Kyle woke up to a very cold and rainy spring morning. His girlfriend, now fiancée, Seraphina, was still asleep next to him. Her long, dark hair looked something like a failed cosmetology experiment from tossing in her sleep. Her dark brown skin flashing lighter from the quiet lightning outside only made him feel lighter inside. Knowing that next year she will be Mrs. Rainer.
Kyle rolls out of bed slowly and easily in an attempt to not wake his one-day bride. She has no real need to get up. It is a Saturday, and they both work weekdays. Kyle works as an online journalist. He has a filming area set up in his office in front of his computer. He does not have enough followers as yet, but one day real soon he will be able to expand his office, or maybe even move altogether and find a place where he can hire an editor to cut his media together, and then he will be able to focus on story and making videos. That will give him more time for investigation and also more time spent with Sera. There ARE times he will work a weekend here and there, but that is only when an event happens that gets the attention of the nation or world. In that kind of situation, Sera does not even notice he is working because she becomes as invested in what he is doing as he does.
Kyle sits down at his desk to get a read on the climate of the American news and maybe read some comments or emails. He can see a message where someone has pressed his inaccuracy, so he gets up and heads over to his closet where he keeps information. Paper info that he was not able to attain online. As he shifts things around, he unintentionally pulls down a book with a thick, puffy cover that has been faded by time and molestation.
He bends the spine back to reveal a photo album of him and his family growing up. His mind is forced back three decades, and everything he had his mind on dissolves and resolves into him sitting in the kitchen of his parents small house some weekend or summer, maybe. No school. He is waiting for his sister to join him for breakfast. He can hear her running through the halls of the house, wanting to eat and finish breakfast at the same time as her brother so they can both go play around outside or maybe hit some video games. Then he sees himself as a young man. Sitting at the same table at the same place he would always sit for breakfast. Waiting for his sister to join him at the table. At this point, Sera was still going to school, but she would head home after class on Friday. Some weekends she would come in later. Some weekends she would not make it home at all, but that was very rare, and she would always call to let everyone know not to expect her that weekend because she was working on a paper or had to cram with friends for some test she had.
Kyle remembered that was the weekend that she had gone missing. He checked his phone. He woke up Mom and Dad to check as well, and they report nothing. Kyle attempts to call the people he knew that Kara knew, but there was nothing to report. Kyle heads to his car to head over to her college to see if maybe she passed out in her dorm with a dead phone. He thought to himself that there was no need to panic. There are still dozens of reasons that this could have happened. The school was easily almost an hour's drive away. She had finished up all the business classes that she had taken years prior.
She had developed a strange obsession with death and dead people. Not so much sick people, but people that have passed on. She says she felt like there was another world. A secret world that was under or maybe even inside the death that she could feel. She said she felt like she needed to be closer to it, so after she got her associate's degree, she went into the funerary arts. She had just recently met new people. To Kyle, this felt very strange, branching out to such new and dark people so close to being done with school altogether. Kyle felt like she was about to do something she would regret. She had never given in to the urge that most girls get to be reckless or give in to something she knew she was not supposed to do. He was worried that she would meet some guy that would get her hooked on drugs or drive them both off a cliff. Metaphorical or literal, he did not want to lose his twin sister off some cliff.
Once he had gotten to the school, he headed for residents. Climbing the stairs, he looked for her room or the resident assistant. He got to her room first, and the door was cracked open. He pushed his way inside but was careful to touch as few things, just in case fingerprints would be important later on. She did have a roommate who was also absent at the moment. Kyle searched the halls of the dorm for the R.A. like a bloodhound looking for an animal to drive out into the open.
A tall, skinny boy standing in the opening to one room says, "Can I help you find something?" Kyle says to the boy, "Kara, she stays just down the hall. Have you seen her or know where she may have gone?" The narrow, skinny, shirtless boy begins, "I saw her early last night. She said she was going out with some new people she had met; she seemed excited and in a hurry." "Is there anything else you can remember that might help me find her?" I ask with the hope I will be able to track her down.
Kyle thanks the boy and pulls out his flip phone to call the police. Stupid automated response seems to be intentionally slow at working through to a real person. He finally gets to a real person around the time Kyle makes his way to the dean's office. He tells the lady on the other end of the phone of the issue that he is dealing with.
The lady on the other end tells him with zero empathy, in his current state of mind, she sounds almost glad he is going through this, she says, "Sir, she has to be missing for 48 hours before we are able to do anything about it, but she is over 18 years old. I doubt that the police would do anything anyway. Girls ditch school every day and begin another life with some guy they just met, or drugs, or…" "My sister does not do drugs!" He says back to her, almost with a yell.
