The Absence of Truth | S. Stilinski

I. | men in the woods

I. | men in the woods

"HAVE YOU EVER seen a dead body?"

    There was something in Presley's voice that made me look up from my math homework. Usually such a question would make me laugh - sixteen year old girls weren't the ones who wanted to look at dead bodies, and sixteen year old boys weren't usually prone to finding them - but the way Presley was holding his phone in his hand had me put my calculator down.

    "Uh, no?" He waited patiently as I fumbled for something more substantial to say. "Do you - have you found a dead body?"

    A brightness filled Presley's eyes and he let out a quick laugh. "Oh, my God, no!"

    I wasn't buying whatever he was trying to sell. Presley was a good student, a great athlete, and the best brother anyone could have, but he was the worst liar in the entire universe. I closed my notebook and set down my pencil. Technically, we hadn't even started school yet, which meant that the work I was doing could wait. "Presley, you're great and everything, but could you not be all secretive and stuff right now? Did you find a dead body or not?"

    "I most definitely didn't find a dead body ... but there might be one in the woods." I opened my mouth to question him, but he was already turning his phone towards me so I could get a glance of something. "This is Lydia Martin. She's a teenager that got attacked by some wild animal at the high school's winter formal or whatever. I was listening to Sarah's radio and they just put out an APB on her."

    The girl on Presley's screen looked to be around our age, with red hair and earrings that probably cost more than my future college education. It was a yearbook photo he was showing me, but she looked like one of the people you never wanted to mess with in the hallway. "She looks mean, Pres. Like 'ruin your reputation for fun' mean. You want to go into the woods in the middle of the night in a town we don't know just to find the high school's mean girl?"

    He weighed what I'd just said in his head then nodded definitively. "Hell yeah I do."

    "Dude, I don't think - "

    "Hey, great! Grab a jacket, I'll go get the car started." And then he left the room in such a hurry that I didn't have the chance to say no.

    There were many things in this world that I would like to stop Presley from doing. I hated  when he drank the rest of the milk and still put the carton back in the refrigerator, I despised when he left the seat up in our shared bathroom, and I could never stand his stubbornness. Which is why I knew there was no getting out of searching for this Lydia Martin.

    With a heavy sign, I grabbed a jacket off of my bed and bounced down the stairs. In the kitchen, Sarah and Mom had left us money for pizza while they worked late. I stuffed the bills into my pocket before going out to the car where Presley was impatiently waiting.

    "You know," I began as we started down the street, "When we got the car, I was really expecting to share it, not be driven around by you all the time."

    Presley rolled his eyes. "If you knew how to drive stick, then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Plus, you don't even like this thing."

    And that was true. A little over a year ago, Mom had taken us car shopping in a dicey little dealership, where prices were high and quality was low. Somehow, I was reeled into a dumpy blue Jeep, which was much older than me and made mostly out of duct tape. Presley loved it - there was a enough room for his athletic frame, and plenty of space for any sports equipment he used during season. I hated it, mainly because I couldn't even get it out of the driveway. A manual car was not my car.