Vendetta

Chapter 1

It’s been five months since I or anyone in our town last laid eyes on Vanessa. I miss her so much, I wasn’t used to missing her like this cause she was always around, never too far from your reach, even when you didn’t want her to be, she was always lurking, just doing something or nothing.
That’s how she forced her friendship on me. She was wild, and loud, and  too social for her own good. In seventh grade, she’d managed to make half the population of the entire school her friends. I always was so concerned for her when it came to the kind of company she kept around her. She was my only friend and seeing her hang out with people who could potentially hurt her always had me looking over my shoulder. But she never had to worry about that, she was so innocent, so naïve, always saw the good in people even when it wasn’t there. She would always tell me to not worry about her, that’d she’d be fine, she knew what she was doing, but half of the time, she never did. By the eighth grade, she’d managed to make peace with the girls in the upper class that always bullied me on my behalf and had gotten them to stop going after me by “simply asking nicely”.
She would never back down from a challenge and getting those girls to leave me alone was something she’d decided to do ever since she saw them knocking over the “weird kid” ‘s lunch tray over at the school cafeteria one afternoon. She made a promise to me she’d get them to lay off of me, and I didn’t even know her then but that was who she was, a kind, selfless being, and now, that person is nowhere to be found.

Everyone knew her in our little town cause her mother and father were very respectable people in our town. Everyone knew the Godsons. Her father was the sixth of his generation descending from his African family, living in the states and her mother was a white Caucasian woman. They were both ministers of the Latter Day Saints Chapel in our community and did a lot of amazing things to help our town. So it wasn’t a surprise that within a maximum of two weeks that Vanessa had been reported missing, the entire town got together to search for her. It was everywhere, even in our local newspaper,
“Daughter of the Godson Family goes missing “.
No one ever rested. We looked for her day and night but we never found her. And then after three months of searching and not finding her still, the Police came to Vanessa’s parents home and told them it might be time we started considering the possibility of Vanessa being dead. I remember, I was sitting around the family’s dining table when the police came in and delivered that news. I felt my heart sink in and my whole world stop. It was as if everything was closing down on me. Vanessa couldn’t be dead, there’s no way, she was my friend, she just couldn’t die like that. I cried, I cried a lot that day. I couldn’t go to school for a whole month after that because I couldn’t bare going to class and seeing an empty seat of what once used to be Vanessa’s desk. Her mother and father just couldn’t accept that news either. The police told them they needed to close the case and that outraged everyone in our town. I remember them holding a walk against it but after a week, the police went through with it and closed the case. And then after a month, the Godsons together with the entire town came to a realization that we might have to accept our truth…Vanessa was dead and wasn’t coming back.

September 11th was her birthday. Her parents decided to hold a mass in her honor. The whole town was present at the town park. That evening, we all lit candles and wore white to honor the loss of my best friend. Dressing up to go to the funeral of a best friend was one thing I never would have hoped for, stepping foot in this town. It was the most painful feeling I’ve had to endure but I had to do it, for my friend. We sang her a birthday song and friends from our class came to give a speech on who Vanessa was as a person and how her friendship had affected  their lives. When it was time for me to go…I couldn’t. My legs couldn’t move and my entire body went limb. I almost dropped my candle if it hadn’t been for Nicholas McCarthy, my classmate, grabbing it before it hit the ground. The Godsons seeing the state I was in decided to allow me to sit down. I sat down and wept silently to myself, my friend was gone and the one thing I was asked to do to honor her, I was too useless to pull through with it. I never deserved Vanessa, she was an angel and helped me with basically everything and I couldn’t even do this much for her.
The night ended with everyone placing our candles in a cup and setting it on the town’s lake as we said silent prayers for my friend and the water took them away.


Written by
Penny.