Kyle tells the receptionist about his sister. The lady takes down his information, but there is not much of a chance they will do anything more than the cops. He might get a call the next time she shows up at class. Technically she doesn't need to keep going anyway. Her grades are high enough, and the end of the semester is days away. She will graduate whether she gets to class or not. There is really no telling what she may have done or where she may have gone. She really could have met some guy, and she can start a new job anywhere and have her diploma mailed to her, or she may not even care. Maybe she met a guy that has some money, and she could spend the rest of her life on a ship sailing from port to port until he gets tired of her and sells her into bondage to be used as payment for a goat or something.
Over the next few days, Kyle got a hold of what information he could from people in her dorm. The same information kept showing up over and over again. She met new people that nobody seems to know of or ever remember seeing. Nobody seems to have bothered to ask where she was going or any kind of follow-up questions at all. She was clearly an outsider living among the self-centered, and she must have finally found someone, outside of her family that really paid attention to the things she said or what she meant when she talked. She met a group or person that could see her for what she really was inside, the way I was able to see who she was, and they were able to take her from her current place in life and transplant her… somewhere. Alive or dead, I will find you, Kara. We may not have been identical twins, but I still know you better than anyone you may have just met. I am not going to walk away from some dead-end information. There has to be something missed. Maybe a person that knows of or saw something happen to my dear sister, and I am not going to rest until I find out what happened and where you are.
The weeks seem to have gone by, but the time seems to stand still. The work that Kyle had been doing with his young internet start-up had come to a grinding halt. He put all of his focus into a missing persons site for his sister. He spent all of his money on posters and what P.I.'s he was able to afford. Kyle and Kara's father had gotten very ill after she went missing and now had passed away. All the money that the parents had was spent on the funeral. Kyle's mom had given him what she was able to give but with no income she was too scared to mortgage the house in fear that all they might find is that she was living a new life somewhere else, happy, or worse, nothing at all.
The weeks turned into months, and then years. The cold trails that Kyle thought may yield something turned to ice. He began to give up hope. More and more he began to move on with his life as most people do when one endeavor fails we pick up another so we are able to keep going. One morning, Kyle was out getting coffee at a local barista. He was in a hurry to get some information on a story, and in his haste he spun around and lunged forward without looking and slammed coffee first into one of the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen in his life.
She was so attractive in fact that he had forgotten all about his sister once he looked into her huge, wide, white eyes. The deepness of her brown was only accentuating the deep color of her soft skin. In the collision, he was able to absorb most of the splash-back from the coffee. He thought it better I be the one with the 3rd degree burns. The Mocha princess had gotten a fistful of napkins to help dry him off enough so he was no longer dripping in magma-hot coffee. She thought he looked like an adorable dumb-ass in his own clumsy way. He finally worked up enough courage to ask for her number before he continued on with his original mission. Her giant anime eyes echoed in his mind over and over for the rest of the day. His focus was on nothing else.
He called her the next day to set up a date. He would not usually call so fast, but it had been a Thursday, and he really did not want to wait an entire week to see her again. He would get nothing done. Not realizing that after he did see her, the date had only made his condition worsen. Eventually they would move in together, and he would ask for her hand in marriage.
Then the breaking day happens. He was in his closet in his office, and he had stumbled across a picture of his sister. Everything that had been covered up over time. The older memories as children. The things he went through looking for his sister all alone. The indifference that everyone around him had about her going missing. Everything came falling on his head like a building being taken out with C4 as he stood frozen in shock at his behavior over the past couple of decades. His mind exploded in haste, and he ran to his car to try to pick up where he had dropped the ball before. Sera played no part in his mind at all as he raced down the road as if he were a NASCAR driver on meth. It was as if he had never met Sera at all. She still lay in the bed, half awake, not knowing what that sound was as he slammed the door behind him.
He made his way to the head office like he had done 20 years ago to see if there was any new information they had that they thought maybe was useless or not worth anyone's time to press. They had nothing to offer up about Kara, so he walked in the direction he was told she had walked the last day she was seen at school. There was only 1 road that went the direction that he was walking and 20 or 30 roads that broke off from that one as you look up the street like a giant comb with asphalt teeth. One by one he went 3 or 4 blocks into each road. He went back to get his car so he could keep going until the streetlights came on. He went to each and every door he could, like a crazy door-to-door salesman. Even stopping inside trap houses and knocked on the doors of places that were clearly not going to care if a girl was taken. In fact, there may even be a good chance that if she had walked down one of these streets to meet someone, that one of these houses was the very reason she went missing altogether.
Homeless people, zombied-out drug addicts, gangsters, and pimps—there was nobody that had any information that would help him get any closer to where his sister may have gone. He drove back to where that street came to a dead end by the school and got out of his car and looked around. As he walked along the fence line of the college, at a distance, he looked like a wild dog that saw fresh meat on the other side. He took a deep breath and stopped looking and began to see. He had noticed that down the fence line about 300 yards (0.27 km) away there was a tree line that he had not seen before. He walked the entire line, and once he had gotten to the tree line, he saw that there was another fence that ran with the trees.
