The morning rolled on, and the clock ticked evermore slowly as the sun rose silently to its highest peak. Not that you could see the sun with the clouds still hovering in clumps above. There was no more rain, at least, though the wind, which so frequently changed its mind, had decided to present us with a warm and muggy noon.

  The bell rang and the students, without missing a beat, flowed down the corridors of the school. The cafeteria filled in an instant, and I stood in line with a good dozen others ahead of me. There were tables with students that laughed and yelled; tables with students who ate in quiet.

  I took my tray containing foods and snacks that I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish had I not been told what they were beforehand. This fine morning, I was told, we were to have some cheesy rice, a pudding, and a juice box.

  The meals here were always a delight.

  Walking through the students and tables that littered the place, I went down to the rows closer to the windows, not quite next to them, but only one line up. The unspoken laws of seniority and social standing dictated me a cozy seat near the brightest place, and two columns off the centermost one. In this school, you would find every clique and group you’d expect: the jocks and cheerleaders sitting in the center of the cafeteria, the geeks and nerds hanging on the outskirts, even the band and theater kids that sat in odd groups sprinkled throughout. Though, to be fair, unlike the movies, everyone was kind of a floater; we knew each other, most since middle school, some from elementary, and a few from way back when our moms would take us to the park to play in the sandbox.

  I walked past a table of senior girls I barely recognized and stopped behind a messy ginger-haired idiot. I scowled down at him. “You are in my seat.”

  “Top of the morning to you too.” He squinted his eyes and beamed a smile.

  “It’s noon, and you’re still in my seat.”

  “Then you must’ve missed the memo,” he placed a newspaper on the table, “because you look like you just woke up.”

  “It’s my natural charm.”

  “Should I even mention the smell?”

  “No, you shouldn’t.” I blinked, breathed deep, and noticed the newspaper on the table. “You bring your hobbies to work?”

  “This?”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t pretend like you don’t know The Lakeside Messenger.”

  I looked at him with vacant eyes.

  “Come on, it’s only the best newspaper that covers north-west Indiana,” he picked it up excitedly, and flipped through the pages, “and it’s got some of the best crosswords out there. Get this: seven letter word, name of the unsinkable ship.” He looked at me expectantly.

  I sighed, gave up, and took the seat opposite his. “Massive?”

  He started counting letters down the page. “Yep, it fits. Fun, right? The theme of the puzzle is movies from the past decade.”

  “Yeah, heaps,” I said, with no lack of sarcasm in my voice. “I mean, psht, who doesn’t do the weekly crosswords?”

  “So, you want interesting, do you? Well, here you go,” he said, his voice a hint more serious. He tossed the newspaper down my side of the table. “Go to the headline and tell me if it’s more to your liking.” He grabbed a spoon and dug a pungent, cheesy piece of chicken-glued-rice from his plate. He frowned, eyed it from multiple sides, shrugged, and took a brave bite. “Way better than it looks,” he said with a mouthful. “You’ve got any bread?”

  “No, you’re not taking mine—” but I was too late, and he’d already taken my piece from my tray.

  He smiled at me, mouth puffy with food.

  I sighed.

  I present to you Nemo Faerwald, my second oldest friend; worst playmate in the sandbox, and most likely the most energetic person I would ever meet. Our parents knew each other from when they were high schoolers and lived only a couple of blocks away. If our meeting wasn’t destiny at hand, I don’t know what was. Nemo was an anxious, hyperactive individual whose charms could only be appreciated by a select few, and those at sparse intervals.

  Nemo scooped a bunch of rice with the bread he’d taken from me. “By the way,” he’d already started saying. Nemo would seldom let a moment pass in silence, and you’d rarely, if ever, find him doing anything less than his utmost to accomplish just that. I, for one, pity him. I doubt he’s ever spent more than an hour without an inner voice narrating his every action.

  Right at that moment he was talking about something again. But I had tuned him out, there really wasn’t any reason for one person to be digesting so much useless information.

  In these long years we’ve been friends, I’ve devised a filter that contained most uninteresting, daily, mindless gossip, and when Nemo would accidentally speak of something that didn’t fit in, my filter would spike, and the sound of his muffled voice would clear out.

  ‘She went missing.’ Was what sparked the switch that time.

  “Sorry what?”

