He stared up at her grinning face, trying to smile back. Her eyes seemed to bore into his, as if trying to get a message across. But he knew that there was nothing to be said between them, because paper couldn't tell him what he wanted to know.
The sign state the obvious, saying "Missing" in bold, black letters above her face. It had been up for 126 days, exactly the amount of time that she had been gone. Nobody had the courage to take the posters down, so they still hung. They remained taped to store windows and street lights, abandoned, now blending in with the scenery. They were the only concrete reminder that she was ever here. No one ever talked about her, or even said her name. Everyone feared that if they started to talk,they would never stop. And someone might say what they were all thinking: That she was never coming back.
To Evan, she was just a myth. A rumor that had begun long before he existed. By the time he got here, she was already gone. The signs had held their positions for nearly a month before he arrived. It had taken him another week before anyone told him her name. Alexis Marq. Evan now knew that she would be sixteen in two months. She was only five months younger than him. If she was still alive, that is.
No one understood why he cared. He had never known her, never spoken to her. But still, he wondered where she was. All he knew of her were the dazzling green eyes on the poster. She was pretty, in an ordinary, nothing wrong, nothing special kind of way. But her eyes were astonishing. Even from the paper they shined, like a polished piece of sea glass, washed up onto the hot, white sand. He could just imagine her, walking along the beach with bare feet, toes poking up from underneath the sand. She would come across a beer bottle and smash it to pieces, letting them get washed away by the murky brown ocean. Evan liked to think that she was someone that understood potential beauty, that knew that somewhere, sometime, people from all around the world would collect those broken pieces. She would know that something ugly to her could eventually be a piece of art to someone else.