Route 262

~6~

Wednesday, and it's police lights that wake me up.

They're streaming across my window, leaving red and blue tints as I force myself up to see what's going on. My eyelids are heavy as squint, trying to make sense of it. There's a police car outside of James' house, and I feel a pit in my stomach, the sleepiness in me suddenly gone. I watch for a moment; an officer enters the household, and I'm looking for any sign of James, but I don't see any. After awhile, I look away, since nothing happens, and I try to put it in the back of my mind.

But it comes flaring right up again during Psychology, when Sydney is crying her eyes out.

She's surrounded by a group of people that I would hopefully never have to talk to - the kind of people in school that tend to make everyone else's lives miserable, albeit unintentionally. I'm pushing down my gag reflex, but she's talking so loudly I don't think that I could tune her out if I wanted to.

"He's gone," she's sobbing, and a pack of girls who I normally would file under 'disgusting' are shushing and cooing at her. "His parents called me this morning to see if I knew where he went."

"And did you?" a girl asks innocently.

Sydney's eyes flash angrily. "No," she spits. "We never had the type of relationship where we needed to know everything about each other - we were much more subtle."

It'd be hilarious if it wasn't hitting me like a truck: James. Missing. And as much as I want to enjoy Sydney's misery, I'm too weirded out.

Because it comes flashing back real quick. Dead Man's Curve. The turn-off. "Do you ever wish you could just get away?" he had said to me, and I hadn't even noticed that anything was wrong, hadn't even thought of anything else to say.

It's a thought that gets me shaking, to the point where I can barely write my name on the daily quiz.

By the time lunch has hit, I'm exhausted; a mixture of guilt and worry have been tearing at me all morning. A new wave of shudders has hit me, so much so that when I grab my lunch bag, I accidentally knock a pile of books to the floor.

This kind of thing would happen to me, of course, I'm thinking to myself, as I go to pick it up. I'm about to put it all back, when I notice something. Bright pink Post-It note, the same kind that Sydney used yesterday on a trash heap of a flyer.

But instead of her loopy disgusting handwriting, there's only two words on it. It's scribbled there, a combination of messy handwriting and rush. All it says is "Route 262." And somehow, I know that it's James' handwriting, that he's the only one who could've written this. I don't know how. I don't know when. All I know is that it's his.

And without even thinking about what I'm doing, I'm grabbing my keys, shoving through the school door, out to drive my car to Route 262 as quickly as possible.