A/N One more chapter and you get to meet Maxx. I'm so excited for you to meet him!! He's my favorite character by far.
I searched the entire forest and still couldn’t find her. I sat on the grass numbly until it was pitch black outside. “Abbi!” my mom yells. “Where’s your sister?” my step-dad adds. I don’t move to get up or anything, I just start to cry again. I hear my mom and dad walk towards me, stumble rather; I don’t know how they can see at all.
“Where’s Addison at?” my dad says again. “She… I don’t know what happened to her. She was just gone.” I look up at them and see the pity in their eyes again.
“She’s missing?” Mom asks, kneeling beside me. I nod and she starts crying with me. My dad, the thinker of the family starts mumbling aloud, “Did she leave on her own?”
No, Dad, she touched a pink orb and went poof.
“No.”
“Was she kidnapped?”
“I don’t know, Dad,” I wipe the tears from my eyes and stand beside him. “But what are we supposed to do? File a missing persons report?”
“She hasn’t been missing for twenty-four hours yet, we can’t do much.”
“Well what can we do? Sit and wait? I can’t do that, Dad. She’s my sister and I need her.”
My mom stands next to me, still silent. “Come on, Abbi, you’ve had enough trauma than one person can handle.” She grabs my hand and gently tugs me inside the house.
My mom forces a mug of hot chocolate into my numb hands and guides me to my bedroom. She made sure I drank all of the hot chocolate before she left. “I know Addison isn’t here but you can’t shut down,” she says, sitting down on my bed.
Easier said than done, Mom.
I wait for her to leave, assuring her that I’m fine, no I don’t need anything, you don’t have to check on me later. And then I do a surprising thing. I break down. I’m never the one to break down about anything. Even when I broke my ankle in second grade, I barely cried. I cried so little, they were worried that I paralyzed my foot. I didn’t, I just didn’t want to show weakness.
First, I started with small tears running down my face. Those slowly erupted to sobs that shake my body that were supposed to be happening two days ago. I let go of all the abandonment and isolation and vulnerability I held in. I sit there crying my eyes out for a good half hour.
I feel a little better, about a fourth of the feelings I left in are floating around in my room, settling on Addison’s empty bed, our shared dresser, our haphazard stack of notebooks, our book bags, everything. The sobs decrescendo into small tears again as the crying takes its toll on my body causing me to drift in and out of restless fits of sleep.
