Warped, My Vision

Chapter Two

A/N: Sorry I'm still lazy and depressed and going to probably do rewrites later. Also this chapter is kind of short.

We're sitting in the living room. I wish I could be holding Aaron's hand.

"He's gone," Miss Light mumbles under breath, again, still staring at some undefined point in the distance. "He's gone..."

"We'll find him," Carrie says, breaking the fragile atmosphere, suddenly forcing her eyes to focus.

"What?"

"We'll find him. We can find him, Zach."

"We don't have any idea where he would've gone, how are we going to find him?"

"No...we have something..." Miss Light carefully, with shaking hands, flattens the piece of paper she had been holding in a death grip, and hands it to me.

"I'll miss the winter, a world of fragile things." The handwriting is scratchy and weirdly linear.

"They're Evanescence lyrics...from My Last Breath." Carrie and Miss Light nod. That was kind of our fucking song. I feel like I've been punched in the chest.

"What does that mean?" I ask no one in particular. "Is this a clue or a goodbye?"

"I don't know."

"You two should go home. I'll report him missing this time." Miss Light sits up and makes eye contact with me.

"You're right. We'll be back tomorrow. Once this week is over, we have spring break. If we're going to look for him ourselves, we should go then."

"What are we looking for? We don't know if he...if he...We don't know anything..." I stop, and let my head fall into my hands. Why did you leave me, Aaron? I still need you. Carrie puts a hand on my shoulder and looks at me. I can see something familiar behind her eyes that I haven't seen in awhile. A sort of deadness, a numbness that follows an emotional catastrophe. It doesn't matter if we look for him and find nothing. She just needs to try.

Maybe if I just go to sleep tonight and forget all of this, I'll wake up and none of it will have happened. I just want to run away now. I don't care if I'm following Aaron or not, I just want out of this mess he left us with. The mess of emotions left in my mind without him. I just want to run from myself.

xXx

It's the morning again. Maybe it was all a bad dream. I've been getting too many of those lately. I get up, I eat breakfast, I go to school.

Carrie is silent. I'm silent. This feeling of missing something is too damn familiar. Of course, despite my pointless wishful thinking, Aaron is still gone. There isn't a trace of him anywhere.

We get off the bus at Aaron's stop again, and walk to his house, again, and find a distant Ambre Light opening the door, again.

We sit down in the same places as yesterday without saying anything.

"Well?" Miss Light asks, quietly.

"I was thinking...The note...Why specifically the winter?" Carrie asks.

"He loved that line," I murmur. I remember sitting outside with him on Christmas night...

"He also loved skating, right?" Carrie asks again. She's trying to go somewhere. Carrie is a fucking genius but I'm worried she's going to get caught up in over analyzing things and she's just going to be disappointed when we don't find him. When he doesn't want to be found. Or worse, when we find him and he's just a corpse.

"When Aaron was born and until he was about ten, I think, we lived in this house with a pond near it. This was..it was before he started getting nightmares or headaches. We used to go skating on the pond when it froze over." Miss Light stares down at the floor.

"He told me about that when we were skating..."

"Do you remember where the house was?"

"Yes...I could get us there."

"Are we going to do this?" Aaron's mom and Carrie look up at me. Miss Light looks scared and lost and like she's still just looking for a direction to move. She has to go back to work at some point, and Carrie and I still have three days of school before break.

Carrie looks at me. She knows more than she's letting on. That girl always knows more than what she lets on. I'm scared for what she thinks she knows. This isn't just about finding Aaron, is it? There's something else going on, isn't there?

xXx

"Zach...Did you tell your parents what's been going on?"

"No. But they've probably heard about Aaron coming back and going missing again by now."

"When we leave, what are you going to tell them?"

"I don't know if I'll tell them anything."

"Then what?"

"I might leave a note. What are you going to tell your dad?"

"I'm going on a roadtrip with some friends. He'll be fine with it." Carrie's dad is very...relaxed about what she does.

xXx

I've started packing. I have a duffle bag with about a week's worth of clothing, a wallet with about five hundred in it that I've been sort-of saving for a few years. I don't really go out much but my parents still give me allowance, so I just kind of have money.

I have a rain poncho, my driver's license, a flashlight, my phone charger, my backpack...I check items off my mental list one by one until there isn't anything left.

xXx

The rest of the week is gone, blown away like dead leaves in the autumn wind. I get off at my bus stop and grab my bags, making sure my parents don't see me walking out the door, and shout something about going over to Carrie's house to play video games.

On the inside of the door is a hand written note explaining very little about what exactly is going on, but enough that my parents, hopefully, won't freak out too much. I've promised to be back within the week.

I meet up with Carrie on the road, and we walk to Miss Light's house. The air outside still feels like winter.