Her friend had been gone for two months and seven days. Two months and seven days. It didn't seem like that long. It seemed more like it had been an eternity. An eternity waiting, hoping that maybe, just maybe, she would come back. Every day her hope was trickling away like water from a leaky sink. Every day a few drops of hope went down the drain.
Angela Deans was lying on her bed, bleakly staring up at the ceiling. Her mind was a great black void, swirling with terrible thoughts. Where could her friend have gone? What happened? Did she leave of her own accord? Was she kidnapped? She didn't want to think about it, yet the thought kept tickling at the back of her mind, begging to come in. Whenever she gave up and let that thought in, it expanded into a great sea of repulsive ideas of what happened to her friend.
She pondered on these nightmares for hours at a time, instead of doing her homework, or listening to music, or playing with her dog. Ah, her dog. She heard scratching at her door and a long, furry tail pounding against the ground, and the sound of Lucy's excited panting. She reluctantly climbed out of her bed, her muscles aching and throbbing from lying down so long. She groaned, stretched, and yawned several times, and then lazily lumbered over to the door. She pulled on the handle and it opened with a creak. Lucy the dog excitedly bounded in, jumping and slobbering and trying to lick Angela's face. Angela's mind felt groggy and her eyes droopy, but she let out a small giggle, then returned to her previous state of oblivion. She traversed through her messy room to check herself in the large square mirror on he wall. Her long red curls, which used to gracefully cascade over her shoulders and back, now were matted and strange.
Underneath her sea blue eyes, which used to be very bright and cheerful but looked old and sunken now, were dark bags that made her look almost zombie-like. Her fair skin was now even paler than it was before. She appeared very frail and weak, like someone had locked her in a dark closet for a long time and had just let her out. She sure felt like it. She adjusted her gaze over to the worn piece of paper taped to her mirror. On it was a picture of a girl Angela's age. The girl had long, straight hair, which was the color of coffee. She had black browline glasses framing her big, bright green eyes. Her smile was radiant like a lightbulb. Her face was pale, but the rest of her skin was lightly tanned from playing out in the sun.
"Heh." Angela thought. "I wonder what she would do, if I was the lost one." She finally forced her wandering eyes to read the words on the paper and face the terrible truth. "$25,000 reward." It read. "Dead, missing, or kidnapped." Finally, her eyes slowly crept over to the last word, as if dreading what she was about to read. Her missing friend's name. "Octavis."
