They Appeared On My Door After Googling Myself

My dad always said he had to move for work, and I didn’t really question it further. Still, I missed out on a lot of things kids got to do.
I didn’t go to school for a really long time and I never really made any friends in my childhood. I got so used to moving every few months that I didn’t even unpack my room. I wasn’t bitter about it though.. If my parents said we had to move for work, I just believed them.
As I got older, these random moves got much less frequent. After we managed to stay in the same place for a whole year – my parents decided to buy a house! It was my dream come true! It was huge! Four bedrooms, a pool, a trampoline, AND it was in a neighborhood full of kids my age!
I was just about to start middle school when we got the house, so it was the perfect time for me to really make some friends!
Among all the friends I made, my best friend was Susan.
Susan and I loved watching Youtube videos together. We loved watching true dramas like on My Story Animated, among others.
We came across one video that seemed to change our lives forever!
Our favorite channel had posted a video about a girl who went missing over ten years ago! One day, a two-year-old had been playing out in the garden when she just completely vanished!
The story was so eerie and a little sad. A woman had just lost her husband in an accident. Her daughter was all she had! Then, she vanished from her life without a trace when she was playing in her own backyard.
Officers made this a cold case years ago, but the mom was still looking! She made billboards and traveled around, never giving up hope. The video transitioned to a slide showing a photo of the girl when she was taken and a photoshopped picture of what she looked like.
Susan immediately paused the video.
“Carly, that looks just like you!”
“Yeah, what are the odds?” I tried to laugh off.
“Pretty slim,” she said.
She was right! That girl in that photo was undeniably me!
We spent the next few hours looking up more about the story. It turned out she disappeared on my birthday, was the same age as me, and even had the same birthmark!
When it was time to eat dinner with my “parents,” Susan and I were uncharacteristically quiet.
“So girls, what have you been up to all day?” my mom asked.
“Nothing!”
She asked why we were acting so weird, and we just told her we were fine! I asked her if I could spend the night at Susan’s so we could study, and they agreed with a smile on their face.
Susan and I continued to research the topic at her house and found only more incriminating evidence!
We didn’t know what we should do, so we asked Susan’s older brother for some advice.
At first, he thought we were being crazy, but when he read into it, he said we needed to do something. He was going to make a call to some of his cop friends and get more information on this missing girl.
Months had passed and I started forgetting all about the searches. Maybe it was because I was getting so invested in high school – but part of me just didn’t want it to be true. Ignoring it was easier than anything else.
Susan and I were eating lunch when a teacher came and approached me. She told me my parents were here to pick me up for a doctor’s appointment. I didn’t know I had a doctor’s appointment that day.
I When I arrived at my parents car, it was clear something was wrong.
When I got in the back seat, I noticed there were blankets covering loads of stuff in the back seat.
There were bags packed and both of my parents were visibly distraught.
“This is an awful lot of stuff to go to the doctor’s,” I said.
My parents looked at me and said that my father’s brother had gotten into a very bad accident and they didn’t want me to find out through the teacher. We were going to drive a few states away and take care of him for the time being.
I didn’t even know I had an uncle! There was obviously something fishy about this. They told me to text Susan to let her know I’d be staying with my uncle for a bit. After I did that, my father took my phone out of my hand.
I asked why he was taking it, and he simply said that my uncle’s pacemaker was disrupted by certain electrical signals. This meant that I couldn’t use wi-fi the entire time we stayed with his family! This didn’t seem right to me, but when I tried to argue that hospitals had wi-fi, they just shut me down and told me to behave.
Because they were so upset, I just let it go.
I assumed we would only be gone for a couple of days. But days dragged on into weeks. Even if I had my phone on me, I doubt it would work. We were in the middle of nowhere!
My uncle was virtually a zombie. He stayed in bed, surrounded by lots of beeping machines. My parents left for work religiously every day, and I was forced to wander this cabin alone most of the days.