Chapter 10

"Beck, did you have to hit me with a snowball just now? I said as I brushed the snow off my hair.

"You seemed to be daydreaming hard over there. I had to wake you up, Mawhaha," she said with a mischievous laugh.

"Daydreaming, don’t you technically mean nightdreaming? It is 7 pm at night?"

"Whatever, I just couldn’t let you be so spacey. I was afraid you might fly off to outer space."

"So what's on your mind that has you zoning out so bad?" 

"I was thinking about how fast time flies by; that is all."

"I understand what you mean. I feel the same way, and soon, we will be adults in the real world before we know it."

"Ha Beck, what do you think is the so-called real?" 

"She rolled her eyes at me. Only you would know a night-dreamer, she said, teasing me!" 

"Well, my brother is home a little early, so he will take you home now. See you at school tomorrow, Beck."

"Oh, and Beck, one last thing, would you want to walk to school in the morning?" 

"Are you crazy more walking in the snow?" 

"Is there anything prettier than the overnight fresh fallen snow at sunrise?" 

"Ha, you are too sentimental, Kaysi. You sound like an old woman."

"Sure, I do," I said in an old lady voice, joking with her. Why not go for a walk? We need to stay fit even in the wintertime." 

"That sounds great," Beck said with sarcasm. I'll see you then, at 7 a.m. sharp." 

"Have a good night, Beck, as she left with my brother in the car!"

The following day, after meeting Becks at her house, I told her I had called and asked Micah to join us before I went to bed. When we got close to Micah’s house, she wasn’t standing outside waiting on us like she said she would.

"Hey, Beck, do you notice she is still missing? It is odd for her not to have been outside right about now."

"She is usually early to school, Kaysi. We may have recently missed her."

"Oh yeah, I remember you telling me that you guys usually walk together at this time. Should we go up the stairs to her house and see if she is there?

"Yeah, I could be wrong. If she's not there, we can go to school to see if she has a head start ahead of us." 

"Okay, so what are we waiting on? Let's hurry up then!" I playfully elbowed her.

Knock, knock, knock. Hello, "Mrs. Monk. Is Micah home?" 

"No, she left earlier for school, and you just missed her," Micah's mom told us.

"I guess we can start walking and see if we bump into her. It's weird that she was ahead out so early when she knew we were coming." 

"Maybe she got the time wrong and thought she was late, but Beck struggled.

I felt off about everything but had an idea we could use. "If she felt like she was running late, she would have taken a shortcut through the park," Micah’s Mom told us this information once before.

Just then, I saw something that caught my eye. "We could follow these," I suggested to Beck, pointing to the tracks in the snow. As we walked in the freshly fallen snow, we followed behind some of the footprints on the ground. 

I looked up at the sky and saw rays of light from the sunrise beaming across the morning clouds. The beams of light that touched the earth made the snow twinkle in different colors like diamonds ." It sure was pretty, wasn’t it?" I asked Beck.

"Yeah, it sure is." Her eyes lit up with the sparkling of the sun and snow. 

"See, Beck, I am not just a dreamer."

"Nah… You must just be rubbing off on me, she teased, elbow-bumping me."

"Now, back on track. Like I told you before, she has been dodging us lately. Now that she is heading to school without us, something must be up with her."

"Kaysi, I told you she’s okay. She must have thought she was late because of the time."

"If you think so." I still felt uneasy.

"She might be trying to catch up with us, considering we missed her."

"Well, let's head through the park, follow her shortcut, and try to catch her."

"We still didn’t see Micah there either, so we moved on to school, hoping to meet up. When we got there, there were new guards everywhere.

"What's going on around here, I whispered to a group of girls nearby?"

"There had been an attack on a possible missing girl in our school, one girl whispered to us."

I was worried about Micah being hurt. We also still have not found her.

When they posted the missing girl’s poster the "next day" with an explanation, it was safe to say Micah wasn’t the one. The girl was found in the park the morning before.

