Like any normal person, mornings were my least favorite time of the day. The only thing I found enjoyable in forcing myself to wake up before noon was a warm cup of coffee. My brain never started working before at least one mug, an hour of scrolling through the nonsense that made me sad on my phone, and at least twenty minutes of regretting every choice I made that led me to having to wake up… again.

Maybe that was why I couldn’t keep a steady job.

By my second cup of joe, I was already so bored of the house. I sat on the couch, not willing to turn on the TV—noise in the morning was a big no. Even if it was past eleven. There were so many times I had to stop myself from sending Damien a text about how bored I was.

I still hadn’t decided if I was going to speak to him again, but if I was, I was going to make him wait more than twenty-four hours to let him know that.

He deserved to sweat.

Seriously, what did people do in this awful town anymore?

I tried to just fall back asleep on the couch, but that didn’t work out so well either.

My parents hadn’t replaced the couch since 1999, and you could feel its age in every lump and bump. After a few minutes of tossing and turning, a distraction came in the form of my parents’ house phone ringing.

Landlines still existed in this country? Wild.

One of the receivers held a phone on the end table behind my head. I reached over and snatched it up without checking the caller I.D.

“Hall residence.” That was how my mom always answered the phone. I didn’t know any other way to answer a generic line.

“Hello, Mrs. Hall? This is Lucinda calling from Meadow Valley Jr. High. We just wanted to report that Skylar has been missing from class today and wanted to see if you were aware.”

I shot up from the couch. I hadn’t even thought to check in on Sky. I figured she was out the door before I was up. Maybe she needed an adult alarm clock, or forgot to set a real one.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Then again, every kid deserved a free day off once in a while, right? “Oh yes. She’s very sick today.”

“Okay thank you for letting us know. Hope he…uh she? I’m sorry. Feels better soon. Have a great day.” Click.

I stared at the phone, considering the consequences of what I’d done for a moment. There didn’t seem to be any. I skipped school all the time, and nothing ever happened to me. My parents wouldn't be back for weeks. This was exactly the type of bad role model behavior my parents were worried about, I’m sure.

But they left me in charge so screw them.

Once it all settled, I leaped off the couch and sprinted up the stairs screaming “Sky! Sky!”

I busted into her room where she was still curled up in her bed in the same exact position I’d seen her in the night before. “Hey, Sky. You should really get up. It’s almost—”

Something was off. The hair that stuck out the top of the sheets was way too… shiny? Sky had bleached her hair herself and as much as a miracle it was that she’d managed to Google her way to nearly pure white, it was dead, dry, and not at all that level of shinny.

I pulled back the covers to reveal nothing but a white Halloween wig, and a pile of pillows.

Um… what?

My head filled with every awful scenario of where she could be. She had to have just snuck out with her friends to skip class. But she was smart enough to know I wouldn’t believe she was sleeping the entire day away, and she knew I would have let her do that if she'd just asked.

With my heart beating out of my chest, I ran downstairs and slid across the floor, over the couch, and grasped my phone. I dialed her number and waited for the ring… and I heard it all right.

Both from inside my phone and her ringtone upstairs.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I searched her whole room for the phone, under all the board games thrown around in shambles, the pillows and blankets everywhere. It looked like a hurricane had come through.

It took forever to find her phone, hidden under the corner of the carpet in the center of her room, but once I did, I placed it on the kitchen counter and texted it:

Sky! You better text me the goddamn second you come get your phone or so help me I will ship you down to Florida and hope your parents drop the package in the ocean!

It didn’t feel like an overreaction at the time.

My blood was pumping. My heart was racing. Adrenaline was flowing. I couldn’t just sit and wait for her to come home. I needed to do something. Anything. And there was, to my disappointment, only one person whose number I had who I could speak to in the worst town in America...

Damien picked up the line and even just hearing his voice again made my already pounding heart beat louder. “Wow. Bored already. I really expected—"

“Damien shut up.” We weren’t doing this. I needed help. “I can’t find my niece.”

“What?”

I walked in circles around the kitchen island. It was the only thing I could do to burn energy and keep my body occupied. “I don’t even know if she was here last night when I got home.”

“You didn’t check on her?”

“She was asleep. Her friends said she got tired. They all left. I don’t know at what point she disappeared.” My breathing became tight. My vision darkened. It’d been a hot minute since I’d gotten a full-blown panic attack, but I could feel one coming on. “Holy shit. I lost her and it hasn’t been one day.”

“Mikkie, you need to breathe. Have you talked to her friends?”

“No.” I leaned on the counter to catch my breath. It didn’t help. “I don’t know who her friends are! Oh my god. What if her friends are murderers? Damien!”

“Okay, they are children. Let’s not jump to conclusions. Why don’t you come back here, I have a yearbook. We can look through and try to figure out who her friends were and then we can report it to the police if she doesn’t show up by then.”

I sat on the floor and put my feet up on the side of the counter, to let the blood rush to my head. It was something an EMT taught me after my first panic attack. It really did help. My head cleared and I breathed steadier. “Yeah. Good idea. I can do that.”

