The Academy of Darkness

Chapter 2 - The Bonfire

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2. The Bonfire

"So... Hayley... we still up for Tara's beach party tonight?" Abbey pouts as I close my locker.

"Well it's not like you're gonna take no for an answer, so I guess that's a yes" I retort.

"Hayle's were sixteen, what you need is to loosen up once in a while, it works for me you know? You barely ever have fun!" she accused.

"Yeah true... but for starters 'loosening up' to you means getting smashed... I don't even see the point of it anyway, so I just steer clear all together, second - I do so have fun!" I protest.

"Are you in, or are you in?" Abbey says with attitude and assurance but an underlying joking facade.

I laugh. "You meet me at mine around ten then"

And so we walk off to our English class in silent satisfaction. 

                                                             * * * *     

That afternoon - as always - I walk home from school. I use my cut keys to get into the house since my auntie, Claire, is a paramedic - and usually gets home about eleven or twelve. I told her I would come home before I went out with Abbey, so I could make her dinner. The story was I was headed to Abbey's for a sleepover. Well... it's not like I'm lying; we are going to hers after the party. Anyway, it's not that Claire doesn't trust me - it's that she doesn't trust some of the people there, she'd be fine with me going but she'd get all overprotective. Claire's the type to do that a lot, but she does it out of love.

Me? I'm the only thing that's left of her sister, Suzan - my mum - that and some possessions. Claire could never have children and is very picky about which guys she dates - mostly because she's too caught up in her career. She's in her early forties, though she looks at least seven years younger with her perfect bouncy dark blonde hair and clear skin with perfect teeth. She has a certain air to her - like she's young at heart. She's like a mother to me since I never really got to know my own too well, and I'm like the daughter she never had.

As for my story - well - my parents died when I was only ten. It happened in a car crash about two months after my birthday. I was in the car but somehow managed to 'miraculously survive'. I don't know why I was spared but I sure left the doctors' astonished. I was in a coma for about four days but after my stay in hospital I came out fine, healing shockingly fast which got the doctors' attention.

It was my folks that hadn't made it. I remember the events proceeding up till then well enough - clear cut and drilled into my head, forever my burden. When I turned ten I began having 'dreams'; these freaky prophetic dreams to be exact. Though little did I know they were visions, not dreams at all. About a month before their demise I had a vision of the car crash, of the blood, of the end. It scared me so bad, but I - including my own parents - wrote it off as a silly nightmare. My mum had been pregnant as well, with my baby sister-to-be. I lost my whole family, including myself, that fateful day...

My grandparents on both sides are long gone; my dad had been an only child and my mum had her sister Claire, since her brother - my uncle - died of cancer when he was only nineteen. I never got to meet him. Death and grief seem to follow me and my family around like how a cat stalks its prey; it's always sudden and unexpected. Though I am wiser, I am weary of life; I expect bad things to happen now - though luckily they haven't been. Not for six years. Life has turned me into a pessimist, though I must say, for a pessimist I'm pretty damn optimistic.