He still had sunscreen on his nose and grass stuck to his knees. We’d just come in from racing our bikes to the end of the cul-de-sac and back. Aunt Marla made us pose in front of the house “for memories.”
I didn’t know it’d be the last one.
Two mornings later, he was gone. Not just gone like missing. Gone like nobody’s looking.
They said he “ran away.” Said he probably got upset about school. That he’d done it once before for an hour. But his backpack was still there.
His shoes, too. He never left without his shoes. I asked Aunt Marla if the police were coming again.
That’s when she shook her head. Said they had “bigger things” to deal with. That a boy like him probably just needed to blow off steam.
But my stomach twisted because I knew him better than anyone. He wasn’t the type to just leave. I kept going back to that photo.
The way his smile looked forced, the way his hand hung half-open at his side like he wanted to say something but couldn’t. It started to feel like a clue. The neighbors whispered about it.
Some said they’d seen him talking to a man in a pickup truck the night before. Others claimed they heard shouting in the backyard. But no one wrote anything down, no one pushed for answers.
After the first week, the whispers faded, and people just stopped mentioning him. Except me. I couldn’t.
One afternoon, about a month later, I was pedaling around the neighborhood when I noticed something strange. At the far end of the woods behind our street, there was a piece of red cloth tangled high in a tree. It looked out of place.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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