Trust Me

Missing

"Swear you will never leave me". She would always say that whenever we saw each other at school, or even when we met for a coffee. I used to think that she might've been brainwashed with that phrase watching a romantic movie for the hundredth time or something. But only now I know... Kate was clever, fearless and extremely exuberant. But I had no idea that she would even think about doing what she's done; she had her own way of finding out stuff about people. And she used that against us, against her two best friends!
I remember every second of it, unfortunately...

It was when I saw her brown, small eyes and her smile, which looked more like a grin, on a damp leaflet on my way home from school that I started asking myself a thousand questions. I ripped the piece of paper off the lamppost with the velocity of a cheetah, as if I wanted to hide it before anyone else could see it and I shoved it inside the left pocket of my carbon black blazer. She has always had 100% attendance in school since Year 9 and that day, a cold, rainy winter day in early January she wasn't in school. I quickly got my phone out of my school bag; it was a beautiful, comfy pink bag with a big pocket at the top where I put all my books and two small ones at the bottom where I usually put my phone, headphones and ipod.
"Hello",  whispered Bella on the other side of the phone.

"Bella, what is going on?"; I replied nervously without giving her the time to even think about a possible answer.

"Ehm, I don't know Claire but this is not the right time for us to talk...", she said, still whispering.

"My parents are having another argument about what happened last night and they keep asking me to agree with whatever they're saying!"; she sounded really tired and exhausted so I decided to end the call without saying anything else. I knew about her mum getting home late the night before from a dinner with her primary school friends and her dad giving her a jealous Third Degree, so I thought I would tell her what I saw the day after at school.

I got home earlier than any other day. My parents were still working, so I was alone in the house. I didn't have any siblings as my parents had me quite late in their busy life; my mum used to run a French restaurant not so far away from our house and my dad was a doctor in London. They always got home really late at night and they only had time for me in the weekend. However sad that might seem to you, that day I was actually glad that they weren't there.

I changed into some cosy pyjamas and I got my Macbook out of its new silver case. I tried to Skype Kate, hoping for her to pick up the call from wherever she might have been in that moment... No answer. I sent her a 3 words message on Facebook saying "where r u???", but only after I sent the message I looked up at her name on her perfect profile and realised that she hasn't been online for about 12 hours. She is always online, waiting for us to send her some gossip about people in our school or Hollywood celebrities (at least that's what she said when me and Bella asked her why she was always online).

I was starting to give up trying to reach her when suddenly an email popped up on my desktop. In my head I thought it was probably some school email, but as I went to close it my eyes crossed the email address it was from: www.missing.co.uk
Immediately, I read the rest of the email and I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing:

"Wanna know where your friend went? Follow me!"