(Inspired by A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder)

Life always seemed so boring in your small town. The only exciting things were just basic gossip and the occasional summer fair. It was nice at times, since you didn’t have to worry about mass amounts of light pollution from big cities. But even so… sometimes you wished you could leave.

Especially now.

Cassidy Brown, a seventeen year old girl at your school, had gone missing on May 17th. She was last seen at 8:47 PM leaving her house on her family’s doorbell camera, wearing a light blue dress, before getting into her car and driving off. She never came home. Local police searched for weeks, but she was never found. It was all over the news. It’s been over three years, and everyone’s just assumed that she’s dead, buried somewhere in the woods or in a field somewhere…

**

Your parents own the local laundromat, and you work there every summer from Fridays to Mondays when school is out. All you really do is give quarters for change for the machines, and make sure no one is stealing shit.

The hot June sun shone through the windows, so you closed some of the blinds in hopes that it would reduce the amount of heat boiling you inside. All the fans were practically on blast. You glanced outside, waiting for any potential customers when you glanced across the street. Cassidy’s memorial was painted onto a wall of the town library, since she wanted to be an author. It was painted for the anniversary of her going missing, and was already full of flowers and whatnot.

Cassidy was your tutor. She was always so kind, so giving, so… normal. Her soft hazel eyes, her sleek light brown hair… Just your average teen girl with a dream to explore the world. And now she’d never get to. Seeing the mural of her made you wonder…

What happened to Cassidy Brown?

You were snapped out of your thoughts by the door of the laundromat opening, before the figure of Micheal Brown stepped in with a duffel bag full of clothes. Micheal, Cassidy’s younger brother. He was your age, in all few of the same classes, and he pretty much looked like Cassidy if she was a boy. You were now both at the age Cassidy was when she went missing.

His eyes met yours, his messy brown hair being ruffled a bit more by the fan.

“Hey,” he spoke up, feeling awkward under your stare.