The Missing

Chapter One: Carmella

I was a perfectionist, no doubt about it. A planner too. Everything had to be just right. Especially at this neighborhood party. When I heard that my next door neighbor was going to be a guy my age, I got excited. I mean, what girl wouldn’t? I wanted this welcoming party to be awesome. Maybe then he would recognize or acknowledge me. Boy, was I wrong.

I had situated and re situated the pasta and desserts on the table so many times I had lost count. When people started pouring into my family’s backyard, I was in charge of setting up the food. The new family was supposed to get here soon, and I was dying to meet them. They bought the old building behind the public library and was turning it into a little restaurant. Hopefully, it would be more successful than most of the businesses downtown.

Everyone called the small town of Eastburg ‘historic’. Old was never a term used. You would wind up offending people if you did. I always thought historic and old were synonyms for each other. Either way, our downtown was rundown, our population was small, and we had a total of four schools operating. In seventh grade, I called the small town of Eastburg ‘sad’. To me, it would always be that way. It almost seemed like I had been living in a ghost town since I was born. There was never any excitement or any action. The same old people went to the same old places. The same stray cat would sit on the same corner. My neighborhood was the only exception.

It looked like a suburb in a popular city with its green, freshly mowed lawns and active children running up and down the block after school without a care in the world. But we weren’t living in a popular city, some years the grass didn’t turn green and we had close calls (car accident wise) once or twice because of the children playing in the street. In my defense, that car came out of nowhere. I guess some things can look perfect, but never truly are perfect.

“Carmella? Did you bring out the pasta salad that was on the bottom shelf of the fridge?” my mom asked as she whisked past me returning back outside, leaving a cloud of her vanilla perfume lingering in the air. I double checked one of the picnic tables set up in the yard to see if I really did set out the salad like I was supposed to. It was sitting right where I had put it, right next to the potato salad I brought out, too. Sometimes, I would be told to do something and my mind would wander somewhere else. I couldn’t help it.

Kind of like how I watched through the window as the black Prius pulled into the empty driveway next door instead of answering my mom’s question. This resulted in a glare now, when she came back inside to get the dessert, and more than likely a lecture later, after everyone left. People started to get out of the car, but the driver directed them back in, pulling out of the driveway and speeding back down the street. They must have had the wrong address. Within minutes, the same car came back down the block, pulling into the available house next door. ‘These must be the new neighbors,’ I thought.

A middle aged woman got out of the driver’s seat and made her way up to the front door. She was dressed in a pair of jeans, sneakers and a red, loose fitting shirt with some sort of graphic print on the front. A boy who looked about my age, dressed in dark jeans and an orange pullover hoodie sauntered out of the car. He had dirty blond hair, curlier than a lion, but it looked nice on him. He opened the back door of the Prius and out jumped the cutest little girl I had ever seen. She was wearing a bright pink dress, and had at least ten fake leis on. The boy grabbed her hand and the two caught up with the woman at the door.

“That’s them!” my mom announced, slightly too excited. She quickly wiped her hands on her apron and ran out our front door to meet them. I blinked in an effort to snap out of whatever trance I was in. The other neighbors that had been in my yard seconds before, ran after my mom into the lawn next door. There was no way I was going to follow everyone else and hound them, too. What happened to giving people space?