Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The girl on the shore
It was a day like any other, the air was chilly and the temperature is dropping faster than our towns cheer in the coming days. On the day it all started, me and my friends were walking out on the lake’s bed. It was foggy but we wanted to spend the last day of our break together, then in the distance we saw a figure sitting in the bank. As we approached, we heard the sound of our classmate “No…” she cried “don’t leave me.” Her yells echoed off the trees, the silence in between yelps was deafening.
“Shara?” Andy-the boy next door-asks walking over to see if she is okay. He stumbles back after seeing her more clearly, “is…is that?”
Vicy runs over and places a hand over her mouth “Blood,” the raven-haired girl says, her words cutting deeper than the chill of the morning. I stop Bret from getting closer. Shara stops screaming, looks at me and falls over as if she had just died. The four of us sat there for what felt like days.
“Call…call the police” Shara whimpers unmoving, I pull out my phone and start to dial. Before hitting call, I look at Shara one last time; a wilting flower sitting on the lakebed, the lakebed holding the flower who is clinging to what she had lost “if they don’t find him, we will” my words hang on the air as the girl dressed in white laid on the foggy shore.
The police arrived and started looking for Sean- Shara’s older brother. The five of us weren’t arrested or questioned; I however caught some stray glares. Shara was loaded into an ambulance and we got rides home. Bret’s mother and father yelled at her for hanging with westside trailer trash, not asking about the girl on the shore “you were such a good girl before meeting that…”
“Stop…” she raised her voice for the first time. Andy’s dad comforted him; his friend did go missing. Vicy went home to her loft and told her mother but didn’t say anything about who she was with.
In the coming days that followed the police stopped the search and declared him a runaway. The once quiet town of Lakeside had been changed forever. Everyone was buzzing about the Cherrytion runaway; The star football player, straight A student, father, and husband to be. A brighter spotlight was placed on the Cherrytion. The once perfect and spotless record of the family was ruined after Sean got his then girlfriend Daphne pregnant and now this. Leaving six months before their wedding and three months before his twins are to be born, without a trace. The paper interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Cherrytion as expected they were grieving the loss of their eldest son. “He wouldn’t have run; he was always happy.”
“He was killed,” Mrs. Cherrytion managed thought the tears, “That is the only thing that would take him away.”
“He was to become a father” Mr. Cherrytion choked on his words “His children will be fatherless.” While answering all the interview questions they said that Shara would not be taking questions nor going to school for the time being she had stopped talking completely. Daphne- Sean’s finance- is also staying out of the spotlight and avoiding stress, although the grief from losing her lover must be taking a toll on her.
Meanwhile the morale at school sunk like a body in a lake, Sean was the beacon of light in our school—the loss of the light and joy of Lakeside took a big toll on us. The once loud and cheerful halls were replaced with dreadful silence. Without the Cherrytion siblings in school, mainly Shara there was less bullying and a need of a “savor.” Sean was the only one that could stop her.
Bret, Vicy, Andy, and I meet up in the old newspaper club room as we often did when working on something. “Shara had blood on her” Andy says nearly gaging.
“Still can’t handle blood?” I ask knowing the answer is yes.
“And like you can?” He snaps back, “just because I play football it doesn't mean I am a brute.”
“I didn’t say that” I laughed, grabbing an old newspaper off the table. Youngest quarterback in the history of our school was awarded a badge of honor for stopping a bully from pushing a girl into the road. We decided to meet up after school. Throughout the day Shara's face on that day flashes back into my mind. She was expectedly sad and, in a panic, eyes puffy from crying, but the way she was screaming out on the water. It was as if he left out on the lake towards the other side, but the water was still and the fog was too thick to go out on the water. If she were fighting to get him to stay—like she always did well, he needed to go to practice— her clothes would have had more than blood on them. I gag a little in my mouth; she wasn’t bleeding but she had dried blood on her dress. The best thing to do is to look around the lakebed where we found Shara.
After school we meet up at Andy’s house. Mr. Frank is out at work, so we have the house to ourselves. We talk about what we plan to do. Bret thinks that we don’t do anything and leave it to the police.
“Are you new here bae?” Vicy says with a chuckle, “We have to find Sean, he didn’t run away.”
“Vicy is right” Andy Chimes in “Sean is…was happy and…” he trails off looking out the window. Vicy walks over to comfort him, but what could we say to a man who lost the closest thing to an older brother that he ever had, I miss Sean as well he helped me find a place to stay after everything that happened. The room falls silent. While he helped everyone in town, he was closest with the other members of the football team, they were close friends, comrades, and a family. Bret opens her mouth to say something; but I stop her. No words can be said here.
“Let’s go to the lake” Andy says breaking the silence “We have to find out what happened to Sean.
“Don’t push yourself Andy” Bret says standing up from her barstool.
“I’m not…” Andy says. If we knew what was waiting for us down at the lake, we never would have left that house.