Nowhere

Prologue

"Dawn! Aurora!" Mum called from the kitchen.

"Coming!" Dawn yelled back. We could hear loud thumps as she rushed down the steps.

"Morning," I said as I sat at the kitchen table and started to eat my breakfast. Oatmeal with cinnamon and apple drizzled with honey. Perfect warm breakfast for a cold winter day.

"Wait for your sister," mum grumbled as she lightly smacked my hand, as if I was still a kid, and I put my spoon down.

"I'm going to be late if I wait for her," I argued while grabbing the spoon again.

Mum glared at me, and I put the spoon down. The three of us had different schedules and lives, so to mum it was extremely important that we could at least eat our meals together from time to time. Mealtime was when we bonded, and she would ask us about our day and how school was going.

Dawn entered the kitchen still zipping up her dress and was only wearing one boot. Despite looking crazy, jumping around on one boot struggling with the zipper, she was always effortlessly beautiful.

We were only one year apart. I was the oldest, but people often told us we looked like twins. Both with big emerald eyes, freckles on our cheeks and around our noses, and long wavy brown hair. And yet, despite looking so much alike, Dawn always had something I didn't. She just had this sweet, amazing aura around her that attracted everyone. She was warm, like the sun. Dawn was perfect in every way, and everybody loved her. People would always feel drawn to her every time she walked in the room.

"Mum, have you seen my other boot?"

"Have you checked the garage?"

"I've looked everywhere. This dress only goes with these boots," she whined.

This was Dawn. She whined all the time for the tiniest of things that had no importance whatsoever, and she looked adorable doing it.

"Maybe it ran away to Nowhere, because you only care about them once or twice a year," mum said as she poured herself a second cup of coffee.

I chuckled.

"Don't mock me, Rora. Your socks keep running away to Nowhere too because you keep mistreating them and poking holes in them with your huge toes."

Nowhere... This was a recurring joke at our home. I don't know exactly how it started. I guess mum made it up when she threw away our broken toys. That way, she would always have an excuse for when we would ask about them months after their disappearance. Everything that went missing, whether it was a remote, a sock, a scrunchie or an earring, it all went to Nowhere, a place for unloved and broken things. If you neglect something, it's going to end up in Nowhere and you'll never see it again.

"Just pick something else to wear, Dawn." I grumbled, annoyed at Dawn's usual tardiness and relaxed attitude towards everything. "We need to go to school. I have a test and I still want to review some things."

"Rora," she grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me away from the table. "You are a genius. You are the smartest person I know. You don't need to review anything. You're going to ace that test as you always do, and next year you'll be at university, making us all proud."

I frowned and glared at her. "I still need to arrive on time."

"Fine," she sighed, rolling her eyes. "Lend me your black boots, then. I think those might work with this dress."

"So that they end up in the same place as yours?" I raised an eyebrow. "Don't think so."

"Pretty please, Rora."

I rolled my eyes. She gave me a quick hug and ran up the stairs to my room. It was impossible to say no to Dawn.

Mum kissed us goodbye, we walked to school, and it was just a regular day. Once we got to school, we went our separate ways, as we always did. Dawn would be with her group of popular friends while I studied or spent time with Matt. After class I went home as I always did, and Dawn said she was going to hang out with her friends, as she always did. Night came, but she never went back home. I called her friends, and they hadn't seen her all afternoon.

That afternoon, Dawn made the irreversible choice of taking her own life. She jumped into the river. It was the rainy season. The river was overflowing, and the current was strong, and she was gone. Just like that. No warning, no sign, nothing. She just... jumped.

I've reviewed this morning thousands of times in my head. Looking for a sign. Anything. Something that seemed off. Something that could have been a sign of her mental state. But nothing. No matter how many times I recall these events, nothing comes up. It was just a normal morning in the Hale household. Dawn would be late, I would be grumpy while waiting for her. She would barely touch her breakfast because she never had enough time, and we would leave.

This was ten years ago. And for the first time in ten years, I'm back home. But Dawn will always be sixteen, and I'm not seventeen anymore. She would've turned seventeen that year, but she didn't. She remained the same, only sixteen, and when summer came, I turned eighteen. Now I'm about to turn twenty-eight this summer and Dawn is still sixteen.