Get Out If You Can

One Year Ago

Caitlyn Tejada screamed.

Loudly, but nobody heard her. She thrashed and tossed, hair obscuring her vision – she fought with grisly, calloused arms; arms that held someone else, not her – yet she fought. She screamed as knives, invisible to the eye, slashed the air – spattered blood till there was no more left to spill, ravishing in weirdly intricate patterns on her skin. She screamed, again.

And then she woke up.

She rubbed her eyes, rubbed them hard – but no daylight poured into them. The room was black as ever. She glanced around in trepidation – but there was no one. No burly hands, no flailing limbs, no – no screams, from a voice very much like her own, fighting for someone who wasn't her – fighting till her dying breath.

I'm dead, she thought, as she had thought on multiple occasions before this. It was all too real. I'm dead.

She rubbed her eyes again. Her finger traced its way up to the flesh on her upper arm, and she pinched the skin below it. It hurt. She wasn't dead – yet.

She was in her room, thrashing wildly on the bed, running away from a captor she couldn't see, couldn't imagine – because it was a captor she had never met.

Color encapsulated her mind; weird whirls taking the place of sound and light, as she tried – tried in vain – to forget it. She'd seen the bottles. She'd seen her like that before – but this wasn't true, was it? It didn't – couldn't – have happened again. Kari was not stupid – or so she thought.

There was a light creak downstairs. Caitlyn's breath caught itself in her chest.

There were footsteps.

Caitlyn raised her eyes to the clock; the only thing sounding in the room – ticking, ticking, like you had enough time, every time. All lies, all lies.

Caitlyn took a deep breath. She felt the air sting her almost-bare legs, she felt damp – frozen – both on the inside and the outside. Why was nobody listening?

Nevertheless. She wasn't the kind who would wait for someone to give her a megaphone when you could very easily scream, and be heard all the same. She rubbed her legs against each other, savoring the temporary warmth, before they left the layers of the duvet and shivered in the cold.

She slipped out from under the covers, skin erupting in goosebumps – but it was like she couldn't feel herself anymore. The footsteps from the floor below grew louder – grew more ragged. She could hear – or was it only her imagination? Was it only her mind, fallen into the realms of a dream, conjuring up the strained breathing below?

One way to find out, she thought. Her feet slipped into her rubber slippers, and she did her best to ignore the way they flapped on the marble floor. She picked up her phone from the drawer beside her bed and pressed the 'wake' button. The time glowed in white against the black wallpaper – six minutes to midnight.

She locked her phone again, and, eyes closed, felt for the drawer. Her breath stalled. Why did her parents have to choose such an inconvenient time to leave? To fucking France? Why?

She ignored the thoughts. That wasn't for her to know. Her parents knew Kari was a party-goer – she was almost never home at night. If they were home they would simply think that she –

But she didn't know for sure if this had anything to do with Kari at all, right?

But if not her, then who else?

She shook her head, like that would drive away the thoughts. She balled her hands into fists, tense. She took a few, tentative steps towards the door, and when she got there, she pressed her ear against the hard wood.