The Day They Disappeared

Chapter 1

It hit the headlines this morning. Another one gone. Another child, another neighbor, friend, son, brother, just gone. It's only been a week since the chaos began again and everyone has been locking themselves behind doors with ten chains and padlocks but it still didn't help. Lucas Maxwell was gone and I just know more will follow him. How many more? I'm not sure, but there will be more. No amount of locks, chains, or strict rules will keep the monster out or away.

Maybe it's wrong but for the first night or two after Lucas went missing I prayed that I would be next. Everyone was looking for him and spoke about him like he was some sort of angel that Father Peters preached about on Sunday mornings. The girls in school cried and the guys all looked at the floor and recalled all the fun times they had with him. I knew that everyone just felt sorry because they didn't do anything, they didn't say anything, and they could never do or say anything to him again. They pitied his real grieving friends and family and put on an act. I knew it was fake but I still wished it was me because for once I wanted people to notice me. I wanted the girls who turned me away to cry and talk about my kind eyes. I wanted the guys who picked on me to say how cool I was. I wanted my brother to say he missed me. I wanted my sister to say she was sorry. But most of all I wanted my parents to say they loved me.

But like I said, after two days those wishes were gone because I knew that Lucas wasn't missing when his severed finger was found in the local playground sandbox. Poor little Susie Laughlin just wanted to toss sand around with a shovel and instead she flung the severed finger of Lucas Maxwell into her hair. When that story made its way around town I knew he was dead and I immediately hated myself for wishing I was in his place. I thought maybe Lucas had finally lived up to his words and ran away from his parents and adopted sister to go to California. He wanted to meet the beautiful Carrie Fisher and see the Hollywood sign. He wanted to be an actor and grace the silver screen alongside Molly Ringwald. I still held onto the hope that he had run away and that the finger in the sandbox incident was entirely false.

But when I woke up to the smell of burnt bacon, scrambled eggs, and the sound of my parents sobbing quietly with today's newspaper in their hands I knew my hope had been unrealistic, just as I had thought in the back of my head all along.

Most of the morning was a blur after that. I remember my parents repeating my name trying to get me to snap out of my daze. I remember my brother shaking his head in the corner and my sister cried for the first time since our Nana's funeral last August. My mother told me I could stay home but I ignored her and walked to school. Walking down the hallways was hell. Kids were whispering.

"That's the dead kid's best friend."

"Why is he in school? Does he know?"

"Maybe he killed him!"

"Or maybe he just doesn't know?"

Teachers avoided saying his name around me but when they thought I was out of earshot they mumbled about how sorry they felt and how difficult this all must be for me. It all made me wish I had stayed home and suffocated myself in the comfort of my blankets but then again I'm glad I didn't stay home so I could listen to my family mope about all day and ask me if I was okay.

Everything was wrong. I kept thinking that when I woke up and went to school the next day that I would see Lucas and his curly brown hair standing on the stairs calling me a loser and telling me to walk faster.

But I got home and I laid in bed for hours before I fell asleep eventually. When I woke up and went to school I still heard the whispers and still got the looks of pity. I saw blondes with bows that tied their hair up, brunettes with blue eyes that gleamed with sorrow, and redheads with too many freckles splattered across their cheeks and noses but I never saw Lucas with his curly brown hair and favorite Star Wars shirt on. In fact, every day afterwards I never saw him in school and I never saw him in his backyard or outside of the Miller's Diner flirting with Florence Miller even though she always blushed and turned him down. The last time I ever saw Lucas Maxwell was the day of his funeral. His face was pale and lifeless much like the rest of him. His usual mop of brown curls that stuck out all over his head was tame and stiff. And his hands were hidden from view making me conclude that the finger in the sandbox story was true. The last time I saw my best friend was the same day he disappeared. His last words to me were "Princess Leia is so smoking and if you don't think so you're wrong." before he pedaled away into the arms of his murderer.

See, the boy in the casket and the boy on the bike were two different people. The boy in the casket looked classy with his suit and tie while the boy on the bike sported a Star Wars tee with Darth Vader on the front. The boy in the casket was surrounded by dozens of people who remembered him in life and the boy on the bike only had a handful of people outside of his family who even knew his name. But I believe the biggest difference of all was that the boy in the casket was lifeless and the boy on the bike was quite the opposite. The boy on the bike had a life, a family, a handful of friends, and a future. And the boy in the casket, well his future was only a dirt filled hole in the Earth with a slab of rock on the ground above. The boy in the casket was Lucas Lee Maxwell, 16 years old, born April 14, 1968, died May 6, 1986. The boy in the casket was now another victim, another child gone too soon, another name on a stone slab, another body in the ground. The boy in the casket was all there was left of the boy I had known.

The boy in the casket was not my best friend.

He was a stranger.