Daily Flash Fiction Challenge

When Elise was a young girl she had the habit of disappearing.
One winter day, the year Teresa's daughter appeared on the front of Life magazine riding a polar bear, she was outside with her cousins playing by the fish pond, throwing twigs and stones and watching the ripples, when suddenly Raymond ran indoors.
"Ruby! Javier! we can't find Elise," his cheeks were red and he was struggling with his breath, "we thought she was hiding at first, but we've looked everywhere, up in the carob tree, in Mo's kayak shed, behind the hyacinth bush..".
Ruby and I went in the direction of the boulevard and Jacob and Sol headed off to the lighthouse. We'd found her wandering around there a few months before.
It was mid-afternoon and even though it wasn't raining it was really too cold to be sitting on the wooden benches that lined the boulevard. There was just the odd person walking briskly, avoiding the puddles, that reflected the brittle-branched canopy of the plane trees.
Then we saw a party of people at the far end. They were sitting on the ground, a cluster of cloths and colours. It was a collection of people from the gypsy encampment who had inhabited the park in the last two months. And then I spotted Elise. She was sitting talking to a boy and drinking tea. He was looking at her and laughing.
"Elise!" She looked up, said something to the boy and then came to us.
"Elise, you can't just disappear like that. We were worried, we looked everywhere for you. Who are those people anyway"
"They're my friends."
But I never got any more information from her.
And sometimes I wondered that if we hadn't come to find her, if she would have come back at all.

300 words