  Nemo was staring at me, lazily annoyed that I wasn’t adequately attentive. “You aren’t listening to me, again.” He jabbed at me with his spoon. “Is it the lack of sleep? You know, I’ve got this aunt—”

  I waved for him to stop, or else he might get lost in his own tangent. “Nemo! What did you say?”

  “Well,” he said reluctantly. “She’s got anxiety and takes these sleeping pills. I could—”

  “The missing part,” I said, my mouth set.

  “Oh, that. Awful stuff, right? Don’t you remember, I told you about a friend of my sister’s who went missing a couple of days ago.”

  “Dan.” I nodded. There wasn’t a single person in town who didn’t know about it: a kid suddenly gone missing after school without leaving a hint of a trace behind. The police, the sheriff, volunteers, you name it. Everyone went crazy those first few days searching for him. But it was all in vain in the end, a week past and they are still no closer to finding him.

  “Well, Dan, has a sister, and she goes to our school. I think it’s better if you read the headline.”

  I gulped, picked up the newspaper, and turned it to the front page. The headline read: Girl missing, sister joins brother to never-land.

  “Very professional.”

  He chuckled awkwardly. “They’re trying out a more playful spin on their recent stories, trying to keep us youngsters engaged. You see sales aren’t going—”

  I tapped my finger on the headline, looked him straight in the eye, gave him the best, most honestly annoyed look I could; even coughed to grab his attention. “Nemo. The abductions.”

  Nemo grabbed the spoon and opened his pudding. “Who said they were kidnapped?”

  “Your sister’s like eight, Dan didn’t just decide to hit up Chicago for a shot at the city life.”

  “Ah, can’t argue with something I agree with,” he said and took the newspaper from my hands. “Hear this: ‘Night descended on the distressed Gallagher household, five days past their son’s disappearance. But when dawn rose, trouble found its way through their front door once more. Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher woke to find their daughter missing from her bed, they searched the rooms and asked the neighbors, but there was no sign of her. The doors were locked, the keys accounted for. The only thing out of place: the open window of her room on the second floor.’” He stopped, put the newspaper down, and took a silent bite out of his pudding.

  “After that?”

  “And …” Nemo looked down at the paper lying on the table. “Oh, here it is, fisherman lost control of his boat in Lake Michigan. Swears he saw something beneath the waves.”

  I felt my patience wearing thin. “Nemo, we aren’t searching for Nessie. Focus up.”

  “Actually, there is a myth—” Nemo had started saying his piece of trivia but somehow came to the miraculous realization that it had been an ironic remark. “Nothing,” he swallowed, “‘call the police if you have any information.’” He swung his spoon back and forth, a piece of pudding flying in an arch across the cafeteria.

  The pudding must’ve landed on someone because I could hear them causing a commotion around the tables behind me. I didn’t get to see who it was, but I like to imagine a certain jock with frosted tips as the unfortunate receiver of Nemo’s creamy dessert.

  I stooped my head and took up a spoon to feed myself the cheesy rice. I couldn’t stomach more than half of it. I looked up at Nemo, his mouth stuffed and sticky with the vanilla-flavored sweet.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “So?” he asked.

  I gave up on the rest of my food, there was simply no finishing this lunch, I looked at Nemo’s empty plate, at least for some of us. I placed the spoon down and gave Nemo a look that clearly meant I didn’t understand what he wanted from me.

  “Don’t be like that, you really don’t find anything weird in all of this?”

  “Other than that a schoolmate of ours disappeared a week after her kid brother? No, I don’t think I do.”

  “Five days,” he said.

  I looked at him.

  “Today is six, but Jenny is reported missing from Sunday.”

  “Doesn’t change what happened. There’s no conspiracy here.”

  Nemo coughed and righted the newspaper. “Want me to read it to you again?”

  I raised my palm. “Window left open, yes, yes. But it’s not like it says a lot; the kidnapper might’ve forgotten about it as he carried her down.”

  I slapped my mouth shut, but it was already too late. I had fallen into his trap.

  Nemo rocked back and forth in his chair. “Like it’s easy to carry a person on your back as you’re going down a ladder.”

  What the hell, I’ll indulge him, I thought. “We are working with the idea that she was taken unwillingly. I don’t see how the open window is relevant.”

  “And what if I told you there weren’t any marks or signs of tampering on the window itself?”

