Outlandish - Chapter 6

Ch 6 - About Having Moved On And Forgetting

And things turned out both unexpectedly and not. Time passes quickly and I stay with Alice in her apartment. She told me to bring my stuff over and really, I could’ve practically moved in with her by now. It has started snowing, actually, and it’s been a while now, but in the end I guess it is quite nice here with her, Even though I didn’t get the answers I asked for. I am still waiting for them, but I guess I can wait.

December rolled forward, with snow and crisp cold air. Alice had done what she could: She had called Ida to help her, she had called journalists and for a while considered hiring a private detective. Why? She didn’t really know. Rachel’s plead for help was stuck in her own mind. She herself had long let go of Jonathan Chesire and all those things. Stuck with those weird times was only her friends: Ida and Rachel. Other than that she lived a proper life, with a real job and a real car and a real apartment. Ida, too, had gotten her life in track quickly; she worked as a nanny and on her spare time wrote short romance novels.

“The idea to begin with was kinda stupid, this is all for Rache's sake,” Alice thought while sitting in the corner of her apartment set aside as an office. She had met Jonathan when she was 12 years old, and he looked to be in his early thirties at the time. Ida was 14 and Rachel was 8 years old. A shady figure to be sure, hanging around outside of schools and approaching the outsiders to talk to them. “Stranger danger,” in its highest form, Ida said at the time.

At any rate Jonathan worked with a “youth and young center, which he and his by much older brother Simon had founded. Open for everyone and with a playground and all. Surely they could’ve approached a far better way of handing out information and spreading their business. Though, in the end, the people there found out that things weren’t as innocent as they first appeared to be; which was to say not very.

As the few people in the group grew older, about 4 years passed. Jonathan with his smile and caring attitude approached them, with Simon tagging along behind him, and offered them a job. The people they talked to were Ida, Alice, Charles, Rachel and Anthony. The jobs were not cleaning or anything like that. They were brought to the attic of the building and tasked with taking calls and keeping score of numbers. Or rarely, package or write notes. Now, any sane person would have declined and walked away, but Jonathan was a very charismatic and well versed speaker, and everyone one of them had a reason for being so easily swayed into doing something that was so apparently stupid.

Ida, for example, had at the time been kicked out of her mother’s house and in turn she needed a place to stay and a source of income, which she got. Alice on the other hand never told anyone about her reasons of staying away from the house, but at the time she always wore long slender shirts. And whenever one by accident slipped up a little bruises could been. She brandished her smile and dismissed it, the time Ida asked her about it.

Now, Rachel. What could be said about her? She had a family and two siblings. A younger sister and an older brother. Both of them she never talked to. In fact, she never talked with her family at all. She never felt connected to them, she always wanted some other way of gaining attention and being listened to. Parents who were absent because of work are not the best at giving attention. So, at least Alice thought, that part of why Rachel was so easily swayed by Jonathan’s charm was because she had yet to anchor herself to someone or something, and chose to do so towards something that in the end would hurt her. It was inevitable.

“It was fucking inevitable, wasn’t it?” Alice asked herself later that day, while sitting next to Rachel in the couch and watching a late night romance. They shared a bowl of popcorn and Rachel, who just a few months before looked ragged and bloodshot, had return to looking healthy. No small part due to Alice, who had tended to her almost like she would’ve tended to a child, cooking for her, tapping up baths and cleaning her clothes. It just turned out that way, and somewhere in the back of her mind, Alice did not dislike, even though she voiced her thoughts that Rachel very well could’ve done it herself. Rachel, too, did not complain. even though she thought it was more than embarrassing being thought of like a baby.

“It was. The whole setup was fucking stupid. I can see the headlines: ‘Young man, enslaving 3 girls and two boys’ or something like that. I mean, for four years we casually went to stay at that building after school. For four years we saw him and Simon scheme and act weird. And when we were asked to work along with it, we happily… or I guess we just didn’t think, at all about it. Did you, Ida? Wait, no, don’t answer. No point to it. Over and done. Or something… just tell me what happened,” She said in a phone call with Ida. She was sitting on a bench in a park not too far away from her apartment. Ida was the one who called her, and they had been talking for many hours about one particular thing. That thing was: Ida had found out what happened with Jonathan. She said she had anyway, after privately trying to found due to gaining interests in what was going on after Alice started to push for an investigation on their part. “Look, I gotta go. Work and kids are calling, but I’ll send you the papers in a few days. Just gotta make sure everything’s done,” Ida said before hanging up without letting Alice respond.

And for Alice it felt like a weight had been lifted of her shoulders. Though she did not tell Rachel just yet. She was doing so well and thought that “My Rache doesn’t need to have him brought back. Not right now.”

She walked through the park towards her home, while holding her cell-phone. She tapped in the number to her boss and called in. She talked with him about holiday vacation and all things related to that: The length, any conditions, payment, etcetra.

When she got home, Rachel proclaimed “Hii, Alicee!” with an unnaturally happy voice. After taking her shoes off and glancing into the kitchen Alice noticed that she was in fact cooking. That was something that not had happened before. It was, so to say, almost as if the prisoner finally got out of jail and was now able to wander outside. That made Alice happy, and she smiled to herself and waved towards the kitchen slightly embarrassed, and mumbled out under her breath “Hey, Rache.”

After entering the apartment more fully she casually removed her jacket, buttoned up her blouse and took her bra off. To make herself more comfortable over all. She barely even noticed that she did not bother to think of Rachel as a annoyance around the apartment. After changing into a pair of sweatpants she leaned towards a wall and looked at Rachel, who was cooking. Rachel, cooking. Alice in the back of her mind dreaded the mess the kitchen would be in after she was done for.

“Hey, Rache, wat’cha cooking?” she asked, and Rachel, who was wearing an apron and everything. She turne her head towards Alice and felt her cheeks becoming slightly warm. “I guess I’m making pasta and minced meat,” she said. Though, anyone that would’ve looked into the pots that was on the stove would’ve assumed that she was making inc or black paint. Alice’s stomach turned after she was invited to smell the food. “It can not be that bad,” she thought. The day after, she called in sick for work. For a moment, the tables were turned: The one that was tended and cared for shifted from Rachel to Alice. Which did not make her her being cured quickly and effectively. Although Rachel did not have a particular hand of taking care of herself, and was not perfectly versed in taking care of others either.

Though even then, things returned to what could be called the “new normal” pretty quickly. That’s bound to happen, after all. The status quo is hard to breach.