This, in our house, was the final word on Alison. She was killed. Passive voice. As if Alison were the recipient of a fate inflicted by nobody.

THAT SUMMER, my parents sold our house and we moved across the country to Pasadena. I was angry at my parents about our move. I thought they wanted to forget Alison. I see now that we didn’t have much of a choice. The victims of tragedies almost always depart, sooner or later. Everybody in our small suburb knew what had happened to us. Cody Lundgren’s mother had made me sad and uncomfortable when I saw her at the grocery store, and now we did this to other people wherever we went. To stay would have been, frankly, inconsiderate. (The Lundgrens had decamped for Philadelphia not long after Cody’s death.)

In New York, we had lived in a large white center-hall Colonial. There had been five bedrooms, a swimming pool out back; Alison and I each had our own bathroom. Everyone I knew lived this way, and I was young enough not to understand that most people didn’t. But we lived differently in Pasadena. We moved into a small sage-colored bungalow in the hills. My mother hung wind chimes along the eaves. In New York we’d had a sprawling acre of lawn; here there was a tiny jewel-box garden. Our home in Pasadena was not inexpensive by any means, and we still lived in the sort of neighborhood that would be described as “prestigious” in a real estate listing. But the little bungalow was decidedly, intentionally, modest. If I found myself in the car with my mother, driving past some newfangled McMansion or an ersatz Spanish revival estate in Oak Knoll, she would scoff and say, “So tacky,” and I understood she meant much more—that the people who lived there were drawing the universe’s eye, leaving their good fortune out in the open, when they ought to be secreting it away.

The night before the first day of third grade, I told my parents that at my new school I wanted to go by my middle name. I could feel them exchanging meaningful looks over my head.

“Try it out,” my father said. “You can always go back to Claire if you change your mind.”

I never did. From that day on, I was Emily.

EVERYTHING CHANGED for me in Pasadena. I’d always been a reticent, prickly child, more comfortable in the company of my family than with my peers. I had struggled to make friends and accustomed myself to spending time alone. But in Pasadena I was new and therefore presumed interesting. Soon I was playing school and orphans in the purple enclaves of other girls’ bedrooms. To my surprise, I found myself sharing with these girls the intimacy of friendship. We confessed our secrets; stuck out our tongues and touched the tips together, giggling at the contact of wriggling, tasteless muscle; carved sacred spaces in the putty of our suburban world—forts and clubhouses, hideaways in the rhododendrons. The compulsions that had plagued me for so long faded away, evaporating in the dry air of my new life. For a very long time, until the winter of my twenty-fifth year, which would find me in New York City, where events would transpire that would change everything for me again, and irrevocably, I didn’t think of them at all.

AT SOME point, my father must have taken the rolls of film from our vacation to be developed, because a few months after our move to Pasadena I found the photographs in his home office, in the back of his desk drawer. Every so often I would sneak into his office and take the photos out. My father had them printed in triplicate. I did not skip through the copies. I looked at each one with the same disbelief. How could it have been real? In one picture, Alison and I were building our sandcastle. In another, the two of us smiled for my father as the woman under the faded blue umbrella braided my hair. There was a series of pictures of Alison posing beside a palm tree. On the back of one of these pictures, in my father’s tidy all-caps penmanship: MY ALI. There were pictures of Alison and my mother walking on the beach, and of me examining a seashell with a look of wonder … swims and games and boat rides and half a dozen incomparably gorgeous sunsets. At first, I went to the photographs when I missed my sister. As time passed, I went to them when I had not missed her in a while and wanted to.

THE ELEVEN-YEAR gap between Alison and me is notable, and requires some explanation. I was not an accident, nor had my parents been trying for years to conceive again. I know because when I was in fifth grade I asked my mother why my sister and I had been so far apart in age, unlike my friends and their siblings. She told me that at first she and my father thought they only wanted one child. But then they realized how much they loved being parents and decided to have me. Those were her exact words: “We decided to have you.” As if they had known, when they chose to have another child, that the child would be me.

When she told me this I felt sick to my stomach. I remembered something my father had said to the chief of police, when he was asked if my sister had appeared troubled in the days leading up to her death: “Alison is the very definition of a kid you don’t have to worry about.” His words had stayed with me, surfacing from time to time like a nagging ache. Because to say such a thing, you had to know what it was like to have a kid you did have to worry about. In my mother’s words, I sensed her betraying insistence that it was exactly me they’d wanted. I don’t mean they didn’t love me; they did, everyone loves their children. But they loved me differently than they loved Alison. I don’t think my parents understood their own desires when they decided to have another child. They thought they wanted to raise another kid. Really, they wanted to raise Alison again.

AS THE years passed, my mother and father continued to fulfill their parental duties. They signed me up for AYSO and pottery and displayed my endless output of pinch pots on the living room shelves. We went on trips to Yellowstone, London, Washington, D.C. They helped me with long division and took away my television privileges when I sassed. In summary, they behaved. Always fair, always reasonable. Wonderful parents, in a way. We lived on the surface, skated figure eights over a frozen sea.

WHEN I was ten, a women’s television network of the feuding pageant queens and psychopathic stepmothers variety premiered Dying for Fun, an eight-part true crime series about young women whose hedonistic pursuits—wild parties, gap years, vacations—had gone horribly awry. Each episode was a dramatic reenactment of one woman’s story. At the time, I knew only that something was being made about my sister and that my parents were upset about it, though their lawyer had told them there was nothing they could do.

The night Dying for Fun: Alison Thomas premiered, my parents took me to a Dodgers game. We ate hot dogs slathered in ketchup and mustard. We stood and cheered when Mike Piazza hit a home run. We sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” too loudly, laughed for too long, and generally tried not to think about the fact that in millions of homes across America, people were sitting on couches and tossing cheese puffs into their mouths as they watched a person who was not my sister die some version of my sister’s death.