Does Your Heart Still Stop When You See Me?

Chapter One

A/N: This chapter is in Nini's POV, but most of these upcoming chapters will be in the third person/ general pov. happy reading!

Ricky disappeared after school on a Friday afternoon, way back when we were in second grade, and small things seemed really important and important things seemed too small. That afternoon, it wasn't weird to see him get in his mom's car, a silver Infinity whose screeching tires rang out in my mind for years afterward.

Ricky and I had been best friends since the day we were born up until the day his mom picked him up from school and never brought him home. We even lived next door, our bedroom windows reflecting each other.

His window's been empty for ten years, but sometimes I can still see into his room and it's exactly how it was when he disappeared. Ricky's dad, Mike, never moved anything. In the past ten years, he remarried and even had a little girl, but Ricky's bedroom never changed. It was if Mike was afraid to touch it; if he touched it, Ricky wouldn't come back.

Ricky's mom was pretty smart about the way she took him. It was a three-day weekend and she was supposed to bring him to school on Tuesday morning. By ten a.m., they hadn't shown up. By eleven, Ricky's father was in the school office. By three o'clock that afternoon, there were news cameras scattered across the school parking lot and on Ricky's lawn at home.

Kourt cried and Mama D made us sit at the table and eat a snack—Double Stuffed Oreos. That's how I knew it was really bad.

We all thought Ricky and his mom would come back that night. And then the next day. And then the weekend. But they never did. Ricky and his mom were gone, as if they vanished off the face of the Earth.

Ricky's absence split us wide open, dividing our neighborhood along a fault line strong enough to cause an earthquake. An earthquake would have been better. At least during an earthquake, you understand why you're shaking.

The neighbors formed search parties, holding hands as they walked through wooded areas behind the school. They took up collections, bought officers cups of coffee, and told Kourt and Big Red and me to go play.

Mike spent nights sobbing into his hands, Mama D and Mama C sitting next to him and holding him , rocking him the way they rocked me whenever I woke up dreaming about Ricky, dreaming about the tag on the back of his shirt, my pajamas damp with nightmare sweat. 

As time went on, it became hard to imagine what he looked like, even as the police age-progressed his second-grade school photo. We stayed and looked and waited for him to come back, as if our love was a beacon that he could use to light his way home, his tag still sticking up in the back.

After a while, though, after years passed and pictures changed and false tips fell through, it started to feel like the beacon wasn't for him anymore. It was for those of us left behind, something to cling to when you realized that scary things could happen, that villains didn't only exist in books, that Ricky might never come home.

Until one day, he did.