A Way to You

Chapter 3

   Cas has been missing for three months and is presumed dead. At first everyone thought he had just ran away, but I knew Cas and I knew that didn’t make sense and when they found his car two days later on the outskirts of town I knew there was more to this. There was no blood and the only DNA found was Cas’s, which was suspicious but the cops said that it was possible the killer faked a scenario to lure him out of his car and then had committed the murder. I hate to put down our police force but it seems most of them are more concerned with closing cases than actually solving them because I didn’t see any signs of a struggle near the car. After studying the pictures for about the hundredth time it hit me that if I was actually on the force I could open this case and actually solve it with help of the force’s resources. So that’s what I did; I pulled out of the university and joined the academy.

   I’ve been here for two months and am doing surprisingly well. Despite why I’m here, I’ve actually made friends, Charlie and Ash. I went to school with both but Charlie hung out more with the dungeon and dragon geeks, while Ash was ironically enough getting high behind the school with the other pot heads (I doubt he’ll stay with the program) but they are both really good at the whole computer side of things and are fun to be around for the most part and they get my mind off of Cas which is where my head seems to stay 90% of the time.  I’m either thinking about how much I miss him or how I should have kissed him when I had the chance, or how I should have waited for him to start heading home and follow him and those are just the shallow things. When I actually think about the whole situation too much I wonder what’s happened to him and if he was murdered or kidnapped or what have you. All the ideas of what’s actually happened to him get me angry or just plain hopeless so I try to keep my thoughts away from them. Besides Charlie and Ash, I have Sammy and he helps me stay out of a pit of despair while at home. He’s going to be a junior this year which he’s excited about because by his thinking that means he only has two more years until he gets to go off to Stanford. He swears he’s excited because it’s a chance to see a new place and learn and in no way is it about leaving me behind. It’s just me and Sammy, has been for a few years now, our mom and dad died in a car crash at the end of my sophomore year leaving us to live with Ellen Harvel, a family friend. She let us stay in our family home and kinda just kept our cabinets full with food and was there when we needed her but truth was she had her business and own family to take care of.  I think that’s why Cas’s disappearance has been so hard on me, Cas was the one who helped me through most of it. Sure I had other friends that were there for me but Cas was the one who would come over and just talk to me about anything and everything.

   Everyone else would either give me a sad look like I was some kind of puppy while they were talking to me or would try and “talk me through it” but Cas never did any of that, ya know? I could do or say anything to him and he would just take it for what it was with no judgment or sympathy, he was just there for me. He really helped me through it all. I think all of that made our relationship develop way beyond just friends and that led us to the night that would put us in a kind of chicken for almost two years.

   We were sitting on my bed in the middle of the night having one of those after-we-graduate conversations. I was complaining about not being smart enough to get accepted anywhere but the local state college and that I had to stay here for Sammy for another two years when he suggested that we just go to the local state school, we could get a dorm together so I could sleep on campus but still be able to go home and check up on Sammy. When I started to protest he silenced me saying that Sammy was capable of taking care of himself during the week and that I would be close enough to home that I could go there on the nights I couldn’t stand to be away. He then told me that as long as I kept up my grades and worked hard and retook my SAT’s that I could probably go anywhere I wanted after my two years at the state school. During his ranting about how smart I was all I could do was smile at him. No one had ever told me that I was smart, other than my mother and when she died my confidence about my intelligence (what little I had) died with her.