The Man in The Cave

Chapter 1

The only clue that made the lack of an adult on Valerie's house clear was the fact that she wasn't woken up by the music of an album her aunt had randomly selected from her wide collection. No, instead she was woken up by her own alarm that ringed uncontrollably making her drag her hand out of the mattress and placing it on the twin alarm clock. Plenty of times she had thought about moving to an electronic alarm clock like the one Audrey had at her house or ditch them altogether and solely rely on her phone. Every time that happened, she forgot about it or figured that since the one she had did the trick pretty well waking her and probably her neighbors up, there was no need to update. Not to mention, it used to belong to her father making the idea of getting rid of it something the teenager wasn't entirely certain she wanted to deal with.

After pulling herself out of bed, Valerie took a shower after which she put on her school uniform. A dark blue with thin green lines plaid skirt that reached up to her knee, a light blue buttoned blouse and socks of the same color, a gray blazer and a red tie. Looking at herself in the mirror she stared for a few seconds staring at the space above her brown eyes making sure her eyebrows were properly plucked, and she was free of acne in her forehead. She looked at herself with pride, happy once again the treatment she had been prescribed was successful.

Making sure the tie was properly tied, next she braided her dark brown hair. Valerie dragged her feet to the kitchen to make herself a sandwich, opting to ignore one of the meals her aunt had left her in the fridge. As good as her aunt Moira usually cooked, Valerie wasn't in the mood to put her food in the recently bought microwave.

Usually her mornings consisted on her aunt waking her up to the music that ranged from classic works of art to some foreign song they had heard on a trip to Mexico and that Valerie had thought she would never have to hear again until her aunt decided to prove otherwise. Her aunt made breakfast while she got ready to school. They talked during the morning about anything they could think of. Valerie left after finishing her breakfast and brushing her teeth when Audrey rang her house's doorbell and waited for her outside. Always patient the days that Valerie took extra time searching for whatever part of her uniform or school materials she had almost forgotten.

This time she was fully ready by the time the doorbell rang. She took her lavender schoolbag, filled with buttons that went from popular boybands or punk rock that her aunt had listened to and gave some of her old pins to her claiming it would serve as good decoration over the soft color. She made sure to give her the ones she had repeated, just in case she would lose them. Valerie hasn't lost a single one of them since she began to take them to the secondary school, she even went as far as to pick a fight with a boy who claimed a particular pin was too cool for a girl to have.

Valerie opened the door. Audrey was waiting behind it, her dark blonde hair held up in a ponytail, glossy lipstick in her smiling mouth as her gray eyes focused on her friend who was making sure the door was properly locked once she left. Audrey stood ten centimeters taller than Valerie and had an unnatural talent to make everything look good on her.

"I thought your aunt arrived today," she commented. Audrey, who walked to Valerie's house to pick her up since they were twelve was also used to the music in the background while the woman bid a quick heartfelt goodbye to the teenagers.

"She does," Valerie said adjusting her schoolbag beginning her path with Audrey. "She is supposed to arrive around midday I think." Valerie meditated for a few seconds.

"Oh," Audrey stated, simple "you didn't say where did she go this time."

Valerie looked at the road that she walked through every day; the trees on the sidelines decorating the outside of each home, some houses had flowerpots that were in full bloom announcing the arrival of the summer. They, besides plaques with numbers were the only thing differentiating one house from the other. Valerie liked her neighborhood, how the appearance of the houses and the material of which they were made of made it look like if they came outside of an old fairy-tale book.