Three o’clock now and your father’s out on the back porch trying to repair the ceiling fan.

He won’t say it, but I can tell he’s beginning to get worried. He drove around the city for two hours hunting for you. I suspect that was what finally got to him. “She could be anywhere,” he said, throwing the keys down on the counter when he came in. He pulled out your school directory, thinking we might go down the list of your classmates and phone their parents. But with two thousand students we hardly knew where to begin—really, you could be with any of them, or none of them. We gave up after the twelfth call. Then your father thought to phone the school counselor, in case she had some clue as to where you might be, but she wasn’t in her office, it being Saturday, and her home phone is unlisted. So after all this, he’s on the back porch, taking apart the ceiling fan. I hear him cursing and rattling metal. He’ll probably break something soon.

It’s been almost fifteen hours, Liz. Fifteen. Do you know how hard this is on your parents? Can you imagine how this makes us feel? Do you even think of us at all?

Missy’s parents, you like to say, let her do anything she wants. Missy’s parents let her go out with boys twice her age. Missy’s parents let her take vacations with friends to Cancún. Missy’s parents let her spend Christmas with her uncle in Aspen. Missy’s parents, I would say, are shitty parents. Pardon me, but it’s a parent’s job, like it or not, to set some boundaries. You’re still our daughter, and I honestly feel that we would be failing in our responsibility to you if we let you go off and do whatever you want.

Do I sound like my mother now? Fine. I don’t care. Fear and worry, I’m beginning to learn, can turn even the most open-minded person into a raving conservative. I’m ready to send you to your room and lock the door for the rest of your teenage life. You think it’s hard being a fifteen-year-old? Just wait until you’re the mother of a fifteen-year-old. Honestly, I don’t know whether I’ll shout at you or hug you when you get back. Probably both.

Okay, I’m going to stop ranting now and make carrot cake. I know it’s your favorite, or at least used to be. I’ve got the TV on in the next room so I can listen to it while I bake. No special bulletins about runaway teenage girls yet. Just the usual dismal reports from Iraq—boys with guns, women in black head coverings crying and shaking their fists at the air.

Those poor women, losing their homes and husbands, their sons and daughters. Mothers all over the world must look at those women and say: I pray to God I’ll never have to know that kind of pain.