Well, no time like the present. Her dad was at work; Miranda’s school didn’t have a half day; Portia was probably down in the basement cooking her brains out, or whatever she did in her spare time. Even if Ariel couldn’t make it to the City Clerk’s, she had time for a house search.

She bolted up the steps to the top floor that her dad used more for storage than for anything else. There were cedar closets and cabinets filled with drawers that lined the walls. There was a TV and a sound system in there, not set up, sort of like extra. And her old bike was there, too.

She ignored the stairs that continued on to the roof and started going through every nook and cranny. Surely there had to be more stuff about her family. A wedding date. Birthdays.

Looking in drawer after drawer at all the stuff the movers had unpacked and put away, Ariel found nothing. She grew more frantic with each cabinet she finished.

She had nearly given up when she found a box marked MIRANDA in the back of a closet. Not exactly what she was looking for, but she’d take what she could get.

Inside was a baby book. Date of birth. Footprints. A hospital bracelet. A photo. Miranda’s first curl. First tooth. But then the book went blank. It was as if their mom had gotten tired of documenting her first child’s existence.

No matter how much she dug, Ariel couldn’t find a corresponding book for herself.

“Figures,” she muttered to the empty room. Maybe she’d always been a little bit invisible.

When she’d searched every corner, Ariel stopped and looked around the room, mystified. She knew that the only stuff her dad had brought with them from the old house was important stuff like papers and files. But even with that, it was like her mom had disappeared, too. Her mom, her parents’ marriage. Her stomach churned.

Returning to the kitchen, she realized what she had to do. It was already after one, but if she took a cab, she could be down at the records office, get her parents’ wedding record, and hightail it home before her dad even thought about leaving his office.

Yanking on a light jacket, counting out a wad of ones and fives, and even a ten-dollar bill, Ariel flew out the front door. A cab was driving by, and she waved her arm.

When she barreled inside, the cabbie barely glanced at her.

“The City Clerk’s office,” she said in a tone of voice that meant business.

He craned his neck. “Where?” His accent was thick, and he looked like he ate little girls for breakfast.

“One forty-one Worth Street. It’s downtown.”

“I know where Worth Street is.”

“Okay then, good.”

He snorted, turned, and threw the car into gear. They were off.

Panic set in as soon as they turned left onto Columbus Avenue. “Be brave, be brave, be brave,” Ariel whispered to herself.

She hadn’t given much thought to the fact that she was going to be in a car. The kind of car that wrecked. Just like when she was with her mom. She had barely been in a car since.

Ariel reached up, wrapped herself securely in the seat belt, and prayed.

The cabbie careened through traffic, clutching the steering wheel with both hands and talking the whole time into his cell phone headset. She couldn’t understand a word. There was a ton of traffic, but that didn’t faze him.

Ariel closed her eyes, concentrating. “If you take one yellow cab,” she whispered to herself, “moving at one hundred miles per hour for five-second intervals, how long will it take the cab to go three miles?”

But word problems didn’t calm her.

“You say something?” the cabbie called back to her, their eyes meeting in the rearview mirror.

“No. Not a word. No reason to look back here. Best to look up ahead.” Where the traffic and cars are, Ariel added to herself.

They took rights, then lefts, and swooped under a bridge. By the time they arrived in front of a building made of huge rectangular bricks, Ariel’s legs were rubbery. On the backside of a heinous cab ride, she wasn’t sure she was up to the task of sleuthing out any information.

But which was worse? Stay in the cab and ask to be taken home, or get her sea legs back and continue her mission? The decision was made for her when the driver barked out the fare.

“Eighteen?” Ariel squeaked. “You mean eighteen dollars?”

He jerked around, eyes murderous. “Eighteen! If you don’t have money, you should no get in my cab!”

“Oh, no, it’s fine. I have the money.”

Keeping her hands from shaking by sheer force of will, Ariel counted out eighteen dollars. She knew she was supposed to tip, so she added some more. The cabbie grabbed it, waved her out of his car, and raced off, leaving her standing on the curb with only three dollars.

As much as she couldn’t imagine getting back in a cab, the thought of taking the subway home paralyzed her. She didn’t have a clue how to take the train home from downtown.

