The Journal of Beatrice Grace Parker

The Duplicate

When I woke, there was light. A lot of light. Enough to give me a headache. I squinted as I lay on my back, and a face came into focus. It was Voldemort. Not the book/movie guy, my Voldemort. ‘I must be dead then’, I thought, numbly, without feeling sorry at all. But something was wrong with the face, like he had melted somewhat, his features made softer, less angular. “Hi there… I’m Jeremy Riddle, Alex’s brother.” And all I could think was ‘wow, they named their kids Tom and Jerry…’ but I couldn’t crack a smile at the sad joke. Because there was no more Voldemort to laugh with. It felt kind of cruel that I had named him Voldemort, despite knowing that the evil dude in the book/movies dies. I hadn’t even bothered to find out that my best friend had a brother. What sort of a friend did that make me?

A sob escaped my lips, and before I knew it, I was crying in a fully-fledged guilt-attack. In my head, I had had a choice, but I had let him go. So this Jeremy tried to comfort me, telling me that he really appreciated how I had stuck around with ‘little Alex’ and how he had always spoken about me at home. He told me that they had had to pry my hand out of ‘Alex’s’ because I had held it so tightly. He said he appreciated our friendship, and I had made ‘Alex’ a friendlier and more cheerful person. This was Jeremy, trying to wash away my guilt by being so nice, and then there was me, idiotically unable to correlate his ‘little Alex’ with my Voldemort. I wanted to scream at him, telling him I had killed his brother, and he should stay away from me if he were smart. But I could only manage a strangled yelp, and that had him holding my hands and telling me how we all miss ‘Alex’ and how I was always welcome, because I had been his best friend. I just couldn’t take it anymore. So I succumbed to the something that pulled my under, into a dark land of confused sleep.

My next visitor was Mom. It was surprising that she wasn’t my first, and I really didn’t like to be shocked that way, finding the Voldemort-look-alike Jeremy hovering over me when I came to. But Mom’s presence wasn’t quite as comforting as it should have been. She cried a little and whispered that she was lucky to have me alive, which was kind of cute and sentimental. I got really teary-eyed. But then she went into Mom-mode, going so far as to say that we were irresponsible to go to the roof when it was so windy. I could not have her calling Voldemort irresponsible. Because he was the one who’d suggested the roof. So I yelled at her. I told her I had killed him. She only looked at me with pity, and that had me infuriated even further (I do not DO pity/compassion/sympathy/commiseration or whatever, okay?). So I tried to scream at her, and this time it worked. She looked on quietly, till my tantrum subsided and I just wept and let myself go back to sleep-land. It wasn’t even a good place to escape to. Because my Voldemort came to meet me in my dark, twisted dreams. Again and again I saw us fall. Again and again I wished I were better at something other than just reading books all day long.