Chapter Six
Jessica stood with one hand on her hip, and the other used to flip back her most prized possession. Her long golden blond silky hair. She surveyed the crowd gathered before her for the morning's warm up session.
"Liz," she said. "Don't you think the group looks a little smaller today?"
Elizabeth looked up from her clipboard, where she was busy planning that afternoon's activities. The written work was always being left up to her. Elizabeth didn't know what Jessica would do if she didn't have her to do all her 'boring work' for her. She quickly counted the number of girls busily chattering in the crowd and looked back at her sister. "We seem to be missing four." The girls met each other's eyes. "I'll go look," Elizabeth volunteered.
"So what did yer get up ta last night?" Fanny said looking at her sister, Heaven. "While ah was stuck all night in the cabin almost dying." She added as an after thought. The guiltier Heaven feels the better, Fanny thought. She's why everything bad happens ta me anyway!
"Yes, Heaven," Cathy said, joining in the interrogation. She was still annoyed at being left to watch over Fanny and her pitiful wailings. "You seemed to have disappeared right after I was left with Fanny." She raised an eyebrow.
"Oh," Heaven said, trying to quickly come up with an excuse as to way she hadn't appeared again in the cabin until much later yesterday night. All the while trying not to make it too obvious that a wide smile was quickly growing across her face. "I thought that I'd leave it up to the expert to watch over Fanny. I didn't want to get in the way," she finished lamely.
"But what were you doing all that time?" Cathy pressed. The little voice in the back of her head was speaking again. Although she tried to ignore it, it was impossible not to hear it when it spoke up so often. You know it's not right Cathy. You know what you and Chris are doing is wrong. Shut up, she told the voice. It was only that once. I'm just looking out for Chris now. But you want it to happen again, don't you... Cathy mentally shook her head, and thus, the conflicting emotions were gone again. At least for now. She knew that at night, when there was nothing to occupy her immediate thoughts, that voice would come back to haunt her again. A voice broke her out of her spell.
"You girls haven't seen Dawn, Ruby, Melody or Laura have you?" Elizabeth tried not to let her worry show on her face, but it was impossible. She had searched their cabins and all the places she thought they might have gone to, but all to no success.
"No, I haven't seen any of them," Heaven said, glad to have the attention taken away from her. She just hoped that no one would question why she hadn't seen any of them. Because that would lead to the question of what she had been doing last night to have not noticed that four girls had gone missing.
"Well, ah haven't seen any of them, but it's not like ah could have gone any where anyway. Being in as much pain as ah was in. Am in," she corrected. It was probably best to play on that for as long as she could. It was the only way to get any attention around here!
"I haven't seen any of them either," Cathy said, the only one out of the three who was genuinely concerned for the welfare of her new friends. They had gotten over the food fight well enough.
"What were you girls doing yesterday? How could you have not noticed that four of you had gone missing?"
The three of them looked guilty at each other.
"Oh my God, we are in so much trouble!" Elizabeth stuck her face to the window of the minibus Jessica was driving searching frantically for any signs of the missing girls. "I can't believe we just lost four girls! We're so going to get fired, you know that don't you? Fired!"
"Liz, clam down. We are going to find the girls. They won't tell," she said jerking her head to the back of the bus where Heaven, Fanny, Cathy, and Cathy's brother Chris, who apparently, as she had just found out, had been hiding out on camp grounds, had insisted upon coming with them. "And if we don't tell the directors, it won't hurt them. Everything will be fine!"
"But the others left at the camp-"
"Will be fine with the junior assistants. They don't need to know anything."
"I still can't believe we just lost four whole people," Elizabeth said, searching the roads to town for the missing girls, possibly lying injured, raged that their camp counsellors hadn't come looking for them.
Like a mirage, the diner had shimmered into view on the horizon, salvation to the girls, almost too good to be true, when they found out that it was indeed a diner, not just an illusion created by the mind designed to drive them crazy. After a 'break', which turned into the stop for the night, they had gotten up the next morning, and continued their walk to find civilisation again. It wasn't an easy walk though; the night had been hard, Melody reflected. Although sleeping on the side of the road, in constant fear of serial murderers attacking in the dead of the night, and in the unbearable heat, usually was. But, after waking the other girls up at 6am, they might as well make up for lost time and at least it was when the day wasn't hot yet, they continued their walk. To much complaint, of course. And that was when they saw it; the diner. In the middle of a highway, in the middle of nowhere, stood Auntie Jo's Diner, complete with 50's décor and used as a stop for truck drivers travelling overnight. It was Ruby who had spotted it first.
"Somebody slap me, 'cause I think I see a restaurant," she had said.
"You better not be joking, because I need to go badly, and if that isn't one I think I see, I'm going anyway!" Dawn had exclaimed in reply.
Singers, Melody had thought, though, instead, she looked up for herself to see if it were really true. She stopped in her tracks. There, stood a building in the distance. "Girls, I think I see it too!" she jumped excitedly.
"Oh my God, so do I!" Laura had said screaming.
Well, it wasn't often that Josephine O' Malley, the one and the same Auntie Jo, had four dishevelled looking teenage girls come bursting through the doors of her beloved diner, passed down to her from her parents, but at eight o'clock that morning, this was just what happened.
"Argh!" one of the girls, a pretty, though ruffled, red head had screamed in delight. "I knew it was real, not like that swimming pool I thought I saw before!"
Josephine stood for a moment, one hand in her hip, the other clutching the dish towel she had over one shoulder, and took in the sight before her. Four teenage girls in clothes that looked brand new; was that a tag she saw still attached to that shirt; but out of place on their sweaty bodies that looked like they needed a good bath, all carrying a few shopping bags each. One was the pretty red head that had spoke first, another had blue eyes and blonde hair, and the last two were similar looking with their long brown hair, one being a shade darker than the other, but not quite the same. She wondered briefly whether they were related. But they all looked at her with the same look of awe and adoration. She didn't know what was going one here, but she did know that she needed some more excitement in her life, more than serving truckies gave, and these girls looked like they were going to be the ones to provide it.