LADYBUG

Chapter 1: The Graduate

"You've got to be fucking kidding me!" I yelled out of my window at the mile-long chain of bumper-to-bumper traffic. The metallic smell of exhaust pipes and cheap marijuana wafted in through the open car windows. The stack of pink flyers that once sat in the passenger seat was now scattered on the floor, a misshapen collage of the word "MISSING" and a shit quality photograph of her face. The driver behind me blared their horn and, with my left hand dangling out the window into the breeze, I flipped him the bird. I watched as the estimated time of arrival on my GPS ticked forward one lousy minute at a time before I gave up and closed it. My screensaver stared back at me instead, the same picture of her from the flyers I'd made days ago, except the original photo was better, prettier, and less foreboding. I didn't change my screensaver when she left me, and I'd refused to change it when she went missing.

I pulled into the gravel parking lot of Elise's Magic Skillet around noon that day before parking and taking one flier from the floor. Elise's was a local family-owned business that had not-so-stellar reviews on Yelp and was in severe need of a remodel. Every staff member was either extremely old or just hitting puberty, never in between. It's the kind of food you ate because you showed up hungry and didn't have the energy to send it back. Edible and underwhelming. But I kept coming back for more. It had character, no Yelp reviewer could deny this place that.

Northern Virginia was littered with run-down mom-and-pop shops. Small businesses with a small budget and even smaller staff. What they lacked in funds they made up for in consistency, and it paid off. The diner brought in an average of thirty people a day, six days a week. I took a pink sheet of paper out of the pile and taped it to the light post, just outside the diner's property. My phone vibrated in my pocket. I stuck the papers under my arm and held the phone between my shoulder and ear, squeezing it with a tilted head.

"Yes, Kayla?" I asked.

"Are you still putting up signs?" She must have heard the wind slapping the papers together as I fought to keep them from flying away.

"Someone has to." I tossed the papers and tape back in the car and slammed the door shut, eyeing the one I just displayed, and willing it not to come loose in the wind. "Just because the police don't think she's worth looking for doesn't mean that I can't do it myself."

"Where are you? It sounds windy."

"At Elise's. I'm meeting my parents in a few minutes. Graduation dinner. Yay me."

"Oh right! I forgot about that! Congratulations!" Her shrill voice crackled through the phone. "Well, I'll let you go. But we should go out and celebrate sometime! You need to get your mind off her, Liv. People break up, it happens! But you know what else people do?" I waited. "They drink. That's what they do."

"You drink, Kayla. That's what you do." I sat on the hood of my Volkswagen Beetle and watched my father's Audi pull into the gravel parking lot. "Hey,can we talk about drinking later? My parents just pulled in."

"Wait, wait, wait–!"

"Bye." I put the phone in my pocket and waited.

I rubbed my fingers against the palm of my open left hand. Rubbed until little rolls of dead skin formed and I flicked them on the ground before doing the same on my forehead. Rubbing. Rubbing until the dead skin clumps together to be discarded. A habit I picked up as a child to keep my restlessness somewhat at ease, a habit I believed I dropped after meeting Rose and now that she was gone, I couldn't seem to stop. I should have told her about her parents and the accident the first time I saw her. The guilt was almost enough to eat me alive. Almost. Afterall, her parents were dead, a man was imprisoned, and she was forced to raise her sister alone, because of me. And me alone. Now Rose was missing, her sister left alone, and I was meeting my parents for a commemoration dinner. I plucked away a few more clumps of dead skin and stared blankly at the diner.