  I didn’t answer outright, not because I didn’t know where he was heading, or what conclusion he had reached already. That was, by itself, easy to figure out. Give Nemo a mystery and he’ll spout the most outlandish of theories. Instead, I drank from my juice box, tossed the idea in my head, and decided to give him what he wanted. “If that’s true, then she must’ve opened—”

  “She opened the window!” He shouted as if he were taking his first breath in a good while.

  I leaned back into my chair, my arms crossed. “It doesn’t really mean a lot though.”

  “What doesn’t mean a lot?”

  “Isn’t it too convoluted? Or rather, aren’t there simply too many variables?”

  “Like?”

  “She could’ve left it open on her own; I did. It was a warm night. Could be that the one who kidnapped her brother threatened her to open it herself. She might have even been forced to go out on her own, as you think. Or, most likely, the police simply missed something.”

  Nemo was shaking his head. “So, you don’t think she left on her own?”

  “What if they held her brother at gunpoint and forced her to open the window and get out. Sure, she got out, but is that any different?”

  “I guess not,” he said. “But picture this: you wake up in the middle of the night, and you hear rocks thrown at the side of your wall. You get up, and you look outside your window to see where the sound is coming from. But there’s your brother, and a couple of guys in masks holding him hostage. Don’t you scream? Don’t your parents come for you?”

  I breathed and closed my eyes. “And Lucy bites it.”

  When I opened them again, Nemo’s face was tense, and his mouth was set in a hard line. Not many things broke him, but the image of his sister getting hurt wasn’t one of them. “I get what you mean,” he muttered without further thought.

  Nemo blinked, and his face lost its momentary edge. “Still, I think it’s crazy that Jenny and Dan were taken like that. It’s not normal. Do you think it’s the same guy? Like some serial kidnapper?”

  “Sure,” I coughed, “I’m not sold on the term, but yeah, it would make sense for the same guy to be involved.”

  He nodded his head and allowed a solid three seconds to pass as he pondered whether he was ready to move on from our current subject of conversation. Scattered words and stray sentences flew from the tables nearby, hurried, excited, quickly meshed together. It was too much to make sense of, though if anyone wanted to boil it down they all spoke of the same thing: a dance; a game. A familiar laughter drew my attention, and I looked above Nemo’s shoulder to where the food was being served. Nemo then let the spoon drop from his mouth and I knew my moment of silence had come at an end.

  “Say, are you going to the homecoming?”

  Interesting switch, I thought. “The game? Yes, probably.” My eyes wandered back to the serving line. “Harry’s starting, you know, and if I didn’t go, Anne wouldn’t let me forget it until we graduated from nursing home,” my eyes fell back to him, “something, in fact, that applies to you too.”

  “Yeah, don’t worry about me. I’ll be front and cheering. Is your mum going to be sneaking in those brownies of hers?”

  I chuckled. “I’ll put in an order for you.”

  “Sweet,” he leaned over the table, his attention drawn back to the question he wanted to ask me from the get-go. “How about the dance though?”

  “The dance—” my voice trailed off. “I don’t think I will.”

  “Don’t want to go without a date, do you?”

  “Don’t really want one.”

  “People do go without one you know. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Well yes, you, for example. Tell me, how does it feel dancing alone during a slow song?”

  Nemo sneered. “Joke all you want, downer, but I’ll have you know that this … this might be the year.”

  I snorted and spat my juice. “Might? Not even a will? A certainly? Definitely?”

  “Keep going, I’m sure you’ve got more synonyms in store.”

  I stopped laughing and waved him off. “Come on man, you are only down to a handful of excuses before High School’s over and your romance is off and lost to the world. Don’t you think it’s about time?”

  He winced at that and scratched the back of his head. It was an excuse for him to turn around towards a certain table of people, more precisely a certain someone. “I mean,” he said, “how can I even approach her?”

  In the middle of the buzzy group sat Allison. And with nothing more than a single glance, anyone would have agreed that she was a pretty girl. But to Nemo, and exactly as he would describe her—word, for, word—she was the cutest girl to ever wear a cheerleader’s uniform, short as a doll, strawberry-blond hair falling down her waist, her eyes green and blue, and as pure hearted as an angel.

  Nemo had no chance, and to make matters worse, there was almost always a handsome guy beside her as her sidepiece.

