Bees

Opening the drawer was a huge mistake. Inside was a little, blue book. Angie flipped to the first page, which was blank. All the pages were blank until the very last where Shayla had written, to have a friend you must bee one.
Angie knew that it was her sister who had written these words. She recognized Shayla’s precise and spidery handwriting. The little drawing of the bee, which followed the written words, could only have been rendered by her sister
“Damn it,” Angie said, as tears rolled down her face. Shayla’s unsolved disappearance so haunted Angie that sleeping was no better than waking, eating unimportant, work a disaster, her relationship with Aaron, with anyone for that matter, a lost cause. Her sister had been missing for two and a half months and Angie thought of little else.
She closed the book and put it back in the drawer. She stood staring at the contents of her sister’s apartment. She thought if she just looked hard enough at the right thing she’d know what had happened to her sister. She looked at her sister’s running shoes, the velvet painting of the Flamingos over her bed, the little shopping bag with the new, unused lipstick.
She’d looked at these things before but kept thinking that Shayla’s disappearance was like a puzzle, if she looked at these things, at everything, just the right way, or in the right sequence, or from the right angle she’d find her sister.