Work Text:
I just want to start this off by saying how glad I am to have found you guys. Seb’s been missing for almost six months now, and my parents…we’ve been out of options for awhile now. Even after everything that happened, everything he might’ve caused, he’s still my little brother. I’m not ready to let his trail go cold just yet.
Seb was always what most people thought of as a weird kid. Quiet, you know? He was always harmless, mostly just sat around reading, but that was enough for the bullies. Once he got to third grade or so, it was just merciless. I got used to getting dirty looks in the lunchroom for shouting down kids two grades younger than me, but you should have seen them. The messing with the food he brought for lunch, the stealing of his books, the laughter whenever he tried to actually stand up for himself. Admin wasn’t going to do fucking anything about it, of course, so somebody had to.
Seb’s favorite thing to read about were storms. Big ones, the kinds that flood whole cities or kill dozens in minutes. He had a special passion for tornadoes. I borrowed his computer once to work on a project while mine was dead, and he’d left his YouTube open. The recommended page was full of tornado videos. He wanted to be a storm chaser when he grew up. He was insufferable to watch Twister with – he spent the whole movie pointing out the ways in which the storms were wrong.
We used to live in New York, my family. Not a ton of tornadoes up there. When I was fifteen and Seb was thirteen, though, we moved to Oklahoma. We’re actually not too far from Moore, if you remember the tornado that hit there in 2013. The one that wrecked that school. Seb spent weeks talking about it, always with this weird somber voice that I wasn’t sure was entirely real. More than once, my mom got really upset with him about it. “This isn’t a fun thing, Sebastian,” she’d say. “People got hurt. People died. You need to be more respectful.” Seb would nod and drop the subject, but I could tell it annoyed him.
In hindsight, I think it was our move to Oklahoma that really took it out of the realm of a normal interest. I still remember his face the first time he heard a tornado siren go off. I froze, I was terrified, but I turned to him and his face was just alight. I remember him whispering, “Do you think we’ll actually get to see it?” It scared me, but I tried not to let it. He smiled so rarely by then, you see. It was good, in a way, to see him excited about anything at all.
He got reckless once we moved, especially when it came to storms. He stayed outside longer than anyone else in the rain and the lightning, and was always the last into the basement when the sirens went off. Our parents thought it was a depression thing, since the bullying somehow managed to get worse once we moved, but I don’t think so. The way he relaxed into the rain, the joy in his eyes whenever we went under a tornado warning…he never looked more alive, more himself than he did during those storms.
I do think he was depressed, though. Or maybe just angry. Enough school shooter jokes and iced coffees thrown at your head would probably do that to just about anyone. It was especially bad on our bus – which is why what happened last spring scares me as much as it does. I don’t believe in coincidences.
I’ve had my driver’s license for a little while now, and once Seb got his permit, my parents finally caved and bought us a car to share. As such, we haven’t really been taking the bus anymore. I didn’t realize exactly how big a relief this was for Seb until after we were off. Sure, Bus 31 was loud and cramped, but apparently some of his worst tormentors were on that bus and I never even knew. They were sneaky about it – mostly asshole freshmen who were too cowardly to say anything to his face at school where a teacher might overhear.
Okay. It’s important that you knew about the bus, but I’m stalling at this point. I just need to make myself get the rest of this story out there.
This happened in April, when I was a senior and Seb was a sophomore. School was just letting out for the day. It had been stormy since about mid-morning, but nothing too serious. Just after the first round of buses left and just as Seb and I were getting to the car, though, the tornado sirens went off. I sighed, used to it at this point, and started to head back toward the building so we could shelter. I looked back and Seb wasn’t following me. Instead, he was staring off at the horizon and smiling.
My heart sank. I think I knew what I was going to see even before I followed his gaze, but I did anyway. A funnel cloud had swirled to life in the moments I’d been looking away, spiralling down from a cloud probably ten or so miles out. I watched it hit the ground, watched it thicken and darken for probably five seconds before I grabbed Seb’s hand.
“We need to go inside,” I told him.
“It’s okay,” he answered. His voice sounded calm, but distant, like I’d pulled him out of a daydream.
“Seb, seriously, what if that thing comes towards us?” I asked. I tried to pull on his hand, and my brother is not strong, but he shook me off like it was nothing.
“You go. I’ll be okay,” he said.
“Seb, please!” I was on the verge of tears at this point, trying hard not to panic.
He finally tore his gaze away from the storm to look at me, and he laughed. Laughed , like he’d planned some smart prank and I’d fallen for it.
“It’s not gonna hit you, okay?” He told me, so confidently that I almost wanted to ask him how he knew. “Go inside if you want, but I promise, it’s fine. I’ll be alright out here.”
Maybe I should have tried harder. No, I know I should’ve, I’ve been beating myself up for ever since that day. But I was just so scared; of the storm, of being caught outside, of my brother. I ran. I ran and I hid in the bathrooms with the rest of the people left in the school and I didn’t come out until long after the wind had died down.
The school was far out of the tornado’s path, it seemed. There wasn’t even all that much debris in the parking lot. But Seb was gone.
I tried calling him, but as was normally the case after a bad tornado, nothing was going through. Either I couldn’t get service, or everything was just too busy. I got people to help me look, but we scoured the entire school grounds and then some, and he was nowhere. It was half an hour before I could get a text through to my parents to tell them what was going on, and another three before they told me to call it a night and just come home, that they would call the police.
It was an awful tornado. An EF-4, I’m pretty sure. The footage of the damage they showed on the news was stomach-turning: houses flattened, trees uprooted and utterly stripped of leaves, signs driven into the sides of buildings. And an image of a mangled school bus that had been directly in the tornado’s path. It was just intact enough that you could make out the number 31 painted on its side. Mine and Seb’s old bus. Six students on it were killed. I spent most of their memorials trying not to throw up.
Seb wasn’t the only person to go missing during that storm, so the officers didn’t really listen to me when I tried to explain that I didn’t think they were going about this the right way, that he can’t have been caught in the tornado. Especially because of what I found a week later.
I’d left the windows open in the car when I’d driven it to school that morning, and though no real damage was done to anything in the school lot, we were still close enough that the wind really jumbled up a lot of the lighter stuff inside of people’s cars. Under my student parking pass, I saw the edge of a torn piece of paper. I pulled it out and discovered that it was a note. In what was very clearly Seb’s handwriting, it read simply, “gone storm chasing”.
Nobody’s seen him since, but I don’t think he’s dead. This summer, for our area, has been one of the worst on record for tornadoes.