What was going on here? This was like the twilight zone or something. Maria and McKenzie were both gone. Rushed away by their parents, and their phones were still here. I had visions of their parents driving them off to some girl's boarding school. A school for delinquent young ladies, or something equally dramatic like that. For all I knew Maria's mother was insisting on shipping them off to some finishing school in Switzerland because they had been suspended. The more I though about it all, the worse the scenarios in my head were getting. And with each scenario, it was becoming more and more unlikely that I would ever see Maria again...for the rest of my living life on this planet.
I rushed back into Maria's room wondering if there was a clue as to where they were all going. Maybe she'd left me a secret note. We'd once written each other notes in class in invisible ink, but there were no signs of it anywhere. I went to her desk where her computer always was, but it was gone. Now I was really worried. Only in the worse case scenario imaginable, like a witness protection program, would a family suddenly disappear leaving all their phones behind, like they were trying to erase their identities, but taking their laptops with them.
I was really starting to panic and threw myself onto Maria's bed hoping it would provide some kind of familiar comfort. I had stared up at that ceiling so many times over the years. I think that I had just taken it for granted that I would always be able to stare up at this celling, and that Maria would also always be there. But now she wasn't, and now it was just me and the boring ceiling on our own.
A darker reality was starting to slide in and take up space in my mind. Maria might not always be here. For some reason she felt more far away now, and not just physically, than she'd ever felt before. That strange, psychic connection thing that we usually had, where we just knew what the other person was thinking or feeling, seemed to be gone. The link to Maria felt severed.
I closed my eyes and tried to reconnect. To reestablish the invisible link, I know how weird that sounds. But it was all I could think of doing. I concentrated as hard as I could on her. I recreated her in my mind down to the minutest detail I could remember. She had the tinniest scar on the top of her forehead. I remember the day she'd gotten it, it was about six years ago. We'd been chasing each other around the garden one summer and she'd tripped and hit her head. There was so much blood and her mom had rushed her to the doctor where she'd gotten a few stitches. She was so proud of those stitches, and I'd thought they were the coolest things ever. So hardcore.
Her face was full of freckles this time of year, and on her left cheek, there were three that looked like they were the corers of a perfect triangle if you traced over them with a pen...
In my mind I saw her smile at me, like she always did. Fuck, how had I never noticed how beautiful she was before? How perfect she was for me. How had I not realized that the girl of my dreams had been staring me in the face this whole time?
And why when I finally, finally realized it, after all these years, was she suddenly so far away from me. Out of my reach.
I opened my eyes again. An impending sense of doom started to swallow me up, and I was overcome with a feeling that I was too late. I had waited too long to catch on, and now the ship had sailed. I had had her for only a second, and now she was gone.
Maria
I stepped out onto the wrap around patio that surrounded our lake house. The sun was setting and it was beautiful. A orange, golden spray of light danced over the still surface of the water. It's aways beautiful here. Our house was perched high on the hill overlooking the enormous lake, so large that it was lined by stoney beaches. The house was tucked away in huge pines that looked like they had been growing forever. If those pines could speak... God, lame thought, but the stories they could tell and then things that they must have seen.
But talk about uncharacteristic impulsivity though! My dad had very suddenly, and loudly, declared that he could take a few days off work. He never took days off work. In fact, he would probably drag his bloody self there if he got run over and lost an arm. He declared again that we should pack our bags, and then declared (even louder this time) that we were going to the lake house for a few days. He had made a lot of declarations.
Family bonding... he'd said.
A time away to think and reflect... he'd used those words too.
Unfortunately, for me, the lake house was also packed with memories of Mike and I. We'd spent a whole summer here once. Reflecting back, it was one of those holidays that McKenzie had been particularly bitchy to me. And now I knew why. And in fairness to her, she actually had every right to be. I was the bitch.....
I can't begin to explain the depth of my regret for what happened with her. The guilt I now felt over dissing her completely, and over night I might add, for Mike. Almost forgetting about her entirely, to the