“Just…make it here safe, got it?”

“Got it.” I hung up the phone and dropped it beside my head. I had to stay down for another moment to fully recover as I counted my breaths. I was actually glad I called.

Obviously, I needed to talk to the police. I always laughed at movies where that wasn’t the first thing people thought of, and yet when the panic set in, it was hard to think straight.

Even if she was just out with her friends, that was the responsible thing my parents never did when I ran away.

When my head had blood once more, I got up, took my mom’s car keys from the holder beside the front door, and drove off with her compact. The drive to Damien’s was less than ten minutes if you hit the green light right.

I did not.

Every red light was a test of my anxiety. Through the grace of some higher being, I made it to Damien’s without knocking anyone or myself off the road.

I didn’t even knock. I hadn’t knocked on that door in my entire life. It was never locked, and no one cared if I entered. I booked it up the stairs, for some reason just imagining Damien would be exactly where I left him.

“Mikkie!” I heard him call from the kitchen when I was halfway up. I used the rail to skip half the steps and slide back down, swirled around the banister, and straight back down the hallway to the enormous kitchen.

The whole far wall was made of windows that led to their over-landscaped backyard—albeit, it wasn’t as well cared for as it was when Damien’s mom lived there. Damien was sitting at one of those counters that stuck out from the island, where stools could fit and one could enjoy breakfast and read the newspaper or whatever rich people did.

He still looked perfect, even in a looser shirt and sweatpants, hair messy, with two cups of coffee made in front of him and the yearbook spread out across the counter.

“Guess we are having coffee after all,” he said and pushed a cup closer to me.

Three cups before noon? Wasn’t the worst thing I'd done. I accepted the coffee and sat down at the nook across from him. “I’m here to find my niece, nothing else.”

“I know. Just trying to lighten the mood.” He sipped his steaming cup. “You look awful.”

“Gee, thanks.” Like I cared when he thought. Just because I wore converse instead of boots...

I stared at the book, already opened up to Sky’s class. It didn’t take more than one mouth full of Damien’s way-pricier, way-darker, way-better, way-less burnt coffee for me to recognize the rich-looking blond kid.

“There. That kid. That’s him.” I pointed to the kid's smug little face, posing with his hair all gelled back and a half smile that he definitely picked up from some social media thirst trap. I hated that kid just by looking at him.

“Christopher Handsworth?” Damien said as he leaned over the table to look at the photo. Never mind the fact that his face was practically right next to mine.

“Of course, he has some kind of preppy-ass name like Handsworth.” My lip curled. He was a kid I would have hated in school, but who was I to judge if he was willing to be friends with Sky, and that was a big 'if.'

I still wasn’t convinced.

“That’s…odd,” Damien said and he leaned back to his side of the counter.

“How so?”

“I watched these kids the past few weeks while I was… substituting. Christopher Handsworth never really struck me as the kind of kid to… well…” He stopped, visibly uncomfortable in saying what he needed to say, but I already knew where he was going.

“Just say it.” I needed to hear it.

Damien let out a long sigh. “He doesn’t seem like the type to be nice to the trans kid in class, that’s all.”

“That’s all?” My whole body wanted to implode in on itself. I knew it. I knew that kid was bad news. I mean, I didn’t when I left him with my vulnerable niece alone for hours… but still. “Oh my god. They were just pretending to be her friend so they could hurt her, weren’t they? What if she’s dead because I left her alone with psychopath kids to screw my ex-boyfriend? I’m the worst person ever! What the hell is wrong with me? How did I get to this point in my life? Oh my god... I think I’m going to throw up.”

I held my stomach. All it had in it was coffee and I was sure I was about to see all two and a quarter cups of it again.

“Okay, Sky is not dead. He’s a preppy rich kid, not Freddy Kreuger. And you’re not the worst person ever.” Damien reached out and put his hand on my shoulder.

I didn’t like when people comforted me physically, but I could tell he didn’t mean anything by it other than letting me know he was there for me, and my stomach settled. The emphasis on the 'ever' I could have lived without, though.

Damien continued to rub at my shoulder with his thumb as he talked, “You made a mistake. It’s not like we all haven’t done that.”

Breaking up with your high school sweetheart wasn’t even on the same page as letting someone else's gremlin children hurt your dead brother’s only child. Regardless, I knew what he was trying to say. I nodded with my head held low.

Even if last night was a bigger mistake than I ever thought it could be, I was thankful Damien was here. I reached my hand up through no consciousness of my own, to place it atop his on my shoulder, but he let go and hopped up from the table before I reached it.

I pretended to scratch my ear to cover up my moment of weakness.

I had to be careful. Yeesh.

“Like I said, I was only there a few weeks," Damien said and started down the hall to the front door. "I could be totally wrong. But, let’s go to the police and at least get their input.” It was a good idea and the right move.

The police could do something.

Sky would be back home in no time.