(FREE TO READ) Bad Moon

chapter 24; candle

Tisper had never been one for hardship.

Half of her life had been sadness, the rest a regret for something that couldn't be helped; a will and a wish to change the way things were. To make everything superficial. Picture perfect.

Nothing was ever perfect, but there were ways to knit together a faux reality where, just for a while, she could pretend they were. So she immersed herself in her favorite colors, binged on all the possessions that made her feel nice. Tisper built happiness from the ground up and dragged it around with her wherever she went. Like everyone else in the world, Tisper filled the holes with things.

But it was as if the ground had opened around her and swallowed her entire universe. And all of the little things left behind, the things that once made her so happy were dust now. Useless, material possessions.

She wanted Jaylin back. She wanted him in her arms, alive and awake and speaking and talking and smiling the big gummy-grin she always teased him about. She wanted the search to come to an end. She wanted to sleep for what felt like the first time in two weeks. She wanted to sleep with Jaylin curled up her pink duvet he always hogged to himself. She wanted to sleep knowing that Julia Maxwell had stopped crying. She wanted to pass out in her own bed, knowing that she'd wake up with Jaylin's sleeping face stuffed in the pillows the next morning. That was all she wanted.

For the second time in her life, it felt like Tisper had lost the other half of her.

It'd been pouring for the past twelve hours, and most everyone else had taken it as a sign to withdraw from the search for the day. Everyone but Tisper, who cut through the dense mud in her polka dot rain boots, the knees of her jeans caked so heavy, she could hardly lift her legs anymore.

This was where they'd found his phone, smashed to bits with a missing sim card. It was the last piece of Jaylin anyone had seen in thirteen days. The rain would wash away whatever ghost of him was left. But it'd rained a lot in the past two weeks. For some reason, Tisper couldn't come to accept that.

"Tisper, it's been six hours." Matt crutched himself against the side-mirror of his wrangler, hands tucked away in his jacket pockets. "Come on. Please."

Tisper didn't look back. Instead, she wiggled her hands around in the mud. "I think I found something." When she drew them out and flung the muck away, the article in her hand resembled a pencil, long and cylindrical and clotted with dirt. When she wiped away the sticky paste, a scratch of yellow cloth revealed itself. "What do you think it is?"

"It's a marker flag, Tis. We've found like four of them. We're right on the property line."

Tisper felt her heart sink. It'd been sinking so often, she swore by now it was anchored down to the deepest darkest pits of her. "There has to be something here."

"What matters is it's not Jaylin we're finding under all that mud. No news is good news, right?"

"Not when it's been two weeks," Tisper snapped. She could see the faint try of a smile wipe from Matthew's face and she sighed. No news wasn't good news. But it was better than bad news. "Alright. Let's go."

She stomped through the mud, back to Matt's jeep, where he dropped a pair of black kicks onto the dirt ground and held out an empty trash bag. Tisper stripped herself of her heavy jacket, and peeled her mud-soddened jeans from the fresh leggings beneath, dropping every muddy item one at a time into the bag. Then she slipped on Matt's shoes.

It didn't matter if not a fleck of mud was left, Matt had the passenger seat wrapped in towels like he was swaddling a newborn child. Tisper had grown used to it since the search first started, and plopped herself down on his precious interior without a complaint.