What I Thought I Knew

unwanted results

"four year old goes missing from county fair" clicking the link, she's taken to an old news article from a little over ten years ago. A couple pictures pop up, one of a four year old girl, who Kara couldn't say if she looked like her or not, her parents didn't really do photos, expect for the family holiday photo, and they never really saved them, or at least they didn't keep them anywhere that she knew of. The one thing she did notice though, was the scare, which seemed to be a lot fresher in the picture of the little girl. The scar that she had no memory of ever running into a coffee table to obtain, but did have a dream that explained it. Scrolling down she see's another picture, this one being a family photo. Everything inside her runs cold the second she looks at the picture, the people from her dreams, they were all there, present in the photo, with their bright smiles. "This can't be real," she thinks to herself when she sees the date that Karina Thomas had gone missing, and the math doesn't add up, Karina Thomas is fourteen, but Kara is sixteen, there's no way this could be her.

Maybe, she had seen the article somewhere before, and when she heard the name Karina Thomas, her mind was playing tricks with her by making her dream of the people in the picture. It's the only logical explanation other then her being Karina Thomas. She had always been told that she looked a year or two younger then her age, but she had always assumed that it had something to do with her freckles. And yeah, her parents weren't great, but they weren't kidnappers, and why would they even kidnap her, they barely seem to even acknowledge her existence, why would they have taken her from a county fair just to ignore her?

None of this made sense, and yet, part of her brain felt that it made perfect sense. Deciding that she wasn't going to get any real answers she exits out of the browser and shuts the laptop down before crawling back into bed with Vicky. She hoped maybe she could get some sleep before school tomorrow, but she knew that with what she just read, sleep was the last thing that was going to happen.

~•~

Wednesday passed, and Vicky couldn't definitely tell there was something off with Kara, but didn't want to push, thinking it was about her parents and wanting to give her space. Kara, barely slept that night too, and by Thursday she was Yawning as she leaves her algebra 2 class, ready for lunch, and maybe a nap. When she see's the girl from the previous Friday, once again. Vicky was waving at her, waiting to walk to lunch together, but instead she walks the opposite direction towards the girl. "Hey you, weird girl?" She shouts, and then cringes realizing that's not how you get someone's attention, exapecially someone you want information from.

Finally catching up to the girl, who unlike most, wasn't headed towards the cafeteria, she reaches out, grabbing her shoulder. "Hey, I need to talk to you," she says and the girl turns around.

"I do have a name, you know," she says, slightly annoyed.

Kara rolls her eyes, "whatever, just tell me why you were asking about Karina Thomas." This girl couldn't just throw a possibly life changing thing into her life and not explain why.

She shrugs, "sometimes I look up unsolved cases when I'm bored, this one had a been from our own city, so it intrigued me. The scar, it was pretty distinct, and last week when I noticed you had the exact scar I thought, that's Kara evens, there's no way, but also it totally could be possible. I mean Kara isn't a big deviation from Karina, so it wouldn't not been hard to convince you as a four year old that it was your name, and your parents are rich, they could have easily payed to illegally adopt you, they just had a case last year in the state over where these parents had illegally adopted their son. So it was very plausible, so when you caught me starring, I figured what was the harm in asking." The girl explains ad if it was nothing, and to her, maybe it was.