Dead & Forgotten

Ch. 13

I could not sleep that night—-literally. Not only was I tossing and turning about my bed, and accidentally making myself fall off the bed every now and then, but I also couldn't stop thinking about everything Rachel Lang had told me. She was related to me, and I didn't even know it. Rachel Lang, aka the former student of Marshall Academy who died without a cause, was also my sister, Rachel Fuller. How did I not know that? Was that what she meant when she said to me, "Well, I can tell that there's a lot of things Mommy and Daddy never told you"?

Luckily, it was the weekend, and on the weekends we were usually given the chance to sleep in. And I always took those chances to sleep for as long as I wanted. But not in this case. I woke up at 6:30, a lot earlier than I usually woke up on weekends, and I decided to take a small trip to the library. You're probably wondering, "Who wakes up at 6:30 on a Saturday morning just to go to a library?" Well, to answer that question of yours, I figured that a lot of things didn't make sense. I wanted to know if Rachel Lang was lying to me, or if she was telling the truth. And if she were telling the truth....

That's right. So I sneaked out of my dorm room, went down in the elevator, and made my way to the library. The library was very big and had huge shelves of about a million books in each of them, stories in all forms of genre. And of course at this time, the library was closed, the door locked, and they always had the CLOSED sign on the glass window door. It was a good thing that I brought my keys with me, and I unlocked the door and gained immediate entrance to the Marshall Academy library. It was big and beautiful on the inside, and there were computers in the middle of the room. I roamed around the library, scanning shelf after shelf, trying to find biography books about real people as well as historical figures and legendary celebrities. Suddenly, I stumbled across a book that was titled, "Aristotle Fuller: True Life Story." Which caught my eye, so I decided to pick it up and examine the first page.

The book read, "Aristotle Fuller was born on July 29, 1946 in the United States to a wealthy Greek family. He is the eldest of three children, and has two younger sisters, Hillary and Elena. At a very young age, Fuller had discovered his passion for theatre and writing. In the summer of 1963, he met the love of his life, lovely starlet Vivienne Kuriyakos at a film festival, and they got married in the early 1970s. Because it was part of the Greek custom to marry while in your teens rather than waiting until your twenties, the couple feared that they would not be able to produce children; for the latest time that a woman could conceive was at the age of twenty-nine. In ancient Greek mythology, if one gave birth late, she would age quicker because the body cannot carry a child after thirty.

"Therefore, Fuller and Kuriyakos adopted a baby girl, Rachel Susanna Lang, who was born on December 31, 1971, who eventually passed away on May 21, 1984 from unknown causes; however, in late 1985, it was reported that Lang's death was due to a fatal drowning incident with unexplained details leading to the tragedy. Fuller and Kuriyakos naturally produced another daughter, Cassandra Fuller, born on March 11, 1974." I stopped reading up to that part. Even I was surprised to learn for the first time about ancient Greek customs and rituals. So Rachel was adopted after all. The Langs were our neighbors, and I'd grown up knowing them. They were a forty-something couple, very friendly, treated us like a normal family rather than celebrities, and I remembered when their daughter Tracey left the world at age nine. Tracey and I were pretty much the same age, born four months after me, and she once suffered a fatal bike injury that left her paralyzed and now gone. She passed away on December 31, 1983. Crazy coincidence, I know, but I could not believe that I did not know any of this stuff until now. I was speechless at that moment. I returned the book back to its original spot on the shelf, but then, out of nowhere the other pile of books started dropping on the floor, making a lot of noise.

"Oh, great," I groaned as I began to put all the books back, some of which were heavy and weighed about a ton. I knew I must've woken up the entire population of the school with the sound of the books falling off the shelf.