Soul Salvation

Upon Brian’s agreeance to try and help his spirit pass on, Rania began pouring everything she had into trying to figure out the mystery. Even though the semester was in full swing at school, her classes getting progressively busier as they all began early preparation for finals, Rania worried less about her studies and more about Brian’s death. She knew there had to be a way to figure out how he had died, even if he couldn’t yet remember anything.

Much to her parents’ approval and praise, Rania spent more and more of her time in the local library. She lied more and more to her parents, insisting she was only there to work on her homework and projects in an absolute silence with no interruptions. What they didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt them, she thought.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

For the second week in a row Rania was sat at the library, looking through the Microfilm machine at the old, film copies of local newspapers. She hunted through as many as she could find from the year of Brian’s death, but so far she had found nothing. Granted her search so far only scratched out about three months of the year. But it was a start. And Rania was determined to go through every single day until she found anything that would help her.

Brian was seated next to her in a chair, anxiously awaiting for her to gasp in excitement upon finding some piece of crucial information.

“I just don’t understand,” Rania muttered quietly. “There’s nothing so far. No cover stories. No side blurbs. Nothing.”

“Maybe it just never was documented,” Brian answered with a solemn shrug.

“Deaths don’t ever just not get written about. There isn’t even word of an obituary so far. It’s like no one knew, or no one cared,” Rania said, getting heated but keeping her voice low incase anyone were to walk by.

“Maybe they didn’t,” Brian said sadly, watching as Rania pulled away from the machine to look at him.

“Someone did. Your parents would have. Otherwise they wouldn’t have buried you on their plot,” she reasoned.

“Maybe they wanted to keep the situation private. My parents aren’t very extroverted when it comes to things like this. They’d have rather kept it to themselves and just told close friends and family than have everyone know,” Brian explained. Rania sighed, relaxing back into the chair.

“Well if that’s the case, it won’t be in the papers, and there won’t be anything on the internet about it.”

“It’s okay,” Brian said, resigned.

“But it’s not,” Rania insisted. “I told you I was going to help you figure this out. I can’t just give up.”

“I know. But I don’t want you spending all your time on this. You need to stay focused on school. Finals are coming up.”

“How do you know?” Rania teased, brows raised.

“Because, I may not have been any good at school, but I always knew when winter break was. Which is always after finals. Which are coming up,” Brian said, matter-of-factly with a smile. “Which means you need to study.”

“I’ll be fine,” Rania insisted, going back to her search. Brian just sighed, rolling his eyes.

“I really don’t want your grades to suffer,” he said.

“They won’t. I’ll be fine,” Rania repeated.

“Whatever happened to your friends? The ones from school?” Brian asked, changing the subject.

“I see them at school. Why?”

I was just wondering. You used to be more social before you started trying to find all this information about me and my death,” Brian pointed out.

“Well, it’s hard for me to focus on so many things at once, is all. Once I get determined on one thing, that’s usually the one thing I focus on,” Rania answered with a shrug.

“I’m going to make you a deal,” Brian began, and Rania finally turned to face him. “You can keep… devoting all your time to this, if you call your friends up and go hang out with them tonight.”

“Fine,” Rania grumbled.

And just as she had promised, Rania called up Mariah and Samantha that night, the three of them getting together for a movie night at Sam’s. But Rania promised herself that night that she would work even harder at helping Brian attain his salvation. If she didn’t help him, who would?