Land of Smoke and Ashes

The Library

It was hard to concentrate on anything. Math class seemed to go by incredibly fast though, she was so lost in her thoughts for the entire thing. Then it was on to English, where she was only jerked out of her daze long enough to realize everyone was staring at her. She'd been asked a question. Thankfully Sera leaned over and said in a whisper loud enough for everyone to hear, "What was the message behind Animal Farm?" and the teacher rolled her eyes and said, "Thank you Ms. Wilson. Perhaps you can answer for her instead?" and Natalie was thankful to find the classes' attention diverted to her friend, who didn't seem to mind in the least.

In the hallway at lunch she was still just as distracted. She checked her phone, but there were no text messages from her father. She wasn't sure why she expected one. Maybe he would realize how weird she'd been this morning, that her pale face and heavy silence couldn't possibly be over a math test. But there was nothing.

Her fingers hovered over the smooth, blank screen for a second. She had an hour. Maybe she should call him.

Then again, demanding answers in the middle of the hall over the phone seemed like a bad idea.

All day she'd been trying not to think about it too hard. It didn't do any good to worry about what she might find out, there was no way of knowing until she could get into the library. Until she could get in front of a computer. She could look on her phone of course, searching her mother's full name and the date of the newspaper article, like she planned to do later... but here in the hall there was a good chance someone would look over her shoulder and see what she was researching. And the last thing she wanted was to be the subject of the rumour mill. In a school this small, gossip traveled at roughly the speed of light. Up until now she hadn't been interesting enough to be in the middle of any of it, but a missing, possibly murdered mother was certainly enough to be the main subject of interest for a few weeks at least.

In light of this, she should really just put her phone away and go sit with Sera, quit worrying about it until she could actually do something.

But of course, Natalie had never been able to logic herself out of worrying, it didn't seem to be how worrying worked.

She seemed to be remembering every episode of that one murder show she'd watched. All those women. Gone. They'd been missing people at first, and then they'd found them in fields and rivers and on beaches, and then somehow things had changed and they were just "the body". The body was found here. They examined the body.

What if her mother had been reduced like that? What if she had become just one more statistic? A police file sitting in some dusty folder in the NYPD's evidence room?

What if her body hadn't been found, was that worse? If she was still out there somewhere? Natalie wasn't sure. And she wasn't sure she wanted to know either. But the idea had lodged in her brain, and even though it made her chest tight and her breathing shallow every time the thought popped into her head, she had to know. She would never sleep again if she didn't, she'd just lie awake every night for the rest of her life, wondering what had happened.

Of course, she could demand answers from her father. She could confront him. But somehow she knew he would hold back, even if he did tell her some of it. She wouldn't get all the facts, because she was seventeen, still his little girl. And little girls had to be protected.

Natalie shoved her lunch bag under her arm and slammed her locker shut. Turning on her heel, she slammed straight into someone who'd been walking behind her. Her phone hit the ground with a sharp crack, and her lunch hit the ground a second later, the brown paper back splitting to spill its plastic wrapped sandwich and the brown-spotted banana onto the dirty tiles.