Elevation

'I used to live in a room full of mirrors; all I could see was me. I take my spirit and I crash my mirrors, now the whole world is here for me to see.' - Jimi Hendrix
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Dressed in the outfit she'd gotten the night before with her great grandmother's pearls around her neck and the jade earings from Amber in her ears, she poked her blow-dryed hair into the guest bedroom to find that Amber had already made up the bed and probably headed back to her own house to get ready for school.

Harlym moved on slowly, trudging down the hall into the kitchen, where her mother could usually be found in the mornings cooking up a nice breakfast of eggs, toast, and bacon. No such luck on this morning, though.

Instead, she was met with a yellow piece of notebook paper hanging on the fridge with a message in her mother's handwriting scrawled across it, reading:

'Your father and I had to get to the bank early this morning. Make sure you eat a good breakfast, honey.
Love,
Mom'

Rolling her eyes, she crumpled up the note and tossed it in the trash can by the pantry. It probably wasn't anything serious. More likely that they had wanted to eat out or get an early start on the work day than that there had been a problem that really required them to get there so early.

She'd come to the conflusion that her parents were borderline workaholics years ago, so this was nothing new.

Ignoring her mother's orders, Harlyn decided to fry a handful of tater tots for breakfast. She preferred foods normally served for dinner at breakfast. Leftovers were often her favorite meal, but there hadn't been any from the party.

Just as she was reaching into the cupboard to retrieve a plate for the frying tots, the house phone went off, causing her to abandon her task at hand in order to get it before her tots started burning.

"Walker residence, Harlyn speaking," she answered it, her greeting a force of habit.

"Good morning Harlyn, this is Amber's mom, is she available?" Rachel, the small town's newspaper editor and only Mormon, asked in that high-pitched nasaly voice of hers, speaking strangely more quickly than usual.

"No, ma'am," she replied with an unnecessary shake of her head. "She usually leaves before I wake up if she stays on weekdays, so honestly I didn't think anything of it. Maybe she had something to do before coming home this morning?"

There was a slight pause and Harlyn knew Rachel was skeptical about her assumption. She couldn't really blame her, as much as Amber partied and sometimes got out of hand, she'd never just disappeared without telling anyone where she was going before.

"She usually comes straight home, this isn't like her," she persisted, "I have a bad feeling about this, will you have her call me if you run into her at school or after?"

Harlyn nodded, forgetting that Amber's mom couldn't see it, "Of course, Ms. Shield."

The line went dead without so much as a 'goodbye' or 'thank you'.

Rolling her eyes at the rudeness, she ignored the sinking feeling in her gut and put the powder blue phone back on the hook beside the fridge. There had been a string of recent disappearances in and around town within the last few months, but Amber would turn up eventually.

She told herself that she was certain of it.

Harlyn reached into the cupboard and retrieved a plate, heading back over to the stove, only to find that her tots had al shriveled up and turned black in the frying oil.

Grumbling under her breath about her bad luck, she fished them out with a curved metal spatula onto the plate and set it onto the counter to cool before she threw them out.

"This is ridiculous," she murmured, slinging her bag over her shoulder and opting for a pop tart on her way out of the house.

What she saw when she opened the front door made her lose her appetite altogether.

Amber's bright yellow jeep was still parked in front of her house.