Olivia Carter glared out the window of her parents car, as she watched the raindrops cascade down the window. Her brother, Mason, whined about the long car ride. She couldn’t deny, the drive from North Carolina to Pennsylvania was pretty rough. She glanced back at the colossal moving truck behind their car on the freeway.
“Only 20 more minutes until we’re there,” her mother, Jennifer, called from the passenger seat.

North Carolina was gorgeous, warm and everything Olivia was used to. She already hated Pennsylvania. Everytime she came to visit her grandmother she couldn’t wait to get home, and the fact that they were moving there frightened her. Her mother and father told Olivia that her Grandma wasn’t in the best condition since her grandfather died. She adored her grandma, but she despised her house. Most of all Olivia would miss her best friends that she was leaving behind. Luckily, it was summer and she wouldn’t have to begin 9th grade just yet.
She pushed a strand of her brown hair out of her eyes, and silently prayed that they could move back to North Carolina.

There car gradually pulled into her grandmothers driveway. The house was enormous yet ancient, built in 1928 to be exact. The porch stretched the whole way around the first floor of the house. There were 6 bedrooms, and 5 bathrooms, which her parents considered to be much too big for a 67 year old lady to be at all by herself. Her grandma stood in front of the door waving at the car, with her slippers on, and her brown hair permed. Her parents got out of the car first and greeted her grandma.
“Mom, how have you been?” asked Olivia's mother cheerfully.
“Just fine, but you two seem to think I need some help!” she said jokingly, pointing to Olivia's father, David. He laughed and gave his mother-in-law a hug.
“Well look at you Olivia! I haven’t seen you in ages, darling!”
“Hi Grandma!” she called, while stepping out of the car. Her grandma fawned over Olivia and Mason, and how much they had grown since she had last seen them. David, Jennifer and her grandmother chatted all evening about family events, distant cousins, and town affairs. Olivia could tell her mother was happy to be back in her hometown, and hoped that she would eventually love the town as much as her mother did.
“Olivia, could you bring down a few blankets from the attic?” asked her grandma politely.
“Sure,” Olivia replied.
She walked up the creaky stairs to the second floor then followed them up to the attic. As she placed her foot on each stair, a squeak emerged, until she finally reached the attic. She turned the knob and opened the door leisurely. The bitter air consumed her as she entered the room. She scanned the room, looking at ancient paintings and a wooden chest that hadn’t been dusted in years.
Suddenly, something caught her eye. A giant photo album laid on a bookshelf. She cautiously grabbed the book. She blew the dust off of it, revealing an ornate design with the last name, Reilly, spelled out on it. She opened the book to the first page. A stench came from the book, and the ends of the pages were beginning to yellow. The first picture was a picture of the house, with a family standing in front of it. A mother, a father and a son.
“Now something in this house is finally getting interesting,” she murmured to herself.
She thumbed through the pages, pausing at photos that caught her eye. When she had glimpsed at just about every picture in the book she folded the book closed, and held the book by its stem, about to put it back on the shelf where she found it.

Abruptly, a loose picture dropped from the pages of the book. She gradually bent down and grabbed the photo. Olivia examined the picture deliberately, trying to make sense of the surroundings and the girl in the picture.The first thing that caught Olivia’s eye was the gorgeous smile that stretched across the girl’s face, and how her light blonde hair fell across her shoulders in an attractive way. She looked like she was about 17-maybe older, and she wore a checkered dress that tied at the waist. The most peculiar thing was that the picture was ripped in half, and there was an unidentified arm wrapped around the girls shoulder.


The next few days Olivia got settled in the house, but was still horrified of the rooms she hadn't yet explored. Her brother and parents seemed to be adjusting just fine, but she still couldn’t seem to get the photo out of her mind, though. She finally decided she’d better ask her Grandma. After all, Grandma had lived in the house longer than Olivia had been alive. Olivia pulled the picture out of the back pocket of her jeans, and casually walked up to her grandma, who was laying on the couch.
“Hey Grandma; I have a question for you,” Olivia said nonchalantly.