But we still had yet to see Micah at school, not at the lunch table or in the class we shared. She was nowhere to be found. Somehow, neither Beck nor I saw her that day.

"They say the attack didn’t kill her, but she did get amnesia." I could hear kids talking as they looked at the picture. "And I heard they said it wasn’t the first attack this year." whispers and rumors were spreading fast throughout the school.

Could there be more soulless people around? "I don't know; I accidentally spoke my mind out loud." I was thinking hard; my mind was spinning, trying to reason with the situation at hand. Where was Micah?" I was severely getting worried at this point.

This was not the same park as Spencer Ball Park, where Becky almost got hurt. This was the city park, which was much larger and had trails. Many people crossed through there, so anything could have happened.

A couple of days later, we finally saw Micah. "Girl," we shouted as we ran up to her. She sat with her head down at the lunchroom table.

She had a poor excuse when we asked her where she had been.

"I have been here," she told us, "but you must not have seen me." Also, I missed class because I had a doctor's appointment all this week." 

We didn't ask any more questions; she seemed moody. 

After talking to Beck about this strange feeling about all this, Beck and I agreed to follow her today. We would report to each other if anything odd happened. We didn’t want to ask her upfront or accuse her. She may have been suspicious, but she was still our friend.

Later, we discovered that she must have been at the park. When police would come to our school and ask her questions, someone in the area had spotted her around the same time. We knew it was odd that she must have gone much earlier than us then that day.

The police left and said that she was a witness, but witnesses were still suspects, and she needed to watch herself.

The third week into the investigation another girl went missing and then later was found dead in a different area very close to the city park.

That is when her behavior started to get more suspicious. She avoided us at all costs, even skipping classes we shared. I saw her once in the bathroom, and she just dashed, rushing past me.

Beck said, "I couldn’t believe my long-time friend could ever hurt someone. She always seemed so good-natured, very calm, and kind."

What else could we think? Was she in the middle of it all somehow?

We decided to ask our guardian baby, and maybe she might know something or what to do in this situation. But the answer I got just made me ask more questions.

We were told that more spirits have been popping out lately, and someone may have summoned them. This was the first time we had heard that someone could call them.

"What can we do?" Beck asked. We chose to confront her face-to-face, follow her somewhere private, and trap her. I hated to do it, but we needed to know the truth.

This weekend, we left for her house. Her mom said she had gone to the store to get some items. We somehow always seem just to miss her, but we won't give up.

Sure enough, the car was missing. She was a bit older and knew how to drive. 

Thanks to the snow, we went down the tracks and saw bloody footprints where the car once was.

The pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place, but I still had several unanswered questions to solve. It became evident that we must locate Micah as soon as possible.

Beck and I didn't have a vehicle of our own trying to locate her, as it was going to be rather difficult if she was driving around.

We went back to our houses and got our bikes, and we decided to start looking in all the areas that we could think of. She was starting with the grocery store that her mother said she was at first.

After arriving at the grocery store, we talked to a couple of the cashiers and asked them if they saw anybody that fit Micah's description.

"Unfortunately, you just missed her." One of the ladies told us she left with a small bag of groceries.

"Well, was there anything funny about her Beck asked?" That is when she told us that she had bought some camping stuff and bandages.

After hearing that, we would go back to the house and see what her mother had to say. We didn't want to alarm her if she was planning anything; we just wanted to ask where she was going.

When Mrs. Monk answered the door, she said that Micah was not there and that she was going to one of her friend's houses for a study session and a sleepover for a couple of days.

As we thanked her and left, we realized that Micah had no other friends than us.

Things kept getting stranger and stranger by the minute. There were not too many areas with woods; we lived somewhat in the suburbs.

"She left the car at her house after returning from the store, so she could not have traveled too far. There were only

Save two wooded areas where she could camp; one was an official campground."

Beck and I devised a plan to tell our parents the same thing: We were having a sleepover. Baby came with us for protection and to help us search.

We packed up some Items and got ready that night to search for her. We would start at the bottom of the trails and comb our way through the forest and mountains once we got there.