So he turned the corner and walked the tree line. He had passed a field, and an empty lot that looked as though it was home to a housing project at one time. He had walked a good long while, and after he was about 1200 yards (1.1 km) or so past the corner, where the tree line had started, he looked across the street to his right, and there was a hospital for people with chronic mental conditions. People with conditions that had nobody, or people with issues too big for one person to manage. Kyle could easily see an older man standing next to a chair in front of a big bay window. He looked very curious as to what was going on. Kyle walked up to the place and knocked on the door. No answer. So he knocked harder and louder. Finally, a large black man with teal scrubs came walking in a rush to shut this guy up.
He answered the door and asked, "What you want man, you getting these folks uppity now. You ain't the one hav'a calm em back down; I do. Stop making all this damn noise out her!"
Kyle took half a step back and said, "Look man, I am sorry for the knocking, but I need to ask you people something!"
The orderly said back, "man, ain't nobody her but me and Leon. Leon so high he aught have a room his damn self. Come back tomorrow after the staff get in. hhmm, say 10 o'clock. They should all be clocked in, with all the peoples straightened out by den. That's when all the peoples will be her to walk you thru whaaaat eeeeverrrr you neeeeed. SAVVY?"
Kyle dropped his head and said back, "Fine. 10 o'clock?" "10-O-clock." The man in teal stressed back. So Kyle began his long walk back to his car, if it was still in one piece! "SHIT!" He said to himself out loud and ran as fast as he could to find his car, as yet untouched. I guess there IS a good use for collage after all, he thought to himself. Kept my car safe for a little while anyway. I still think that this creepy ass school for the dead played some part in Kara going missing. Directly or indirectly.
If this college was never here, my sister could have gotten some NORMAL job working in a cubicle somewhere safe and sound. Meet some boring guy she works with. They could get married. Have a couple of kids and vacation every year like normal jerk-off people. Why was that so crazy of an idea to her? She would rather be a weird old cat lady, she would say, then to ever be with someone that could not make her feel exactly how she needed to feel at any given moment. I know she was my sister, and I love her more than anything, but that is just crazy talk. Why should a person depend on someone else for emotional happiness? Maybe it's just because she never dated much when she was younger. All the girls I would talk to said they wanted a sensitive man or someone that understood them. I know when Sera tells me something, I hear what she tells me.
Making his way back home, he finds Sera in the kitchen making something. "Hello baby, making something to eat?" Kyle says. Sera fires back, "I am making something for ME to eat!"
With a bewildered look on his face, Kyle opens his mouth, but before he could even process what was going on, Sera snaps back, "I was not the one who left before I even woke up today. I am not the one who wouldn't answer his phone. I am not the one who had me wondering what the hell was going on with you!! You say you want to get married, but you offer up no stability in how you behave. You give me no structure with regard to how you are going to act day to day. Sometimes you have these emotional outbursts, or you blame me for things that I have no control over. I had really hoped that when we met, it revolved around your sister, and after some time passed, you would show a little more strength in how you approach this relationship. But after today, I am really starting to think I made the wrong choice when I said we could get married! You do NOT give me much to work with, Kyle!" Kyle was even more confused than when he first walked in the door. A single tear began to roll down his cheek.
"Right there!! That is what I am talking about!!! What kind of a fucking man openly cries in front of a woman he intends to marry! Are you sure you're not gay or something?" Kyle slaps Sera across her face before he can even see what he was doing. Sera looks back at Kyle with eyes of a frost giant. Nothing so cold as her eyes has ever come into existence before this very night.
She looks at him through her fingers as she holds the very spot she was struck, and through gritted teeth she says, "I'm going to my mother's house. Don't fucking follow me!" Kyle lowers his head like a beaten dog and walks into his office to try to figure out what the hell just happened. What was her deal? Just let her go, I will call her in the morning, and everything will be back to normal again.
Sera grabs a prepacked bag from the side of the bed and goes for her overcoat. "Did you have that made up already?" Kyle says to her as he looks from his office across to the bedroom. "Yes, when you do something like this. Like vanish when you promised that we would go to lunch together. At my work! You remember the lunch you said you would take me to. Where I paralegal at." Oh, shit, he thought to himself. I really fucked this up now.
Maybe I should give her 2 days to cool off. Sera storms out the door. As she pulls down the drive, Kyle cracks the seal on a 40-year-old bottle of whiskey that his father had gotten for him the day the twins were born. Kyle drinks himself to the point of blackout. He is really going to have a bad day tomorrow.