom gets home ten minutes later. She works as a teller at a bank in town. Her boss is kind of a dick, so she must have been genuinely scared if he let her go.
“Come here,” she said to Mia, scooping her up in an embrace. Mia started to cry. Don’t be a baby I thought, then caught myself.
Mia is two years younger than me, a freshman in high school. Petite and whiny, she isn’t just a baby, she’s the baby.
I don’t mean it to be bitter, it’s just true. She’s a lot of things. Funny, dramatic, loyal, good at making up little dances, decent at soccer, great taste in music, horrible taste in boys. My bratty, beautiful little sister.
Who was not missing.
Who was right there, where she belonged.
“I’m calling the police,” my mother asserted. She pulled out her phone, then paused. “There’s nothing you need to tell me, right girls?” She asked, her eyebrows raising.
“Like what?” Mia cried out. “Oh yeah, sorry I forgot to mention, I saved up my Christmas money for a few years to buy a billboard ad and prank you guys in the scariest way possible.”
I snickered at that in spite of it all. Once, when she was around ten, Mia fell from the swings and cracked her head clean open. She walked in the house, blood streaming down her face, and said, “I wanted to see what Jessa went through when you dropped her on her head as a baby, but it got out if hand.”
A little blood never stops a true smart ass.
“I don’t know Mia, this has never happened to me before!” our mother exclaimed. “Do we call the emergency or non emergency number?”
Already tired of pacing, I sank into our ancient, overstuffed sofa.
“I guess like, we aren’t technically in danger,” I added lamely. “Are we?”
The police didn’t have a lot to say to us. They suggested we contact an attorney.
“I don’t understand how this isn’t a crime,” Mom protested. “She’s a minor. They don’t have permission to use her photos.”
They said they will look into who purchased the billboard usage and get back to us. They also let us know that the number posted on the billboard to call is not actually connected to the police department in any way.
“Have you tried calling it?” they asked.
“Well, that’s what we thought we were doing now,” my mother said.
I pulled out my phone and dialled.
“The number you have dialed is not in service.” The Tonotone voice filled my stomach with a strange dread.
The police took all the details to make a report, and then we got off the phone. Silence hung heavy in the living room. I glanced at the endless amount of crosses my mom has above the couch. Heaven help us, I guess.
I threw myself into internet research, trying to see if I can find who owns the billboards. But there was no ad company name on them to call. They’ve been there for a long time, as long as we’ve lived here, so surely someone must know. We post across town social media pages, we call local ad agencies.
No one has answers.
We call my father, who drives a semi and isn’t slotted to return for another week. He insists on coming home right away, but my mother points out we need the money from the job. The only concrete information we’ve gotten so far is that legal fees are expensive.
The next day, Mia’s face still loomed above us. She covered her eyes as we drove by it. She didn’t want to go to school, and I couldn’t blame her, but Mom thought she’d be safer there, surrounded by people.
I wasn’t so sure.
“Why?” is the word that has left Mia’s mouth, all our mouths, thousands of times over the course of twenty-four hours.
It’s not cheap to rent a billboard, let alone two.
My family doesn’t have enemies. Mia is biologically ours. She’s never lived anywhere else but with us. We take down her social media and we all sleep in my mother’s bed.
The next few days, nothing has changed. This is torture in itself. It feels like something more should happen. Our neighbors phone us, concerned. Her friends swap theories but quickly run out of things to say. What else can be said?
Hours drip by like an incessant, slow leak. They pool at my feet, turning into days, the water rising. A few lawyers get back to us, but they say it’s such an unusual situation they aren’t sure what can be done. Especially if we have no idea who’s behind it.
A week passes. Mia starts soccer practice for the spring season. It’s a welcome distraction. Her face still greets us every day from above.
“I’m being haunted by myself,” she mutters.
The assumption living in my mind, based on nothing, is that this won’t go on forever. It can’t, right? Will we see it coming home from college? Will she have to explain this anomaly to future visiting friends? Boyfriends she brings home to meet our parents?
No. Surely not. Her face remains smiling in the cold.
“By spring at the very latest, we’ll have answers,” I tell myself.
We almost start to find it funny, having run out of other things to feel about it.
“Watch this be the start of my modeling career,” Mia says, flipping her hair. “Who else can say they were on billboards by fifteen?”
Another week and a half later, when my mind is still set on this ending any day now, the flyers start.
They’re posted everywhere.
Thousands of them, all over town.
MISSING: MIA JOHNSON
The same stats as the billboard. The same smiling picture.