She started to panic.

“Buck up, Ariel,” she chided herself. “It’s a subway. You take it on the Upper West Side all the time.”

She turned to face the imposing heights of the City Clerk’s office. “You are fine,” she whispered to herself.

Inside she was confronted by intense security. She made it through, though not without a few raised eyebrows, and stopped at the information desk. “I’m here for the records department.”

A gruff woman with steel-gray hair looked down at her. “What kind of records?”

“Marriage.”

“You seem kinda young to be getting married.”

A man behind the desk glanced up from whatever he was doing and chuckled. “A mite young, indeed.”

Great. A couple of jokesters. “I’m doing a report for school.” Ariel tried to look young and smart and like she had a really good reason for them to let her in. “We have to document a city record’s search. I’m going to write about my experience working with New York City and the kind of treatment one gets while pursuing their rights within the law.”

“Whoo-whee,” the man said with a chuckle.

The woman got serious. “Are you some kid reporter?”

“Well no. Just doing a report for Miss Thompson’s social studies.”

The woman glanced at her watch for the first time, probably noting that as it was early afternoon, Ariel should have been in school.

“It’s a teachers’ training day. I’m using the time to finalize the details of my research.”

God, she was good.

“Whoo-whee,” the man said again. “A smart one.”

The woman debated, and then nodded toward a hallway. “Third door on your left.”

“Thank you,” Ariel said. “I appreciate how helpful you’ve been.”

Maybe that was a little much, she conceded. But she was glad she had thought of the whole research angle. She was even gladder after waiting in line for nearly an hour only to learn that she had to be one of the spouses to get the record.

“But, ma’am, I’m just doing a report. I don’t want the actual record. I’m just reporting on how it’s done.” Ariel trotted out the whole social studies angle, eyes wide and earnest. “So if I could just look up a record and explain how the process is handled, you know, how easy it really is for New Yorkers to get the things they need from the government, I would appreciate it.”

This woman gave her a strange look, half disbelief, half worry. No one wanted to be shown up by some kid publishing a tell-all blog.

And her dad said the Internet was a bad thing.

“Fine,” the woman said. “Go to that door over there and tell Ida I said to help you.”

Thankfully, Ida couldn’t have cared less who Ariel was, why she was there, or what she wanted. Ariel blurted out her mother’s maiden name and father’s name, and with a few keystrokes, Ida came back with a date. “June 27, 1998.”

Ariel wrote it down so she wouldn’t forget it. Something seemed wrong, but she couldn’t place what. She gave her parents’ names again. “That’s definitely the date for them, right?”

“Yes.”

Ida clearly wasn’t one to waste words. “Is that all you want?” she said. “It’s 3:15. We close at 3:45.”

“Really?” That seemed really early to close an office. But then Ariel realized she had to get home before anyone found out she was gone. And she still had to figure out the subway route. She slapped her notebook shut. “I mean, no problem.”

But outside, her heart raced. Spotting a policeman, she raced over to him. “Where is the subway? Ah, sir.”

The guy gave her a crooked smile and pointed. “At that brown building, take a right. The subway is a few blocks up on Canal Street.”

She followed his directions. Sure enough, when she came to Canal Street she saw the station. But it was for the N and R trains. She had never even heard of the N or R train.

Fear started to creep up, the kind of fear Ariel rarely allowed herself to feel. “You are not a panicker, Ariel,” she muttered.

Shaking herself, she found one of the posted subway maps. The spider’s web of multicolored lines wasn’t for the faint of heart, but Ariel wasn’t faint of heart, she reminded herself.

With her remaining three dollars, she purchased a single-ride MetroCard and made it to the uptown platform just as a train arrived. She hopped on. The bell rang, the doors slid shut, and Ariel offered up another prayer that this train would get her somewhere close to the Upper West Side.

“Excuse me,” she said to a lady standing next to her.

The woman narrowed her eyes at her.

“Does this go to Seventy-second Street on the Upper West Side?”

The woman hesitated, and in the silence, another woman answered. “No, sweetie, it doesn’t. You’ll need to get off at Thirty-fourth and change to a B. Or, if you need a 1, 2, or 3, you’ll have to go to Forty-Second and change there.”