Like It Was Yesterday

Part Eleven

I walked back into the hallway to see that she was nowhere around. Why would she be getting help from Mrs. H. now? She was never here this early and her classroom was still locked.

I told Abbie what happened when I got to 1st hour. I also told Ryan and Ashleigh in 2nd hour. When I got to 3rd hour however, I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell David or Rachel, although I knew Ryan would probably tell Rachel himself.

The whole hour went by and Iliana wasn’t there. How could that be? I just saw her that morning. I decided to tell David and Rachel then, as long as she wasn’t here to hear me I figured it would be safe.

When I first told them they were really confused. David gave me the idea to maybe do some research on her or something. He thought that maybe there was something about her that she was hiding.

“What if she a ghost? Or something like… a vampire?” he asked.

Okay, vampire stories were becoming way too big these days. I can’t believe he even suggested that.

“I doubt that,” I said, shaking my head.

“She seems pretty human to me, just like everyone else… but then, so do the vampires in all of those teen books being published these days.”

“ Seriously though,” I said, trying to get him to really listen to me. “It’s like she just appeared out of nowhere, just because I was thinking about her.”

“I can’t believe you still have the necklace,” Rachel said out of nowhere.

“What?”

I looked down to see that she was staring at my necklace Iliana gave me back in 6th grade. I also realized why it had caught her attention in the first place. It was definitely shinier than it had been yesterday. I wonder how. I never cleaned it. Sometimes, that just happened though… out of nowhere. Then a thought suddenly came to me.

“You guys? What if this has something to do with it?”

“What do you mean?” David asked.

I told them about how most of the time it was a dark dull gold color as if it was dirty and needed to be cleaned, but sometimes, it was so bright gold you’d almost think it was glowing. I held it in my hand for a few seconds and started to wonder if maybe it was the reason she was so weird around me. Maybe there’s some weird connection to the both of us.

During lunch I decided to go to the library and look up her family to see what came up. They didn’t come up to anything though. That’s weird. No address, no phone number, no background information, no anything. She did come up on our school’s website for winning an award, but that was it. I went to various sites typing in her family members’ names, but continued to find nothing everywhere I looked.

There had to be something on her somewhere. Knowing that Kyle wasn’t in school that day I decided to call him and ask him to look through his phone book for me. At first he wondered why I wanted to know her number and where she lived, so I just told him I had it before, but lost it and I didn‘t want to ask her because I didn‘t want to tell her that.

A few minutes after he finally found his phonebook he told me her parents weren’t listed in it. I asked him to double check and make sure, but he said they really weren’t there.

The next day at school I told David and Rachel what I found out, or well… what I didn’t find out, because I didn’t really find anything.

“That’s strange. I wonder why we can’t find anything on her. I tried looking yesterday, but also got nothing,” David told me.

“Same here,” Rachel added.

Iliana was back today. It was kind of weird seeing her when I now knew there was something oddly suspicious about her.