The Vanishing of Brandyn Taylor

Decisions to be made

When I still hadn't heard from him by the next morning, I was really concerned about Brandyn. I'd tried calling his mobile a few times, with no reply. He'd never done this before, never not answered me for so long, and yet I still kept trying to justify it to myself. There could any of a hundred reasons why he wasn't replying, but most of the reasons I could think of weren't good ones.
I knew I wasn't going to be able to calm my anxiety until I heard from him.
I'd woken up several times in the night, and by five a.m. I had all but given up any hopes of getting more sleep.

After half an hour laying in bed, awake, that morning, I decided to get up and make a cuppa. The kettle seemed to take forever to boil. I made my tea, and curled my legs up beside me on the sofa, covering myself with a blanket even though the flat was never cold. What did I do now? What could I do was more to the point. I'm sure I read somewhere that an adult had to be missing twenty four, maybe even forty eight, hours before the police would class them as missing, unless there were reasons they were vulnerable. So going to the police now probably wouldn't do me any good.
I could go over to his house, but it was on the other side of town, and with the snow it would take me a while to get there. I estimated that, on a non snow day, it would take me around two hours to walk there. On a day like today I would easily have to double that time, and then some. That meant it was going to take me the best part of the day, and if I didn't leave soon I'd be coming home in the dark. Another problem with this idea was what if the weather conditions got worse during the day? It would add even more time to my journey. I couldn't bank on there being any buses, just from looking out of the kitchen window, when I had made my tea, it looked doubtful that there would be any running at all. I could call a taxi, I had enough money to afford one there and back, if it could get through the snow.

I've never been the best at making decisions, it can take me a good ten minutes to decide what to eat off a menu when we went out for lunch. A decision like this, well, that could take me hours to choose what to do., and I didn't have hours to pick, I'd have to make a decision, and fast. I didn't really want to go outside in the awful weather, but for my best friend I absolutely would do. I gave it some more thought, and came to the conclusion that Brandyn would do it if it was me missing. That was that then, I was going to try and get to the other side of town and back. Half of my brain knew it was a bad idea, but what else was I meant to do?
I got dressed, making sure I put on several layers to keep warm, made some sandwiches and a flask of tea, put on my big jacket (this time!) and gloves, pulled my hat down right over my head, and looked at myself in the mirror above the hall table.

'You, Kiera, are nuts. Totally and utterly nuts.' I said quietly to myself. 'You're going to freeze to death out there, or fall in the snow and lay there, until you freeze to death.'

As mad as it seemed, I just had to do this. Brandyn meant too much to me not to, I mean, anything could have happened to him. Within about sixty seconds of leaving the house I realised how nuts this really was. It was absolutely freezing out, and there was a lot of patches of ice, and huge chunks of half snow half ice. The paths were mostly covered in a thick layer of freshly fallen snow, which did help me walk without my feet slipping with each step I took.

I haunched down in my coat as far as I could, and trudged on, slowly. Within a short time I began to realise that this was going to take longer than I anticipated. My only hope was that the sun would come out and melt some of the snow. If it snowed any more I might have real trouble getting through town. I stuck to the busier routes as much as I could, they'd been gritted through the night and I was starting to see more clear patches. Where the paths were too icy to walk safely I walked in the road, keeping close to the curbs. As I walked I tried to call Brandyn, a lot. The last time I tried I heard a message telling me the phone I was trying to call was switched off. His battery must have ran out. My walk took me near Phil's coffee shop, so I decided to take the short detour, and see if Brandyn had been in.