It was hard to tell which of his parents William Van de Kamp took after more. At fifteen he was already nearly six feet tall and gangly, just like his father. His long nose (also his father's) was freckled and his eyes were blue has the Wyoming sky, the mirror image of his mother's. He didn't know this of course, the parents he knew were both petite and brunette, as was everyone in his family. He had eight aunts and ten uncles and at least eighteen first cousins. At family gatherings he stood out in every photo, a laughing giant with fire colored hair.
Not that it bothered William. His mother insisted her great aunt had been a red head and that William looked just like her father when he was his age. Williams cousins teased him sometimes, but he could out run any of them and beat them at touch football every single time and besides, they didn't really mean anything by it.
In fact it was hard not to like William. The boy was always smiling. He was a quarterback on the football team but defied any stereotypes that came with that. He was a good student, perhaps a bit loud but always bright, and well liked. He dated a cheerleader, Clarissa, but neither of them we bullies. Both were shining examples of Midwestern values and manners. Wholesome milk-drinking all American kids with their whole lives ahead of them.
William didn't remember the needle that once pierced his scalp or the rush of iron in his blood, though he did has a small scar he had discovered at age eight, when there was a lice outbreak at his school and his mother shaved his head in the kitchen with his fathers electric clippers. His mother said he fell when he was a baby, just learning to walk.
William met Clarissa when he was twelve and she was eleven at a dance and they drank punch out of plastic cups in the corner of the middle school gym under maroon and white paper streamers, their schools colors. He had seen her before in class but never spoken to her. She had braces and straight blond hair that she tucked behind her ears when she talked. She asked him to dance and he said he didn't know how and so instead they stood drinking their punch and talking about the class they had together.
The next day she passed him a note written in purple pen asking him to sit with her at lunch. He never sat anywhere else again.
The first time William kissed Clarissa he was fourteen and she was thirteen. They had been best friends for two years and had been boyfriend and girlfriend for five months already. William wanted to kiss her sooner but Clarissa had made him wait until she got her braces off, so instead they held hand in the hallways between classes, or he kissed her cheek before going home for the day. He kissed her fingertips intertwined with his when they sat on the bleachers and watched a football game the next town over (William liked to see all the local football games when he wasn't playing himself)
The first kiss lasted only seconds, her lips were sticky and she was wearing something new, strawberry lipgloss, and her smile was all new too, straight white teeth instead of the familiar metallic grin. He remember thinking after that first kiss that he wanted to kiss her every day forever.
When William was fifteen he got his learners permit and started driving his fathers pick up truck. He would pick up Clarissa and they would go to the movies or get a milkshake at Freddy's or just drive around and talk. She had a ten o'clock curfew so they couldn't go too far but there was a place off the road they liked to go where the stars were especially bright and sometimes they saw shooting stars falling to earth and sometimes they didn't even look at the sky and kissed until nine forty-five and made in back to her house at ten on the dot.
I was also when William was fifteen and Clarissa was fourteen that she was taken. As far as William knew, nothing bad had ever happened to him before, and he didn't spend much time worrying that it ever would. But suddenly it did. The police launched an investigation, but from the beginning it didn't feel hopeful. There was a strange lack of detail or clues. From all accounts she had just vanished.
At first William thought it must be a mistake, that any minute she would appear in the empty desk seat in front of him, smiling and applying that strawberry lipgloss and telling him about what had happened in her last class. The wonderful thing about Clarissa was they could have parted one class period ago and she would be just as happy to see him as if they had been apart for days, laughing at his bad jokes and writing him colorful notes littered with gel pen flowers and also some doodles of footballs and their high school mascot, a lion, just for him so it wouldn't be too girly.
But as the days passed the atmosphere changed. They held a memorial of sorts for her in the auditorium. Other cheerleaders tearfully talked about what a good friend she was, how she was always helping them learn new routines, how much they missed her bright light. They played her favorite song. William didn't cry then, he sat motionless in the front row, feeling his classmates eyes upon him. He waited until he was home and broke down in his mothers arms, for even though he was nearly six feet tall, he was only fifteen.