  I did find it somewhat endearing though, if you ignored the fact that he had a crush on her from the day she offered him some of her chocolate milk in kindergarten. “You could ask her for her notes, don’t you share classes?”

  Nemo turned to me with disgust, his eyes half-closed and his face scrunched up. “Terry, next time you want to give advice on talking to girls, please put some disclaimers before you do so.”

  A hand rested on Nemo’s shoulder. “What’s going on you two?” Harry stood above him, smiling.

  “Oh, look who’s come to join us,” Nemo said. “Did you get tired of trading slaps with your football buddies?”

  I could feel Harry cringe from where I sat. “Doesn’t happen as often as you think,” he said.

  He turned to me, his eyes pleading for leniency. I knew we had some more jokes we could’ve made about athletes and their age-old tradition of giving each other a good smack on the butt. And to be honest, I was almost too tempted to fuel Nemo and make fun of Harry, but something in me was inclined to the opposite.

  “Just talking,” I said casually, and made my allegiances known.

  “About?”

  Nemo shrugged his hand off his shoulder and gave me a hard, judging stare. “Nothing interesting,” he looked down the newspaper still splayed open, “oh, look! A bass smacked a fisherman in lake Mi—”

  “Allison,” I spoke over him, my lips curled upwards into a devious smile.

  Harry drew a deep breath and grimaced. “Tough luck,” he said, his voice taking on a comforting tone that could only be perceived as pity. “You’ll get her next time.” He patted Nemo on the back.

  We looked at each other, then turned back to Harry. He knew something, obviously, that we didn’t.

  He slid down to the seat next to me and spilled a rumor we had been oblivious to. Propped on his elbows, slightly bent over the table, ready to speak in hushed tones. The two of us clustered nearer, as was the typical response when one was about to receive gossip, as if, in our minds, we were about to miss the reveal of aliens or mermaids. “Allison and Mason are a thing,” he whispered.

  Nemo’s face was the textbook definition of shock and disbelief. “The senior?” he asked with a voice that rose above the confines of our council.

  Harry and I shushed him. “Quiet,” we both said.

  Nemo ignored us and his voice pitched higher, “Since when?” He realized he was shouting and coughed in the hope of fixing his tone. “Since … when?” he repeated quietly, his voice lower but excessively so.

  Harry shrugged, his usual indifference towards gossip and tea-spilling evidently clear. It was so frustrating having a friend so close to the circles of ‘popular kids’ care so little about spreading the intrigue of their personal lives to the rest of us less-fortunate, less-fascinating ones. But something had changed in him at the start of the year, when he’d misguidedly, if you’d asked Nemo, made it his business to hang out with them and spend less time with us. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was or if anything actually had changed, but I couldn’t deny myself the rare tingling sensation in the back of my nape.

  “August, I think. They met at the Dunes by chance and instantly hit it off,” Harry said.

  Nemo and I waited a moment more to see if he’d add anything else. “That’s it?” I asked even though I knew better than to expect more from him in this department.

  “What more is there? Anyway, I only know because I heard Mason talking about it in the locker room.”

  Nemo grabbed his unopened juice box and popped the straw in. “Unbelievable,” he shook his head, frustration creeping through, “after so many years of friendship, so many hours invested, and you still come with half-baked information.”

  “Hopeless,” I added.

  “Hopeless,” Nemo repeated, nodding absent-mindedly. He moved the straw to his mouth and with a single breath he drank the box empty. He exhaled a long-held breath, and said, more spoke to himself really, “What’s another year? I’m in it for the long haul anyways.”

  It was our turn to laugh at such a mature confession.

  “I admire you,” Harry said. “I could never match your conviction.”

  “Ah, so we’re calling it conviction now.”

  “I’ve got a plan you know,” Nemo spoke in his defense.

  “We know!” Harry and I said in unison, giggling before we could look at one another.

  “I don’t even know why I still hang out with you two,” he said but he was fighting against a smile of his own.

  We talked some more, discussing nothing in particular—mostly made fun of each other—then the bell rang, and we made our separate ways back to class. Harry was walking with me, clearly troubled by something but not quite sure if he should say it. I could tell, long years of friendship and all, but also by the fact that he would hesitantly open and close his mouth all the way to class without saying anything. I wasn’t one to pry, if Harry wanted something said, he would. Plus, if it was bad enough that Harry was having trouble with it, I sure as hell didn’t want to know.