I moved to Sleepy Brook when I was 12 and my brother Brewer was 9. My sister was 17 and a junior in highschool.
It was the week after we first started going to school that Valerie’s car got taken away. My mother had caught her speeding, and had suspended her from driving. This of course, was the end of my teenaged sisters life. She threw a fit, threatened to stop eating, threatened to run away, but my mother stood strong. My father thought it was harsh, because after all, who doesn’t speed?
Because of this, she was forced to take the bus for the first time in her highschool career. This again, was social suicide according to her. It never made sense to me until I actually got to highschool and I witnessed first hand the curiosities of the social hierarchy. I also was a guy, and guys generally just had to be assholes to be cool.
Valerie had been taking the bus for a while now, and had become accustomed to the routine. She had to wake up earlier, which made her hate the whole thing even more. She would get ready, eat a granola bar, (it was the only thing she had time to eat) and then make her way out to the Bus stop just outside our house. The busses always came at different times every day, so she would wait there for a while sometimes, and to her times she’d almost miss it.
On this day, Valerie didn’t have to wait long at all. As the bus pulled up to our house, the brakes louder than usual, I saw my sister stall before getting in. She looked back towards the house one last time, waving to me, before climbing aboard the bus.
Around 5 minutes later, another bus rolled by our house, stopping for a minute with its doors outstretched before carrying along. I told my parents, who told me it was probably a new driver running the routes.
An hour after that, I was called out of my first period Algebra class. My mother met me in the lobby, and she walked me outside to the car where I could see my dad was sitting in the driver’s seat.
A knowing look was plastered across my fathers face as he shot me a half smile. My mother said nothing, her eyes never met mine, as if she was ashamed. The odd silence, the creepy glances, it all made me sick. I shuffled into the car, trying to keep myself from crying when I saw Brewer in the back seat aswell.
I felt my body liquify in my seat as my father turned around, placing a hand on my knee like he had a month ago when I was afraid of leaving for Sleepy Brook.
“Your sister never made it to school today.” He said
My mind flashed, and I saw her. I saw her climbing the steps, I saw the doors closing behind her, and I saw the bus driving off.
“That’s-that’s not true!” I spat, “I saw her get in the bus…I saw her!” My voice began to break as I placed all my hope in that unsure statement.
“The police think that Valerie was taken by someone who pretended to be her bus driver.” He added, looking down. I looked at my mother, who was crying, her eyes fixed on the scene just outside the dashboard.
“Taken? Taken where?” Brewer questioned, his voice sounding closer and closer to a cry.
The scene kept replaying in my head. How she had hesitated, how she looked back at the house one last time before getting on. She had known something was wrong. She knew. I could have stopped her. I could have told her.
Brewer kept asking until he was brought to tears, his voice a incoherent mess of words. Every now and then he would cry out for Valerie, with such pain that I felt it in my bones too.
My parents didn’t have any answers for us. They didn’t know where she was, who took her or why. They didn’t know when she’d come back, or if she’d come back at all. The police in the town had no leads, even when they brought in detectives from neighboring cities, we found nothing. All we knew is that an extra bus was checked out of the bus lot, and due to the lots less then ideal security we had no idea who had been driving it. There was no security footage where the bus had gone, nor was there a record of the license plate. We put out advertisements, flyers, everything, yet Valerie stayed gone.
I don’t think my family understood how important Valerie was. We quickly found out that Val was the glue, and without her, we were severely fractured. We stopped having family dinners, we didn’t play board games anymore. No one dared touch her old car, it stayed there, unmoving in the driveway. We couldn’t have a funeral, and we never got any closure. Her ghost seemed to haunt the house, always. Anytime the doorbell rang I thought it might be her, I never lost that hope. It almost was worse than her just dying, because I couldn’t bring myself to move on.
I remember that night, walking into my house, my feet carrying me through the hallway and up the stairs. I wasn’t thinking, I couldn’t. Before I knew it, I was at Valerie’s door, my hand raised like I was going to knock. It was then when I realized I didn’t have to, then a sob crashed through me. It brought me to my knees as a scream punched its way out of my throat. Footsteps thundered behind me, and before I knew it, I was being pulled into my mother’s frame.
My mother was a petite women, but she always had a way of making me feel protected. I was almost too big to be fully covered by her, but her arms swaddled me and held me close to her chest.
“It’s okay Joesph, it’s okay” she whispered through tears of her own. I wanted to believe her. I wanted it to be true that I was going to be okay, but I never was after that. I never found myself being okay ever again.