I don't wanna be your friend

Chapter 18

Sorry for such late updates, and these chapters are progressively getting longer and longer. I hope you guys won't mind it.

I need to warn you people that there are mentions of human trafficking , abuse and self harm in this chapter.

Hope you guys will not be disappointed. 💜
—————————————————————

Third time. It was the third time that night that Cedric tried to find refugee under his blanket, but that leather-bound book was bound to haunt him— it had been doing that since nine days, right from the second Cedric flipped its cover to read the first page.

The first page was terrifying. It was pure, unadulterated horror.

If Cedric was in his right state of mind, he would rolled his eyes at how he was exaggerating it and at how dramatic he was being. But the point is that Cedric was NOT in his right state of mind. He was far from it, light years away to be precise.

But honestly, Cedric was ready to fight anyone— himself included— if they tried to argue and say that he was over-acting. Because this was too much.

What was Damien even thinking when he handed Cedric his childhood diary?

Childhood diary!

There were supposed to be a ton of warnings that were supposed to come along with those words, but none came, and Cedric was naively fooled by those words.

But it wasn't his mistake, though. Because what could a childhood diary written between the ages 9-13 have much in them? Right? Cedric guessed that most pages would be filled with stuff like how Damien must've tied his lose teeth to a thread and done different experiments to pull it out— that sounded painful— or write about things kids do.

Cedric wrote a lot of things when he was a kid too. He wrote letters in Italian to his dead grandfather for a whole year before he stopped— a lot of them were painful to read, but his words reflected a child's way of thinking and perspective. So Cedric thought that there weren't much things that he couldn't have imagined a kid write.

But Cedric couldn't have been more wrong.

Now, as he thinks deeper, he realises that only the first page was free of actual horrors.
But after reading those few lines on the first page, Cedric had closed that book and didn't dare to look at it for the next 3 days.

In the corner of the first page was Damien's name written with a blue crayon— clearly in a kid's scrawl, but it were the words that were written at the center of the page that were freshly written in cursive writing.

Damien had written them before giving it to Cedric, those words were meant for Cedric, and that was what terrified him.

DAMIEN

For Cedric,
I have never known what it is like to have painful memories or unexplainable feelings, but I've heard the people I love speak about them. It is from their life stories that I am whatever I am today. Maybe their stories and experiences are not mine to share, but I don't know what I'd be without them...in a way, I have felt their stories like they are part of me too, and maybe they are.

All of everything you'll read in my diary was shared with me because of the trust they all had in me, and while giving you this book, I wondered if I was breaking that trust. But I don't have anything apart from these lessons that I could call mine. It might be their stories, but it is my learnings, and that is everything I have.