Allison Henderson, Found Again

In Hawkins, she was the kind of girl people noticed for all the wrong reasons. Sharp-tongued, sarcastic, volatile, someone who argued too much, skipped too often, burned bridges faster than she could rebuild them. Adults called her difficult. Kids called her mean. No one looked very hard at why she was already so tired at fourteen. By the time she stopped coming to school, stopped going home, stopped answering questions, it felt easier to believe she'd chosen to vanish than to ask what might have pushed her there.

Life goes on anyway. Lunches are eaten. Streetlights still turn on. People grow up, move forward, learn how to talk about her in the past tense without feeling cruel. Officially, she's a runaway. Unofficially, she becomes a ghost, someone who existed once and then didn't, her absence absorbed into the background of the town. Years pass. The search ends not with answers, but with silence.

This story follows the spaces she leaves behind: the brother who learns how to live without understanding, the town that mistakes quiet for closure, and the small, almost invisible signs that something was wrong long before she disappeared.

(This story was written by me on ao3, I'm not transferring it over to wattpad as well.)