Unfamiliar Territory [Book One]

Chapter Nine | A Change of Pace

The next few weeks were plagued by bad events.

Yet another student went missing, with no sign of their Hero. Mouse and I soon started to walk together to school every morning, which at first made me feel safer. Though, it didn't take long for that security to be ripped away and then replaced with the hair raising feeling of eyes watching my every move. Mouse never once mentioned feeling the same. I couldn't decide if it was the dog or Kat and Mutt.

Mouse would always meet me in front of my house on the way to school and, on the way back, she would walk past it. She had mentioned we lived close, but I never once saw her enter any of the houses near me. Even when I would spy on her through my window, as she left, she would just keep walking down the sidewalk until I could not see her any longer. Several times I would try to bring up her family but...

"There isn't much to say."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean there isn't much I want to say, you know? Can we talk about something else, please?"

It was a hot topic, to be sure. Once you got her going, she could usually talk a lot about a lot of things. She wasn't just a big buff on medieval stories; she read action, science fiction, romance. Anything she could get her hands on.

"Books are a great escape," she said once during lunch, an open book in her lap. "It's so easy to get lost in their worlds, if the book is good enough, of course. Life can be pretty rough sometimes, you know? Characters in a story can have a rough time of it too. And, if it's a good book, most do. But it's different reading about someone else having it rough than having it rough yourself. It's that outside perspective. If they were real people, I could tell them that it won't be so bad. That, if they are in a good story, things will get better. I can't always tell myself that. Real life isn't like the life you find in story books."

It was the closest I could get to knowing what her life was like. The life I couldn't see. It didn't seem much better then the one she led in school. She only seemed happy when she was talking with me. Every time I would see her in class or in the hallway, she was the Mouse I knew before. Quiet, withdrawn, and blending into the scenery. Easy to forget that she was even there at all.

That's why she needed us. That's why I was doing this. That's why it was so easy to smile and laugh with her despite the gut wrenching feeling. Despite the eyes always watching us.

Then, when I got home near the end of the week, I opened my bag and saw the hat Kat made was gone.

I pulled everything out of it, I even turned the bag upside down and shook it, but it wasn't there.

How could it not be there? What had I done?

My room was bare, most of my belongings still in boxes, but I searched in every nook, every corner, under the bed, and behind the curtains. I shook every piece of clothing, dug through every drawer. It was nearing the middle of the night when I had to give up.

It wasn't here. I had lost it. I lost it. Kat's hat was gone.

It was my fault. My fault.

I didn't sleep. As soon as light peered in through the window, I was gone. I went through the path I always took to school, looking through bushes and up into the tree limbs. I had to stop when I got closer to school and other students started to join me on the path. Had that much time already past?

Some were giving me strange, suspicious looks. If I wasn't careful, they might start another rumor. The freak thing that's searching frantically for some other freak thing that's dear to him. Something like that. Kat was smart, she would piece it together. She would discover the truth.