She steps to the side and glares at me as we pass her. “You get away with everything, just like your daddy,” she says. I look away from her so she won’t see the confusion on my face, and I follow Officer Grant outside, clutching the backpack over my shoulder.
Luckily the rain has let up. We keep walking until we’re standing next to my car. He turns to face me, and I have no idea if I’ll be able to answer the questions he’s about to throw at me, but hopefully they aren’t too specific.
“Why are you not at school, Silas?”
I purse my lips together and think about the answer to that. “I, um…” I look over his shoulder at a passing car. “I’m looking for Charlie.”
I don’t know if I should have said that. Surely if the cops weren’t supposed to know she was missing, I would have clarified that in the letter. But the letter only stated that I needed to do whatever I could to find her, and reporting her missing seems like it would be the first step.
“What do you mean you’re looking for her? Why isn’t she at school?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. She hasn’t called, her sister hasn’t heard from her, she didn’t show up for school today.” I throw a hand behind me in the direction of the house. “Her own mother is obviously too drunk to notice she’s missing, so I thought I’d try to find her myself.”
He tilts his head, more out of curiosity than concern. “Who was the last person to see her? And when?”
I swallow as I shift uncomfortably on my feet, trying to recall what was written about last night in the letter. “Me. Last night. We got into an argument and she refused to ride home with me.”
Officer Grant motions for someone behind me to come toward us. I turn around, and Charlie’s mother is standing in the open doorway. She crosses the threshold and makes her way out to the yard.
“Laura, do you know where your daughter is?”
She rolls her eyes. “She’s at school where she’s supposed to be.”
“She is not,” I interject.
Officer Grant keeps his eyes trained on Laura. “Did Charlie come home last night?”
Laura glances at me and then looks back at the officer. “Of course she did,” she says. Her voice tapers off at the end like she’s not sure.
“She’s lying,” I blurt out.
Officer Grant holds up a hand to hush me, still directing his questions at Laura. “What time did she come home?”
I can see the confusion wash over Laura’s face. She shrugs. “I grounded her for skipping school this week. So she was up in her attic, I guess.”
I roll my eyes. “She wasn’t even home!” I say, raising my voice. “This woman was obviously too drunk to know if her own daughter was even inside the house!”
She closes the distance between us and begins pounding her fists against my arms and chest. “Get off my property, you son of a bitch!” she screams.
The officer grabs her by the arms and motions his eyes to my truck. “For the last time, Nash. Go back to school.”
Laura is thrashing in his arms, trying to break free. She’s not even fazing him as he keeps her in a tight grip. This seems so normal to him; it makes me wonder if she’s called the cops on me before.
“But…what about Charlie?” I’m confused as to why no one else seems to be concerned about her. Especially her own mother.
“Like her mother said, she’s probably at school,” he says. “At any rate, she’ll show up to the game tonight. We’ll talk there.”
I nod, but I know good and well I’m not going back to the school. I’m taking my bag of Charlie’s secrets and I’m going straight to my house to find more.
Chapter 2: Silas
The first thing I do when I walk through the door to my home is pause. None of it looks familiar, not even the pictures on the walls. I wait for a few seconds, letting everything sink in. I could search the house or browse the pictures, but I’ve probably already done that. I’m on a time crunch, and if I want to figure out what happened to Charlie—what happened to us—I need to keep focused on the things we haven’t wasted time doing before.
I find my bedroom and walk straight to the closet—to the shelf that contains all the other stuff we’ve collected. I dump everything out onto my bed, including the contents of the duffel bag. Sifting through it all, I try to figure out where to begin. There’s so much stuff. I grab a pen so I can make notes of anything I find that might be of use if I end up forgetting this all over again.
I know a lot of things about my relationship with Charlie as of late, but that seems to be it. I know almost nothing about how we got together or how our families were torn apart. I don’t know if any of that is even a factor in what’s happened to us, but I feel like the best place to start is from the beginning.
I grab one of the older-looking notes addressed to Charlie—something I wrote myself. It’s dated over four years ago and is just one of the many letters I grabbed from her attic. Maybe reading something from my point of view will help me figure out what type of person I am, even if this letter is over four years old.
I sit down on the bed and lean against my headboard, and I begin to read.
Charlie,
Can you recall a single time we went on vacation without each other? I’ve been thinking about that today. About how it’s never just my immediate family and me. It’s always both sets of our parents, Landon, Janette, you, and me.
One big happy family.
I’m not sure we’ve ever spent a holiday apart, either. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving. We’ve always shared them together, either at our house or yours. Maybe that’s why I’ve never felt like it’s just been my little brother and me. I’ve always felt like I had a brother and two sisters. And I can’t imagine not feeling that way—like you’re part of my family.
But I’m scared that I’ve ruined that. And I don’t even know what to say to you, because I don’t want to apologize for kissing you last night. I know I should regret it, and I know I should be doing whatever I can to make up for the fact that I might have officially ruined our friendship, but I don’t regret it. I’ve wanted to make that mistake for a long time now.
I’ve been trying to figure out when my feelings for you changed, but I realized tonight that they haven’t changed. My feelings for you as my best friend haven’t changed at all—they’ve just evolved.