“Oh, what is it dear?” Grandma replied in her usually cheery voice.

“I found this picture, and I was wondering if you knew who this girl was?”
Olivia pulled the picture out of her pocket and handed it to her Grandmother. She tilted her glasses down to get a clear glimpse of the photo. She flipped to the back of the photograph and read the date.

“I’m afraid I don’t know who this was, but do you have the other half that I could look at?”

“No, I only found that half, and I was assuming it was your mother.”
“Not my mother; she had dark hair, but the date on here,” she said pointing to the back of the photo,” means that it was someone probably about her age.”
Olivia thanked her grandma for her assistance, but knew that she had hit a dead end.
The weeks that passed were tiresome and dull, and Olivia found herself searching the grounds, and finding places where she could relax and be alone. One day on one of her many strolls in the cottage garden, something caught her attention. She could barely make out the shadowy figure in the distance. It began moving away, curious, Olivia decided to follow it. She felt her legs moving faster and faster as she followed the figure. She began approaching the figure, until she was able to distinguish it as being a teenage girl.
“Hey!” she called coming closer and closer to the girl.
Finally she came into plain view. Trees surrounded the two girls who were now standing face to face.
“Who are you?” Olivia inquired.
“Hello, I’m Marie,” claimed the girl, who seemed much too polite to be a trespasser.
“What are you doing here? You’re trespassing, you know!” Olivia said angrily.
“I was looking for a close friend of mine, but I see he doesn’t live here anymore. I’m sorry if I disturbed you and your family. I live next door,” she spoke quietly this time, and seemed a bit distraught.
She was a gorgeous girl, and looked a few years older than Olivia. She looked harmless, as though she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Olivia’s eyebrows furrowed, scanning the girl up and down, judgmentally. She wore a beautiful white flowing dress, and had her hair down and curled.
“We don’t have any neighbors,” Olivia snapped, with her arms crossed in front of her chest.
“I live right over there.” Marie pointed to a field of trees. “Let me show you!” She grabbed Olivia's arm, and pulled her towards the huge evergreen trees. They moved through a gap in the trees, that had obviously been there for a long time. As they emerged from the trees, an ancient home that resembled Olivia’s grandma’s stood in front of her. She stood in amazement at the simplicity yet elegance of the victorian home.
“See? This is where I live,” said Marie sweetly, gesturing towards the house.

“Wow! This house is gorgeous!” Olivia admitted.

“Thank you! Would you like to come in for a tour?” Marie asked.

Olivia knew not to go anywhere with strangers, but this girl seemed so innocent, so she promptly agreed and entered the home. The girls talked for hours, and Olivia had finally found a friend in this melancholy town.

Over the next few days Olivia traveled through the same evergreen trees and over to Marie’s house. Marie always wore that white dress, and when Olivia asked her about it, she just said that it was one of her favorites. They always stayed in the living room of the house, which had no television, and Olivia never breached the boundaries of the first floor.

