Camp Where The Hell Are We? | ✓

23

It was a typical day. That was the worst part — she didn't see it coming. Neither did he.

10-year-old Marley Hoover was sat at the kitchen bar that morning right beside Jacobi Hoover eating their favourite — grilled cheese. At the time, Marley found nothing odd about eating grilled cheese for breakfast. Jacobi was always a picky eater, and Marley wanted to copy her older brother.

She remembers how cluttered their eating space always was, having to lift their arms so they wouldn't knock anything off the table from mail to bills to random dishes to whatever their parents decided to throw on the counter that day.

Marley keeps everything clean now. She only has to pick up after one other person. Do one person's laundry. Cook one person's meals when he asks.

But at the time her mother had three people to look after, and she was always pushing the chores aside. Looking back now, Marley has no idea what her mother did all day. Go to work? Stay home? What was her job? Did she even have one?

Whatever it was she did after was a mystery, but there were the occasional days she'd drop her kids off at school in the morning and pick them up at the end of the day. Jacobi and Marley normally took the bus, but they enjoyed the days that they didn't have to.

The drive that morning was spotty in Marley's memory, but nothing stood out as unordinary. They usually kept preoccupied with whatever they had in their backpacks and were always quiet. That was the enforced rule in every car ride — no talking.

Everything was normal, everything had its order and made sense. Marley even saw Jacobi at lunch sitting with his friends in the cafeteria. He was in the eighth grade at the time, and he was at school for the majority of the day as far as she knew.

It was after school when everything started to change.

The bell rang, and Marley skipped off to their rock at the front doors of the building. She waited for the sight of her mother's car, or of the familiar head of dark brown hair to emerge from the crowd. The bodies of the other kids passed her with shouts and laughter as they found their rides home or headed for the busses. She watched hundreds of kids file out of the building and disappear.

Marley waited because she would always get in trouble for being impatient. Her father, to this day, hates impatience. She played with her hot wheels cars on the rock, making the 'vrummm' sounds as she did. Their rock was partially hidden from where the teachers always stood watch, so they ended up leaving with no clue that she was still waiting there.

The only reason why she wasn't at that rock all night was that Gabby had Mad Science after school. At around 6:00 pm, she walked out of the building holding her father's hand and chattering animatedly. At the sound of her best friend's voice, Marley rushed to her side and asked her one thing.

"What experiment did you do?"

Marley found nothing abnormal about the fact that she was stuck waiting for hours outside of school. Even past dinner, when her stomach had been rumbling. She waited and didn't think anything of it.

That afternoon had been typical to her when it shouldn't have been at all.

It gets spotty after that, once again. She remembers sitting with Gabby in the back seat, watching Mr. Collins standing at the door to her house making wild hand gestures. She remembers her father grabbing her from her seat and carrying her inside silently.

Marley remembers being in the closet alone for the very first time, humming to herself and rocking back and forth.

She remembers waking up every day expecting Jacobi to appear at the island, "Hey Marebear!" Munching on his grilled cheese and helping her pull her stool out. She'd walk downstairs and expect to see her mother cutting their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into squares before putting them in a paper lunch bag.