What Everyone Said About Petra

The posters went up on a Monday.

Zara saw the first one on the lamppost outside the newsagent on her way to school. A blurry photograph, taken from a distance, of a girl standing on the roof of the old waterworks building with her arms raised and dark clouds churning above her like something out of a film. Below the photograph in large red letters it said: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? And below that, in smaller letters: RESPONSIBLE FOR THE FLOODING OF MILLFIELD PARK AND THREE SURROUNDING STREETS.

Zara's stomach dropped straight through the pavement. She read the poster again. Then a third time, as if it might say something different. It did not.

She pulled her hood up and walked faster, her eyes forward, not looking at the people passing who might also have seen the poster and might be looking at her and thinking about the girl in the photograph and working out the three streets between them.

By the time she reached school there were two more posters on the route and her phone had seventeen notifications from the local community group her mum was in, all of them about the Millfield flooding and the girl on the roof and what somebody ought to do about it.

She found her brother Kofi at their usual spot by the science block gates. He was already looking at his phone with an expression she recognised, the one where his forehead went smooth and still because he was concentrating too hard to let any other expression through.

"Have you seen them?" she said.

"I have seen them," he said, not looking up.

"The photo is blurry. You cannot tell it is her."

"I can tell it is her," Kofi said quietly. "And you can tell it is her. And anyone who knows her can tell it is her." He finally put his phone in his pocket and looked at Zara. "We need to find Petra."

"She will not want to be found," Zara said. "That is the whole problem."

"I know," Kofi said. "We need to find her anyway."

Petra was not their sister, not by blood, but she had lived three doors down since they were all small and their mothers had been friends and the three of them had grown up in and out of each other's houses the way kids do in streets where everyone knows everyone. She was thirteen, one year older than Zara and two older than Kofi, and she had always been the quietest of the three of them, the one who noticed things and said little and felt everything more than she let on.

The weather power had arrived six weeks ago. A storm that came from nowhere on a clear afternoon, following Petra down the high street, lightning hitting the pavement ten feet behind her as she ran. She had told Zara about it that night, sitting on Zara's bed, her hands shaking slightly, her voice very controlled.

"I did not do it on purpose," she had said. "I was upset about something and the sky just." She had made a gesture with her hands that meant everything happened at once.

"What were you upset about?" Zara had asked.

"It does not matter," Petra had said, which meant it mattered very much.

Since then the weather had followed Petra's moods like a shadow she could not shake. Sunny days when she was calm. Sudden squalls when something caught her off guard. And three days ago, when something had happened that she still had not told Zara about, a downpour so heavy and so concentrated that it had flooded the park and three streets and sent everyone in Millfield looking for an explanation.

The explanation was standing on the roof of the waterworks trying to pull the storm back in, which was what the blurry photograph had captured, and which nobody looking at the poster understood at all.