Thirteen

Nearly two weeks and Lena was still missing. Chris was starting to think he was going insane. At the very least, he was becoming obsessed.

Things were changing--he could feel it happening. Things were fragmenting, shattering into disconnected bits of what they had been before, and in the great scramble to put pieces back together, things were getting mixed up.

Or maybe that wasn't it. Maybe he was over-analyzing. Chris was, after all, quite prone to over-analyze things. He especially was prone to over-analyze the actions of girls. In his mind, "Can I have a pencil?" seemed to transform into, "I love you! I love you!"--he luckily always had the common sense to not act upon his falsely perceived declarations.



And Lena had done the most drastic thing of any girl he'd yet to come across. She hadn't asked him for a stupid, trivial pencil. She'd disappeared.

He was certain, now (although perhaps it was just another instance of Chris' over-analyzing), that Lena had made the choice to go. There had been something about the way she'd looked at him as she'd walked out that door, something dry about her chuckle when he said he'd see her in math.

At first he hadn't told anyone that he, Chris Mathis, had been the last living person to see Lena Harrison out of fear of being implicated in her disappearance. Now he felt like he couldn't tell anyone. Just couldn't.

It was one part that he felt stupid admitting to seeing her after all this time. And it was one part that he wanted to hug the secret to himself.

But it was also one part that he didn't want to find out that he wasn't the last one to see Lena. Because maybe that would take off some of the pressure, take away some of the guilt of not being able to save her. But it would also make her less of his, in the intangible way the he felt she was.

Not that he didn't try, poor boy. One day at lunch Chris gathered up all his courage and said to his friend (his best friend, really) Mark, "So it's weird, isn't it?"

Mark was studying for a Psych test. "What's weird?" he mumbled after a moment, much more absorbed in reading about Erik Erikson's eight stages than the words of his best friend.

Chris shoved a mouthful of salami sandwich in his mouth and choked out the words around it. "That thing with Lena Harrison going missing."

As a matter of fact, Chris was very lucky that Mark was so absorbed. If he wasn't, he may have noticed that his best friend did not sound cavalier (as Chris had intended to sound), but rather extremely nervous. And if he had noticed how nervous Chris had sounded, he might have begun to wonder, and perhaps ask questions as to why Chris even cared, and then the whole secret would be blown.

But as things were, Mark didn't even look up. "I guess," he replied, a few seconds too late. He wasn't even paying attention.

Chris was safe. Nobody cared about Lena anymore, nobody except him. She was old news. If she had been looking to create waves (and somehow, Chris didn't think this was her intent at all), she had missed her mark. Nobody was interesting in talking about a former honors student who had gone missing a whole two weeks before. Who the hell even cared?

(Chris Mathis cared.)

(But don't tell anyone. He doesn't want them to know.)

And secretly, Chris was glad that Mark didn't show an interest at his question. Because that meant that Mark hadn't seen Lena on the day she'd disappeared. And that was one more person, one more person out of the seven billion in the world, that had less of a claim to Lena Harrison than did Chris Mathis.

And that made him happy. Happier than he cared to admit.

Lena had to come back. She just had to.