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The day I was kidnapped started off just like every other day.

There was nothing special that occurred on the morning of November the twentieth to warn me of what was going to happen. No strange gut feeling or sudden shivers. Everything was just the way it always was.

My twin sister and me had only exactly one more month before we turned seventeen. It was a Wednesday morning and we both had to go to college. As usual we walked together half way down the road where we met up with my best friend. Two houses further down Cheryl’s boyfriend would join us. The four of us, just like every day, walked ten more minutes before we started our school day. Nothing about that day felt any different to the Tuesday, or the Monday. It felt just like the Wednesday that it was supposed to be.

Cheryl and I were identical twins. I never did anything without my sister. But she was just so much more than that. She was my other half, she was me but in another body, and I was her. Our twin bond was one of the strongest anybody had ever encountered. When we were little we wore matching outfits but in different colors. Our parents were sometimes frightened by the intensity of our bond and fought tooth and nail to send us to different schools, but we weren’t having any of it. By the time we reached fifteen however they saw the advantages that our connection held. Cheryl was the wilder, more impulsive one of the two of us, whereas I was conflict shy and would evaluate a situation before walking into it, which was ironic because the day that I went missing I did not evaluate my situation.

It was the same Wednesday procedure as always, at the end of the day after a session of double history, I waited for Cheryl at the school gates. Normally she arrived on her own as her boyfriend Jake was part of the school committee and had meetings. But that day instead of meeting me she sent me a text saying that she’d see me at home again, she was going to walk back with Jack after his meeting.

Mum said that she always blamed herself for my disappearance.

As I slid the phone back into my school skirt pocket my best friend walked past.

“Hey Eva, you coming to my party tonight?” Oliver pushed his outgrown fringe out of his eyes and bit his lip awkwardly.

“Of course I am,” I had said with a wide grin.

He was one of the first of our friends to turn seventeen, one year closer to the drinking age. Not that it mattered to Oliver. Everyone always assumed he was rowdy, and even Cheryl didn’t like him so much. It was one of the few things that we disagreed upon. But he was the shy arty type. His schoolbooks were covered in neat printed words or big black marker pen drawings. At the same time he was also the class clown, girls liked his sense of humor and the slight attitude that came with it and he knew it. But he was always me best friend, since the first day when I’d struggled to open my locker and he helped me.

“Great so I’ll see you at seven?” He was still shockingly hopeful even though I had said yes months in advanced and not just because it was my duty as best friend. It was important to me.

Little did I know then just how pivotal November the twentieth was to be for me.

I nodded emphatically and hugged him goodbye, not knowing that I wouldn’t be able to do that for a very, very long time.

I guess the first mistake I made was to walk home on my own.

Oliver was seeing his friends before going to his party. He had looked concerned when he realized that I would be walking on my own, but I brushed it off. The second mistake I made walking home was to walk up to the white van, when the non-descript man sat at the wheel asked me to show him where he currently was on a map. In the papers it was called ‘victim blaming’. But I didn’t know that until later.

I hadn’t expected to be taken right off the streets on a chilly but dry autumn afternoon in November. That just didn’t happen in our quite little suburb of Sheffield. Nothing ever bad happened here. The worst thing to happen were children who fell down off their bikes onto the tarmac road and scraped their scrawny knees.

But I remember the details of that day so vividly.

I was wearing my favourite dark blue duffle coat over my school uniform, and button had fallen off in the process of me being pulled into the van. There had been a little bit of frost on our front lawn in the morning, enough to excite us about possible snow next week. I’d felt very pretty that day; I’d put my wavy blonde hair in a loose plait and put a little mascara on. It had annoyed Cheryl a little because she’d straightened her hair that morning and she said we didn’t look as identical as always. We’d had Shepherd’s pie with green peas for lunch in school and Oliver’s eyes had lit up like the sky on bonfire night when I had given him his birthday card. I had laid my outfit for his party out on my bed that morning, excited to wear the new suede boots I’d been given as an early birthday present because of the cold weather.

All these thoughts flashed through my mind in a matter of seconds before a cloth was pushed over my face and after a while everything went peacefully black.