The house was quiet.
Usually Arbel loved the quiet, she needed it, but now?
Now she hated the silence.
The silence was proof that her little brother wasn't here. Proof that Arbel actually had no idea where he was.
"The little shit must be having fun somewhere while I'm having a heart attack" Arbel muttered to herself.
She went to take a shower, with all due respect to Leo and his dramatic disappearance, She was smelly and sweaty, whatever the world brought upon her could wait an hour.
Within an hour she was sitting in the living room, a cup of coffee in front of her and a list of tasks next to her. Each task was more annoying than the last.
1. Try to understand the pages Leo had left.
2. Call the police (annoying)
3. Call mom (more annoying)
4. Cry in the corner
She couldn't wait to get to task four.
She added, on second thought, to check on Rosie, to see if she had found anything and if she was even okay.
This shit was pretty heavy, even for her.
She felt a little bad about dragging Rosie into this, but she couldn't handle it alone. Not now, not like this.
Arbel grabbed Leo's stack of papers.
The condition of the papers seemed worse somehow, old and wrinkled, full of tears and stains. Even the words that were in better condition were still not clear and Arbel just couldn't believe how bad Leo's handwriting was.
I mean, there's no way he wasn't doing it on purpose. The little brat.
And then she started to think about it more seriously, is there a chance he was doing it on purpose? Makes it harder to read? Because it sounds exactly like the kind of crap Leo would love to do.
Arbel went to the kitchen and gathered every note from the fridge that Leo had written on it. Which was actually the majority.
Arbel and Leo usually didn't have the same schedules so they found other ways to communicate. Leo preferred notes on the fridge and Arbel preferred messages on the phone.
At least Arbel's way made sense, Leo was the one who insisted on an ancient way of communication.
Now at least it helped her, because she could compare the writing styles.
She returned to the living room and spread the notes out on the table, surprised to discover that she was right about the fake handwriting, well, maybe half right.
Because half of the notes were in significantly clearer and more understandable writing, the other half on the other hand? Not as legible as the pages Arbel had found behind the picture, maybe even worse.
It took Arbel a minute to realize that the difference was in the different times the notes were written
The older notes had the better handwriting, and as time went on, Leo's handwriting seemed to deteriorate more and more into complete incomprehensibility.
Had Leo had a stroke or something? Had his brain developed in reverse?
Arbel tried to understand how someone's handwriting could deteriorate over time, not improve.
The easy answer was to say that Leo did it on purpose, but there was no clear reason for it. If he wanted people to not understand the handwriting on the pages in his room, that was understandable, but why would he try to ruin the handwriting on the notes on the refrigerator?
"Strange-" Arbel said to the empty room
"-everything this boy does is strange"
She decided to write the matter down for herself with the writing on the side and consult Rosie later, she usually had better ideas than her.
Arbel returned to the pages, lay back on the couch and tried to decipher Leo's cursive writing.
Among the words Arbel found over the next hour:
Impossible, perhaps, under the bed, darkness, future, emperor and monk.
So her best theory was that Leo was considering running away and becoming a monk, or running away to become an emperor? Are there even emperors today?
It was only when she reached the last page that she found a paragraph with one clear sentence, unfortunately that sentence was:
'Rosemary seems to be a good solution to a wide range of problems.'
And it was quite high on the level of useless sentences.
The problem that Arbel most urgently needed to solve was her lack of Leo, and she didn't see how Rosemary would help her with that.
Arbel folded the notes, who cared, it was crumpled anyway.
The pages were probably more likely to be related to schoolwork than to why Leo had left. She would still keep them and share the results with Rosie, but she had a hard time believing that their big breakthrough would be related to Rosemary or monks.
She moved on to her second task. The fun task of talking to the police.
The hardest part of it all seemed to be the waiting time in line. Arbel thought it was a sin not only to make her wait so long, but also to make her hear that stupid waiting song.
Someone finally answered her, interrupting her during the important process of staring into space and thinking about all her life choices.
The answer Arbel finally got was more or less what she expected. They told her they were looking into it and that they had put out a wanted notice for Leo, that she would be the first to know and blah blah.
At this point the secretary said they were having trouble getting through to her mother and Arbel had to hold back the howl of frustration in her throat.
"I'll take care of it-" she told the secretary, "-she's just less available because of her job, I'll tell her to get in touch with you."
"What does she do?" the secretary asked concerned.
She works at every job that would keep her away from home and her kids, Arbel thought.
"She's Scientist" she said shortly, hurrying to end the call before more questions could come.
The third task was undoubtedly the most terrifying, and Arbel had trouble mustering the energy to call her mother.
She stared in contacts of her phone for a long time, occasionally looking at the contact's photo of her mother, an old photo with her and Leo in a field of flowers.
She didn't know why she hadn't changed that photo. The woman smiling at her from the screen hadn't existed for years, she had been replaced by a cold and distant woman, both physically and emotionally.
But the photo still remained, and Arbel hadn't touched it.
Her finger hovered over the button and she was ready to rip off the band-aid, to end this hell.
But then the door to her house burst open and slammed against the wall.
The noise was like a gunshot and Arbel almost jumped out of her skin.
The aggressive entrance awakened some dormant part of her brain and Arbel grabbed the empty coffee cup and swung it as if it were a weapon.
Rosie stood in the doorway, breathing heavily and a little red.
As if she had rushed to here.
This is not good.
"Put down the coffee cup-" Rosie gasped
"-I have bad news."
Well, Shit.