9 months earlier (August)
Zach was sitting on his bed, his brain jumbled with thousands of thoughts. Some of them were of fear. Others were merely of comfort and relief. Finally, he decided that he must feel satisfied. Yes, satisfied and triumphant. No more arguments, no more lies and hidden truths. Alex was not here, nor could he ever be near, he thought.
"Zach, tell me what you're thinking," Eliza, who lay next to him, said. Eliza was Zach's best friend. She knew Alex too, but not as much as she did Zach.
"It's over," he said. "It's really over." He added, "did I do a good thing?" She could sense worry in his question.
"Well," she replied. "Maybe what you have done to Alex wasn't a good thing, but I strongly believe it was the right thing to do."
Eliza was a true friend; she could never try to lie to Zach even if it meant he was going to get hurt.
"I'm scared, I guess. I don't have a good feeling about this. What if someone knew? What would happen to me?"
She saw him nervously shaking.
"Remember, Zach, that you weren't the one who attacked him that night."
In an attempt to make him feel relaxed, she hugged him. He winced.
She said: "Sorry, I forgot where your scars are."
"It's the stupid old one," he said. "It gets painful from time to time."
Zach was scarred by a knife when he was less than two. Every time he asked his parents what happened (because the incident always slipped away from his memory), they would say the same thing: "You were a nosey kid; you kept on exploring the things around you until you got in trouble. Once, you wanted to grab the kitchen knife, it fell from your tiny fingers and cut through your clothes then skin. You almost killed yourself."
"Very realistic!" Zach would tell them.
Eliza looked Zach right in the eye. Smiling, she tilted her head, a cute head motion she did before saying funny or meaningless stuff. "A scar can't be stupid; it doesn't have a brain. You can't calculate its IQ."
"Stop it! You and your literal jokes!"
Long ago, Zach, Alex, Eliza, and Brian were playing hide-and-seek. Zach and Eliza were looking in an empty attic in Brian's house. Zach said there was nothing in the attic, to which Eliza replied: "This is a room containing air and both of us. You can't really say there is nothing in it." Zach usually likes her sense of humor, but now he didn't feel like laughing.
"Oh come on!" She said. "You can't keep having this blank face and sad eyes." She added, "Aren't you going to watch 'The Night in the Woods'? We've been waiting for months for it to get released."
"Okay, yeah fine," Zach said. "I'll call Brian and Lynda."
Today, Alex wasn't there to say he wouldn't watch a film suggested by Eliza because they were all utterly silly.
And Zach decided feeling satisfied and triumphant didn't turn out to be an easy task.
YOU ARE READING
Twin
Misterio / Suspenso18-year-old Zach has finally got what he always wanted: get rid of his haunting nightmare. Ever since he was just an innocent little child, he never was able to receive the tiniest bit of his mother's attention. It all was directed and granted to Al...