One day, when Olivia came home from Marie’s house, she was greeted by her mother at the front door.
“Where have you been, young lady?” asked her mother scornfully.
“I was… um... at a friends house,” Olivia murmured under her breath, avoiding her mothers rigid gaze.
“You need to be telling your father and I when you leave the house! Where does this friend of yours even live?” scolded her mother.
“She lives in the house next door.”
“There is no house next door, Olivia!” her mother snapped.
“Ask grandma! I’m absolutely positive there is a house next door,” Olivia told her mother.
When Olivia and her mother asked Grandma, she said that there was- in fact- a house next door. But Grandma had also said that no one had lived there since her own grandmother had been born, and that she never recalled anyone living there recently.
“Well, I’m just happy that someone finally bought that old thing!” her grandma said, referring to Marie's house.
The next day, Olivia walked through the hole in the trees, and knocked on Maries door. No one answered so she knocked again. Still no answer. She turned the knob, and found that the door was open.
No, Olivia thought, I can’t go into her house when shes not home.
But Olivia had always wondered what Marie kept upstairs. Her curiosity won, and she tip-toed into the house, and attempted to walk as quietly as she could up the old creaky stairs.
The upstairs of the house was just as eerie and chilling as her own home. It seems so dilapidated, as though no one had dusted or cleaned it in years. The doors looked like they were rotting, and had been for years. It made Olivia wonder if Marie actually lived here. She quietly walked into the first room. The wooden furniture matched perfectly, from the bed, to the armoire. There were pictures that stood in frames, but they were black and white, and looked relatively old. Olivia was becoming more and more perplexed as she walked through each room.
The last room she investigated seemed to be Marie’s. All of a sudden, she felt a gust of brisk air hit her, that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand straight up. Slowly, Olivia turned around to find curtains blowing in the wind, and the window wide open. She could’ve sworn it was closed when she walked in. She closed the window firmly, and gazed outside. No one was there. She went back to the vanity she was scanning before, but this time there was a picture on top. She grabbed the photo, beginning to feel a bit panicked.
The photograph was of a boy about the age of 18. The photo was ripped in half. He had one arm by his side, and the other seemed to be wrapped around something. Then, realization hit her, and Olivia raced down the steps, and back to her house as fast as she could go, with the newly found picture in her pocket. She ran to her room and grabbed the photo of girl, the one she had found a few weeks prior. She slowly placed the pictures beside each other. It was a perfect match.
Her heart began to beat rapidly, like a drum, thumping louder and louder. How could she have miraculously found the other half? How did she find it in Maries house? Olivia stared at the picture, completely bewildered. She knew that the first step would be to ask her grandma.
She raced down the staircase, and found her grandma in the kitchen cooking dinner.
“Grandma, do you remember that picture I asked you about a few weeks ago?” Olivia said breathlessly.
“Yes, of course,” Grandma replied.
“Well I think I may have found the other half.” Olivia spoke quietly.
She gave the two torn pictures to her grandmother, who easily pieced them together. Her grandmas eyes were fixed on the photograph.
“Olivia, where did you find this picture?” Grandma finally spoke.
Olivia steadied her breath. “In the house next door.”
“That was my father,” Grandma sputtered.
In fact, it was Olivia’s great-grandfather. He was about 18 when the picture was taken, but Grandma still didn’t know who the girl was. Olivia knew she had to investigate more, she couldn’t just stop here. Her first instinct was to check the ominous attic.
While looking more attentively this time, she scoured through boxes of newspaper clippings and photos. She looked through the photos first, but was deemed unsuccessful. Then she looked through the newspaper clippings. After 30 slow and boring minutes of nothing, she finally found something that intrigued her. The heading read Missing Girl. It wasn’t the article that caught Olivia’s eye, but the picture beside it. It was identical to the one that was ripped in half.

The article was written on May 6th 1940. It stated that a girl had disappeared on the morning of her wedding, to Mr. George Reilly, who was Olivia’s great-grandfather. The two had lived next to each other all their lives, and fell in love. The very end of the article read “If you see Miss Marie Holland, please contact the authorities.”
“Marie,” Olivia spoke quietly to herself.
“Olivia, thats why you found me,” spoke a tender and caring voice.
Olivia slowly turned around. Now the familiar voice sounded even more angelic than usual. Her white dress glowed, and now her hair was pulled up, and out of her face. She held a bouquet of flowers in her hand, but now she wavered above the floor.
“That day I ran away from my future, and I regretted running away everyday that I lived,” she spoke sorrowfully. “I never came back until now, I never had enough courage to see where his life went or what he came to be. That day you met me, I was looking for him. I hoped that some how I could just see him again, but he’s gone now. He started a family, and never waited for me to return. You see, time really flies when you’re…” she paused, and had to choke up the word. “dead.”