STAY

1.

I'm walking down the stairs when I see them. Both of them are standing in the doorway to my house, but it is his mother that I see first. She is standing there talking to my parents. I can barely hear what they are talking about, but I can see that she's crying. Something is wrong. Something is very wrong. I have never seen her cry before. She isn't dressed in her usually nice and neat clothing. It's simple. And her hair doesn't look that good either. It looks like a mess. His father looks a bit better though. His hair is nicely combed and styled as always, and he isn't crying. His eyes are not red. But you can see the sorrow in them. I am terrified of what I am going to hear. I'm not even sure I want to hear what they are talking about. I am about to turn around and walk up the stairs again, when my mother turns around and looks at me.

"Olivia, come here", she says towards me, her voice a bit more unstable than I am used to. I hesitate at first, but when I see his mother smiling, even though she has tears in her eyes, I can't resist but to walk towards them. I look from my mother, to them.

"What is going on?", I ask feeling something thick in my throat. Do I really want to know the answer?

Both of the parents look at me, but it is his father that talks to me first.

"Have you heard anything from him, Olivia?"

So I wasn't wrong. He is really gone. I haven't heard from him for a couple of days now. I feel confused and I don't know what to say. No I haven't heard anything from him. I look over at my parents who are looking sternly at me. I shake my head as I whisper a quiet "no".

"He wasn't here before he left then?", his mother asks a bit more hysterical than the father did. I shake my head again, now turning my gaze towards her. I want to tell her that I don't know anything. But I can't. My voice somehow got stuck in my throat. I can't speak.

"Are you completely sure he just left?", my father asks them as he grabs my shoulders. "Maybe he just went with his friends somewhere?"

His mother looks at me, and I know what she is thinking. She knows what I am thinking. The question I am asking myself is if something has happened to him? But there's an even bigger fear inside of me that I don't even want to speak about...

"My son would not just disappear like this!", his mother almost yells towards my father. "Something has happened to him! I can sense it..."

"Please come inside and calm down", my mother says towards the woman. She breaks down crying even worse now than when I saw her before, but both of them walk inside our house. It is the first time that they are here. I figured that the first time they would be here would be during other circumstances. This is not really what I imagined. But it finally sank in. He was gone. I had not heard anything from Michael in 4 days. And I was scared. Where was he?

***

Before Michael had appeared in my life, I used to live a very simple and unexciting life. I was a regular 17 year old girl and just started my junior year at the central high school in town, when I first met him. There was really nothing special with me, and I still don't know what got him to pay attention to me in the first place.

My friends usually referred to me as being "cute" with my wavy dark blond hair and chocolate brown eyes. They would usually also say that any guy would melt into the ground the second they saw me. The ironic thing was that even though they thought so, I had never had a relationship until then. I mean a real relationship, in high school. I'm sure I had some boyfriends when I was in kindergarten or during elementary school, but not since I started middle school or high school. It simply didn't seem like my thing. I was not interested in any guys in my area and they were obviously not interested in anything else than the girls that walked around school in either very short skirts or the ones that had parents with a lot of money. I never figured out what was so special in having a girl that showed everything to everyone or that had parents that would pay everything for her. On the other hand, the guys who dated the rich girls at school didn't have to pay for much either, so maybe that was the benefit. But I still didn't get it. Why did people care so much about those things, while the most important one was forgotten? Love. How could people forget about that? Somehow I doubt that I will ever get an answer to that.

Most people, even my parents, referred to me as an old fashioned teenaged girl. Not only because of my point of view about relationships, but also the fact that I was never really into partying. I enjoyed reading books a lot more than going out and getting drunk with my friends. Of course it could happen when I felt like it, but that happened very rarely. Usually only during special events. But it felt better to stay at home some evenings, since I had a pretty complex family. My mother was a finance controller at the local hospital dealing with the cost and revenues of the company, while my father worked as one of the top surgeons there. My mother was usually the one to come home late from work, so it resulted in me and my father eating dinner together, if he ended his afternoon shift at six. Otherwise it would only be me and my little brother Jacob, who was 2 years old. My mother would usually come home around seven or eight in the evening, and by then I would have already put Jacob to bed. It didn't bother me that much that my parents were working that often, since I didn't mind staying at home in the couch reading, studying or watching a movie. What was bothering me the most was that Jacob barely got to see his parents and it was even worse when I was in school. He would usually cry when I left him with Angelica, the babysitter. He hated seeing me walk out of the house, because he knew that he wouldn't see me for several hours. I was his security, and I hated abandoning him that early in the morning. But it was always a relief to come home and see him overexcited to see me back home. It brought joy to my heart.

Somehow I felt like I never had to worry about anything in the world. My grades in school were good, and I know I deserved them. I studied a lot to be able to get all the A's and B's that I wanted to have. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do after high school, but I still had a couple of semesters to figure that out. It was probably leaning towards an English master, or maybe just some different literature courses. My parents would usually tell me not to worry that much, but they always encouraged me to do my best so that I got the chance to do whatever I wanted. They knew that I would figure my life out just in time. Just like they had done with their jobs. And I trusted them. But there was something inside of me that would doubt what they told me. I didn't want to become like them. I wanted to be able to spend time with my children, not being busy all the time with work. I wanted a different life for my future. I eventually thought that Michael would be the trigger for that change in my life. And I was right. He was not only going to change my life. He was going to turn my whole world around. In one way or another.