“Is there something about me you never told me?” Mia desperately pleads to my parents. “Am I adopted? Is my birth mother looking for me?” She collapses on the ground in tears.
“Am I even fucking real? Am I even really here?”
We tell her over and over:
You’re real.
You’re here.
You’re our flesh and blood.
We have mountains of proof. Birth certificates, photos, baby teeth. You’re not missing, Mia. You’re with us.
But she’s becoming more and more sullen by the day, as if each new flyer we see drains a little more life force, like an opposite of Dorian Gray. Her friends have started to avoid her. The town thinks we are the ones doing it. To what end, I’m not sure.
She skips dinner. She doesn’t talk. It’s no longer funny.
“What does it even mean to be missing?” she says. “Maybe I should be.”
“Don’t say that. You aren’t missing to me,” I say.
On Friday, three weeks and two days since this all started, Mia’s friend Stephanie is supposed to drop her home from soccer practice at six. But six slinks by like an alley cat, and no Mia. She doesn’t respond to my text, nor my phone calls. As it turns over to seven, I give Stephanie a call.
“She told me she didn’t feel good, so she wasn’t going to practice today,” Stephanie says. “I thought she went home with you?”
Ice shoots up my spine.
“No, she didn’t tell me that. She wasn’t at practice. She’s not answering my texts.”
“She’s gotta just be, with like, a friend or something. Maybe Ashley.”
I call Ashley. I call Lola. I call our neighbors.
No one has heard from Mia.
Our parents are starting to panic. My father and I climb in his pickup, racing to the school. I don’t know why she would not go to practice but stick around campus, but where else would we go? The flickering streetlights spark a fear in me deeper than I knew possible. It’s so cold out.
We find nothing at the school. No one has seen. I call out her name in the woods behind the buildings. Just in case. My father drops me home, defeated, but continues to drive around town.
At ten, my mother calls the police.
“I thought you told us she wasn’t missing. Now you’re saying she is?” they say.
“That’s just it, we’re worried it has something to do with the posters,” my mother pleads. “Whoever is doing this to us. What if they’ve taken her for real?”
“Usually, these teenagers pop back up in a few hours or the next day. She have a boyfriend?”
“No!” my mother insists.
“Not that you’re aware of at least.”
“Mia didn’t run away. She’s not that kind of girl,” she pleads.
“That’s usually what parents say.”
So that’s what we get. People who don’t know Mia insisting we don’t know her, and no real help in finding her.
That night is sleepless. My father drives till dawn. I stay up staring at my phone, calling Mia’s every five minutes. Just in case someone, hopefully her, was able to get somewhere to charge it.
Time warps in a crisis like this. Each hour distorted as if reflected in fun house mirrors. Stretched and then compressed. Multiplied and duplicated, until you can’t tell which way is forward.
At six am, I fall asleep without realizing I did until my school alarm wakes me back up at seven. I always thought I couldn’t hate that noise more, but turns out I can.
My mother and I go to the school together. With the help of the principal and the janitor, we get her locker open.
It’s completely empty.
The books, binders, little pink magnets holding up pictures of her friends, all gone. We talk to her teachers, her friends, and an announcement is made over the intercom.
Nothing.
Twenty-four hours slip by with nothing.
Finally, the police step up.
Searches are organized. Neighbors dispatched.
I watch my sister’s face on the news now.
How many days of my life have I spent looking at that face?
Almost all of them.
We see her walking out the back door of the school, a way she doesn’t normally go, on CCTV footage from the school’s cameras. At 5pm, when no one is around. What was she doing from 3:30 till then? That no one seemed to see?
Time, no longer warped, is now in a dead sprint forward. Every blinding second taking us further away from her. Every day nothing, nothing, nothing.
It doesn’t take long for more rumors to start.
Her family planned this.
It’s an elaborate hoax.
It’s a mental illness.
I don’t trust the parents, something is off there.
The dad’s a trucker? Suspicious.
She was trafficked. The missing poster was an ad.
She was into the occult.
She’s definitely dead.
Every one, a new knife in my stomach. I think things can’t get worse. Then, about a month and a half since this started, I am driving home from school when a new face greets me from the MISSING billboards.
Another highly familiar one.
Another round of accurate stats.
Another name I know.
Another toothy grin, bearing down the side of the highway, white like the February snow.
My own.
Editor’s Note
I love how this tale ends – it doesn’t feed us anything by way of answers, which, to me, is why it resonates so much. That, and the characters are all lovable and believable, something that is tough to do in such a short space.
I peppered Nina with questions about the tale and how they came up with it, which you can read here.