Everything gets darker from here on out. That should make most of you happy. Just thinking about what I'm going to type makes me sick to my stomach.
Xenna was tainted after the pencil box was found in her desk with her own hair inside.
The police said Xenna couldn't have had anything to do with my sister's disappearance. She was goalie for her soccer team, and plenty of people saw her allow seven goals in a seven to three loss on the Saturday that my sister was taken.
They said that there were no fingerprints on the message in my desk, or on anything in the pencil box.
What the police said didn't matter to kindergarteners.
Our group shut Xenna out.
We shunned her, and that weekend, Xenna disappeared.
Her parents said that she'd been watching T.V., but decided she wanted to play in the backyard. Her mom said that was fine so long as she stayed in the backyard. Her mom sat by the window for a little bit, watching Xenna sitting alone in the grass.
Xenna's mother said that she glanced away from the backyard for a moment to watch a trailer for Eyes Wide Shut on the television. When she looked back through the window again, Xenna was gone.
Same thing. No trace, no witnesses. Taken from her own backyard.
No trace of Xenna ever appeared until almost a year later.
When first grade started, everything seemed a little brighter, a little more normal. People seemed to be moving on from the disappearance of Abi and Xenna.
The darkness returned that December.
One of our classmates, a kid named Matthew, disappeared on a random weekend, but it was later determined that his disappearance was not related to Abi and Xenna's.
But wait, you're probably saying, how did they know that Abi and Xenna were taken by the same person?
Because Xenna's mom checked the mail on a normal day that December and found a triangular shaped stone-rounded on the top side, mostly flat on the bottom-that was painted a light shade of blue. The stone was sitting on top of her mail. A brown smiley face was painted on the underside.
Xenna's mother thought that it was a prank, just kids in the neighborhood messing around, but she found the stone cute and put it on her mantle. She thought it was the type of thing that Xenna would've liked. She didn't find out what it was until we were all in second grade.
No matter how many times I think about this next part, I know that it couldn't have happened. It doesn't matter how vivid it is in my mind. Things like this aren't possible. It had to have been my imagination.
Mr. Carlson was my second grade teacher. He wore an eye patch over his right eye. No one knew why.
Austin, Jonah, Maggie, Ivan, and I were all in his class. To us, Mr. Carlson was Captain Carlson. An evil pirate captain descended from Blackbeard himself.
He also had a lisp, which threw us for a loop. A pirate captain wasn't supposed to have a speech impediment.
"You know what's behind the patch, right?" Maggie asked me at lunch one day. She was on my left.
I shook my head no as I chomped on the rubbery school cafeteria pizza.
"What'd she say?" Jonah asked from my right.
I swallowed my bite and ignored him.
"What's behind it?" I asked Maggie.
Maggie looked across the table at Austin and Ivan, her hazel eyes darting back and forth, then she looked back at me and whispered, "The Hope Diamond."
