The Vanishing of Brandyn Taylor

Fear.

Despite all the worry going through my mind I slept well that night. Rachel was asleep before I was though,I think the driving had made her more tired than she would admit to me. I didn't know what I would ever do without her, she never let me down, ever.
I had hoped coming here would have given us some answers, but it was just opening up even more pieces of the puzzle that was falling apart.
I couldn't have got so many details of the boys life wrong; one or maybe two yes, but not all of this. Perhaps I had remembered his room number wrong, but there was, at least, a room here with the same number, just not a letter before it. Easy mistake to make, I was trying to recall memories from six years ago after all. Slight mistakes I could accept, an entire life seemingly vanished - not so easy to accept.

When we woke the next morning it was a little before nine, we both seemed to wake up at about the same time.

"Morning boo. How'd you sleep honey?" Rachel asked me sleepily.

"Morning Rach'. Slept quite well actually. Which surprises me a lot."

"Well you've not slept much, if at all, for a bit. Your body obviously needed to try and catch up a little. What do you want to do today then?"

"I really don't know. I mean, all I've done, since I realised the boys missing, is try and think what I can do. But now we are here nothing seems to be working as hoped. Mrs. Riley should, hopefully, ring pretty soon. I could just wander about the campus, asking random people, but the chances of that helping us are next to none. Like you said, it's highly unlikely any students here will have been here back when the boy was. I assume most of the teaching staff will be holding lectures. We can't exactly invade every single lecture today, that would probably get us escorted off the campus pretty quickly."

"I would presume that a university would have some sort of staff room, one for each department or building at least, if not a main one. What about trying to find them?"

"See, I knew I bought you along for a reason!"

"I'm not just a pretty face you know!" Rachel laughed.

"You're so much more than that. Staff rooms seem a good idea, if were lucky there will be a few staff there at least. Easier and quicker than asking them all one by one."

"Yup. After that though?"

"My mind hits a dead end after that. We can't go round every single member of staff asking them to look him up in records, they're all linked to the same system so that would be pointless anyway."

"Is it a case of try the staff areas and Mrs. Riley and that's all we can do then?"

"It seems to be." I said, feeling like we were never going to find Brandyn here. "I mean, I did wonder if asking any shops local to the uni would help, but they're not likely to remember someone from so long ago."

"Ahhh, maybe not but that's given me a light bulb moment. Didn't you say he had a part time job somewhere, to help pay his fee's and stuff?"

"Oh my god Rach', you're amazing. Yes he did! He said it was near campus. God what was it called? Damn, I can't even remember what type of job he had."

"Relax a little boo, getting yourself worked up isn't going to help you think. Ok, take this step by step. Can you remember if it was a shop he worked in or an office, or what?"

"Erm, uh, I remember him talking about serving customers, especially when they'd had a difficult or funny one. So that's suggests shop or restaurant. No, I'm sure he wasn't a waiter, because knowing how clumsy he could be that would have just ended in disaster."

"Well that's a start," Rachel said excitedly. "we've ruled out office based or waiter. What else would be near a campus? Book shops? Computers, phones, that sort of thing?"