Hiding From the Unknown

Part 1

"Are you sure you'll be ok, Dad?"
"I'll be fine, LoLo, it's just a business trip, what's the worst that could happen?"

This conversation haunted me every single day of my life.  What could I have done? That one thought circled my brain with the conversation, as I racked up about twenty memo books a month with endless possibilities about how I could've changed what happened.  When I was eight, my father went on a trip, and went missing. He was never found, and it made my life miserable, as it still did. A 'normal' sixteen year old girl would have a boatload of problems, but nothing even close to what I had to go through. 

To them, 'problems' were getting the wrong prom dress, smudging mascara, losing their phone, and not texting their friends back less than an hour after receiving their texts. The problems were stereotypical, but they did apply to most sixteen year olds...well,in my city.

On June 17, it was my birthday. So what? I didn't ever care that much about birthdays, so what was the reason to care today? Why was sixteen so different from other ages? I had never understood this. While girls all over the nation who .were turning sixteen were putting every ounce of effort they had into planning a flawless sweet sixteen party, I was putting every ounce of effort I had into convincing my mom I didn't need one. 

"This will be like any other day," I remember reminding myself , as I stuck my head out of my bedroom door and smelled the wafted scent of crystalized sugar. Which only meant one thing...frosting....on a cake. A cake that I had begged my mother not to bake. I stuck my head in my palms. When would she understand that I didn't want to celebrate, when I could have been searching for my Dad?

When I was eight years old, my dad went on a business trip to Colorado, and he texted me every day telling me what happened, and how much he loved me...until one day the texts just stopped. My mom and I were so scared that we even called a private investigator and tried what ever we could to find him, but all hope was lost. No one could track him down. The only evidence they found was a small paper containing his introduction speech, which they looked into, but he was never found. We had a funeral for him anyway, and the incident changed my life. I now feel like the must be a way for me to find him again, and I spend every minute trying to.

My mom refused to help me search for him after my fourteenth birthday, because the small amount of money we received from her accounting job was simply not enough to hire another private investigator, or a police searching squad, but I went out of my way to try to find some other way to find him, any other way.

Anyway, it was present day, and I didn't want to go to school. Going somewhere on your birthday always attracted unwanted attention, and for the populars that was fine, but for me, it was not. I would rather curl up on my bed and google for new private investigators until I got so tired that I just fell asleep. Some people called me addicted and crazy, and said that my dad was gone forever, but I would never believe any of them. Ever.