Not Her | ONC 2022

| chapter two |

   LEIGH lay on her bed, her head resting on her hands, as she watched her ceiling fan creak as it spun in slow, lazy circles, barely fending off the heat. She played with the pages of a book, trying to unfold a crease on the cover when a small chime interrupted her thoughts. Her phone's notifications went off, illuminating the dark room with blue screen light. 

    Leigh rolled to her side, and reached for her phone, squinting to make out a text from an unknown number.  It simply said 'hey,' so Leigh thought twice about clicking on the message before finally giving in, having a creeping suspicion of who it was.

    Leigh responded warily, "who is this" and clicked send, and stared at the screen. Moments later, another text popped up.

nora. can we meet up tomorrow?

    Leigh blinked, swallowing the lump in her throat. Of course, it was her. Leigh didn't change the contact name. After all, she wouldn't need it after this project. She set her phone back on her desk, and picked it up, feeling stupid again. 

She quickly typed up a response. 

sure. where?

Almost instantly, a reply came.

sunset cafe, 12. 

    Leigh didn't bother to reply, and threw her phone on the floor, pulling the laptop from under her bed. She opened it up and typed in keywords for the suicide case, and in a couple of seconds, she had dozens of articles at her disposal.  She scrolled through the page and clicked on the town website, her eyes skimming over the article. 

BREAKING NEWS

    New resident, Aubrey Fortdale committed suicide just two days ago at  Point Pleasant Beach. The young 18-year-old girl had stabbed herself at around 10 pm at night. She had last told her mother that she was going out for a walk.  According to the police, Aubrey was found with drugs in her system, easily attainable ones. 

    Officer Wanda says, "It's extremely important to keep educating students about drug use. She could've done this under the influence and maybe, if she was sober, this unfortunate event may have not happened." For now, this suicide has taken the town on chokehold, as there hasn't been a suicide here in about five years. 

    More importantly, Aubrey was found with a hard disk drive, which contained a confession letter. The police have not disclosed the contents of this confession letter, but we do know is that it has caused a huge shock to the mother of Aubrey, Samantha. We assume it is not good news as there are hardly things kept so private.

     Aubrey's only family in contact is her mother, who is a single, working woman. She has refused to comment on this incident. Her funeral will be done privately. Summerset continues to grieve for this beautiful soul taken from us.

March 18th, 2015.

    Leigh clicked out of this website, opened up Instagram, and looked up Aubrey's name, and her account popped up, dozens of pictures of her pouting into the camera, red lights, and thin bra straps all common in her post.  The account was public so Leigh had access to Aubrey's following (which was extremely sparse) and her followers (which racked up numbers even after she died.) The comments were all the same, but in her older posts, Leigh noticed one person commenting "my love" and "beautiful."

    Maybe a girlfriend? This girl had stopped commenting in Aubrey's newer posts indicating a falling out or a breakup. Aubrey had a lot of rumors about her, hardly any good, and a handful of bad. What Nora said wasn't wrong, there were a lot of things Aubrey left in her old town, and maybe those things would help her uncover the truth.

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